AN: Because it is two years this month since I first began Deathsong, and because I saw Midnight in Paris and afterwards could not sleep until I wrote something. Set just before 480.

Anabiosis

-.-

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

—A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

-.-

He finds her on the roof.

Rukia is not surprised he follows her, not really—it is, after all, his roof—but she is surprised Ichigo bothers to take the long way through the house, with its two ladders and short attic passageways and the window that sticks when the weather gets warm. She herself prefers the easier route: a short hop from the nearest telephone pole.

But—Ichigo is human, after all, with human habits and a human perspective and seventeen months of enforced humanity behind him. Perhaps she should not be so surprised.

"Hey," he says, in a very human way, and drops down next to her on the roof. There is a patch of dirt on the elbow of his t-shirt where he struck the window to open it.

"Hello," says Rukia.

"So," Ichigo says, drawing out the word like the lazy curl of smoke from the end of a cigarette. "Lieutenant, huh? Byakuya still stiff as a poker about that?"

She thinks of a ceremony in the Thirteenth, of Ukitake pressing a heavy wooden badge and a band of cloth into her hand—and of her brother standing witness at her side, unsmiling and silent and gentle as he knots the ends of the fabric into place around her arm. "He is pleased for me."

Ichigo puts both hands behind his head and falls back to lie against the warm slate tiles of the roof. "I bet."

"Be polite," Rukia says, reaching to thump him on his ribs—but Ichigo flinches back before she can touch him, and that causes her to flinch in return. They stare at each other a moment, both startled, and then Ichigo's eyes slide away to the burnt blue of the sky, and in the heartbeat between words she thinks suddenly that he will apologize. The very thought skips her heart forward a beat or two—she and Ichigo do not apologize to each other, and neither do they flinch; they have always faced their truths together, and straightened the other's path when they were lost, and she thinks that if he asks for her forgiveness now then they have lost something more between them than time.

"Yeah, yeah," he mutters instead, and stretches out his long, long legs towards the edge of the roof.

They sit like that for a long time. The winds are warm, here, stirring the ends of her hair against her neck and bringing with them the smell of exhaust and cedar trees and fast food, and Rukia thinks that even if she were to fetch her gigai, it could not possibly make this world more visceral, more alive, more real.

She wonders how it felt, for him, to be wholly human.

She sees Ichigo's eyes turn to her in the corner of her gaze, but when she glances over he is staring up at the cloudless sky. Rukia hesitates, then looks out over the graceful black branches of power lines that map the city's streets in open air—and again, his eyes burn into the side of her head, and again when she looks over he is gazing upward in studied indifference.

Rukia pinches the bridge of her nose and says, "What is it?"

"You're shorter than I remember."

She swells in indignant fury, but before she can kidou him clean off the roof he laughs and rolls his head on his hands to face her. "I'm kidding," he says, then adds, "You're exactly as short as I remember."

"And you are just as much a fool," she retorts, but her irritation is deflating despite herself; this is the Ichigo she remembers, cocky grin and all, and she cannot pretend she is not pleased to see him. "I should have known not to expect otherwise."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"And your powers of cognition seem to have declined as well. Time is cruel, indeed."

"Not as cruel as you are, old woman—hah! I've been dodging the old man for a year and a half, you think I can't dodge you now—"

"You—Hadou #33—Blue Fire—"

"Oh, no you don't," Ichigo says, and claps his hand over her mouth.

Her laughter dies away like an ebbing sea as they both fall still. Ichigo's skin is hot on her lips, his fingers long and curving over her cheek; the amusement in his face fades even as she watches to leave behind something more serious, something dark and curling and hot that he has never shown her so clearly before. Her hands falls slowly to her knees, incantation forgotten—and then his hand slides away and his eyes do too, and at their loss Rukia almost feels cold.

"Anyway," Ichigo says, still not looking at her as he rearranges himself on the roof tile, "it's been a while. People have changed while you were away."

I wasn't the one who was gone, she wants to tell him, but instead she says only, "So I have seen."

"'So I have seen,'" he repeats, gently mocking, then says in his own voice, "What, so you visited the others while I was—out?"

She does not acknowledge the stumble; neither does she lie to him. "No."

"Huh," Ichigo says after a moment. He does not ask why not, and she does not say it hurt to see you. "Well, how's Soul Society, then? Still standing?"

"Considering how much damage you do when you come, it is in considerably better condition than when you left it."

He snorts, throwing one arm over his eyes to close out the sun. "Except that you've got Aizen there as a permanent attraction. I think that one goes in the 'con' column."

Rukia agrees. It unnerves her, sometimes, to think of him chained and smiling and deep in the earth under her feet—twenty thousand years is a long time, even by her standards, and she cannot imagine him sitting pliant and obedient as they pass—but Aizen is gone and Ichigo is not, not anymore, and she presses her worries to the back of her mind for another time.

"Something wrong?"

"No." She pauses, then asks, awkwardly, "How have you been?"

Ichigo laughs, short and sharp, and drops his arm back over his eyes. "Just fine, Rukia."

She winces. That had been a foolish question, barbed and hooked and too cruel, especially when she knows the answer, and her fingernails tap a stilted staccato on the dark tiles at her hip in unconscious discomfort. It hadn't even been what she wanted to ask, really; it's just that they have so much to talk about, so much to discuss that she doesn't know where to begin—she wants to speak to him of Aizen, and of his defeat; and of his sisters and his school and his friends, their friends; of her officer ceremony and of her brother and of Renji. She even misses Kon.

She wants to tell him how glad she is to see him. How glad she is that he can see her.

But that is far too transparent, especially for them, and the rest of it all bubbles and catches in her throat like a dam-choked stream, so instead she laces her fingers in her lap and falls silent. A flock of birds wings by overhead, dark and sharp like pencil scratches on the sky, to settle on the gentle curve of a power line a few streets over. One of them lets out a brilliant burst of song that cracks the air open; the others follow suit, and for several minutes the sky fills, cloud-like, with the raucous cacophony of a hundred open-throated sparrows trying to outdo each other. Then a car honks as it passes and the birds startle, lifting off the power lines as one, and they disappear behind a copse of pine trees with a final, indignant series of squawks.

Rukia laughs and the wind picks up, lifting the black sleeves of her uniform away from her arms. Then, without preamble and without lifting his arm from his eyes, Ichigo says, "Zangetsu's back."

"I'm glad," she says, and closes her eyes into the wind. She knows how it feels to have a part of one's soul torn away—knows too the wild and silent elation that surges like the sea when the broken thing is made whole again.

Shirayuki laughs, then, high and light like bells glinting off ice, and says, It was only for a time.

It was too long, Rukia thinks, and when Ichigo chuckles beside her she wonders if Zangetsu might have said the same thing. She smiles and tips her face up to the brilliant sun of the human world, letting it spill over her skin in a wash of warmth that seeps straight into her bones. The sun fades red behind her eyelids; a woman a few streets over calls her children in to lunch; the wind turns east, carrying with it the heated, heavy smell of honeysuckle.

"You cut your hair."

The world is too bright at first when she opens her eyes, bright and blinding as the sekkiseki stones of her onetime prison, and she has to blink Karakura back into existence before she can answer Ichigo. She looks down at him, still smiling, until his arm lifts enough for her to see one brown eye; she raises a mocking eyebrow and to her faint—and gratified—surprise, he flushes before hiding his eyes again. "What?" he mumbles. "I just noticed."

"Curiosity skinned the cat."

"Killed it."

"What?"

"Curiosity killed—never mind. You cut your hair, is the point."

"Did I? I hadn't noticed."

"Rukia."

She laughs as he props himself up on his elbows to glare at her, but relents. "Yes."

"Why?"

Rukia blinks, but Ichigo's gaze is level and unflinching, and she settles back on her hands to ponder his question. They don't ask each other that very often. Why is a dangerous thing to ask, for the two of them: their pasts are littered with pitfalls, bruised and treacherous and slippery with shame, and neither of them treads often into each other's history without permission. But why does that anyway, fearlessly, pries open the soft spots and peers in without warning, probes the sore places until they do not hurt anymore. Sometimes they are not ready to be healed.

Of course, Ichigo has never been known for his patience.

Rukia pushes up to her feet and looks out over the city. Seventeen months have passed since she's been here, more still since it was her home, and still she knows the line of each soaring tower; she turns to Ichigo, then, seated still on his slate-tiled roof, patient and steady—and she knows this too, knows him like she knows her name, like she knows the name of her sword. Her heart is inexplicably racing; she presses her fingertips into the black fabric over her heart as if to still it, to calm it as one calms a frightened bird, but it will not be still. Again, faintly, she can hear Shirayuki laugh.

Ichigo is quiet as he watches her. At last she says, slowly, "I was not the same."

It is not an answer, not in the way he meant the question—but Ichigo nods as if he understands, as if it is enough, and Rukia thinks that if it was not clear it was true, and she and Ichigo have always faced their truths together. He looks up at her as if she is something else, something changed from what she was—and that, she thinks, is another true thing—and then, distantly, a Hollow's roar rolls low and thundering over the slanted roofs of the city.

Rukia turns, Shirayuki already singing in her mind let us go and dance again, and she places her fingers on the cool hilt of her sword. "I must go," she says.

"Wait," says Ichigo behind her, his voice shot through with repressed anticipation. "Rukia. I'll go with you."

His face is alight with the promise of combat, with the promise of flight and the wild and screaming victory of an open sky laid out before his feet. Rukia does not hesitate; she stretches out her hand to him and pulls him to his feet—him, tall and straight and true in the soul-burnt black he belongs in, and Zangetsu curves skyward on his back. His human body they leave curled on the sun-warmed slate. He does not need it now.

Ichigo laughs, and then together they step to the edge of the roof, towards the city's steel and shining skyline, towards the blazing cry of battle that clenches fiercely around her heart. She does not release his hand; he does not pull away. Seventeen months, Rukia thinks—and all that matters is this single sunlit instant.

They leap forward, exultant.