#bleachbigbang

“Ichi-niii~” Yuzu’s voice floated through the thin washi paper walls like a melody, breaking Ichigo’s concentration from the papers he was bent over. He could hear her footsteps approaching now. 

“Shit…” he muttered under his breath as he hurriedly folded up the orihon laid across his lap. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. Careful not to wrinkle the paper, he slid a pair of scrolls back into their sheathes and tucked them along with the orihon hurriedly beneath the straw of his bed. 

Somehow, he managed to put everything away just as his sister began to slide open the door. Faking a yawn, Ichigo threw his arms out above his head as if he were merely stretching while he raised himself slowly upright into a sitting position. 

“Good morning Ichi-nii,~” Yuzu smiled at him upon entering the room with a tray piled high with breakfast food. “Did you just wake up?”

“Yeah, just a little while ago.” Ichigo lied, smiling softly with a gentle nod in agreement. 

He didn’t want to lie. Keeping secrets from his family, especially his sisters, felt so gut-wrenchingly wrong, it almost made him nauseous. But he knew his family didn’t like the way he obsessed over the missing fragments in his memory. Every time he brought it up, an air of unease fell over the whole house. The conversation would become stilted, and his family would trade less than subtle glances with each other as they spoke until he dropped the issue once more. 

They were keeping secrets from him too. 

“How late did I sleep?” he asked. 

“Not too late.” She set the tray down across his lap and settled by his side on the mattress. “Dad and Karin-chan already left out on the boat a little while ago, but I haven’t started working on the garden yet.”

That was a lie. Ichigo could feel his throat tighten with the knowledge of it. The sun was already up and had been for a good while now. Unable to sleep, he heard them depart while the sky was still dark—before the sun had even begun to peek over the horizon. They hadn’t even bothered to ask if he felt well enough to go, and the knowledge of that stung.  

Ever since he woke up from the so-called accident, he felt like nothing more than a burden upon the family. With injuries to his head, arm, and back, he was practically useless when it came to anything that required fine motor skills or being upright for an extended period. Ichigo felt as if he were going out of his mind with his newfound lack of purpose, yet hardly half a moon had passed since he woke up. 

“Do you want any help?” Ichigo asked, nonetheless, picking up the chopsticks from the tray. The hand holding them trembled finely, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been before. He couldn’t eat the rice like this, but he could at least manage the pickled fish, which he set upon with gusto. 

Yuzu smiled at him but shook her head. “I can manage it, Ichi-nii. You need more rest.” She reached up to brush her thumb against the dark circles under his eyes. “Are you still having those dreams?”

“I’m fine, Yuzu,” Ichigo said, letting out an exaggerated groan. He set down the chopsticks so he could wrap an arm around her, pulling her close to his side, and reached up with his free hand to ruffle her hair. “You worry about me too much!”

“Ichi-nii!” she whined in indignation. Despite this, Ichigo could feel her shaking with barely suppressed laughter as she squirmed in his embrace. “Stooooop!”

She batted at his hand until he relented. Chuckling as she pouted up at him, he could only hug her a little tighter to his side and rest his head atop hers. “You’re growing up too fast. Do you know that? Why don’t you and Karin just stay small and let me worry about you?”

“You’ve worried about us our whole lives, Ichi-nii. Protecting us, working so hard, picking up every job you could to make sure we had everything we needed…” Yuzu twisted in his arms so she could wrap her own around his torso. She pressed her face against his side, her voice growing quiet, “You almost died… Let us worry and take care of you this time.” 

“Yuzu…” There was a prickle at the back of his eyes as a lump began to form in his throat. Suddenly, he felt so much more aware of all the gaps in his memories than ever before. As if the empty spaces in his mind were throbbing with the loss. 

Nearly three solid years’ worth of memories—alongside an unknown amount of scattered bits and pieces—were ripped away from him in the accident. It didn’t seem like all that much—especially since, according to his family, he’d spend nearly two of those years traveling and picking up odd jobs in the nobles’ courts with only the occasional visit back home. Yet, Ichigo could hardly reconcile the meek little girl from his memories with the steady young maiden his sister had become in three short years. 

Three years ago, Yuzu would be on the verge of tears at the mere idea that he could have died. She would be easy to sway and unable to lie at all. Now she was self-assured. When she spoke, her words brokered for no argument. Still sweet as honey and more cheerful and kind than anyone else he knew, it wasn’t so much that she changed. It was more like she found herself more. Became more comfortable with the person she was, and that allowed her to grow. 

And he missed it…

Hugging him tighter for a moment before letting go, she made to stand, “Now I have some work to do in the garden. Finish your breakfast, and then go back to sleep. If you really want something to do, you can wash your dishes, but then straight to bed. Got it?” 

Arms crossed over her chest with her chin raised, she was obviously trying her best to pretend to be stern, but the look on her face ruined the effect—her eyes blown open too wide and lip jutting out in a pout. It was the same expression she wore when they were children to guilt their dad into doing whatever she wanted.

Ichigo let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sniffle as a wide smile spread across his face. “Yeah, yeah, I got it. Shoo, shoo, don’t let me keep you from your work.”

Breaking down in a brief fit of giggles, she nodded and pressed a quick kiss to the side of his forehead over the long scabbed over cut from the accident. “If the pain is too much, we still have herbs from the monks. Take them.” 

“I know Yuzu. Eat, take herbs, go to sleep, heal. I will, I promise.”

“Alright…” with one last uncertain glance back, she left his room, sliding the door shut behind her.  

Ichigo waited for a few moments, almost expecting her to double back for whatever reason, but once he was sure that she wouldn’t, he let out a long sigh. She was right. He was healing still, no matter how much he didn’t like that fact, he needed rest to heal and get better. 

Despite that knowledge, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. 

Ever since he woke up from whatever accident he’d been in, sleep rarely found him. His brain was restless with the yearning for the memories that he lost. Restless with an incessant feeling burning in the back of his mind that he’d forgotten something important. 

Even when he could sleep, he was always hounded by strange dreams. People, those who he knew and others he didn’t recognize and whose faces were lost to him by the time he awoke, swirled around in his head, imploring him to stop wasting time. 

To remember. 

And a man—always the same man—whose face he couldn’t hold on to no matter how many times he saw it, but whose voice haunted his every waking moment calling out to him, ‘I gave you everything and you left me alone, Ichigo! Why?! Why didn’t you come back to me? Didn’t you mean it when you said you wanted to be with me?!’

Every time, he wanted to ask, ‘Who are you? What do you mean, ‘be with’ you? How do I know you?!’ but he could never speak. In his dreams, he had no voice. He could only watch the flood of faces and listen to the man’s miserable cries for answers. 

Something big happened in the last few years that he was missing, and his family wasn’t telling him what. That meant that he had to figure it out himself. 

“Sorry Yuzu…” he scarfed down the last of his fish and soup before setting the tray aside and taking the scrolls out from under his bed once more. He would rest later. 

Ichigo’s finger stroked along the wooden sheath of one of the scrolls, tracing the characters etched into the surface almost reverently.

Like the moon, I bathe

In my sun’s resplendent light,

Yearning to embrace. 

-A gift from me to you, my dearest Ichigo. 

It sounded like a courting poem, and it was only one of several dozens scrawled on loose washi papers tucked into the scrolls and the creases of many of the orihon. Were they from the man in his dreams? Did Ichigo ever send him any back? Did his family know? If they did, why were they acting like this man didn’t exist?

Sighing, he settled himself into a more comfortable position so he could comb through the poems and scrolls and orihon for any sort of clue that could tell him who this person was. 

He would rest later. This was more important.