Characters: Hiyori, Urahara
Summary: How her feelings start to change.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Turn Back the Pendulum arc
Timeline: post-Turn Back the Pendulum arc, pre-manga
Author's Note: I can't help but think that Hiyori's obvious antipathy towards Urahara might have been a little softened out by time. Maybe.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
Her skin seems to flake and burn even though to Hiyori's sight it's just as cool and smooth as it ever was, the thin blonde hairs still snaking gently across the curve of her arms. Everything's turning upside down and burning, the cages up with bars for her to run fingernails across, the houses all gone, the world changed.
Everything has to change now.
Those are the words on Urahara's lips, anyway.
Hiyori doesn't know where she is, only that it's dark and she can't see Shinji or any of the others anywhere, and now she's got a new voice cackling, too low-pitched to be human, gravelly and grating. Unholy joy at the freedom it thinks it's going to have, at the newfound, newly animal aggression it pumps into Hiyori in the form of brittle bones and adrenaline making her veins feel excruciatingly tight.
It thinks it will have freedom, until it is suppressed and put down, brutally, confined with the help of Urahara.
Urahara, again. It's all coming back to Urahara now, for some reason.
At the first, Hiyori tries to think of some way to blame Urahara for the mess she's in. She's half-Hollow, she can never go home, and by his own admission it was a device of Urahara's own invention that caused all the trouble. It would be so easy to blame him for all of this, and Hiyori wants to, too.
But really, she can't find a way to blame him. Hiyori goes up and down the aisle of reasons and can't find a single one that fits the situation. And she can't quite bring herself to blame him.
That's the first development in the gradual break-down of everything Hiyori has ever stood for. But still, it all comes back to Urahara.
There's an element of melancholic sadness in his eyes and the inflection of his voice that will never go away now, not even when he overenthusiastically advertises the products found in his shop. Hiyori's own mask, when not made of bone is one of surly moodiness—not all that different from what she used to wear, but different, in that it's darker, uglier and shadowed. But what Hiyori notices is his sadness, all of it.
For whatever reason, Urahara's sadness, his regret, his guilt—does he really feel guilt, over us?—infects Hiyori with it too, presses a dissolving solution against the walls of her dislike and antipathy for him.
It's not that she's suddenly had a huge epiphany, that she's come to the realization that her behavior was "wrong", because there is no "right" and "wrong", not anymore; they're just words that have lost their meaning, and their value.
It's just that Hiyori finds this unbridled rage and harsh aggression increasingly difficult to maintain in the new, strange world she's been thrust into. Survival is more important than the maintenance of a grudge. And she can't hold on to hatred anymore; she can't even find hatred to hold on to it.
The way they both carry their burdens doesn't allow for the antipathy. Hiyori has, subsequently, called a reluctant truce and Urahara has been more than happy to agree.
Her eyes are a little softer—not gentle, not friendly, because Hiyori doesn't think she can ever voluntarily or consciously be either. She's just not like that; she was born for battle, for bloodshed, not for the gentler occupations of the female species—now, when having to deal with Urahara. While this is somehow—Hiyori's still working out how—Urahara's fault, he's also done the best he can to make this better. He's the only one who can help her and her friends now, the only one with a plan. Pragmatism isn't something Hiyori's ever been lacking.
Not to say she holds him in terribly high esteem. Hiyori still looks upon Urahara as a cheap, mediocre, second-rate replacement for Kirio-taicho, and frankly, in her opinion he's not all that smart if he let Aizen get his hands on…on… whatever it was that allowed Aizen to turn them all into Vizard.
There was just something about Urahara before, that aroused Hiyori's ire to great extents. At first, she just thought it was the way he had replaced Kirio and removed everything in the division headquarters that reminded Hiyori of her. The way he tried to take her place.
And after that, after Hiyori got over her feelings of abandonment and was able to see that Urahara wasn't trying to usurp Kirio's place, she still wanted to break his nose every time she saw him. It was some sort of fire raging out of control, something Hiyori with her lit fuse of a temper never tried or bothered to try to suppress.
But the fire no longer burns, and the sight of Urahara's face no longer sends Hiyori into paroxysms of rage as it used to.
She doesn't think it ever will again.
And, most of all, Hiyori finds it deeply ironic that, when she has a Hollow inside of her and, because of that she's struggling with her temper more than she ever has before, she wants to hurt Urahara less than she ever has before.
Maybe she was a little more into the truce than she thought.