((Warnings for depression and Uryuu having a bad headspace for a lot of this This is a post-canon Uryuu, complete with being a depressed loner working as a doctor in the hospital Ryuuken works at.))
Uryuu stared tiredly at his schedule for the day, already wanting to just… call out and leave. His day was booked solid with patients, each one more exhausting than the last, and he just… he was tired.
He was tired.
(He didn’t know how Ryuuken did it, how the man seemed to live and breathe being a doctor when Uryuu could barely stand it but…)
(But… that was his problem, wasn’t it?)
(He was never enough, never good enough, even his choice in specialties barely acceptable…)
(If only he could do something, change something…)
He heaved a sigh and carefully straightened up, banishing the thoughts into the back of his mind even as he reached for the first folder of the day.
(No time to waste on pointless what ifs.)
(He had a job to do.)
By the time the day was done and he was finally home, Uryuu was beyond tired; nothing had happened, nothing had gone wrong with any of his patients, but fuck did it seem so pointless sometimes. An endless stream of checks and rechecks, suggestions and prescriptions and on and on and on, faces blurring one into the next into the next—
(He wasn’t cut out for this.)
(Why had he ever given in to Ryuuken’s urging…?)
(Why had he…)
(Ugh, enough.)
With a groan, Uryuu kicked off his shoes and tossed his jacket over the back of the couch before collapsing into it and staring up at the ceiling, letting his mind sluggishly wander instead of trying to corral it into line again. It was… strange that he was having regrets now, he supposed, years of medical school and training and practicing behind him. But also, maybe it wasn’t so strange.
(Inoue had tried to call him last night, had left a soft, cheerful message in his voicemail and he…)
(He couldn’t help but wonder, even as he reluctantly deleted the voicemail and relocked his phone, what might have been…)
(He’d… been happy at one point, way back when, as Kurosaki dragged him into his circle of friends and then— then—)
(Well.)
(Then it had all fallen apart, hadn’t it.)
Uryuu hummed and resettled himself more comfortably, disinterested in adding future physical pain to his already exhausting existence, and tucked his arms behind his head as he continued to stare up at the blank ceiling.
It really did all fall apart, didn’t it? He mused sadly as he went over what he currently knew of the group he’d once saved the world with. Kurosaki at least had Inoue, but Sado… he remembered spending time with Sado as a teen, remembered how huge Sado was and simultaneously how gentle, how little the other boy had wanted to fight, how he’d been so reluctant to do anything violent, to harm anyone, and now…
Now, Sado was out there fighting professionally, and maybe it wasn’t the same sort of life-or-death battles they’d dealt with before but it was… it felt wrong, like a smudge of ink on a pencil sketch. And even if the fights weren’t life-or-death, they still left damage behind, potentially serious damage, and it seemed… so strange to think about. To consider that Sado had for some reason chosen to fight for entertainment when he’d once shunned it so much…
He didn’t really know what had happened with Arisawa or those other two teens Kurosaki had hung around with back in high school, but then again he’d never been close with any of them. Even that shady shopkeeper, Urahara, had sort of faded into the background after the final fallout of the Blood War, leaving Uryuu more unbalanced than he’d expected.
(Not that he particularly blamed the man— who wanted anything to do with a bunch of fucked up teens if they didn’t have to?)
(Besides, he was pretty sure the man had his own issues to sort out in the aftermath of that clusterfuck of a ‘war’.)
And in their absence, Ryuuken had swept in with a goal, a plan, something to focus on that wasn’t war-death-killing-betrayal—
And by the time Uryuu had come to his senses, he was a fucking doctor in the same hospital Ryuuken was.
(What a goddamn joke.)
(He spent so much of his life hating everything Ryuuken stood for, and now he’d practically become the man.)
(If only he could just… go back.)
(Do it all over again.)
(Choose differently.)
(…)
Uryuu groaned and ran a hand over his face, knocking his glasses askew and not even caring because why should he? There was no one around to scold or mock him for his disarray, after all.
(No one around to care—)
(No, fucking stop it.)
(That wasn’t useful.)
(…even if it was true…)
He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose, counting to ten, then to ten again, until he’d managed to once again banish those thoughts; neither wishful thinking nor morose thoughts had solved a damn thing in his life, and they weren’t about to now.
He had things to do, including feeding himself, because he was tired but he wasn’t stupid; if he didn’t eat he’d end up feeling even worse, and quite frankly he was about at his limit of feeling like shit, so… food it was.
And then bed, because he was fucking tired.
Except the tiny, niggling thought of if only he could do it all over again, if only he could choose differently, speak differently, act differently kept cycling through his head at the strangest times. It popped into his head as he ate his convenience store lunch. As he parsed through test results. As he trudged home and heated up dinner and prepped for bed and—
It just wouldn’t leave him alone.
And it was stupid. It was a stupid thought and a stupid wish because it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t.
(Or was it?)
(Could he maybe…?)
It dug and dug and dug at his brain until he finally gave in. Finally dug out the old Quincy books he’d once desperately rescued from Ryuuken’s neglect and hoarded in his own apartment, only to box them up and hide them away again in the aftermath of… everything. He just… needed to look. Needed to make sure that there was nothing he could do to change things, and then the desperate, circling thoughts would finally shut up and let him get on with his life.
The books were… about as useless as he expected. Except at the same time they… weren’t?
Years of studying medicine left him with a viewpoint that his teenaged self never had; the complex diagrams and heavy jargon no longer made his eyes cross and his brain go numb, nor did everything seem quite so impenetrable as it had once appeared. He still didn’t quite understand it all — he was missing far too many fundamentals and at this point he’d just accepted that limitation — but he could see patterns where he once couldn’t: bits of an earlier diagram in a later one, arrangements of symbols that reappeared again and again, overlapping elements here and there…
It made something in his subconscious perk up and take note. It made something in him have hope.
(…)
(Well, it wasn’t like he was doing anything else after work and on weekends except sleeping, so… why not?)
(What could be the harm?)
The harm, Uryuu immediately discovered that weekend, as an array he’d painstakingly drawn out on a piece of paper turned into a smoking ruin, was that it had been over a decade since he’d done anything with his reiatsu.
He hastily scrambled to his feet and over to the smoke detector, yanking it down and pulling the battery before its shrill beeping could give him a headache, then turned back to scowl at the mess on his only table. ‘Smoking ruin’ hadn’t been what the book had promised, but he was probably just out of practice. A bit of work and maybe he’d start to figure out how the Quincy arrays worked.
(And then he could figure out if he could really…)
(…well, no sense in getting ahead of himself.)
(Practice first, dream later.)
(He had work to do.)
Having a goal seemed to simultaneously give him more energy and less interest in his actual goddamn job. Every day was like wading through muck, waiting-waiting-waiting for the work day to be over so he could go back home and do what he actually wanted to do. People were noticing, too, and that felt… dangerous.
(If too many people noticed, would Ryuuken notice?)
(Would Ryuuken interfere again?)
(Would his last chance be taken away from him?!)
So, reluctantly, Uryuu forced himself back into the mold of hardworking doctor, dedicating himself to his job while he was at his job as best he could without going outside of any of his previous boundaries. And as soon as he returned home, he set to work on re-mastering his powers and then onto mastering the arrays in the books he was trying to learn from.
It was a slow process, with so, so many useless arrays to cover — fighting and purification and strengthening and so many more things that would have once been useful and were now just stepping stones to a better understanding of it all — but he wasn’t about to jeopardize anything by rushing heedlessly into things. He wasn’t Kurosaki, after all.
He knew how to have patience.
But he was beginning to see the shape of it all, the overarching structures that made the individual arrays work, and that was starting to give him hope. He was starting to see a… method, perhaps? It was vague at the moment, more instinct than fact, but there was something there that might work. Might.
(He didn’t dare have hope, and yet… and yet…)
(He couldn’t help but have hope.)
(Maybe he could do this.)
And that, of course, was the moment Ryuuken took notice.
He didn’t give Uryuu even a fragment of warning; one day he was comfortably below Ryuuken’s notice, and the next Ryuuken was stalking into his office and staring at him with narrowed eyes.
“I hope you aren’t planning on doing anything foolish,” the man said as he stared down at Uryuu, not even bothering to take a seat like a reasonable damn person. “I’ve been hearing rumors—”
“I’m fine,” Uryuu hissed out in exasperation, slamming a patient’s folder closed as he sat up, brushed a strand of too-long hair out of his face and glowered back at Ryuuken, annoyed by the way the man was towering over him but not wanting to give in and stand up as well. “You have nothing to worry about, I assure you.”
Ryuuken frowned at him, tucking both hands behind his back as he kept staring, like somehow he could divine whatever Uryuu was up to just by looking. “As you say,” he eventually settled on. “You… make an excellent doctor,” Ryuuken added a touch awkwardly, before continuing with a stern, “don’t throw that away with a foolish choice made under pressure.”
Uryuu blinked up at him — pressure? What pressure was Ryuuken thinking he was under? — then huffed and deliberately turned back to his work. “As you say,” he repeated back at Ryuuken, unable to resist adding a touch of mocking to his words. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to get done.”
Except Ryuuken… didn’t immediately leave. He stood there, still staring, like Uryuu was a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve, or like… like he’d never seen him before—
(How ridiculous.)
(Ryuuken had seen him before and had then chosen to disregard him for years.)
(Just because the man was suddenly confronted with, what… evidence that Uryuu was an adult?… didn’t mean he had to keep staring like that.)
—before finally sighing softly and turning to go, not even uttering a farewell as he closed the door behind him.
The minute the door clicked closed, Uryuu heaved a sigh of his own and slumped forward, letting the tension drain from his shoulders at last.
(At least Ryuuken hadn’t forbidden him from continuing to practice his Quincy powers.)
(He would… take what he could get, at this point.)
(Ugh, he couldn’t wait to figure his problem out and finally leave.)
(…he really couldn’t…)