Word Count: 1,649

Timeline/Spoilers: set during whatever the hell 686 was but au; spoilers for bleach ending

Summary: What's worse – to live along parallel lines and never once meet, or to converge for a single instance and then drift apart forever? Perhaps saddest of all is to slip closer and closer together yet never intersect. ; ichiruki / 686 spoilers

Notes: I swear I meant to write a fix-it fic, but instead I came up with angst. Lyrics from Losing Your Memory by Ryan Star, which is kind of what inspired this.

part one. parallel

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Married to his not-quite-high-school sweetheart, with 1.5 kids (one on the way), and keeping the family clinic afloat, it was no wonder Ichigo was the envy of all his friends. It was a charmed existence, and that was exactly his problem. It felt like someone else's life.

He scoffed at the thought. Here he was, at 27, already in the awakenings of a mid-life crisis. Karin loved to tease him about his receding hairline, so maybe there was something to that. He ran a hand through the thinning locks, trying to reassure himself.

His son Kazui was everything he wasn't. Friendly. Inquisitive. Easygoing. The only thing they had in common was the shockingly vibrant hair. It went without saying that he mostly took after his mother. Ichigo isn't quite certain how that came together, either. Of course, he recalls proposing and pledging to spend the rest of his life with her, but they hadn't exactly been voted 'cutest couple' back in high school. In fact, they rarely spoke, tethered only by a mutual best friend by the name of Arisawa Tatsuki.

On some level (when he was no longer a bumbling fifteen-year-old who turned crimson at the mere suggestion of a girl having feelings for him), he was aware of her harbored affection, but it was only at Tatsuki's constant nudging to give the other girl a shot and his father's annoying insistence on needing to carry on the family line that Ichigo budged. He had to admit he had a certain fondness for the eccentric young woman, who was still merely an acquaintance at the time, but it was far from what she apparently felt for him, despite their status as relative strangers. In the end, it wasn't romantic, and it wasn't conventional. He had kept in peripheral contact with Orihime throughout college (again, mainly via Tatsuki). At a high school classmate's get-together, he popped the question. They skipped the whole dating phase, and went straight to the courthouse. The young woman was too star struck at finally getting the man she'd pined after for years to heft a complaint about not getting her dream wedding along with it (or any wedding at all, really), fearful that it might all dissipate before her.

They lived comfortably, with Ichigo providing as a licensed physician. Though she did obtain her own degree, Orihime was content to remain as a homemaker and to raise the children, or at least she never complained. In fact, she never found fault in him at all, holding him up as some sort of flawless being. It appeared that her concept of him hadn't evolved much since their days at Karakura High. But she was happy, as far as Ichigo could tell. Despite being intimately involved enough to produce two offspring, he couldn't claim to know his wife at all as a person. They had the perfect marriage, the perfect life, from the outside, and Ichigo knew he was lucky in many respects, so he couldn't understand this feeling of having missed out on something. It couldn't even be counted as a rough patch, when there was nothing he could complain about.

He glanced at the clock on the wall. Lunch break was nearly over, and he'd spent too long retreated into his own mind. Perhaps he'd bring home some jewelry for the wife and a toy for the kid after his shift.

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pretend that you want it, don't react

part two. perpendicular

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"It's not shinigami. It's Kuchiki Rukia," she'd said.

But she was gone the following morning, and he would never again feel the pull of another plane. More than a decade down the road, he's tempted to say it was some half-imagined fever dream from his teenage years. But the ghost of a girl who showed him wonders and seemingly changed his world in a single night had been too real to disregard. Her eyes, too vivid purple to be of this realm. Her words, too gruff and demanding to belong to any fantasy girl his subconscious may have conjured up. The sword in his chest and power coursing through his veins, too exhilarating, too right, to have simply been imagined.

No matter, whatever may have transpired that night was clearly a one-time deal. He no longer encountered spirits drifting along after their deaths, nor did his sisters ever again mention seeing or sensing ghosts. It was like the first fifteen years of his life had been wiped clean. He was given a new slate that he had never asked for.

Still, he can't help but choke back a bitter laugh at the irony of a living-dead girl haunting his memories. But she's been fading as of late. Part of him is relieved that he can finally get a move on with his life, but the other half is inexplicably distressed, afraid to lose this strange remnant of a night that may or may not have been. The anxiety is bleeding into his personal life. More often than not, he finds himself dreamy and distracted, trying to separate the real from the illusory. He's certain his patients would not appreciate it if his mind drifted off in the middle of surgery, so he keeps a lid on it as best as he can. It's difficult without someone to talk to about it, but he's used to keeping to himself. Besides, what would people say if he revealed he'd been fixated on the (false?) memory of a shinigami girl who'd gifted him with her powers when he was a boy of fifteen? They'd be shipping him off to see a doctor of his own.

He wonders what she'd say if she could see him now, living his mediocre, human life. Real or not, she'd changed something in him, this Kuchiki Rukia. Would that they could cross paths just once more.

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i would have loved you all my life

part three. asymptotic

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Ichigo: 27 years old

Hair color: Orange

Eye color: Brown

Occupation: Doctor

Special skill: Ability to see ghosts

For as long as he could remember, he'd been able to see ghosts. Young children, old geezers, even roadkill dogs and cats. Most might think it an exceptional ability, but he mainly saw it as a nuisance. Ichigo kept interaction with them to a minimum. Sure, he went to their defense if a little girl's shrine was being tampered with, or he would bring flowers to a lonely kid, but mainly, he pretended they didn't exist. It would be a bother if too many ghosts went asking for favors or if they tried to follow him around like a lost puppy (just as the ghost of a lost puppy once tried to).

It was no longer a novelty to him, not since he'd been a young boy. He tried not to get too involved with the spirits he did interact with. Best not to get attached or to mess with the workings of the spiritual plane. He wasn't a superstitious man, but it was hard to ignore the existence of literal ghosts, especially the geezers who didn't know seem to understand the meaning of personal space in life or death.

Sometimes, the ghost of some kid he'd wave at every morning would be gone the next day. He didn't question it. They had to go somewhere after they died. Ichigo wasn't sure if he believed in heaven or hell or an afterlife at all, but he hoped those spirits found peace, wherever they went.

Besides the occasional small favors and daily greetings, ghosts didn't factor much into his daily life. They were like background noise at this point. To him, the paranormal was just, well, normal. Not to say that strange things didn't occur sometimes. (Stranger than seeing ghosts on a daily basis that is). There were times when he swore he felt like he was being watched or that he saw grotesque creatures in the shadows just out of his line of vision. There was even one time (and he swears that it had to be a dream) when he was a teenager and he woke to find the entire town dead silent and bodies just passed out all around him. He'd felt a sharp jab in his side at that point and promptly passed out himself. He awoke the following morning in bed, and no one he knew made any comment of some mass hallucination, so he left it alone, even though that string was just begging to be pulled. It was best he kept it to himself.

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i just want to keep this dream in me

part four. coincidental

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It starts like this – a boy and a shinigami meet, and fate falls at their geta-clad feet.

He combats across worlds to save her, and she halts the rain in his own inner plane.

Then it's like the ground is pulled out from beneath his very feet, and the earth stops turning, devoid of her constant presence.

But she returns, and he drifts back into her orbit, as easy as breathing.

They face trials and tribulations of the natural and supernatural kind. Sometimes it's hollows and an undead bureaucratic society and masterminds bent on ruling the worlds, and sometimes it's knees knocking and first kisses and endless bickering over trivial matters.

She turned his whole life on its head in the span of months, so he resolves to spend millennia at her side, paying her back for every second. It's not the life he imagined when he was fifteen and simply seeing ghosts, but it seems he was never meant for an ordinary, human life.

A decade flies by in the blink of an eye, and he's not sure if he feels 27 or 207, but the ceaseless clock keeps ticking on.

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all the best of what we've done is yet to come

A/N: Yea, I really did write a fic based on different kinds of lines you learn about in math. Tbh I almost didn't write part four, just to keep the angst boat afloat, but in the end I let them be happy lmao. Please review and/or complain about the manga ending at me!