A/N: Reuploaded. First time I had to take it down because FFN was being glitchy with me. Then when I was about to reupload this I reread my first chapter and wisely decided to spend some time reworking it. So in it's place, I have this one. What follows is the previous A/N.

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Latest obsession has got to be Bleach. SO. AMAZING. Just to exercise my rusty writing skills, let's see how this goes. A drabble idea I thought of.

I have some ideas lined up for other drabbles, but if you'd like, feel completely free to drop me a request. I'd like to test my writing abilities that way. It can be something as simple as a character name and a word, or a more full-bodied idea. And for the record, I can do any pairing at all. Crack/yaoi/yuri/canon, s'all good :D

(I guess these might turn out a smidge longer than your average drabble.)

Summary: 'It's been awhile, Ichigo.' It's not always easy to say the right things, but sometimes the right things don't need to be said.
(On Rukia, Ichigo, and finally coming home.)
Characters: Ichigo x Rukia. Moar powah to the IchiRuki.
Disclaimer: (Applicable to all chapters.) Kubo Tite owns Bleach. I'd be lucky to have some hair dye of my own.

Chapter One - Homecoming
(by with a smile.)

At first, Ichigo had thought it was some form of a twisted practical joke.

After all, all of the dreams that had haunted him night after night once he returned to the physical world (without Rukia, which was a decidedly unfamiliar feeling) had all contained some form of a dramatic re-entrance of the shinigami he had come to know as his nakama into his life. So naturally he thought at first that he'd finally cracked under the strain of a normal life and was finding his dream world leaking into his vision of reality and manifesting itself in the form of the images of Renji, Matsumoto, Ikkaku, Yumichika, and Hitsugaya standing in his classroom doorway.

Frankly, it was difficult enough registering that they were standing there, actually talking to him, that these bodies contained souls that he considered his friends. However, his slightly slack-jawed reaction to them was nothing compared to when he heard a soft whap from behind, amplified by his own jumpy nerves and suppressed hopes and wishes, of a secret desire he wouldn't share with anybody, even with himself (too bad it had awakened and was stirring in his heart, thanks to the appearance of Team Hitsugaya).

He spun around instantly and still managed to feel like he was going far too slowly, that he was never going to reach that moment when he would lay his eyes again on the one shinigami who he wanted back the most.

His breath stopped dead in his chest, his heart freezing with his eyes locked onto hers, and it was as if the moment was stilled, that everybody else's movements were light-years and eons behind his own thought process, which was pattering out garbled messages of disbelief at a hyperspeed-like pace. No one could move quickly enough to interrupt this moment, and for that second that may as well have been a lifetime, they were the only two people in the classroom, they were the only two people on the planet, and all that mattered was him and her, and gazes that met and ignited a fire inside him that had long since remained dormant.

And he wanted to say something, anything, to voice how he was feeling, but his throat didn't agree, thick as it was with unnamed emotions, and his voice was lengthy in the coming (everything was working so painstakingly slowly).

For all those thousands of words he wanted to say, he could only stare and hope that his eyes would say what his mouth (and heart) could not.

He knew that she saw nothing else too, that for her the classroom consisted of no one else but him, that she too wanted to say something more, that she was meeting his gaze and reading his stare, that she understood the message that his eyes were begging for her to comprehend.

And in that single moment, her gaze held a message for him as well.

Me too, Ichigo.

A/N: Thank you for reading all parts of it. Your feedback is, as always, requested and cherished :)