His children are all in bed. Isshin made sure of that, cracking each door open to check on them, on Karin and Yuzu cuddled together, on Ichigo with his sleeping face squinched up in a grimace. (It'd freeze that way, he'd joked before, and Ichigo had just scowled at him.)

Each door got shut again, tight, keeping them in and bad things out, and he'd gone down to the kitchen to sit in front of its giant picture of Masaki. While he usually only smokes once a year, he keeps the package in his breast pocket, because you never know when you'll need to be a little cool.

He lost another one today.

It wasn't his fault -- he knows better than to take blame for things out of his control. He'd done everything he could with the facilities his clinic has, had sent Ichigo to the phone for the ambulance the moment the door opened, had at least eased the young man's passage. It wasn't his fault, but-

Please! Please, save my brother! He's my only brother, please, I want to see him again, I want to hear him again, please-

Isshin inhales smoke, holds it until it burns, and then exhales it. It passes through his vision, between him and Masaki, so her picture seems to blur in the air.

He's heard Karin and Ichigo debating before if they can see ghosts because their father is a doctor and he thinks that sort of blame's a damnation they're not old enough to understand. If the two of them can see ghosts for that reason, it's not because of the patients he saves but the ones he loses.

Karin, at least, can't see them clearly, though Ichigo sees them as if they were living, breathing, there. Karin can't describe them, and Ichigo chooses not to. (If you don't talk about it, Isshin heard him tell Karin abruptly, then nobody can get hurt from it.) It's frustrating, not knowing, and Isshin's grateful, at the same time.

He doesn't want to see how many ghosts this clinic, their house, might hold, or who they are. He's seen their faces at the worst times, he's seen them pass on, he's seen the life go away. It's not his fault, and as long as he knows that then everything's fine, but they might not know. And they're the only other people whose business it is to know why Isshin's lost patients.

But he wants to see Masaki again, and if he had to see and hear them all to do that, he would. And at least then, maybe it wouldn't be the children who'd bear his human limits.

His cigarette's down to the filter and he sighs, grinds it out on a plate the children missed when they went to do the dishes later. He hasn't got time to be rueful. Knowing his children, they'd bear that too.

She smiles at him in the clearing air and he smiles at her, wry, and lets go of the non-ghost of the young man who died there today.

"Goodnight, Masaki," he murmurs, and heads upstairs to bed.