Characters: Shinji, Hiyori
Summary: Shinji visits Hiyori in the hospital.
Pairings: Shinji x Hiyori
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Fake Karakura Town and Deicide arcs
Timeline: post-Deicide arc
Author's Note: What do you think? Shinji and deep emotions don't always mix, but I did my best here.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
"Hey…"
Heavily drugged on painkillers and antibiotics and any host of other medications, feeling like a wet rag doused in gasoline then set on fire Hiyori wakes up to that sound. Her whole body aches and her mind feels as though it's been put through a cheese grater. At first, Hiyori isn't sure what she's hearing.
There's a blob hovering in front her eyes, pale and yellow with two brown spots. It shifts and sparkles in her line of limited, blurred vision, unrecognizable until Hiyori's mind begins to work again and she connects the blob with the sound she heard.
When she opens her mouth, it doesn't want to work for her and the blob that's Shinji cocks his head at her. Like a yellow bird observing a worm. After a while, Hiyori's eyes start to work again and her mouth is once more capable of producing words, slow and labored, words that make her chest hurt and her throat burn. It's only Hiyori's desire, alive even now, to get a rise out of Shinji that keeps her voice from failing.
.
This is what Shinji sees: a waxen limp doll of a girl, with hair longer than it should be when out of pig tails and huge black circles under the eyes to match his own. Hiyori doesn't look herself except for the sullen, defiant spark gleaming in her eyes even now when she lies prostrate on a hospital bed and is laboring, straining, gasping for a breath for even a single word.
Somehow, she's still a ball of poorly-suppressed fury even at the threshold of Death.
"If… If I'm… dead…" Hiyori chokes out, eyes just barely focusing on Shinji's face and as disagreeable as ever "…then I guess… this must be Hell, since you're here."
Shinji doesn't know whether to laugh, scream at her or simply break down and cry. He thinks, however, that the slack, blank look that steals over his face in the absence of knowledge of how to react probably speaks to everything he wants it to.
Hiyori, predictably turns away when she sees that all too familiar expression suffusing Shinji's skin. This is a familiar pattern for them. There is little that can hurt Shinji anymore but Hiyori herself and they both know it—Hiyori is more than a little fond of exploiting that at times but when she actually does, it never turns out the way she wants to and instead of being pleased, she's just hollow (What a stupid pun, she thinks sullenly), and empty and maybe grieving a little bit inside. Grieving for what's happened to make the blows sword cuts instead of finger pokes.
Nothing that once gave her pleasure ever does the trick anymore.
It only takes Shinji a minute to recover, and he rolls his eyes in the old empty way he used to that carries no weight, not anymore. Everything seems false and fake and plastic now, even more than it did when they were first transformed, empty rituals that mean nothing. Prayers to a God that doesn't exist, not for them.
"Let me assure you, Hiyori, that you're not dead. None of us are, though—" Shinji leans back and lets Hiyori see that he sits with his shirt left open to allow the bandages wound all round his torso to breathe "—we all came pretty close. Once again, Hiyori, you have proven yourself to be insanely lucky—I don't know all that many people who could survive being cut in half."
The hollow words ring and fill the air and Shinji regrets them immediately. They fill the atmosphere with the reality that can no longer be denied. That she nearly died, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Shinji's always hated feeling helpless.
And looking at her on the bed now, just barely alive, still on Death's door in a way, he's never felt more helpless in his interminably long life.
He's trapped in the same Purgatory that has engulfed him from the moment he saw Hiyori go flying in two different directions across a clear winter sky.
.
Before the silence can drown them entirely in carbon monoxide waves silent and odorless, Shinji starts to talk again and Hiyori blinks at him in a way that indicates that she's not entirely pleased that he's opened his mouth again. Shinji sees it and registers but doesn't listen—he knows she thinks he talks too much but really, what balm is there for this but to talk? Even if that balm is just more poison to lay across the wound, it's better than nothing—at least it will numb them both, for a little while.
"So how do you feel?" Really, Shinji's at the stage where he's fishing around desperately for words because nothing works and everything he says just makes him feel worse and it's impossible to look at Hiyori, brought down low and quasi-calm only because the painkillers have her on a mellowed high that could knock out an elephant, without feeling like the poison's already settled on the walls of his veins.
Hiyori had had her eyes shut, trying to sleep and pointedly ignoring Shinji's presence, but now they open and are swimming in irritation. "Like Hell," she grumbles, shifting and face contorting in pain when she moves. "How do you think I feel?"
"Like butterflies and roses," Shinji returns mockingly to hide the pain that's seeped like an incarnadine sea over his face, and the sarcasm can't completely hide it. Hiyori is again, all too aware.
Rolling her eyes she snorts to hide her own discomfort. "Where are we, anyway?" Hiyori demands with minimal interest.
"In a hospital in Seireitei."
Her whole demeanor changes and Hiyori's again hiding behind belligerence that, this time at least, isn't entirely feigned. "Oh, great, this place again. No wonder I thought I was in Hell."
Silence fills their lungs again and just as Shinji thinks he's going to drown, he can hear his mouth working, hear words escaping from his lips that he feels strangely disconnected from, even though they're tearing at his marrow like wolves at a kill.
"Hiyori…" His voice cracks, over and over again like bones breaking. "…I… I'm sorry… I…"
"Shut up," Hiyori tells him, voice unnecessarily harsh and jarring off the walls, and Shinji's all too happy to fall silent.
His voice in those moments is nothing more or less than that sound of a heart beating open. A heart splitting until it drains, and it's nothing more than a dry, withered husk. Something that can't beat anymore.
Can't live, can't hurt.
Hiyori's not looking at him but her eyes open wide as Shinji leans down. Skin is clammy and cold—for him, for her, for both of them—as he presses dry, cracked lips down on the top of her head. Hiyori doesn't answer though she stiffens in shock and is probably too weak to shove him away.
"Listen." This has always been, will always be a battle for him. "Get some rest. Get better. Shout if you need me—" Shinji licks his lips "—or if you just need to talk."
Hiyori doesn't answer him as she leaves. Her eyes have fallen limply to the wall, cheeks oddly peaked with color and body drained of belligerence, anger, hot air, everything. She looks like a broken doll and Shinji doesn't want to leave, but he can't speak, can't stop his feet from moving as he steps beyond the door and closes it behind him.
The silence drowns out their words, leaving them as ever to be a tragedy of things unsaid.