hey y'all. welcome to my version of a fix-it for the ending of bleach; a fix-it that tries to work with what we were given.

i wanted to repair the ending without changing it. see if i could make it into something that actually respected the characters and who they were. it's not perfect and i skip over tons of plot stuff and side character stuff, but i did my best to clean up and provide character explanation where kubo did not. is it possible to write ichigo and orihime being together in the ending in a way that makes sense with the rest of the 685 chapters? and how do we get them and renji and rukia to where they truly belong?

anybody who hates on orihime as a character: don't let the door hit you on the way out. the ending of bleach was as unfair to her as it was to ichigo and rukia. also, i attempt to make kazui and ichika be their own people who are important to the storyline, so if you want to pretend they don't exist, this is not the fic for you

the first part is ichigo's human life, and the second is what follows. i've got 11k of the whole thing written in total so far, and the end is in sight, so you won't have too long to wait for the end!

belated as this fic may be, i hope someone enjoys it!

It's his knuckles that hurt the longest after the fight. Weeks in the barracks of the Fourth mean that his ribs and back and arms have been restored to as good as they were when he first stood in front of Yhwach, gripping his sword, but his hands—

His hands seem to take longer.

He lies on the bed with a weight in his chest like an anchor pulling down, and he curls and uncurls his fist, waiting for it to feel like he's not tensed around Zangetsu anymore.

What next, he thinks. What happens next?

He slept for days after the battle, a sleep half induced, and half genuine, and when he wakes, almost too much has happened for him to catch up with. Everyone is focused on re-building, and seems to slip away from him whenever he tries to ask questions. He doesn't know where Aizen is. There are people he thinks are missing, and it doesn't make sense that the Quincy are all gone and dealt with now that Yhwach is. He sees Ishida's shape in the hallway outside his room again and again, but he can't make himself call out to him.

It is a strange recovery, but his friends visit, and slowly, he moves from lying down to sitting up, to standing beside them and hearing about what had happened while he slept. Inoue had been banned from using her powers of healing in order to let her rest. Chad's arm had been broken in several places, and needed a lot of time. Renji came back from the brink of death with the casualness of a cat that had almost slipped from a tree branch, but thought no one had seen it. They do not treat him like a god, the way some of the nurses at the Fourth do, or like he's dying, the way some of the captains and seated officers who visit him do. But they don't quite treat him the same as before.

Rukia was sitting in his room the first time he opened his eyes after. He does not know if this was a dream, or reality—remembers only that she looked very pale, and that there was a small, black hell butterfly perched on her finger. In this vision, she looked startlingly similar to the girl who used to crouch on his windowsill before school, shiny black shoes and black hair. He watched her for as long as his eyes could stay open, waiting for her to notice him and tell him what was happening. The battle hadn't felt like the deciding, dramatic finale he'd been subconsciously expecting, and he keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.

What next?

He does not remember the conversation he had with Renji before the final battle until Matsumoto's party.

There is a party, because of course there is. Ichigo's never been big on drinking, mostly because he hasn't had much time for it what with the whole, killing hollows for much of his teenage life thing, so he stays mostly on the fringes. Despite that, everyone's faces grow slowly blurry. He has the strange feeling that he does not remember everyone here, or that somehow, again, people are missing. It has been a long time since he saw some of them.

Rukia is crystal clear on the other side of the room, looking long-suffering and much more sensible than some of the other vice-captains dipping drunkenly around her. Ichigo makes to head her way, but stops when Renji gets there first, his shoulders blocking Rukia from view.

Ichigo remembers then that Renji is in love with her.

He's not as stupid as he looks, or maybe fighting Yhwach made him do a lot of growing all at once. He'd suspected back when he was fighting all of Soul Society to save Rukia, but when nothing seemed to happen between Renji and Rukia in all the time afterwards, he'd let his awareness of it sink under the comfortableness of being their friend. But he knows now for sure, with what Renji said to him before the battle—Renji is in love with Rukia.

Ichigo stands half a step away from the wall, his glass sweating in his hand, and he watches them talk. Rukia has to crane her neck to look Renji in the eye, and she gives him this smile sometimes that knocks Ichigo back on his heels even from twenty feet away. The edges of Renji's spiritual pressure go soft around her, and Ichigo can't quite look away from Rukia looking up at him. A door closes in his head so suddenly that he does not catch even a glimpse of what lay beyond it.

He lurches off into the crowd.

Inoue finds him later in the night, and fumblingly tells him first that she wants to kiss him, second that she didn't mean to say that, and third that she loves him. Matsumoto's set up a strobe light that she bought when she was in the Living World, and the lights make Inoue's face look unfamiliar, constantly shifting. She's supposed to be solid, dependable, and he realizes suddenly that he does not know her.

And she does not know him.

He sputters alcohol down his front and Inoue draws back to dab at it with the edge of her sleeve. Her ears are pink, and Ichigo feels intensely uncomfortable, and cowardly for feeling that way. This is something he should face head on. He's always been like this around girls who seem to want something from him, or who wear their sexuality as casually as a sheen of sweat after a battle. Inoue's wristbones are delicate against his chest, over his pounding heart. He remembers the anxiety of having Rukia just sitting on the edge of his bed, years ago now.

So much has changed, and he has to change with it.

He still doesn't mean to kiss back when Inoue tries again, but it happens. She is kind, and just as fumbling as he is, and if he doesn't open his eyes, he doesn't have to see anyone else in the room. They end up in Ichigo's hospital room, and when she undresses, he tells himself to be a man, and doesn't run away from her.

He's such a child in the end. Looking at Renji and Rukia just reinforced it—he's a child, and she's—she's something far beyond reach.

Ichigo and Inoue are both drunk, and she makes the softest sound on earth when he puts his mouth against her neck. They are allowed to be children together.

It happens again. Every time it happens, Ichigo does not know how he got there—it seems somehow inconceivable that it's Inoue's bare back under his hands. He keeps feeling like he's watching himself from outside of his own body, like the way Yhwach must have seen the future. He's himself as he pictures himself—a couple years younger, free of any knowledge of Yhwach—and he's seeing a future that doesn't make sense.

Unlike Yhwach, he doesn't have the power to change the future. It keeps happening.

"They look up to you," Rukia tells him. He's at the point of recovery where staying in the hospital any longer seems like vanity, but he does not know how to leave just yet. A group of eleventh company soldiers just challenged him to a fight as he sat with Rukia in the coutryard outside the Fourth, and he snarled until they went away.

"They're bored," Ichigo says. "And I'm interesting right now."

She shifts beside him. "They have looked up to you ever since you came for me."

"They hated me."

"They hated themselves."

Ichigo is never certain what he and Rukia are talking about. He always wants to talk to her, but when he does, he finds them dancing around subjects he can't put shape to. It was simple at the beginning, when she lived in his closet and knocked his soul out of his chest daily with the heel of her hand, but nothing is simple now.

"How does everything look the same again?" Ichigo asks. "It's like nothing ever happened."

He gestures loosely to the buildings around them, the sky. Everything.

"It's like Inoue's powers. All mess...erased, and made like perfect."

"I'd rather see it heal the traditional way," Rukia says. "We could use some scars."

Ichigo grunts.

"It shouldn't be the same. I think we need to make sure it doesn't stay the same." Rukia says.

"You don't need me for that."

"Soul Society doesn't change, and neither do you," she says. "When two unmoving objects meet, there is only one option—one of them has to move. You have always been the one to make them move for us."

"Us?"

"This is my home. I want to help change it."

"With Renji?"

Her eyes cut sideways to him.

"It's his home as well."

"On the hill," Ichigo says. "It looked like they were starting to build something."

"Some elders believe the Soukyoku should return."

He feels a little sick—an old injury twinges, hidden underneath all the fresh ones Yhwach had laid upon him.

"The thing I saved you from?" he says. "What do they need that for?"

"You could stay," she says. "And help me figure out how to not turn back the clock."

It feels like home, in the courtyard next to Rukia, with black uniforms whipping around the edge of every corner and the buzz of energy in the air. He misses the home he knows though, his sisters and his friends, even the stupid ones.

What she forgets is that he has changed, once; at fifteen years old, he bent like light around her, and he doesn't know where he fits anymore. She's always been the only thing to change his world. It makes him feel strangely out of control.

He gives her no promises, but her voice, saying "you could stay", rings in his head long after.

When Inoue tells him about the baby, he is not suprised. Maybe he should be, but he is used to outside factors making decisions for him. Taking his friends, his powers, his choice in every matter. Usually he fights it. But he is not a child anymore.

He goes to ask Rukia for advice, feeling sheepish and nervous and ashamed for reasons he can't pinpoint—catches her standing at the window in her room with Renji, his hand on her back. Renji sees him, and Rukia does not, even though he knows she can sense his reiatsu. Ichigo leaves without saying a word.

They return to the living world and get married.

Him and Inoue, not anyone else. It's alright. He's confused about it too.

She tells him he does not have to, that she doesn't expect him to, even that she doesn't want him to if it's not what's in his heart. She can be fierce when she wants to, and it makes Ichigo regret all the times his gaze skipped over her in the past, all the times he only half-listened.

Inoue deserves a good lie, and so he tells her he wants to.

This is the other shoe dropping, and he is paralyzed by it.

Kazui is a miracle. Ichigo loves like he didn't know he could, just holding him for the first time. He's afraid as well, monstrously so—has the feeling of wanting to lock away a prized posession, take it from his hands so he cannot hurt it. It's an instinct so different from his usual desire to gather everything he loves in one hand and fight for it with the other, that he can barely stand with it; he is unfamiliar to himself. Rukia was wrong about his steadfastedness, and he hates it. He passes the baby in his arms to Yuzu and goes to the only other person who knows how he is feeling.

Orihime's hand is sweaty in his, and she squeezes gratefully.

"I am definitely not as brave as you," Ichigo tells her. It feels like he's never seen her properly before.

"We both know that's not true," she says. "He's beautiful, isn't he?"

Ichigo kisses her forehead and agrees.

He is afraid all day that Yhwach will appear and steal this from him—he has not forgotten the ominous promise that he will come when Ichigo is most happy. This feels like it could be that moment. His son has been born—this should be the moment.

Yhwach does not show up. Ichigo's relief tastes a little bit like shame.

He forgets that she's Orihime now sometimes. He forgets a lot. Sometimes she goes to call him and he sees the "Kurosaki-kun" on her lips, remembers hearing it like a sick mantra when there was blood in his eyes and Ulquiorra staring down at him. He can see a pleased, uncertain light on her face every time she calls him Ichigo, like it's a victory somehow. Every time he doesn't call her Inoue, it feels a little like he's insulting her, like he took something from her.

She's happy though, and he gets used to it.

Rukia and Renji get married too, and when Ichigo looks back on it, he can't remember if it was before or after he married Inoue. It seems monumentally important, because surely, even with a baby, he wouldn't've—if Rukia and Renji hadn't been tied together so closely yet, Ichigo wouldn't've—

But he did and they did and it's happened now, all of it. This is what happens next.

He tells himself it is all because Renji was in love with Rukia, not because he is a coward.

And then, slowly, he falls in love himself.

Of course he does. Orihime is a glowing sun in the muddle his life has become, and he can't help but lean into her glow eventually. At first he thinks it's Kazui—that seeing her with him makes her into something bigger in his head, but after a couple years he knows it's just her. It's a soft love, not something he could've expected from himself, not something he thinks he would've felt if circumstance hadn't put them so close together, but any regret fades away more with each passing year, until he's no longer surprised by her name on his mouth, no longer picturing anyone else in her place.

There are other things he regrets, like the directionless feel of his life and the way his friends seem to have drifted to different corners of existence, but he does not regret Orihime.

He wakes up with his power gone choked in his human skin sometimes, begging to be knocked out by a gloved hand, but he breathes until the feeling passes. His knuckles don't hurt anymore, but sometimes he wants them to. Sometimes he sits awake at night, watching the moon.

He's got a son though, and he's human. That's what he's picked.

He dreams of a woman all in white; the air is so cold it pulls the blood up just under his skin.

He knows who he is in his dreams.

"Why didn't you come back?"

Renji smokes when he visits Ichigo. He says it doesn't matter if it kills him since he's already dead. They stand outside the clinic that used to belong to Isshin. Both Ichigo and Ishida were predictable in taking after their fathers.

Ichigo doesn't say anything, and Renji blows out a puff of smoke.

"There were a lot of seated positions vacant after everything went down," he says. "I think she thought we were all going to be vice captains together."

It's been five years.

"How's your daughter?" Ichigo asks.

Renji looks at him. "Ichika?"

"Unless you've got another one kicking around I don't know about," Ichigo says.

"You never say her name," Renji says.

Ichigo shrugs. "Seems too much like egotism."

"You know it was my idea, right? She agreed to it, but I thought of it."

Inside, Ichigo can hear Rukia and Orihime laughing together. Rukia's voice reminds him of the pull of moonlight. He likes seeing them together, his wife and Rukia, but it hurts a little, like someone pressing on an old bruise.

"Why haven't I met her?" he asks. "Kazui's about her age."

"Maybe you'd meet her if you came to visit us once in a while," Renji says. "You know Inoue would come with you."

"Kurosaki."

"What?"

"She's a Kurosaki now."

Renji stubs his cigarette on the ground. "Right. If you're going to be stupid about Soul Society, are you at least going to do something about the crazy power your kid's got?"

Ichigo goes still.

"You have noticed, haven't you? He's been leaking spiritual pressure everywhere. Would've been dead a hundred times over from hollows if we hadn't been watching over this place."

"You've been doing what?"

"With your head in the sand, who do you think's been making sure no one comes looking for the saviour of the free world, or whatever you are?"

Ichigo can see Rukia through the window, and she's got her chin in her hands, watching Orihime talk at great speed about something, probably something ridiculous. She looks fond, and Ichigo knows how she feels.

"I haven't seen her anywhere," he says.

"Anyone ever tell you you've got tunnel vision?" Renji says. "I'm your friend too, and we've got some clout in that place. We made sure better warriors than Afro-san got posted here."

"Thank you," says Ichigo.

"Wouldn't need to if you weren't keeping it all locked up."

Ichigo sighs, ignores him.

"She'd be happy to see you back in Soul Society."

Ichigo has no idea which "she" they're talking about anymore.

"Are they still rebuilding the Soukyoku?" he asks.

Renji's face twists.

"Not that much clout then," Ichigo says.

Orihime calls his name from inside, and says that Ishida's on the phone and wants to talk to him. Ichigo doubts that very much. Ishida calls to hear Orihime's voice and for little else. Ichigo misses him nonetheless.

Ichigo goes inside. Renji remains on the sidewalk for a while longer.

The day of Rukia's captain ceremony, the ghost of Yhwach reappears and is crushed under Kazui's tiny fist.

Ichigo and Rukia sit on the roof after Chad's match is over, Ichigo gravitating there first, and her following. Renji saw them go, but did not comment. Orihime was still talking to the officers from Soul Society who came to investigate further and make sure all of Yhwach's reiatsu was truly gone.

"Why today?" Rukia asks.

"I don't know," Ichigo says.

"I thought it was meant to be your happiness that he fixated on the most," Rukia says. "This day is special only to me."

"Not only," Ichigo says.

She gives him a look. He resists the urge to bluster; he is an adult now.

"I'm proud of Chad," he says. "He's worked hard to be as good as he is."

"He won quite handily," Rukia says.

"I knew he would."

They are silent for a long moment. He thinks briefly about asking her if she dreams too—if he is there.

"We are tied together," Rukia says. "Since I gave you my powers, we have been tied. Perhaps he mistakes my happiness for yours. Perhaps it appears the same to his eyes."

Ichigo had woken up content that morning, with Orihime warm beside him and Kazui yelling vaguely in the hallway. The happiness had grown throughout the day as he thought of Chad's upcoming match and Rukia's captain ceremony—she had instructed none of them to attend, as she wanted to look professional in front of the other captains and believed for some reason that the gang being there would distract her. Even if he wasn't there, Ichigo had known how happy she would be, and he'd known that he would see her later in the day. Ichigo had been happy today, and if Yhwach sees his and Rukia's happiness as the same, perhaps he is not so far off.

"Maybe," Ichigo says.

"It's done though," Rukia says. "And that's what matters."

"How did he do it?" He's open now, unable to hold it in with only the sky and Rukia there to hear it. Belated fear chokes him; he hides his face. "It took me and Ishida and fucking Aizen to take down Yhwach, and Kazui just—"

"He is your son—of course he can do extraordinary things."

He can't bring his face out of his hands.

"Get up."

He doesn't respond.

"Ichigo."

She pulls his hands away from his face. It is not gentle. She is crouched before him, and with the light of the moon like soft chalk around her head, her hair almost looks white.

"Do I need to throw you in front of a Hollow to remind you who you are?"

"No," Ichigo says. Her fingers are biting into his palms—it feels like she is gripping a sword, not his hands, and that is what makes the contact permissable. He will let himself have this. "I'm alright."

"Would you like me to get Orihime?"

"No."

They sit, still connected. It is only for the space of a dream.

"Is Kazui in danger?" Ichigo asks.

"We will not let him be," she says.

He tries to feel relieved that it's over, that it's done, but the shadow of Yhwach remains in his head.

Ichigo teaches Kazui the bare minimum of being a shinigami, only so he can try to control his spiritual pressure. It feels too much like relapsing into an addiction, allowing himself to be in his shinigami form too long, too much like becoming the boy he still pictures himself as again. He teaches Kazui very little, and leaves the rest to Rukia and Renji and Ichika when they visit. They start visiting more as the kids get older. Ichika looks like a perfect hybrid of her parents, unlike Kazui, who is all Orihime, and it's intensely strange to see them standing next to each other.

Kazui likes his lessons, but his favourite honourary aunt is still Tatsuki, who makes him laugh like no one can, not even Ichika.

Kazui is excited about his shinigami powers, and it makes Ichigo feel strangely distant—he chose to put those aside for the sake of Orihime and this child, and here he is, burning up with power and possibility. Ichigo is positively shrivelled next to him, and he doesn't like feeling that way around his son.

He doesn't know him very well, at the end of the day.

He overhears Orihime speaking to Kazui in his room once, after Rukia and Renji and Ichika had left from their most recent visit. Kazui is complaining about Ichigo not allowing him to go to Soul Society, voice pitched whiny and creaking. He is fourteen years old, one year younger than Ichigo was when he met Rukia.

"Is this really about your father," Orihime says, soft and measured. "Or is it about Ichika?"

Kazui blusters. "She's my friend. No one around here gets this stuff like she does, because they're all human."

"You're human too," Orihime says. "That's why you're feeling this strongly. It's okay."

Kazui's voice is quiet then. "She's really cool."

"I always thought this might happen," Orihime says. "Kurosakis have a tendency to fall for Kuchikis."

Ichigo flattens himself to the wall in the hallway and tries to breathe.

Orihime reports cheerfully to him later that Kazui has got his first crush, and isn't it darling. Her hands shake a little on the knife as she's cutting carrots for dinner, and she nicks her finger. Ichigo kisses it, and then kisses her mouth, trying to take all the pain away. He does not know how to tell her he loves her in any louder way. It almost feels like it works.

Kazui gets over his crush. Just another way he is different from his father.

Years go by and take more and more from Ichigo, even as they give to Kazui. He sheds childhood with an ease that leaves Ichigo envious, and he tamps down his power once he realizes he has no desire for battle, throwing himself instead into study and travel. He wants to be an archaeologist, and he has his mother's kindness and his father's stubbornness—just the right things to carry him through. He leaves them behind. Visits a lot, but still. Leaves them behind. Ichigo had never anticipated that this kind of grief came with being a parent. He thought he'd already had his fair share of grief over leaving people or being left.

He misses his own father a lot, and tries not to think on it. Of the many unaccounted for after the final battle concluded, he leaves the biggest scar.

Ichigo and Rukia fight one night a couple days past his forty-fifth birthday. Orihime has gone to visit some of her old school friends, and Renji is apparently at meetings, so he does not come. It's raining when Rukia comes in through the window—it's rained a lot in Karakura in the past twenty-seven years.

She's not in her gigai, but her full shinigami outfit, captain coat and all. Ichigo feels insignificant in a way he hasn't around her since the day they met.

They argue about a captain seat left empty in Soul Society and Ikkaku refusing to accept it—how they have no other candidates right now. Ichigo asks if it's always Soul Society business that brings her to his house, if she's just been checking up on him all these years or if she truly wants his company. She throws back that he is not the man she knew if he can say that to her. He is electrified just by the argument alone, and has the strange sense that he wants to make her angry enough to hit him. Aging is different in Soul Society, and she looks the same, just with longer hair. He has lines at his eyes and a persistent click in his jaw.

She does hit him eventually—on the chest with a familiar glove in hand, dragging him out.

"If it is a fight you want," she says. "Then do it as yourself."

They fight, and he has not forgotten as much as he thought. They pivot in the air above his house, with rain smashing down around them, and droplets seem to hover when their swords clash. Ichigo feels fiercely alive. She laughs when she beats him, and Ichigo can't even be grumpy about it because he's looking at her smile and he's fifteen years old again, thinking "I remember now, why I wanted to save you so much".

"I understood when you wanted to stay in Soul Society," he says when they sit together on the roof afterwards, Zangetsu and Sode no Shirayuki stabbed carelessly into the shingles besides them.

"That was a different time and situation," Rukia says. "And you forget that I watched you when you had lost your powers, and I know how hard that was, how stifled you felt."

"I don't feel stifled."

"No, because you have your family. Except Kazui is a man now, and Orihime—she has a place in Soul Society too."

"She doesn't," Ichigo says. "She isn't a shinigami, and she's not dead. I'm not dead."

"Then stop acting like you are!"

He goes still, breathing in short, sharp pants, like a dog. The rain has turned into a fine mist, making the air hazy between them. He wonders at how strange it is to feel so close to her and yet so far apart. When did their roads diverge so much?

"There is another candidate," Rukia tells him. "But he has risen too fast through the ranks, and is the kind of rich that even my brother cannot compare with. I do not like to think of the era someone like him in power could help usher in."

"When I met your brother, he was the kind of person you wouldn't want in power, and look at him now."

"Was that a compliment for Nii-sama?" Rukia says, cracking a smile. "I'll be sure to pass it along."

"I wouldn't want to give him a heart attack. He must be getting on."

"Compared to you, I'm sure he is, but he's got time left. There is still much time left."

"I know," Ichigo says, annoyed. "I am so much younger than all of you. Practically still a child."

"That is not what I meant," Rukia says quietly.

At each stage in his life, Ichigo has wanted something different from Rukia. What he wants now is to be equals, to stand on the same footing and talk without feeling like he's being stupid. Half of his human life is gone, and yet he still feels too young for her.

"Nii-sama was the kind of person you wouldn't want in power until he met you," Rukia says. "You changed him. You changed me and that place, and I just want to see you do what you were meant to."

"And what exactly am I meant to do?"

She throws her hands up. "I cannot make your life for you, Ichigo. But I have felt, since the moment I met you, that you and I were meant to...to change things. That we were meant to shake the world."

"Ambitious," Ichigo says. "You're not going to turn into another Aizen, are you?"

She sees through him, as she always does. "He did not do this to us, Ichigo. We engineered our own meeting, not him, and we have chosen every step of the way to remain together." She draws in a deep breath. "To be nakama."

"That hasn't changed," Ichigo says.

"Has it?" Rukia says.

"So this is just a roundabout way of saying you miss me? A bit sappy, isn't it?"

"Tell me you're happy like this."

Ichigo hesitates. Her leg on the roof is a foot from his own. The boy he was once would have been restless and needy just from sitting here with her, too stupid to catalogue everything his body was trying to tell him. His shihakusho fits more comfortably than jeans ever did.

He was afraid of happiness for ten years—afraid that it could be taken from him so easily. He doesn't know how many choices he made were affected by that fear. Yhwach is gone now though, has been for years.

"I am happy," he says truthfully. "Not all the time, but I am happy enough. If you are actually worried about this other candidate, I can come and beat him up though."

She smiles. "That won't be necessary. Renji is already advising everyone in charge of captain selection to not aid this man's ascension. I've even provided him with notes."

"I hope you didn't include drawings."

"Excuse me!"

She shoves him, and he lets the force of it slam him back into the roof. Dazed and grinning, he stares up at the night sky. He's not sure when it stopped, but there's no rain anymore, and the stars are clear and bright.

"You are shit at drawing," he says happily.

"Do you want me to challenge you to another duel?"

"Any time, Rukia, any time."

"You'll regret saying that."

"I don't think I will."

They are comfortable in silence for a moment longer, and then her face appears over his, cutting a moon-sized hole in the sky.

"If you would like to see through this business of being human," she says. "There is time. We will all still be here when you are done."

A sharp swell of gratitude pushes in his chest.

"Don't let Soul Society fall until I get there," he says.

"Never."

"And don't miss me too much."

She storms off the roof in a whirl of black fabric, dazzling.

"I am never speaking to you again!" she calls behind her. "Making me say such foolish things. Remember your place, boy!"

He remembers a rainy night and Rukia screaming for him from the circle of Renji's arms. He remembers lying in a lake of his own blood and Rukia looking back at him with tears in her eyes before following her brother through the gate. He remembers that there is time still, and he races after her for one more contest.

He and Orihime travel the world together, sometimes with Tatsuki, who owns a sailboat and is frightfully good with it. Orihime makes terribly bizarre food and he eats it anyway. She takes up an interest in researching a specific type of pottery glazing used in feudal Japan and hides it from him at first, apparently thinking it a betrayal of the person he knows her as. He is both excited for her and relieved when he finds out—she'd done so well in school and he'd been worried he made her give up everything else in life when she decided to be a stay at home mother. But there is time for them still to become better people to each other. She gets a degree. He writes some books, and Rukia asks for extra copies to bring to their friends in Soul Society.

The humans grow old and the shinigami wait. Ichigo never stops dreaming of the woman in white.

Chad is the first of them to go. After his boxing took a toll on him that he couldn't quite describe to Ichigo—something about getting into it for the wrong reasons, and not feeling like himself—he went into music, and then humanitarian work. He gets sick not when he's abroad, but when he's back home in between trips. It's cancer, because nothing short of that could've taken Sado Yasutora down, and he outlives the doctors' expectations by three years. His husband, Akihiro, who he met in America at a fundraiser for a charity Chad worked with, stays by his side the entire time, and knows who to notify when it looks like the end. Chad is seventy-one when he dies, and it is the first time in decades that all six of them have been in the same room; even Ishida comes.

It is Ishida who is next, and Ichigo doesn't mean to think of it as a countdown, but he does. Ishida sees it as a contest, because even though he's not remembering things quite correctly at eighty-nine, he still glares at Ichigo from his bed in the hospital and says, "This doesn't mean you've won, Kurosaki." There is no husband or wife at his side because he never married, although Ichigo knows there were people of all genders for him throughout the years, especially after he very suddenly left the medical practice to become a fashion designer. When they come to see him, he calls Orihime "Inoue", and neither Orihime or Ichigo correct him.

"Will he go to Soul Society?" Ichigo asks Rukia in the hallway. "Is he allowed there?"

She gives him a withering look. "If he was not, we would all punch a hole in the walls of Seireitei until he could climb through."

"I'm just looking forward to him finding his way out of Rukongai and assassinating Mayuri to take his place as captain," Renji says. "It might take a while, but it's gonna be great."

They haven't seen Chad since his soul went to Rukongai, but no one is worried. Chad makes family fast, and if there are any orphans suffering there the way Rukia and Renji did as children, he is the best thing for them.

Ichigo and Orihime are the last, even of the rest of their friends. Tatsuki dies a year before they do, and her death does something to Orihime that Ichigo cannot pull her out of. Kazui comes home to take care of them, which Ichigo finds kind and infuriating. His power still feels young in his chest—it is only the body that is old. In spirit form, he knows he could move as easily as the day he struck down Yhwach, stand evenly beside his son, but it is not fair to Orihime if he did.

He wakes up on a Wednesday knowing that it is going to be his last. He can feel Rukia and Renji's prescence downstairs, and knows they have come because they know. They are keeping their distance for now, and he is grateful. Orihime's hand is warm on his chest, frail.

"Ichigo," she says, with difficulty.

"It'll be alright," he says.

"I know," she replies. "There is something I need to say to you."

She is so beautiful. He wonders that it took him so long to see it.

"When I went to Hueco Mundo to keep the rest of you safe, I said goodbye to you when you weren't awake to hear it," she says. "And I told you that if I had five lifetimes, I would love you in every one, no matter what else changed."

With great difficulty, he raises her hand to his mouth and kisses it. Both his mouth and her skin are like paper now.

"I wasn't lying," she continues. "But I've found that one lifetime is enough for me. I will not hold you to any more."

Appalled, Ichigo says, "I won't stop loving you in the next."

"No," she says. "It's not in you to do so. After all, you never stopped loving her."

There is nothing he can say to that except her name. He says it twice more when she does not answer, afraid she has gone on ahead of him and already passed.

"It's selfishness on my part as well," she says finally. "We can be new things to ourselves, and to everyone we love in this next lifetime."

"I love you," says Ichigo, and means it more than he ever has. "'Till the end."

"'Till the end," she agrees, and takes his hand.

They do not die so much as slip out of their bodies into spirit form. They appear young again—not as young as when they had met, but somewhere solidly around their late twenties, and Orihime smiles at him, as dazzling as five minutes ago, when she was ninety-five and wrinkled. They let go of each others' hands as Rukia comes in. She kisses Orihime on the forehead before she brings her sword hilt down and sends her first, in a burst of light. There are tears in her eyes when she turns to Ichigo.

"Happy to see me?" Ichigo tries to joke. His voice sounds creaky, like he has forgotten how not to be old. "Or sad you've got to put up with me now?"

"Happy for myself," she says. "But sad for Kazui. Sometimes I felt like he was my son too."

Ichigo's breath gets stuck in his throat, but it's alright; he doesn't need to breathe now.

"I will visit him," he says. "As much as he wants me to."

"It was a good life?"

He thinks back on all the mistakes he made, his intital misery and then the climb out of it into where he is now. He thinks of the wrinkled body on the bed behind him and the years he spent inside it; thinks that the distance between him and Rukia is smaller now.

"Yes," he says. "The best."

"The next one will be better," she says, and brings her sword down.

Welcome home, Ichigo.

yes, the voice at the end is zangetsu, and also, yes, i made as many of the characters queer as possible. ichigo is also probably hella bi, it's just that the loves of his life have been women.

more coming soon! ichigo and rukia in soul society! plot! danger! emotional times! this fic is cross-posted at my ao3 (inlay), and will always be updated there first