I have no business throwing myself into yet another weird Ichiruki-Bleach-AU thing, but lately I've realised that I probably worry about my writing way too much which is why I never get anything longer than a oneshot done. In the interests of actually learning to write a multichaptered fic, I've decided I'm going to write this one really lightheartedly, no worrying about whether each turn of phrase is exactly right allowed. As a consequence, it might be kinda shit. But, uh, do feel free to give it a go anyway.

Also, the summary and the first chapter make it look kinda bleak but dw it's going to be quite lighthearted. I think. Maybe. Look I have no idea where this is going ok just have it

Chapter 1

Incidence

I'm going to kill the person who first came up with the concept of soul mates.

All that bullshit about being mentally connected? Lies. All that crap about taking one look at them and something in you clicking, you being made whole — quite frankly, a pile of horseshit. All that 'through every life, in whatever form, I'll know you' reincarnation bull — fucking hell. I want my money back.

Don't believe everything you read in books, kids. You think you'll recognise the love of your life if she gets cut down in front of you by your nemesis and reincarnated into the world you literally just abandoned to be with her?

You're fucking wrong.

Soul Society, Captain's Quarters, Eighth Division, 2103 AD

"We found her."

It's the best thing Kurosaki Ichigo has heard in a century. The statement is short, brusque and without context, but even so, he knows exactly what it means. There is only one person about whom Abarai Renji would have come to him for, eyes ablaze with an intensity he knows all too well himself.

"Show me," he says, kind of unable to believe his luck— but then again, if the universe was any kind of fair, it was due to show him some mercy sometime in the next decade.

It's just, you know, the universe has never really been all that fair before.

But who was he to look a gift horse in the mouth? Urahara had said it would be nigh-on impossible to find her again, after he managed to anchor her soul together and send it off into the cycle of reincarnation instead of letting it drift apart like it would have without the intervention. He'd saved her, he'd said, or what he could of her, anyway; but Kurosaki-san shouldn't expect her to be exactly like the Kuchiki Rukia he knows— had known. Actually, on second thoughts, Kurosaki-san shouldn't expect to find her again at all, period. Kuchiki Rukia, as he'd known her, was gone.

What was the point then, he had raged, what was the point of sending her soul into the reincarnation cycle if it wouldn't result in her? If Kuchiki Rukia was gone and this soul was going to inhabit a new body and grow up to be a stranger—this, this was no solution at all, and Rukia was still dead. What was the point?

But even as he'd raged, he'd felt it— cruelly, a voice in his head was whispering that this was better than nothing. Something of her was out there, something of her warmth, her light, her goodness, and if he could just find her again, even if it wasn't exactly her—

He'd refused to let that whispering voice bloom into anything resembling hope, but some part of him must have agreed, because instead of letting his Hollow run rampant, instead of running away into the woods and becoming a hermit, instead of falling on his own sword and following her into the cycle like he'd wanted to, he'd endured. He slaughtered Ywhach, decimated the Sternritters, accepted the Captaincy the Gotei-13 offered him; if he was going to find her (he still refused to call the strange lightness in his chest hope), Soul Society, with all its connections and spells and Kurotsuchi Mayuri's twisted idea of science, would be the best place to start.

He'd forgotten this was Soul Society they were talking about. The place that apparently has no organisational structure worth mentioning, despite being entrusted with the afterlife of every single person that had ever existed on the planet. Fuck, people had to band together in weird nuclear second families just to stay alive in the outskirts of the place. Their soul-finding program was beyond shit.

The only thing shittier than Soul Society's structure (or lack thereof) had been his own thought processes when he convinced himself that joining them would be the most efficient way of finding Kuchiki Rukia.

It took them decades. He and Renji, and covertly Byakuya, slaved over reconnaissance and reiatsu detection and buttering up Kurotsuchi Mayuri in between their duties as Captains and rebuilding the Gotei-13. Ichigo even learned freaking kido, to help him better understand the nuances of controlling, manipulating and detecting reiatsu. He'd hoped the Gotei-13 would be enthusiastic in offering their help; after all, Rukia was nakama, and they fucking owed her after their disastrous attempts to execute her so many years ago. And if they thought their debt to her repaid by promoting her to Vice-Captain and allowing her to die in the line of duty, then they certainly fucking owed him for saving the entire damn world multiple times.

No such luck. Captain-Commander Ise drove a hard bargain.

"I'm sorry, Kurosaki-san," she'd said, pushing her glasses up her nose in a way that was infuriatingly reminiscent of Ishida, "it's not as though I don't wish to help you—after all, I know firsthand how much of a help you were to us— but there are some laws that not even I can violate. Laws, you understand, like the spring turning to summer and fire being hot."

She'd softened her gaze at the look in his eyes. "I apologise. I wish there was some way to help. But interfering with the reincarnation cycle is currently impossible, even for us shinigami, and locating where and when Kuchiki-san will be reincarnated would be like trying to count the number of spirit particles in the world. Could be done, technically, with an infinite amount of time and manpower, but ultimately futile."

So. He could count on no help from that quarter. Urahara had had similar answers for him. So it had just been him and Renji, and occasionally, quietly Byakuya, and Hanatarou had offered what little he could, and he's sure that had he still been alive, Ukitake Juushirou would have backed him up. But he's not, and it had been a long, lonely, quiet struggle between him and two other Captains and a handful of their acquaintances to find the girl who once drew them all together.

And now Renji was here, telling him that the struggle may be over.

"Show me," he repeats, eyes slowly lighting up with the same intensity (he still won't call it hope, he won't, he won't, but he can't deny the feeling in his chest is spreading, his whole body getting lighter, like he'll be able to float away) he sees in his fellow Captain's gaze. Renji nods tightly, once; a hell butterfly materialises out of nowhere (Ichigo still hasn't got the hang of calling on those damned things) and the two of them take after it in shunpo.

It leads them to the barracks of the sixth division; Kuchiki Byakuya is there, waiting, not a hair out of place, but his expression is the wildest Ichigo has ever seen it in their years of acquaintance. "I have contacted the Captain-Commander," he snaps out, voice as restrained as ever, but Ichigo can hear the cracks in it and he's as shaken about this as they are— "we are cleared for a living-world visit. Observation only."

He looks at them with those eyes again, the exact same twilight shade as hers despite their lack of a blood relation. "The Captain-Commander informs me that this will be the last time she grants us leeway in relation to this particular… matter. She can't have three of her Captains up and running out on a whim every decade, she says." He swallows, and Ichigo wants to shout, because that's bullshit— you'd think with the amount of times he's saved the world from annihilation bureaucracy might cut him a break—but that's for when he gets back, because maybe after this trip he won't need to shirk on his duties to try to find her anymore. "So make it count," Byakuya finishes quietly, and the other two nod, resolute.

They open up a senkaimon, and set off at a run.

He is expecting them to come out over Karakura Town; the sleepy little city of grey apartments and brown pavement is familiar to him, even after a hundred years, so when the senkaimon opens and deposits them over a beach, of all things, all pristine white sand and rolling waves of aquamarine, he's more than a little confused.

"Wha—what the hell is this, Renji?" he hisses, looking around, taking stock—the weather is beautiful in a way that it has never been in his living memory, the sun so hot that he imagines he can feel it prickling on his own skin despite the fact that he was a ghost. All his father's lectures about skin cancer and sunscreen come back to him in full-force. He's never had any reason to take them to heart, but here, under this foreign sun blazing in the sky above them, he kind of understands Isshin's concern. "Where are we?!"

"Sydney, Eastern Coast of Australia," Renji snaps, and Ichigo stares at his friend, dumbfounded.

"Australia?!" he croaks, incredulous, "Rukia's in Australia?!" Shit. He hadn't meant to say that—it had slipped out of him before he could stop it, because it's not Rukia they're looking for, not anymore, her reincarnation won't be her—but Renji doesn't seem to notice his slip-up, scanning the beach with his eyes screwed up against the blinding light. Byakuya is doing the same, he notices, just with a more dignified expression (because of course), and Ichigo finally decides to follow suit rather sheepishly.

The beach is crowded—not overly so, not enough for it to become unpleasant, but enough for the lifeguards to be on high alert. There are families with kids, and absently Ichigo wonders what time of the year it was in the living world. School holidays? A weekend? He's lost track, and he thinks maybe that that disconnect from the living world should frighten him— but no. He was a shinigami now, through and through. It was the choice he'd made when he'd decided to stay with her.

Too bad fate decided to be a bitch and pull her from him no less than a week after he'd made that choice.

A squealing kid, no more than five years old, runs wildly across his field of vision and abruptly Ichigo realizes that he has no fucking clue how he's supposed to go about looking for her.

"What… exactly are we doing here?" he mutters to his companions, and both of them tear their eyes away from their search briefly to look at him as though he'd gone insane.

"I mean," he defends hastily, "how are we supposed to find her anyway? How are we supposed to know? Where did we even get this information from in the first place?"

"You're only now thinking to ask that?" Renji rolls his eyes and goes back to scanning. "Urahara called us in. You know he's been attempting to help us on this, trying to find a way to track souls through the reincarnation cycle. It's not concrete, but he thinks he's figured out a way to tell when souls are reincarnated. Something about them breaching the barrier between the spirit world and the living world as they transition from one to another. And he thinks Rukia's soul was reincarnated around five years ago."

"So we're looking for a five-year-old kid?" Ichigo looks around at the beach full of anklebiters and feels kind of faint. Neither of his companions seem perturbed by this.

"Then why the hell are we in Australia?" he continues, even as his eyes slide over potential five-year-olds. That one's blonde, that one's got green eyes, wait, how the hell do we even know the reincarnated kid will look like Rukia? What if she looks completely different?

Renji scoffs. "Because that's where Urahara told us to go, moron. He said he managed to keep track of her soul for as long as possible before he lost the trail, and it wound up somewhere around here. Now are you gonna shut up and look for her?"

He does, despite the myriad questions on the tip of his tongue. He should have been elated, he knows, but none of this seems quite real, the three of them on the east coast of fucking Australia scanning the beach for the five-year-old vessel of their friend's reincarnated soul. Honestly, he's not sure what the other two are basing their search on, since they had no guarantees that Kuchiki Rukia reincarnated would look anything like she had done in her past life. For all they knew, that little boy at his feet building what looks like an atrocious sand sculpture of Admiral Seaweed was her reincarnated self.

Then, three syllables catch at his ears, and he whips around like lightning to look for its source.

"Lu—ci—a—" it had sounded like, and it's close enough to Rukia that his heart stutters in his chest. He searches, searches, his amber-bright eyes darting across the sand, before he identifies a tall blonde woman as the speaker and his gaze follows hers to a tiny, dark-haired figure dipping her toes into the water.

It feels like his stomach drops and bottoms out; his breath is coming erratically and his heart—god, his heart is beating like it hasn't beaten in a hundred years and is determined to make up for lost time. There's sweat in his palms (wildly, he hears her voice in his head, clearer than ever, chastising him that clammy hands were gross) and he wants to tell his companions about his findings but his vocal cords don't seem to want to obey him. He's frozen, and he should get closer to this girl, sense out her reiatsu, actually see her face—but he can't, he can't, it's too much after one hundred years, he can't deal with this.

"Is that—no way…" comes Renji's hushed, almost reverent voice beside him, and it's Byakuya that acts, closing his eyes and visualising the spirit ribbons of everyone on the beach. Hundreds of white streamers flare up around them, but the three of them have eyes only for the tiny girl playing at the edge of the sea, whose ribbon is —

"…white?" Byakuya says, opening his eyes again, sounding not disappointed but quizzical, almost like she was a puzzle he had failed to put together. "This… cannot be," he says, and moves closer to the girl without any warning. Renji and Ichigo yelp and scramble after him.

They stop in front of the girl, hovering over the surf, and she looks up—not at them, but at the sound of the blonde woman's voice. The three of them start—her face is achingly familiar, especially to Renji, who has grown up with that face leading his pack. The blue-violet eyes have remained the same, as has that glossy, raven's-wing hair and even that endearing strand of it down the middle of her face. There is no denying that the girl in front of them looks like a five-year-old Kuchiki Rukia.

But her spirit ribbon is white. Frowning, Byakuya tries the visualisation again, then Renji, then Ichigo, but no matter how many times the white strands shoot up, hers remains resolutely, stubbornly white.

The three ribbons that flutter around the shinigami are a deep, blood red.

"But it's her!" Renji insists, swiveling around to keep her face in sight— she's stood up, now, and is walking back to the blonde woman who's called her name— "it's her, I know it, I'd know her anywhere, I swear to god, that's Rukia right there—"

"It does seem… odd," Byakuya agrees, a little hesitantly, and he looks to Ichigo for input.

Ichigo closes his eyes, and tentatively feels for her reiatsu. This will put all doubts to rest— this is what will determine whether the girl in front of them is truly Rukia reincarnated, or simply someone who looks remarkably like her. It's been a hundred years, but there is no way he has forgotten what her reiatsu feels like. It resonates with his, polar opposite and yet exactly the same; it was her reiatsu, after all, that had drawn out his dormant one to the surface.

Except he senses nothing. He reaches out, tendrils of his power brushing against the girl, but there is nothing there. The spirit ribbon is white, and the girl isn't gifted in the least. The warmth he'd always felt in her presence does not come.

She has no reiryoku.

Something in him crumbles at the realisation; bitterly, he understands that despite all his efforts to the contrary, the thing that had been sustaining him for all these years really had been hope. Now that the lightness in his chest is gone, something heavy settles in its place; he feels that perhaps being dragged down to the bottom of the ocean by its weight is not a bad way to go.

Renji sees the expression on his face change and understands what it means.

"Bullshit," he hisses, and grabs Ichigo by the collar— "that's her, I'm telling you, it's got to be her, you don't know what she looked like when she was young, it's her—"

"Can you sense her reiatsu?" he counters dully; once, he might have been angry at the way Renji is questioning his ability to know her, but that was long ago and far away. "That might be the body that her reincarnated soul has settled into, I'll give you that, but that's no longer Rukia. Rukia's not here, Renji. She hasn't been anywhere for a long, long time."

"Fuck you," Renji says, but lets him go; what else could he do? He sensed it, and so did Byakuya: no reiatsu, no reiryoku to speak of, a white spirit ribbon.

I've saved what little of Kuchiki-san I could, Urahara had said. But I'm not sure it was enough.

Renji closes his eyes in defeat. The three of them stand silent, the surf loud in their ears.

"Lucia," the blonde woman calls again, a pretty smile curving her lips, and the child runs up to her, calling her mama. "Lucia, darling, come back from the ocean, there's a good girl; don't go in too deep, stay close to the shore…"

Lucia, she's called, and the sound of her name triggers an ache in Ichigo's chest; Lucia, not Rukia. Even her name is representative of what she is to them; close enough to Rukia to build up their hopes, but different enough to tear them all back down brutally to the ground. Lucia, not Rukia, is the culmination of a hundred years of guilt and worry and hope—the anticlimactic finale to a search that had ended before it had begun.

"Lucia," Ichigo whispers, and it tastes like ash on his tongue.

"… We return to the Seireitei immediately," Byakuya says, voice clipped and cold and low, something like fury whipping through the words. "We begin anew. I will talk to the shopkeeper personally as to where his sensing devices may have made an error. Kurosaki, Abarai, follow me."

Neither of them remind him that technically they are no longer under his command. They turn around obediently, a senkaimon opening up behind them; they stride after him in silence. The girl does not turn her head after them in some display of recognition or stirring spiritual power. She laughs once, high and pure, and her eyes remain locked on the woman she calls mama. Only the pitiless sun burning in the blue sky sees them go.