Characters: Byakuya, Rukia, Hisana.
Pairings: Byakuya x Hisana, Byakuya x Rukia.
Warnings/Spoilers: If you consider Byakuya x Rukia to be incest or pseudo-incest and dislike that, then you probably shouldn't read this oneshot.
Author's Note: We should all thank God that Byakuya has such iron-strong control of himself.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
It always hurt when he looked at her and had another's name on the tip of his tongue, only to realize that the one whom he stared at wasn't who he thought she was.
Byakuya wished in his mind that Hisana and Rukia didn't look so much alike, nor that the same lines formed around their mouths when they smiled, nor that their hair fell over their small, pale faces in exactly the same way, nor that they walked with the same light step and that their shoulders sloped in the same way.
He wasn't sure who resembled whom. He didn't know if it was Rukia who looked like Hisana or Hisana who looked like Rukia but he realized that whoever resembled the other was the shadow, and the one who was supposed to be the model for the other was the true woman. And Byakuya had no way to judge who was real and who was the shadow.
Byakuya had never known what honoring Hisana's last wish and finding her sister would do to him, what it would start and how it would torment him, plucking at his skin at the most inopportune times and reminding him of who was now living under his roof.
The feelings were disturbing, disgusting, and downright wrong. Byakuya cherished the memory of his wife maybe too much, seeing her everywhere he went, in the falling cherry blossoms and in the quiet of a still pool in the garden… and in her sister's face and body.
Whenever Rukia passed in the hall, silent as a wraith with the silk of her kimono making a slight musical rustle, his eyes would follow her with a feeling akin to obsession, desire, everything Byakuya didn't want to feel.
It was a stiff struggle to put the feelings down to a deep, dark place where no one could find them. Byakuya sternly reminded himself of what he knew was the truth. She's Hisana's sister, my sister. She's not Hisana; she's nothing like Hisana.
But all that paled in comparison to the fact that Rukia lived and breathed Hisana's soul, and the fact that if Byakuya was caught off guard, he could honestly believe he was looking at Hisana again. He wondered if Rukia knew that her sister had had the same taste in music as her, if Rukia knew that her sister had had the same sweet tooth as her, or if Rukia knew that she had the same liking for certain colors, of lavender, deep violet, pale yellow and royal blue, that Hisana had.
No matter how much Byakuya told himself that Rukia was not Hisana, he was still racked with twin feelings of misplaced desire and enveloping guilt. Just working to suppress those feelings made him distant towards Rukia, and at times a dark, forbidding figure in her life. It was little wonder she spent so much time away from the Kuchiki estate, and when she left, Byakuya breathed a sigh of relief.
With distance came the ability to analyze his situation.
Rukia had become a pseudo-proxy, the possible subject of Byakuya's stunned, thwarted feelings for Hisana (and Byakuya prayed that it wasn't even that, that maybe what he was feeling wasn't what he thought it was), because of her close relation to Hisana, because of her proximity to him, because she just looked so much like Hisana.
Byakuya attempted to tell himself that the yearning to reach out and touch her was just feelings for Hisana speaking from beyond the grave. He just barely restrained the urge to go through with what pulled him to places he didn't want to be, and there were times when the only reason he didn't go through with it or try to was because Rukia moved away too quickly, utterly unaware of the turmoil within Byakuya's mind.
Rukia was far too close for her own good, and when she left, only then could Byakuya live without the pain, the guilt and perplexed grief, live without tantalizing reminders of what he had lost and what was existing right under his nose.
When Rukia was gone, Byakuya could forget all his confused feelings. He could live without the weight of less-than-brotherly feelings towards her on his shoulders, and remember that Rukia was not Hisana's still-living other self, that she was just Hisana's sister and a completely different person, as unlike Hisana as anyone could be.
But then, Byakuya would fall asleep, and when he slept he couldn't tell if the woman he was dreaming of was Hisana or Rukia.