A/N: Ahh, new story. I'm really rather excited, I do hope that I don't fail your expectations as I had received such wonderful reviews from you all for my last story.

The motivation for this story lay in that Rukia always seemed to be the older one, supporting Ichigo silently through his lows and pains. But inside, Rukia is really the same fragile girl needing love of her own. So, I wonder what would happen if Ichigo is the older and more mature one for once.

Please bear with me as I try out this new genre, and I hope you would like it.

When he saw her again after fifteen years, two months and six days, he was a man of thirty one, and she was still fifteen. Still so small, so elfin.

It was a hopeless exchange of glances from the first moment, those eyes peeking at him from behind bangs damp from sweat. The same eyes that he had looked into on countless occasions, and the same ones that had bore into his just as many times, showed no recognition of him at all.

The automatic doors closed with a swish behind him. He chuckled to himself, how many times had this happened before?

She leaned the mop against a shelf and waited beside the cash register as he picked out his usual brand of cigarettes, trying his hardest to seem natural. The moisture from his palms accumulated on the plastic film on the cigarette pack, his heart thudded uncontrollably in his ears.

"Would that be all?" She asked while punching in the price, the cash drawer jumped out with a ding. "700 yen, please."

She looked up at him, waiting for the payment. Instead, she found him staring at her with a fearful intent. She shifted uncomfortably on her feet and repeated the amount. It was then that Ichigo was shaken out of his stupor and pulled out his wallet. The drawer closed with another ding and it was his cue to leave.

Smell of stale moisture in the overheated air, humming of the aging air conditioner painstakingly blowing out lukewarm air, and the moisture that made his palm stick with the cigarette pack. It was all so mundane, so irreconcilable with the wild fluttering of his heart that had long been stagnant.

Thinking that he seemed suspicious enough, it was only when he got into his car and slammed his car door shut with a thud, that he let a sharp huff and stole a glance at the convenience store in the rear view mirror. She could have just been someone who looked like her, he rationalized, someone who so resembled her that he thanked her for giving him a flicker of hope that perhaps he could have another final memory of her. He had never frequented this part of the town, so it was entirely possible. Ichigo only came today because the hospital in this end of town had invited him for a consult on a peculiar case.

He laid back against the seat and pulled one out of the pack, lighting it and inhaled deeply. The difficult case had occupied him for the entire morning, and drained all strength from him. Just as when he turned to one of his few solaces and found the box empty, only did he decide to brave the scalding sun to find a convenience store. She had died long ago, he told himself, wearily congratulating himself on the record of having not thought about her since this morning. A new record, really, as at every unaware moment the memory of her bloody little body would float up in his mind. Nonetheless, something ached more than usual at the sight of her, the ache so sweet that he re-sketched her face in his mind, tracing every dear line to crystal clarity.

I miss you, Rukia.

With five minutes left of his break, Ichigo drove back to the hospital and found the conference room already full. Quickly sitting down in his seat, a man who Ichigo recognized to be an attending from the hospital's ER stood at the head of the table with an anxious looking on his face.

"Another girl had just been brought into the ER, with the same primary assessment. A passer-by found her collapsed in an ally due to myocardial infarction with no external injuries, again with unexplained lacerations on the cardiac tissue."

Ichigo ran an exasperated hand down his face and struggled to make something of all the torrents of facts in his mind. Since last week, a series of girls had been brought to the ER. All of them fifteen to sixteen years old, found unconscious due to something like a heart attack and with damage to their heart tissue that was impossible to inflict from outside the body. Nothing drew together in his mind, as all the girls were otherwise healthy with no signs of cardiac disease and someone would have had to come in physical contact with their hearts to lacerate it like that. But the girls were untouched…

Deciding that he was getting nowhere, he stood up and asked:

"Would it be possible for me to see her?"

The same attending looked startled at the strange request, but conceded as no one else in the room was getting any closer to the solution. Following him through the chaotic ER, weaving through bloodied victim of accidents and relatives who fell asleep beside gurneys, Ichigo was finally led to a quiet corner where a small figure lay crumpled under the thin cover. Pale and thin lipped, her black hair partially hid her face from his view. He examined her again, not knowing whether he should be satisfied or more confused to find her pupil reflex and breathing normal, with not surface trauma. Ichigo sighed, at the least relieved that she was stable for the time being. What followed was an afternoon of flipping through medical dictionaries and textbooks, their hopes of finding a diagnosis died with the darkening sky outside that signaled a day's end.

On the way home, Ichigo purposely drove by the convenience store again in the vain hopes of seeing her again. Just to prove to himself that she was only an ordinary girl, not her. He did, a glimpse of her smiling face at a customer, and wished that he had not. The entire way home he fought hard to keep down the wave of nauseating desire that the sight awoke in him, for that touch of fey grace that he had not managed to grab onto so long ago. The heated knot in his stomach burned even more at the thought that he would never get a chance to satiate it, that she would never be there to accept the love that he so desperately wanted to give to her.

When he got home, the rare beeping of the answering machine brought no bright news either.

"Ichi-nii, Inoue-san and Ishida-san's wedding is tomor-"

He cut Yuzu's voice off with a touch of the delete button. Not that he was shy of being happy for them, but he had left the place with its past two years ago, and would like to believe that he had left it all for good.

Afterall, he was somebody that even he himself had forgotten.