Title: contrast
Rating: T (S,L,V)
Characters: Rukia, Hitsugaya, Matsumoto
Pairings: Rukia x Hitsugaya, Hitsugaya x Matsumoto, implied Hitsugaya x Hinamori
Setting: Post-Modern Alternate Universe
Description: She had too little, and he too much – and somewhere in the in-between, they made up the difference.
A/N: Yes, I'm double-dipping from the one-shots collection… but this was an unusual pairing that deserved to be categorized correctly, sooo…. *thumb twiddle*
For Allison, who requested HitsugayaxRukia, and Final Flight, who wanted HitsugayaxMatsumoto. This is primarily a Rukia centric collection, but I thought I'd try and mix 'em for ya. The flavor is something different than anything I've done before, so feedback is appreciated.
--0--
She was an oddity – a discolored, displaced piece from a different collection entirely. She had pale skin, white as snow, among a throng of chocolate browns. Her hair was raven silk among bramble weeds. Her eyes were stark lilac against midnight and mud.
Some might call her 'exotic', but she knew it was only because she was mismatched to the world she had been thrown into. It was only a degree of difference; as a child of half-Asian descend, she had been a neko mask among Greek proposa in Europe – similar, but not similar enough. Now, in central Africa, she was something else entirely.
Was she three, five? Didn't matter; she was barely old enough to begin forming memories when her sister – her caretaker, her adoptive parent – died.
'You're a part of the Kuichiki estate now. You'll be taken care of,' Rukia thought she remembered her saying before it happened. Or maybe it was a fabricated memory; didn't matter. What mattered was, her sister was cold and dead in the ground beneath an ornate-beautiful-hulking stone (as if the size of her towering monument might fill the gaping hole she left in the world behind). Rukia was left in the care of the dead-woman's husband, her adoptive brother.
Her earliest memories were of being taken care of by servants. But as the seemingly endless reserve of Kuichiki investments depreciated in market crash after merger failure after bad investments by the foundation – the familiar faces tapered away until there was only one. By age nine, her world was turned upside down again. From slum to mansion to impoverished, war stricken jungle.
"We're going to Congo," Byakuya spoke passively, carefully folding her sweaters into totes, as if she might ever need them again. "The only remaining holdings are in a Belgian mine. It's all we have left."
She wanted to say, 'We have each other…' but even a year shy of a ten into life, she knew they were silly words, and so she only nodded and offered a demure, "Yes, nii-san."
Byakuya tried his best to provide for her – enrolled her in a prestigious American-volunteer based school, had a house built that was more secure than the other rickety ones available when they arrived. Dare she call it a manor? Barely a bungalow by European standards, but it stood out like a castle among mud and straw huts, and maybe that was their downfall.
At age ten, Rukia came home to find Byakuya-nii-san dead of a gunshot wound to the head. His watch was gone, she noticed absent-mindedly – the house was in minor disarray, but the safe was untouched. It was a minor robbery – probably some hooligan looking for a buck, not even smart enough to have done his research before the hit. Byakuya Kuichiki had lived only months into his second decade.
It killed her to see him put in a box with ragged-wood edges. But it killed her more when the skipper of the ship told her that the meager crumbled bills fisted in her hand were only enough to buy passage home for one.
And so, she wrote on his cheap casket with a stick of charcoal – wrote her sisters name, and the cemetery where they might find her and her ornate-beautiful-hulking stone (now theirs to share, if only he could find his way there). She hoped perhaps back in Europe someone might recognize the name, and help him home.
(Home, she thought bitterly. I suppose I have no such place anymore. But she never had, and so in place of hurt, she instead felt the sharp sting of emptiness.)
She sat on the shore and watched the boat sail away, and when it finally hit her that the skipper could just as easily toss the load over the side midway and no one would ever know the difference, she wanted to cry but could only feel a biting cold inside. It was a welcome feeling, that cold, that ice, in this damned land of sun and heat.
She wanted to freeze.
--0--
When he was young (younger, some snide corner of his mind corrected… younger), his teachers had always doted on him. He was smart – a prodigy, a genius. He had exotic hair (oh, such beautiful silver, they cooed) and rare irises (turquoise – have you ever seen such a clearly, lovely shade of turquoise?) and a mean cunning for all things scholastic. (You have such an old soul, junior high teacher admonished him. Don't you want to go out and play with the other children, Hitsugaya?)
He graduated high school at age nine and made the national news. By age fourteen, he was graduating college. By age sixteen he was a doctor (of biology, his father said with chagrin; how trite – not even a medical doctor, his mother concurred, because they wanted only the best for him even when the 'best' wasn't what he wanted himself).
At age seventeen, he felt old. 'I'm marrying Aizen-sensei,' Hinamori cheered, crushing him in a hug. Her arms tight around him weren't the only thing making it hard to breath. 'Oh you will be there won't you?' She was barely twenty. Aizen was a graduate student prof-ing one of her undergraduate classes.
He wanted to get away. Not boarding school away; not prestigious-out-of-country college away. Away away. 'Research grants in Russia!' he read on a flier on the wall, and plucked it up on a whim.
His professors looked in askance when he applied; he was boy genius, world-renowned. He could go anywhere, do anything…
And instead, he ended up in Siberia, in some shit-hole podunk corner of nowhere. There was scarcely any life out here, and that made for a good façade of a research project: to study what it took to survive in this harsh environment, he said – the paper might as well have read 'for Hitsugaya to survive'.
He had little patience for others – perhaps least of all for the boisterous, too-cheerful, too-sultry, too-buxom environmental-scientist that shared the outpost with him, headed the research grant under which he was toiling. She was old enough to be his teacher, maybe even his mother – but, one particularly spiteful evening, he thought, 'Why not? Hinamori fucked her professors,' and so he did.
He felt guiltier for the spiteful thought at Hinamori than for blatantly using the buxom blonde before him. He might have felt even worse upon that realization, if Matsumoto (god, he still called her by her last name…) hadn't rolled over and wrapped a comforting, almost maternal arm around him. 'I know everything isn't ok,' she murmured quietly. 'But sometimes… just being… is all you've got, and that's got to be enough.'
And for a minute, her warmth against his back, her blatant acceptance of him, her maternal affection – these were all things he had never had his entire life – for that minute, he thought, maybe it would be enough.
Six months later, he received a backlog of mail and opened a yellowed envelope filled with frilly wedding pictures and a note asking 'Where were you?' When he turned back to the outpost, and saw Matsumoto leaning against the door waiting for him, hugging a mink stole close around her neck against the bitter Siberian wind, the sense of homeyness washed over him like a wave, and it was cloying. Hadn't he come here to get away from all this? Hadn't he come here… to get away?
"It's too crowded here," he sighed late that night, as Matsumoto held him too gently, too kindly, too lovingly in her arms. He didn't deserve her – and she didn't deserve him, in a different kind of way. Their age difference – their personality difference – their taboo – simply wasn't enough arms length anymore. He was cold, and he was suffocating.
He didn't say anything else – but he didn't need to, either. Matsumoto picked up on it in that cunning, too-perceptive way of hers. She knew him too well.
"Do you want me to go with you?" she asked, genuinely. If he said yes, he didn't doubt for a second that she would never look back. But instead he said no, and wanted to be disappointed when she only nodded sagely, as if she had expected his answer all along.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Somewhere I can burn," he snapped waspishly – and it wasn't even that he was angry, but just that it was his way. When she wasn't offended, he felt a sharp jab of something like regret, knowing this deep rooted understanding – this stable thing he had – would soon be gone. "My skin is too white, and it's so goddamn cold here…"
"With the white hair it does make you look albino," she tried to jibe. He tried to laugh, but could only find it in him to scoff. He wondered why his eyes burned.
It was a welcome feeling, the heat.
--0--
Her camos, her steel-toed boots – her utility belt, her multi-knife, her machete – her semi-automatic – they were all standard American issue. Left to guerrillas in the foreign-government's half-assed attempt at a coupe d'etat without getting their hands dirty. Instead, everyone's' hands got dirty, and nothing happened, and even wearing her pilfered grubby uniform, even hacking through the surrounding forest as if she owned it (didn't she?), she was porcelain doll among dogs.
She was only a few months older than twenty, and holding a gun to the head of a boy who looked to be near her age, maybe a little less. She thought of nii-san, and the irony was not lost upon her. She thought she was the sorest thumb to stick out in the Congo, but the moment she saw a white head ducking into her mine, she knew she had been mistaken.
She expected him to panic, but instead he only cocked his head – looked at her in a sidelong glance with exotic turquoise eyes. "You aren't from around here," he drawled.
"I'm not really from anywhere," she replied. It was perhaps the most honest thing she had ever said in her life.
She wondered if they had sold the little cemetery plot next to nee-chan and nii-san's. She knew no one would write in charcoal on her ragged-wood edged box, and so instead she kept the information pinned to the inside of her collar in a laminated envelope with a crumbled bill to pay the skipper. She hoped the vultures who picked over her body would fear haunting and follow the implied request of the dead – but then again, there was no way to know if nii-san had ever made it home either, so what did it matter?
"Not from anywhere…" he echoed, and he looked wistful. "What's it like?"
She stared at him blankly – eased her finger off the trigger. "Like nothing," she sighed. "I hate this godforsaken place."
"I keep running, but I just can't leave it all behind no matter where I go. What's holding you back?" he asked, a hint of bitterness in his tone – a hint of something like envy. The first sentence was like a breaking dam – like he had confided something important to her. Like he had opened up in some centripetal way, if only because he knew she wouldn't understand anyway.
"The only remaining holdings are in a Belgian mine. It's all we have left," she echoed woodenly. (Not we – not anymore, a part of her mind chided.) Diamonds – they may as well have been rocks, those pretty shiny little baubles. But she supposed someone somewhere must care about them, because they traded for a lot of bullets.
He turned his head fully now that the barrel of her gun wasn't pressing into him. When she looked at him, it occurred to her in a rush that they were perhaps as polar opposite as the ying and yang locks upon their heads. He kept running away, and she couldn't seem to move her feet.
"It's not much," he noted.
She barked a harsh laugh. "No, it's not." He wasn't here to steal her precious rocks – not here to ransack her precious mine – and realizing that, she felt suddenly drained. She pulled back and turned to walk away.
"Do you want me to go with you?" he called – quickly, impulsively almost, as if the words had surprised even him. She hesitated – cocked her head, regarded him carefully.
"It depends on where you're going," she offered finally.
He thought about it for a while – and then laughed, shaking his head. "Somewhere I can burn."
She looked back at him and smiled, tight lipped and ruefully ironic. "You've come to the right place for that." She continued on her way then, and though she didn't tell him to follow, she didn't tell him not to either, and so he did anyway.
And somewhere along the way, they found something between his overfill and her under.
--0--
A/N: Well – should I do any other post-modern work, or stick with canon-based? Themes, prompts, concrit welcome.