Characters: Ichigo, Rukia
Summary: The magic is gone. /One more time would be enough./
Pairings: IchiRuki
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for 423-424
Timeline: During the time skip
Author's Note: Another IchiRuki; it's a post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving miracle. Think of it what you will. Reviews are always welcome; flames, on the other hand, are not. Also, Ichigo seems really miserable, doesn't he? It will be interesting to see where his character development goes in the manga.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

No such things as ghosts, not anymore. At least, that's what Ichigo knows he has to tell himself, repeating it with his eyes screwed shut whenever he sees Karin talking to nobody or when Ishida gives his hurried excuses (he's getting better at lying convincingly) and runs out of class. What he can't see, can't sense, he must deny if he ever wants to look at the sky and see a morning again, if he ever wants to keep a firm hold on sanity and reality.

But still, Ichigo didn't think he life could ever hit a deeper nadir than where if fell after his mother died. Trust Rukia to prove him wrong.

Besides the old, battered badge Ukitake gave him so long ago, no remnant of his life as a Shinigami remains.

Orihime prefers to behave as though it never happened. This is how she deals with things she can't control. Ichigo knows she hasn't forgotten (will never forget), would like to talk but doesn't know how, so she simply doesn't acknowledge it.

Sado and Ishida are a bit different. Neither of them talk either, but Sado holds a silent, tacit agreement with Ichigo to remember, and Ishida is just a fraction milder with Ichigo than he used to be—if Ichigo looks hard enough, he thinks he can see sympathy, never acted on, behind cautiously neutral eyes.

Isshin, of course, is stubbornly waiting for Ichigo to start the dialogue first. Stupid Dad; now is not the time for things like that. Isshin is incapable of taking a hint; the girls are much better about that, Karin especially.

None of them are the one Ichigo really wants to see, though.

Why Rukia won't even visit, he can't begin to fathom. She was never cruel, if a bit thoughtless at times, but she has to know what this does so why doesn't she at least visit? Even if it's just to hear her call him an idiot, Ichigo would give away anything to hear her voice again—and he had no idea how sweet a sound her voice was until it was gone and it really sank in for him that he'd never hear it again. Now all that's left is the dry, barren desert; not a drop of water in sight to keep him even slightly sustained. Dying for lack of air and water, without her guiding hands there.

Memories simply aren't enough. Not for Ichigo.

Without Rukia life has lost its luster, become a dull, colorless affair of shades of dreary rain shower-gray. Like everything's bled out to black and white, bleached of all radiant color, gone back to monotony like a soup with no seasoning. Like stale water, left in storage for far too long.

And the thought never leaves him, that she never looked more beautiful than when she was fading away—or maybe it was just him who was fading—, that he never longed for her presence more than when he knew he would never have it again—because even if Rukia did come back eventually, it wouldn't be the same.

For long months, through the dark winter and the unsteady growth of spring, pass it all over again, Ichigo waited for Rukia to come back. Waited for the one person who had known how to breathe life back into him after everything had gone so, so wrong, to come back and breathe life again.

But that's just it.

Rukia hasn't come back.

And there's nothing to give Ichigo the hope that she ever will. He's still getting lessons from Rukia even when she's not there, lessons in futility, lessons in what cruelty and pain tastes like and lessons in how to drown and die of thirst in the same moment in time.

Lessons in how to fade himself.

She's left and taken the sparkle with her. There's no more luminous moon in the sky, no more glittering wealth of stars—only cloud cover, thick and gloomy, the harbinger of a storm that will be the attacker of memory and the devourer of past happiness. It will uproot him again, sending his past self back into the abyss.

Really, Ichigo feels almost the same as he did after his mother died. Even when he knows that this time, he did everything he could, that he did everything right, he still feels like he failed.

And as Ichigo begins to wash out himself, he wishes—wondering if wishes carry any weight anymore—that Rukia would just visit, just once.

He wishes that she would just give him some reason to believe that his life as a Shinigami was any more than a fantastical dream (a time when life may not have always been happy, but at least it was vibrant), any more than a fading dream being carried off on the waves to oblivion.

He wishes that she'd give him a reason to believe that she was ever any more than a dream herself.

One visit.

One more day, one more hour, one more moment to remember her by.

That would be enough.