Characters: Uryuu, Ryuuken, Soken
Summary: It takes him four years to decide.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers
Timeline: pre-manga
Author's Note: Okay, weird and disjointed (I love that word; can't you tell?). What else is new?
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
It does occur to Uryuu that there's a choice (Heart beating, blood pounding a steady rhythm, he tries to breathe and can't quite manage it the way normal people do). The small hand with its ill-defined lines rests on the top of a coffin and the flesh-memory of eight years worth of pain and confusion tells him one simple thing:
You're going to have to choose. Do you want to stay true to the memory of the one who loved you or do you want to know something resembling peace for once in your life and try to adhere to your father's ideals.
The word "ideals" used in any sort of connection to Ryuuken sounds foreign, ugly and utterly wrong, but Uryuu does think, in the bowels of night darkness once he's returned home.
(He knows Ryuuken's still awake because he can hear some sort of muted shuffling through the paper-thin wall to the next room. Uryuu's almost afraid to breathe too loudly, thinking it might draw his father's attention.)
Of all the harsh lines Uryuu has known in his life none have been quite the same as this: listening to his heart beat and each tells him a different story.
(This is the only point of similarity between him and his father, their heartbeats and those racing pulses tell two different stories:
A man who is of the living world
And a child who is not)
They all end the same way, him torn across the fence and divided.
What to choose?
In the end, there is no choice. None Uryuu can make and truly live with, not at the moment.
For the first four years, Uryuu tries. For four years he tries so, so hard to please his father, to just try to forget—his dreams are blood-soaked and there's no forgetting them—and move on. He still hears the screams, sees the spirits darting back and forth, trying to hide, and shame rises viciously in his throat and he tries not to see. He labors under schoolbooks and ever the perfectionist Uryuu finds himself in a sort of vicious race to outdo every classmate he has academically. He senses no approval and expects none.
(He's like any other child who just wants to please the one they live with, just wants to be on good terms on them—and Uryuu knows that good terms doesn't mean fighting constantly and taking up sewing just to try to make it go away.
Uryuu doesn't want to be alone—who does?—and more than anything else he fears—OhGodanythingbutthat, Pleasenotagain, Whywon'tyoujustlookatme?—rejection from his father even more complete than what he already received when Ryuuken denied the birthright and in so doing rejected his son as well; Uryuu picks up on these things even if he is in Ryuuken's mind "just another reckless fool".)
But it's not enough, and Uryuu isn't like those—old beyond all recall, brittle, cracked down the middle to show two divided halves—who can shut their eyes.
It's not enough; Ryuuken can see it. He'll never be a child of the living world, and his father can see it. Always measuring him against what he should be in his eyes and falling short, judging him to be weak and incapable of doing it. (Why won't you just look at me, instead of what you think is me?).
There's no pleasing him (Not that there ever has been, but now it stings more than ever). The sting drives him into action.
Four years late to the party, but late is better than never.
He's never going to be able to please anyone, so he will heed the call of the blood in his dreams and fight.
Childhood is over, burning, dead, as choice is seized in a hand better defined than that which touched the coffin.
I'll live among the world of the dead but I'll at least live, which is more than can be said of you…