Disclaimer: Kubo Tite owns Bleach.
A/N: To be quite honest, I seriously think Byakuya won't make it to the end. So this piece of crap merely goes to show how hard it is for me to accept that. If worse comes to worst, this may turn out to be a last-ditch ByaRen for me.
…
Renji Abarai hated thinking about his captain. He hated the fact that most of his days were most profusely spent waiting for his captain to bat an eye on him. But here's the real reason why he hated this mental, perhaps emotional, incarceration: it was a fucking witch, if anything, and it followed him everywhere he went.
His worries, however, were soon to end—only to be replaced by a whole new one which was, as fortune would have it, much more serious than anything he had so far encountered. As of the present, rumors of grave implications were on everybody's lips. 'It appears Byakuya Kuchiki is dead.' Dead. The word seemed to hold not the remotest sense in connection with his captain's name. For all that commotion, it didn't help that he was currently in the hospital, recuperating from the damage he incurred from the battle against the Quincies, and barely conscious. Perhaps it was also worth noting that he himself nearly died. As a result, his standards changed then and there. Not only did he start to pine for other problems to replace the one he had now, but also he began to grasp the meaningless life he was about to lead now that Byakuya was gone.
And where was Rukia now? From what he remembered, she wasn't as badly afflicted as he was, therefore, at this point in time, she most likely had been given the permission to discharge herself from the 4th Division's quarters. More specifically, she was most likely attending to her brother's funeral arrangements.
…
"Oh, god! Don't tell me! Don't you tell me anything! This shit is going to kill me! Oh, captain…my captain!"
It didn't take long before Ichigo discovered what type of lunatic Renji was. He was the severe type and, right at this moment, he was being more severely nuts than he had ever shown, or been. So frantic were Renji's outbursts that Ichigo was on the verge of considering certain measures, measures which mainly involved killing Byakuya so as not to waste the strong and earnest surge of emotions coming from the lieutenant. But the teen's imagination flat-lined as soon as the lieutenant started to wring his dreadlocks in what seemed like an attempt to de-scalp himself.
"Err, Renji—"
"Don't tell me he's dead!" Renji screamed. For Ichigo's part, he didn't tell. He kept quiet, spoke not a freakin' word because one mention of Kuchiki's name would have the lieutenant personally delivering his own head to the chopping block. And he howled, like a fucking baby, never grasping the reality that his captain had, in point of fact, errr, survived.
But having ascertained he had no further assistance to offer and that subduing his comrade was well beyond his range of abilities, the teen soon left the premise, leaving the nurses begging for some form of abuse other than to attend to the utterly distraught Sixth Division Lieutenant, whom reason and sanity had abandoned. It would soon all pass, Ichigo surmised. However, what he failed to concern himself about was, the extremity of Renji's current mental state. While he had imagined any number of times how likely it was for the Lieutenant to sink into some serious clinical depression, it didn't occur to him that the worst was just right around the corner.
…
"You had one job, Ichigo, one fucking job." Rukia was saying. If she somehow noticed that Ichigo was as mortified as she was by the turn of events, she refused to see the necessity of bringing it up.
"He said I shouldn't tell him a shit! More than that, you told me never to cause him any distress. 'Do everything he asks you to.' were your exact fucking words! And that's precisely what I did. Besides, it didn't look like he wanted anyone to interrupt his grief. Moreover, you yourself didn't even bother to drop by yesterday." was Ichigo's defense.
"I was busy attending to Nii-sama. You know that."
"What, your brother requires round-the-clock supervision now? He ain't an infant, for crying out loud!"
"Ichigo, do you happen to know what exactly happened to Renji after you left the ward yesterday?" She asked all of a sudden.
"Frankly, Rukia, I don't wanna know. All I've been hearing is, he is in a more critical state now because of the neglect he received under the nurses' care. But if you're challenging me into a guessing game I'll be testing my luck by saying he stuffed himself in a fucking coffin. If that ain't good enough, my second guess would be that he attempted to slit his throat."
A very strong urge to strangle the substitute Shinigami gulfed over the girl. She now was starting to see how useless it was to conduct a sensible discussion with him, and this was just exactly the sort of shortcoming for which, she swore, a solution did not exist. But today his especially callous remark seemed to have overstepped a boundary somewhere. For that she allowed several minutes to pass out cold before speaking,
"Renji swallowed half a gallon of bleach, the sort which has a very strong formula, exactly the type used to disinfect certain areas in a hospital."
"What?!"
"Apparently, that's the best suicide plot he could come up with. But it doesn't end there—"
"—Why did that that moron do that?!"
"Why, you ask? Besides the fact that he's a moron, there's also the additional fact that you also happen to be a moron." This time, she spoke in a manner which left Ichigo begging for leniency. All the same, he couldn't see what role he might have undertaken to assist in Renji's attempt at suicide, and so he lashed out,
"Dafuq? What do I have to do with this?"
"You told him—rather you implied—that my brother's dead." She answered. The sternness and the anger in her voice were hard to miss, with neither condition dominant. In fact, one would have to be an imbecile to overlook such a bad display of temper.
"I most certainly did not!"
"Exactly!"
"Yes exactly that! I didn't tell him a shit, which just goes to show I wasn't the one who—"
"—You really still don't fucking get it?!"
"Hell, you explain like a friggin' toddler! And stop cursing—"
"—by keeping silent you just about confirmed his worst fears, his worst nightmare! Among all things he cringes to hear, the one he dreads most is the news of Nii-sama's death! And to think Nii-sama isn't even dead to begin with…aaargh!" Rukia's volume, along with the gestures she was throwing in the air, stood as the most fervent incongruence against the conducts one would expect from nobilities. As it was, Ichigo was left stupefied, allowing the Thirteenth Division Lieutenant to finish her tirade, "I can't believe you'd go as far as to allow his imagination to run his mind! Jesus, Ichigo, I can't quite recall a time in my life where silence brought about anything worse—than this!"
As her vehemence was suspiciously loosely-based, as far as Ichigo was concerned, he, on the other hand, was little by little gaining his ground, to finally realize something. And just like that, his predicting powers soared to the rescue. Instead of feeling the entire expanse of his own guilt, he was then and there starting to form accurate conjectures as to the other things left unsaid.
"Jesus Christ, Rukia! I didn't know he was in love with his fucking captain! If I knew I would have been more sensitive, in which case I'd have done anything in my power to prevent a shit!"
The argument had definitely turned a corner. Had Ichigo's discovery come a day or two before Renji's attempt to take his own life, things would have fared more accordingly. Instead, the Lieutenant was facing not one, but two life-threatening conditions all at once—not to mention he had yet to achieve full recovery from the Quincies' attack. Mental instability and acute substance poisoning, were, after all, too much to handle, especially when combined as was the case now. As such, all this didn't do anything except to give Rukia more reasons to lament. And so having gone past the limits of her exhaustion, she calmed down, at least on the surface, and muttered,
"Regardless. He remains delirious and on death's door. All we can do for now is pray."
Her sudden change of attitude pushed Ichigo to postpone his extravagant claims on sniffing intrigues out of people. Considering the appeal of this particular case, the very idea that Renji was somewhat head over heels in love with his captain, he would've specifically preferred to boast around for having unraveled that much without help. But, to his credit, self-restraint got hold of him altogether. Indeed, for once, he conceded to be mature,
"I suggest we do just that… And, by the way, earlier this morning I heard from Matsumoto-san that Byakuya was being transferred to the ICU. I suppose one of the few things against which he has no power is his own Ban Kai, his own strength. I'm rather impressed."
"He's not being transferred for the injury he sustained from his own Ban Kai. He contracted a wholly different one this time. I was about to tell you." Rukia corrected, her eyes determined to miss his companion. But try as she might to suppress her emotions, her deceptive complacency and utter subtlety grew less vivid beneath the sky outside. Unfortunately for her, Ichigo was in no mood to refrain from being a prying son of a gun.
"A new injury? Did someone attack him while he was in the fucking hospital?"
Ichigo's bewildered gaze was coupled with a curiosity he took no trouble to conceal. As it was, the girl deduced that neither he nor she would be the least advantaged if she spoke the truth about the mysterious circumstances under which his brother acquired a new set of physical affliction. After all, she had recently learned firsthand, through experience as a matter of fact, the dangers of withholding one's words.
"Nothing like that. He..."
"He what? Just spill it."
"Well, damn it, Ichigo; he drank bleach, too—close to a gallon."
Ichigo, for his part, couldn't tell whether he was sorry for or angry at Byakuya. All he knew at the moment was that vice captains and captains were slowly degenerating into morons and were surrendering themselves to sheer idiocy.
"What the fuck! Is that a fucking fad around here—mistaking bleach for fucking rum?"
"Obviously, no."
"Then why is your brother, of all fucking pricks, jumping into that bandwagon?!"
Rukia, for an instant, was seized by the desire to make Ichigo her enemy for life, for calling his magnificent brother a prick. But soon she realized this sort of expletive-laced address was a thing so common to deserve censure. For what could've been a violent retort, a sigh was heard, and finally her answer,
"It's because, like Renji—and you, for that matter—, brother turns out to be a moron too. He thought Renji died of suicide, and he almost did, mind you. So now both idiots are suffering from substance intoxication due to large intakes of… bleach."
"Just who did they think they were, some Shakespearean chick and dude?!"
"That's hardly the point—"
"—and all the time they were battling that Quincy bastard Byakuya was like, 'If I die here, Renji, finish him with your Ban Kai yada yada yada.', without realizing he'd sooner slit his own throat than to experience vice versa of that! Worse still, it never once crossed his mind how hypocritical—"
"Must we dwell on this subject still?" Rukia interjected, wanting nothing less than to be spared the hysterics her companion was demonstrating. It seemed to her that the more passionately they proclaim their individual thoughts the further they receded to something pointless.
"Okay, fine." Ichigo submitted, but continued anyway, "But we have to break them apart. They can't be a love team. It just won't be right."
"And why is that? They've shown they're ready to die for each other, so why stop them?"
"What do you mean 'why'? It's sick! For the love of god, captain and subordinate ought to stay like what their titles imply, no more, no less.
This was the sort of concern against which she wished to guard herself. It was in fact the Alpha and the Omega of the whole affair. If love hadn't been present or had decided to steer clear of his brother's and best friend's way, so complex a series of events would not have found its way to them. But, as things were, there was no reversing the situation, not when two suicide attempts among high officials were involved. As she was also under no illusion to sugarcoat her concerns, she was all the same consumed by a different cause of anxiety. And so before she knew it, she caught herself disagreeing,
"Wait a damn second, Ichigo. Love chooses neither gender nor age, much less social rank."
"I knew it!"
"Knew what?"
"You have a thing for your captain, for Ukitake-san!"
Far from looking disturbed, Ichigo's lips were contorting very provocatively into what looked like a menacing grin.
"Shut the hell up. And do you seriously fancy yourself as someone who has the right to insist what's appropriate and its opposite, what's right and wrong, when you just about nearly got my brother and best friend killed, because of your stupid notions?"
This shut Ichigo up, thereby restoring what little harmony both their conducts could afford, at least for the present. In time, they reached the hospital ward, where much of Soul Society's people were being bereft of their sanity in a gradual pace, or so it appeared for the meantime. Once inside the lobby, Ichigo spoke,
"So what now?"
"You're gonna tell Renji…No, I'll handle Renji. You handle Nii-sama. By this time they should've recovered enough to warrant a few visits from friends. So you tell brother that Renji's alive while I tell Renji that you deliberately scared him off his wits for the hell of it."
At that, Rukia strode away, employing Shunpo, to ultimately leave Ichigo at his leisure. This time, he would stop at nothing to speak the truth, lest Byakuya Kuchiki attempt suicide twice in a day.
END