A/N: A legit, full-on IchiRuki. Hope you enjoy it. Takes place after Ichigo gets his powers back. Hope you enjoy, and feedback is always appreciated! Thank you for reading!
Dust and Gold
He reckons he should probably be angrier.
Seventeen months. It really is a long time. Maybe not so long to her, this girl-woman who has existed over one hundred and fifty winters, this soldier who has lived several of his lifetimes over. It must have passed like a blink for her. It must have felt like minutes, not months.
He forgets, sometimes.
How big she is.
He forgets the way she can stand, all four-foot-eight-inches of her, forgets the way she can confront men three times her size and take them down without batting an eyelash.
He forgets how this tiny slip of a girl had taken out the Ninth Espada with only her shikai, remembers only how she'd almost died, the flickering feel of her spiritual pressure at the edges of his consciousness.
He forgets how much she's seen, how long she's lived, the love and the light she harbors in that battered heart of hers.
He forgets, sometimes, how she's so, so big, so giantlike, and he – well, he –
He's just small.
He is seventeen and he has waged wars, has held them deep inside himself. He has tasted the dust and the gold of battle, has kept secrets like a promise. He is a king and a horse and a warrior and a child, and he is small.
She has held kingdoms in her palms, crushed and cradled them with a twitch of her fingers, and he – well, he.
He is only just beginning.
(there are ruins in his mouth and
they taste like blood and snow)
There's this memory.
It plays along the edges of his vision, deep in the caverns of his head. The hollow berates him for it, and Zangetsu is sighing when he dreams.
It is the memory of a perfect blue sky (not so perfect, not really, not in his soul, it's all endless and gray in there) and twin violet eyes staring up at him, watery, not completely from the wind.
It is the memory of pink lips parted, words lost in the air, his heart lurching and begging and pleading: no tears, no tears, not for me, you precious girl.
She wants to say something. She is going to say something. Perhaps she does say something, but she always goes before he can hear the words. He always wakes up before she can reappear.
Blinking, eyes pressed into the darkness, he remembers: she never did reappear.
She probably never will.
When all is said and done, he takes her back to his home, her home, the house. His dad is helpful for once and opts to take the girls out for some "daddy-daughter bonding".
It's a bit strange, knowing his dad knows, having that heaviness attached to his frankly ridiculous father. He hasn't gotten used to it, even now, almost two years later.
She shuffles over to his bed and plops down, legs swinging, eyes roving. He can almost pretend it's the way it was before, that she never left. That he was around to make snarky comments when she got that new haircut of hers, that he was there to congratulate and tease her when she became a lieutenant.
But then he sees her eyes, and knows that's all just silly. There is seventeen months separating them now, whole worlds in the rift between them.
He wants to say something, doesn't know what. Doesn't know how to articulate.
His words never seem to come fast enough, with her.
He wonders if she misses him, sometimes.
He misses her. He'll never admit it, but it's crazy, how much he misses her. He'll sit on his bed and stare at his closet until he remembers she's just a ghost, now.
The dead could haunt the living. But the living had no right to haunt the dead.
The thought rips a hole through him. The words "Don't leave me," spill from his mouth and into the still December air before he can think to stop them, hoping she's there, just to listen.
Shame slams into him from all angles – he needs to move on.
Why can't he move on?
She was just a girl. A temperamental little know-it-all who got under his skin, claimed a spot in his world. Changed him.
Saved him.
Shit.
He tumbles back into bed and decides school can wait another day.
Hours pass. The sun sets. The dusk steals in, the dust settles on the windowsill, and her eyes are dark when she leans up to look at him.
They never needed words, to know what the other was trying to say. It had been that way since the start, from the moment she sank her sword into his soul, or maybe even before that.
He sees something in her eyes now, written across the violet in shimmering, icy silver, louder than anything either of them could ever verbalize.
He crosses the room and doesn't realize how much she's trembling until she's in his arms, in their first hug in seventeen months.
"I missed you," he says, breathes against her newly-cut hair, and she nods.
I missed you too.
He pulls back, and maybe it's an accident, probably it's not, but she pushes forward, desperate to keep the contact or something else.
Their noses brush.
Time stops, as stupid as it sounds.
Breaths mingling, his eyes run over her, heart speeding up, pounding against his chest in a way he hasn't felt since she crashed into him, that day on the ice, so, so long ago.
"Ichigo," her voice, too deep and too heavy for such a tiny big thing, rushes over him, runs down his spine. "Ichigo, I –"
There's something, something building between them, something big and burning and bright. Zangetsu hums inside his heart. The sun is shining, he says. He's seen clouds and he's seen rain and he's seen such an aching, endless blue, but this is the first time he sees the sun, he thinks, maybe, in all probability.
He runs calloused hands over the sensitive skin of her neck, fingers tickled by her soft hair. Mouth dry, lips pressing against her forehead when he breathes, "I just – if I asked, would you let me –?"
She pulls him down, presses her mouth to his before he can think to finish. Tiny huge hands, yanking at his clothes, seventeen months hanging between them, and all the months before then, from her sword in his soul to that last-minute glimpse of her endless eyes under that burning blue sky.
Her lips are burning against his, when he fumbles with the ties holding her together, and he can taste whole empires falling to ruin in the flick and swipe of her tongue, the dust and the blood and the snow.
She's tasted the war – he wonders if she can taste it on him, too.
Seventeen months.
Not very long, in retrospect.
He thinks of all the months he's lived, later, when the night gets cold and they curl up within each other for warmth. He thinks of all the moments and days he spent, the fifteen years he didn't know her. All the days that never were.
Moonlight spills into his room, and maybe tomorrow she'll be distant, or maybe he will. Maybe tomorrow, they'll act like this never happened. Maybe tomorrow, he'll take her hand and they'll start rebuilding the kingdoms she claimed.
Maybe they'll start with his.