Prompt: Weapon
They were two in a legion of soot-faced children.
Rukia was only a baby when she died. She can't remember what it was like to be alive. And even if she could, what had she experienced in the Living World, anyway? Her tiny past-self had most likely known nothing but hunger, pain, and merciful death.
In Rukongai, her neighbors spoke of a sudden influx of souls that happened on the day Rukia made her way to Soul Society in her sister's arms. From what very little remained impressed upon her of her sister's face, it had always been covered with a light dusting of soot. Later, she supposed, after Hisana had set off on her own, perhaps the soot had faded from her incorporeal soul-body as it had from Rukia's. But in the beginning, the two sisters had carried their deaths with them into the afterlife.
Vaporized.
Nothing but a soot stain on a wall.
It was a bomb, they said. A big one; the biggest one the humans had ever made. The destruction and sorrow it caused... Even Pluses and Hollows had been forcibly sent on in the wake of the blast, and the humans had done it all to themselves.
The soot-faced children crowded into Rukongai, upsetting the careful balance Shinigami had sought to maintain. Soul Society had prepared for a population boom from the war being waged in the Living World, but it had not expected - had not even thought to calculate - the number of Pluses and ex-Hollows that would be joining them. The result was chaos and overcrowding and soot-faced children pushed to the outer sectors to live dying as they lived living: orphaned and in squalor.
It wasn't always bad. She had her friends to chase and tease and share stories with.
Rukia was lucky that she had died instantly, because the ones who hadn't been blown up, those like Renji, had suffered days-weeks-months of unbearable sickness. If, back then, Rukia knew nothing but pain and hunger, then Renji had known nothing but pure agony. During the war, he had been a starving war orphan. In the aftermath, he had spent his last days retching and crying in a dirty alleyway as fire raced through his veins. His own blood, poisoned. His skin, a jagged mess of red and black from where the flash had seared the patterns of his clothes onto his flesh forever.
And it was something the humans had done all to themselves.
But he was only two years old, Renji said with a shrug. It wasn't like he had been old enough to understand what had happened to him. He knew only that he hurt, and that death made it stop hurting quite so much.
She had wondered, once Renji's bond with Zabimaru had begun producing those tattoos, if maybe he remembered more than he let on; if maybe there was a deeper meaning behind the red and black and the whip-like sword that resembled a skeletal snake. (But of course she never asked, and Renji never offered.)
And Rukia wonders, still to this day, about Sode no Shirayuki's frozen tears. In her inner world, it snows when she is sad. The delicate flakes drift from the heavens just as they do when she calls upon her partner's powers in battle. It has the look and feel of water-snow, but Rukia wonders if, maybe, in the atomic winter of her soul, it isn't snowing with the ashes of the fallen.