Author's Note: Written for a challenge in the kagetsumaster LiveJournal community—to write Tatsumi's reaction in an alternate universe where Tsuzuki doesn't survive Touda's flames. This is my interpretation; reviews are immensely welcome. As usual, I don't own the characters; no copyright infringement is intended.
With your death...
Touda's fire burned and there was nothing the firefighters could do to stop it. Witnesses comforted themselves with the fact that at least it was contained, however mysteriously, to that single building. When the flames were finally quelled, only an outline of blackened walls and charred rubble remained. It was hours later when the Shinigami returned, hoping against fragile hope that some trace might remain. There were no bodies, only ashes and embers that burned his skin when he lifted a handful and dashed them to the wind.
...please destroy me.
Winter seemed to impossibly touch the Meifu in the days that followed. In the Shokan Division, reactions ranged from one end of the spectrum of another; denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, none was left untouched. Hisoka, youngest among them, had barely escaped with his life; he'd been returned unconscious slumped in Watari's arms with his hands fisted in the scientist's lab coat and tracks of tears on a face darkened by soot. He had been in the infirmary since, drifting in and out of awareness, plagued by nightmares and the indelible mark of empathy for a dead man.
Everyone mourned in their own way. There was no body to bury and in a way they were glad for it. A few attempted to reason that perhaps that meant he had escaped, ignorant of the fact Touda's flames had more likely incinerated any remains. Tatsumi, ruthless in all his grief, had finally ordered silence to the theories. Tsuzuki-san was dead, he said coldly, and didn't they have work to be doing?
If the secretary had been difficult to deal with before, in the aftermath he was far worse. Those who knew him began to grow concerned; those who did not learned to fear him anew. When one day Watari entered Tatsumi's office to tell him the red ribbons of Muraki's curse had reappeared on Hisoka's body, he had left looking stricken and refused to speak of Tatsumi's reaction to anyone.
The next day at lunch hour everyone crowded around the window with a view of the sakura grove below, to see Tatsumi Seiichirou's unlikely form kneeling in the grass, breaking apart the earth there with a small trowel. He returned inside promptly at one o'clock and left behind as a sign of his effort a small flower bed with a rosebush planted in its center.
Each day it became like clockwork for everyone to see Tatsumi there working in the flowers, in the grove where he and Tsuzuki had one day sat discussing mortality. He tended it with efficient but caring hands, pulling weeds and snipping off dead leaves. No one questioned his motives, seeming to understand that in some unexplainable way this was severe, cold Tatsumi's way of coping.
After what must have been weeks watching him, Wakaba went down and offered a tiny flower plant of her own. Tatsumi assessed her a moment with serious eyes, accepted the flower and planted it. By the next week, the little garden had more than tripled in size with offerings of the other Shinigami, meant in tribute to a lost comrade, until only one remained.
Hisoka was dull-eyed and haunted by the loss of his partner, the only person who had dared truly care for him in perhaps his entire life. That life he would have gladly given in exchange for Tsuzuki's, and it was whispered sometimes in the halls of the Shokan Division that young Kurosaki slept at night with a light on to ward off the shadows that had been responsible for preventing just that.
When the empath finally went to see the garden that grew in Tsuzuki's honor, he stood for a time staring at Tatsumi, who knelt with his shirt sleeves rolled up and worked with no gloves, until his fingernails cracked and his knuckles were scraped open. Then the secretary reached one of his dirt-stained hands out and Hisoka took it, clutching his fingers around.
They pulled away long seconds later and Hisoka's hand was shaking, but he gave the shadow master a silent nod, clutched his hands at his sides, and turned to walk back into the building. Tatsumi worked on.
Time continued to pass and the one year anniversary came near. On the day that Tsuzuki had died, Tatsumi went down to the garden, clipped a dozen of the white roses he had so carefully cultivated, and without a word rippled out of view from the rain of cherry blossom petals.
When he returned that afternoon the roses in the bouquet were red that matched the flecks of blood on his cuffs.
fin