20_souls | the greatest love story ever told (isshin/masaki)
Isshin/Masaki. Uh, one-liners SOON. Semester's going to be over in less than a week, so I'm just going to make a separate post for them, truly, HONESTLY.

Anyway, read on, Macduff.

A quick note to you readers of 186 and beyond:

This ignores the canon knowledge of Isshin's being a shinigami and my personal belief that Masaki is a shinigami and Aizen's sister. I wanted to explore them as people and lovers before shinigami. Apologies to anyone who is peeved.





1.

Masaki began smoking when she was thirteen, leaning out the window while teaching herself how to blow smoke rings and keeping an ear cocked on the door to make sure her mother didn't walk in. By the time she and Isshin met, she was nigh onto a chainsmoker, an open pack of cigarettes in her purse and two more somewhere along the bottom with a hundred-yen coin and a few wadded Kleenex.

She announced her pregnancy at the dinner table, one hand resting on Isshin's, the other holding a cigarette. Once he finished his fluttering excitement, the first thing he said was, “You know you'll have to quit, don't you?”

Masaki stared at him for a moment, said, “Yes,” and then took another drag. “After this cigarette."

The next day, Isshin comandeered all of the cigarettes in the house (including his own; he made a sympathetic attempt at quitting, at least for the first few months), and they stood over the garbage can, breaking cigarettes in half and throwing them away.

“It's for the best,” he reminded her, and she gave him a sideways glance: “Tell that to your mental state when I'm seven months along and dying of a craving.”

She still couldn't bring herself to throw away her favorite ashtrays and her ivory-handled cigarette holder, so she sat on the floor while Isshin was tending to a patient and wrapped each one in tissue paper, then tucked them in a box in the corner of the attic. It's still there: Ichigo hasn't discovered it yet.

2.

Every year when he visits her grave, Isshin waits until his trio has left, and then puts a pack of Lucky Strikes next to the stone. “It won't last you long,” he says, “but it's all I've got with me.”

3.

He met Masaki when they were seniors in high school and made it his mission to speak to her; he was shocked when she shrugged and agreed to go on a date with him. They graduated a month later and married within two weeks, eloping with little more than train tickets and a suitcase each.

Isshin caught her staring at bridal magazines in a bookstore; he was about to ask her if she regretted their whirlwind wedding when she shook her head and said, “I don't see the point in so much fuss and bother.” When they got home, he found their envelope of wedding photos: the two of them tired and rumpled from lack of sleep and long train rides, poised with excitement by a justice of the peace, smiling with the world's unbridled optimism.

4.

Until she turned nine, Masaki kept her hair long: ringlets halfway down her back. Her mother nearly fainted the day Masaki tromped in, muddy and scraped up, hair up to her ears, a grin from ear to ear. “It doesn't get caught when I try to climb trees now,” she explained, and settled into her chair.

5.

They marry before Masaki ever says I love you; their wedding night is the only time she ever comes close, staring in the mirror at his reflection. “Not so much love,” she says to him, “as needing you to complete me.”

6.

Isshin has never gotten over the guilt of losing Masaki. Even now, he sleeps surrounded by pillows because he cannot bear to feel an empty space next to him.

7.

Masaki is the last person Isshin would expect to be a virgin, but she is, this tiny, uncharacteristically vulnerable pixie of a girl in bed with him. He's slower and gentler with her than any other girl he's ever been with, teaching her how to touch and be touched, how to love and be loved.

It isn't long before the day that she greets him, naked, in the foyer of their tiny apartment, and they fuck on the floor, surrounded by clothes and shoes and med school papers.

Afterwards, he combs through her hair with his fingers and stares at her with amazement. "My," he says finally. "You didn't tell me you were such a quick learner."

8.

His pet name for her is "hummingbird," those tiny North American birds of beauty and grace and vitality.

He reads later, in a magazine, that they only live three to five years--fragile creatures, hummingbirds.

9.

Isshin didn't think it was possible to love anyone as much as he loved his wife; this, though, was before the first times he cradled his children in his arms.

10.

Once Ichigo was old enough to appreciate a good bedtime story, Isshin and Masaki sat him down on the couch between the two of them and spun fantastic tales to lull him into sleepiness.

"The prince," Masaki told him, "could defeat anyone."

Ichigo stuck out his lower lip in concentration. "Anyone? What about dragons?"

"Dragons, trolls, and wizards."

"What about--" Ichigo took a pause to yawn. "--the worst bad guy in the entire world?"

"Even him," she promised. "In fact, they met many times, and every time, the prince promised to defeat him, but first, he had to grow as strong as he could. And each time, the prince came a little closer to defeating his enemy, and finally, the last time they clashed swords, the prince cried, 'Aha! Your hour has come!' and defeated his enemy once and for all."

"Would he rescue a princess?" Ichigo's voice was growing softer; he curled against his mother's side.

"Of course!" said Masaki, stroking Ichigo's hair. She smiled over his head at Isshin. "The princess would be in a tall, tall tower, so high you could barely see the top, all covered in vines. And the prince would climb all the way up those vines, all the way to the top, and he would break the enchantment that kept the princess in the tower, and then he would bring her all the way back down."

"And then what?" Ichigo blinked blearily.

"Well," Masaki said, "after he had rescued the princess, he would take her back to her kingdom, where she would rule over her people and make them happy for the rest of their days. That's what he should do, don't you think?"

But this time, there was no answer, for Ichigo had fallen asleep; so the king and queen scooped up their sleeping prince and took him to bed.

11.

Isshin grew up with a desire to fix things; his mother often found him on the garage floor in the midst of a pile of bits of machines and tools. Over time, he became known as the Boy Wizard of Mechanics around the neighborhood, with staticky radios and bent bicycles and run-down clocks waiting in his room to be fixed.

It was a broken wrist (his own, from a playground fall) that changed his attentions; the entire drive to the hospital, he ignored the pain and stared at the fracture with delight, chattering about the best way to repair it.

Only then did it strike him how interesting it would be to fix people as well as machines, and he set on the task with new energy.

It came as a crushing disappointment when his mother forbade him from breaking any of his bones on purpose. "How can I learn to fix it if I can't break it?" he complained, so she bought him a model of a skeleton. Within a week, pieces of plastic bone had joined the mess of wrenches and sprockets and screws, and his friends ran around with makeshift slings and crutches.

Through the years of med school, he dealt wih increasingly sophisticated technology, examining the workings of the human body in ways he never thought possible.

And yet, he rather missed the dismantled plastic skeleton, who had lain in pieces on the garage floor until his mother, in a fit of frustration, swept it out with the trash.

12.

The first time they go out drinking together, Masaki sits primly next to him and orders an amaretto sour; Isshin kids her about girly drinks, so she disregards the amaretto and challenges him to a contest of tequila.

When Isshin finally comes to, he can just make out Masaki on her barstool, surrounded by a host of empty shot glasses; he wants to tell her she's far too cheerful and lucid for that much alcohol, but he's too drunk to speak coherently.

13.

When Ichigo was born, Masaki beckoned Isshin over and whispered to him with a conspiratorial grin: "I can't wait until he's old enough for us to embarrass him in public."

Isshin can only imagine the way she'd smile if she saw him now.

14.

"What would you have been if you hadn't married me?" Isshin once asked her while they washed dishes.

She thought for a moment and placed a cup in the cabinet. "A superhero. I always did want to fight crime."

15.

His favorite picture of her was from a summer vacation they took to Kyoto: standing hand in hand with Ichigo on a bridge overlooking the river, framed by the afternoon sun, the only people in the world.

Now when he sees it, his heart hurts so badly he thinks it might burst.

16.

Masaki was fascinated with Karin and Yuzu: "More beautiful than any other daughters in the world," she said to Isshin, "although I worry that they'll turn out like me."

"I imagine that you mean hope, not worry," he said.

17.

Masaki is peppered with scars; her pride and joy is a two-inch gash on the back of her leg. As a schoolgirl, she told the story with gusto, her eyes lighting up and her hands dancing with excitement. "It was a piece of glass, you see--an even slice, but it was worth it to punch Daisuke from 2-A in the face. Besides, he bled more."

18.

They decided, like all young and idealistic couples, to travel the world, so they bought a world map and tacked it to the laundry room wall. On rainy Saturdays, they stayed in and circled cities in red, arrows hopping from country to country, a journey of dreams hung above the washing machine.

19.

Isshin hogs the covers nightly; Masaki never is able to wrench them free. Eventually, of course, she winds up curled against Isshin like a cat, trying to steal her own small bit of warmth.

He doesn't mind: it's what he had in mind all along anyway.

20.

Her face is peaceful when he sees her for the last time; he kneels by her, shaking, glad that at least one of them is not suffering.