The marks lay open. So did the rest of her, her skin failing to glow in the dark like it used to. She was inhaling morphine. Breathing it along with the cold air. In the dark. She closed her eyes, felt the pain, opened them again. And as she silently looked at him, her goodbyes had never been heard with greater clarity.
Byakuya Kuchiki knew Hisana was dead. She had to be. He began calling her name.
He liked the nights after a sordid battle, when the raw wounds were just beginning to dry after being washed with sterilized water. He would remember the smell of Hisana's room, her deathbed, and recall the days when he tended her in her slow decay. After she had gone, he asked the maids to let her room be. The smell remained, but neither she nor her spirit was going to come back.
In those nights he would rub his wounds against the surface of his thumb until they came close to bleeding. The following morning he would send for Unohana Retsu to look at the burning blisters he had made. He only needed a few bandages.
His battles were fierce. There were times, many of them, when he had heard his bones crack upon contact with something hard and his katana clang loud against skulls and spines. He had looked a number of times at bloodied bodies he believed were dead before he even dealt those blows. In their lifeless eyes, he saw a simple reflection of a man who had successfully completed a job. More than once, he had been called a genius.
At the end of the day, he found himself desiring Hisana's warmth, coming home to her at last, instead of sitting in his office, knee-deep in paperwork, doing overtime. With her, his childhood came alive. He came to be alive.
When he decided to break the rules his family had laid on him, he decided to break it every step of the way, too.
He was away on a mission when she dropped on her face, they said, tiny beads of sweat standing stiffly on her skin. It was cold, like the surface of a glass pane in autumn. He traced his hands on her cheeks soon as he saw her, slowly, so that she wouldn't wake but she opened her eyes and smiled. Her smile was a grimace, as though she was in pain; and she was. Byakuya had given her that pain. She lifted her arms to receive his touch and swooned. He was trying to decide whether he liked the sound of her troubled wheezing.
The moonlight had bayed the small distance between them; in a little while, worlds would separate them.
Against their wishes he had employed the Fourth Division captain's service to heal his woman. One look at her and Unohana had read the doom that lay close to Hisana. She handed her herbs to digest, pills to swallow, and some melted liquid to sip while it boiled and peeled the partial skin of her lips. For weeks Hisana religiously followed Unohana's prescription. At various times since then she had been able to get up from the sheets and enjoy supper without the servants' assistance. But she would never leave the room alive.
Byakuya watched them. Nothing betrayed their quiet ritual, their desperation neatly tucked beneath their smiling, conspiratorial faces. If anything, he was a victim.
In his office he kept a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost. The pages were creased and dog-eared. Brownish yellow stains marked the edges of the leaves: coffee spills, tea, drops of muddy rain on days when he'd left the windows open and left it beside the sill. He would pick lines off the book from time to time, run them over his head until he forgot why he was even doing it in the first place. His fingers would begin to search through the letters and ink, as though they felt anything.
And then he found a pen. He flipped the book over until he came to the last page, just before the back leather cover. A blank one. He scribbled.
At the Fourth Division, there is a woman I have loved for a long time. Her name is Unohana Retsu. She has been a friend of my father's. She is much older than me.
He stopped before he added a little bit more: She doesn't know I do. Days later he would cross out the last sentence. Maybe Unohana knew he did, maybe not. But that is of little, if no, consequence.
On the bottom of the page, he had written in optimum calligraphy: Hisana is dead. Droplets of unidentified substance dotted the paper, causing the ink to blot and the space around it to whiten and dilute. Time alone knew how loudly his tears crashed against the smoothness of the page.
The morning of her funeral was a golden one. Her burial site was made on a green mound, at the foot of which tiny scavengers burrowed and ate the dead; but the area around her gravestone was bleached white like the foam of the ocean waves in spring. The smell of medicinal fluids had long left her clothes; it remained amidst the comfort of her bed, along with a few strands of her hair. For now, she had stunk of damp soil.
Byakuya Kuchiki stood in her wake until they started burying her, a handful of earth after another, turning her into some indistinct part of nature. His mind was on Rokongai, on the day he swept her away from the filth and squalor of her former life. She had been fragile and small; but she had been the most human of them all.
Out of all his comrades at the Gotei 13, Unohana Retsu alone came to join his mourning. She had doffed her white cloak and in the morning sun she looked like she had never once wielded a sword. Her black hair strayed faintly, and her even blacker eyes stared far off, beyond the scent of the mountains. She inched closer beside him, the fumes of dirt springing from where she'd stepped on.
"You didn't tell me how bad it was." He began.
"She didn't want you to know her real condition."
"I see."
"I'm sorry. She loved you." She muttered. The gust of air sank her voice.
"Yes." He admitted.
He held in his hands and mind the promise she left him with. To find the sister she abandoned. But in his pocket he clutched the last page of his book's copy, where he'd once written all of his heart's content. He fished it out for her to see, the crumpled whitish sheet telling an altogether different story. One apart from all of this.
She protested and shook her head. She knew. There was nothing more to be said.
"When I was a child I told my mother I would marry you." He spoke just when she was ready to depart.
"But where is she?"
"She is dead. Like Hisana."
"Then let it be dead. It's easier that way."
She scuttled away from him, from the scene, and let the wind speak for her thoughts. He sighed at her retreating figure, grasping no memory of it, as the blades of grass below swayed afresh on their roots. He thought of Hisana, how she'd bothered to cook dinner for him after a long day; how, knowing he hated it, she'd ask him to relay the gory details of his fights. She had laughed at whatever he said and shed caution off where it should be assumed. She had died smiling. He thought of Unohana Retsu; how she'd dressed his wounds after a deadly battle without a word and without asking anything in return. She was able to regenerate lost limbs, refill spilled blood, reconnect open gashes on the skin, cure terminal illnesses, even restore damaged vital parts. She had done all this without the aid of expression. She never smiled.
And she would never be able to heal a broken heart.
In the warmth of a bright summer morning at his wife's funeral, Byakuya Kuchiki nursed a heart broken twice by women he believed he loved. That night he would fight the most merciless of his wars.
END