your love is like (a million thank yous)

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It comes in all shapes and forms, sometimes in the most inconvenient of times, and sometimes in the right, all perfect and momentous. Theirs is something that is deeper than time, something that transcends her lifetime and his own. It is both beautiful and torturous, in one. Theirs is intangible and endless—forever, and doomed. They were destined to meet, strings interconnecting souls and enriching hearts and lighting a mutual spark evident when amber collides with violet, yet they had never been destined to be. And that's the tragedy of their kind of love, and it's something they are only forced to accept.

This is the reality of it.

So, it goes like this:

He marries someone else. Someone who is loving, kind, genuine, and present. And he thinks, that if he'd been placed in a lifetime where he had never been haphazardly thrown into the abyss of spirits and soul reapers and the battles within the concept of the afterlife—if he simply lived normally (or as normal as life could have been for him, for the most part), he could have fallen in love with her. Really fall in love with her, that is. Maybe with some nudges and subliminal hinting from Arisawa, or perhaps, a group project, overrated school dances that Keigo would force him to attend, something conventional (that hadn't been in the shape of a small woman with absurd, blunt, and nosy curiosity with fingers that never hesitated to point and a voice so cutthroat that it would leave him silenced) could have brought them together.

And he would be able to actually have a wholehearted conversation with her, his future wife, the innocent girl with the large brown eyes and the even larger heart. One that could possibly love them enough for the both of them. If he hadn't been preoccupied with surreal worlds and superhuman beings and a shinigami who swung a blade into his chest and inevitably entwined their souls, he possibly could have naturally grown to love this girl.

It's funny how fate works:

how minor inconveniences, unexpected interferences, and in its most purest form, the smallest of moments—change how he feels about the could have beens, the would have beens (because as soon as the woman in a black robe steps foot into his room, her strong aura invading his senses, everything is different.)

And suddenly:

what he expects is not what he wants.

But in the end, it happens, regardless. He ends up with the large brown eyed girl, in spite of it all, and he lets it. Lets it because he's simple, because he's content, because he would be an idiot not to, because regardless of the in-betweens of clashing worlds and victorious battles, in this lifetime, he is human. And she is here, she has always been here, and she has always loved him.

And even when it's a pity he can't seem to resonate with the passion that flares for him, for her, (since someone else had stolen every ounce of his much earlier, stripping him of any chance to feel so strongly about anyone else) he still marries her.

Since, as stated: it comes in all shapes and forms, whether it's conventional, destined, easy, real, or anything but. He could have fallen head over heels for her, and my god does she love him, would do anything for him, would plunge herself off towers for the sake of him—and he, in turn, is stunned, flattered. Accepting the fact that he will never feel as strongly for a person as he had with a violet-eyed woman that has gone, he lets Inoue take the wheel. He lets her drive their beings together, proximity always a consistent closeness, words smothering, and love unconditional.

He is indifferent and unbothered, and she is irrevocably in love with him. Because nothing will ever change that (and nothing will ever change him, again,) he does what he finds to be the most logical thing.

He may have fallen in love with someone else—the shinigami—the supernatural woman that with one instance, turns his entire world upside down (horizontal vertical backwards colorful.) Their relationship may have become the strongest bond, a connection so passionate and wild that he would eternally be grateful for experiencing—an uncontrollable binding of hearts, minds, auras—but theirs was a love that had never been meant to be. It was one that had been sparked by a small moment of clarity with a blade, spilt blood, and vulnerability. It was one that had continuously expanded with longing, understanding, wanting and gradually, swallowing them whole, unexpectedly so. Their love was a flame that was never supposed to be lit, spreading like wildfire and out of their control.

And although theirs is something that drains their emotional being as they are fatefully drawn to separation, and an entanglement completely and utterly impossible to break free of, one that causes excruciating pangs of nostalgia and need with all its loose ends and bittersweet what if's, he wouldn't take any of it back. Not even for a second.

Even when destiny has other plans for them, he can still (and only) thank her, endlessly and forever: for meeting him, saving him, teaching him, supporting him, and showing him that a love as rich as theirs had been real all along.

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fin.

_a/n: I have been in this fandom for about 7 years and I have never been able to write for ichiruki despite the fact that they were my #1 otp.. but then the end fucked me up so bad and here I am, having written 3 fics in 3 days and I don't know who I am anymore and I also don't know what love is...really.

on another note: I am a bitch for angst