Chapter Text
Kurosaki Ichigo comes awake to the knowledge that there is someone else in the room. The sound of the rain pouring hard outside clashes against the cheerful jingle of his TV. It's yet another rerun of a cheesy 90s sitcom that only one person would ever choose to watch at 2AM on a Thursday. He sighs and turns to her. Rukia’s soaking wet and curled up in his chair, far too comfortable for someone who just broke into his home. As she’s been doing for the past months. “Will you ever learn to knock” he drawls. Then he sees the two glasses of rum aligned on the table and says “Oh”. “Tough week”, he says again. She shrugs and reaches for her drink. It’s weird, sitting across a cranky ghost in the middle of the night.
*
They first meet in a bar. A colorful temple of booze and flickering lights he stumbled upon by mistake. Yet another failure to tell apart what is real and what is not supposed to be. When drunken shadows start dancing and shouting around him, he looks for the closest exit. That’s when he notices her across the room. Cigarette in hand, back against the wall, she notices him too. “You should not be here”, she startles him. She sits next to him, lies against the counter, blows purple smoke on his face. “You’re a human.”
At twenty-two and without warning, Ichigo’s very normal and very human world became overcrowded with faces that shouldn’t be there anymore. Priests, nuns, monks and healers, he met them all to try and make sense of this odd predisposition. As it turns out though, ghosts are real, and ghost busters aren’t.
Now, he’s stuck navigating between two intertwined dimensions, seeing things – sometimes, often, unspeakable things – and trying to go unnoticed by them. What more this curse entails he does not know for sure; but he can feel danger looming closer and closer, sharp nails clawing at his ragged breath. It’s in the sight of burnt limbs, in the smell of putrid blood that overtook his life.
But that night Rukia sees him, and her eyes aren’t leaving his. It makes his skin crawl and his heart race.
“No one usually sees or hears me around here. That or the barman has been ignoring me.”
She stares again, then smirks. It’s small and a bit crooked. Then she motions the barman for two beers.
“You’re not going to tell on me?” “No,” she takes a sip, “I’d rather talk”. He lights up a cigarette of his own.
“I’ve got a feeling that you shouldn’t be here either.”
Bravado and faux nonchalance are things he usually wears for the living, but there’s a first for everything. Even for sitting at a bar and talking to a nice deadly dead lady with a strident laughter and a better understanding of Mishima than he’ll ever have. She must find him charming enough though because she keeps asking for more stories, about what he’s seen, what he’s done, how he lives. The thought that she might be some voracious black widow does cross his mind, but he figures it might be the right kind of high note he’d like to leave on. If he ever leaves at all, he reminds himself. Death means little when you witness its limitations on the daily.
“You have to tell me more,” she says again. Then a few drinks later, “Let’s go to your place, I want to try your minibar”. Then his name is the only thing on her lips in the dead of the night.
At dawn, as she scoots closer, Ichigo ponders on the unlikeliness of her soft skin, on the tangibility of the spirit. He dreams of the beasts he meets, and of his flesh melting and decaying in their mouths.
“Say, where do souls go?”
The rules seem easy enough: you die, get your memory wiped clean and start again, the most triumphant wash rinse and repeat life has to offer. No heaven or hell, a trampling over death of sorts. The living cannot see the dead; the dead cannot see the living. We coexist in peace, leading parallel lives, without ever having to acknowledge the other side.
“So what about us?” he asks and stops her in her tracks as she’s about to leave.
“What about us,” Rukia repeats flatly. “We’re anomalies. Bummers. But at least I get paid for it.”
Because it’s one thing for people to vanish into the night, and another entirely when they leave behind blood and poisoned feelings. Some remember, linger, won’t let go.
“My job is to make them”.
*
Ichigo is close to dozing off again as he thinks back on the thin scars that lace her body. His finger traces lazy lines in the air. He has learned the map.
“Wake up. Let’s go dancing. I need to move.”
He sometimes wishes he could do something about this. But there is more to it than he can fathom, and he is confused and absolutely helpless. Absolutely human. Which is actually the same bitter afterthought. He wants to brush off the dark strands of hair falling on her eyes, like he remembers once doing so, but he can’t. Rukia’s standing there in front of him again after a month of absence and there are still appearances to maintain goddamn it.
“Then go.”
She glares and he sighs. He downs his drink and they get moving.