The Inmost Calm
Summary: Byakuya, after having made peace with his conflicting vows, haltingly tries his hand at being a big brother... in his own way.
Genres: General, Family
Rating: Everyone
Length: Multi-chapter/WIP
Story Notes: Once again, this is a fic I had originally intended to be a long oneshot. As such, I can't imagine this fic stretching too much farther than, say, eight chapters, but take this estimation with a grain of salt. My record for estimating the length of fics, so far, is 0-2.
I had a few reasons for beginning to write this. The most obvious one is the peculiar way Byakuya, after the Soul Society arc, chooses to express his brotherly affection. Another is Rukia's unwavering loyalty toward him, even when he did nothing to save her from execution. A less obvious (and more compelling) one, however, is the remarkable difference there is between the Byakuya of the past, who would shout, chase Yoruichi, emote outwardly, and marry a girl from the 78th district despite his own familial status, and the one of anime and manga present.
As with most characters who show such a drastic shift in temperament, at some point there must be a marriage between the two. That is part of what I am attempting here. The other major part is simple: Byakuya and Rukia being family. Because, let's face it, I have a weakness for family fics.
Chapter Notes: I have a few points. 1.) This chapter will most likely be edited later, but only for style, not content. 2.) I have not abandoned anything, and if you're waiting for a certain fic or chapter to appear, chances are it's on my hard drive in progress. 3.)The quote here (and the title) are from "How Can I Keep From Singing" (also known as "My Life Flows On"), 1860, by Robert Wadsworth Lowry, as performed by Pete Seeger.
What through the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
What through the darkness 'round me close,
songs in the night it giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to this rock I'm clinging.
If love is lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?
The Kuchiki compound had always had a sense of folding, of collapsing. It sprawled across the inner sections of Seireitei like a dragon sprawled across mounds of stolen gold that was only truly his on merit of his vast size and diamond-hard scales. It was all open windows, tatami, empty rooms and spare futons. It was silk curtains and too many memorials. Even as a child, pre-academy, when his days had been filled with learning kanji, making mischief, and shaming his grandfather with his impropriety, even then he had been aware of it.
Surely, at one point, their family must have been large enough to rationalize such vast property, but in Byakuya's experience, his family only seemed to grow smaller. He once had aunts and uncles, distant faces from early childhood. He remembered them sometimes, for an instant when he woke from dreaming, or saw them in the corner of his vision when he walked down the street. He didn't know what had happened to them, only that before he even realized it, they were wholly and comfortably gone from his life. There were others, too: adults of seeming importance, standing with his parents and discussing grown-up things, looking over him and beyond him, never noticing scraped knees or loose hair or stains on expensive clothing. There were the ones he only saw once, women who pretended to know him, who greeted him like an old friend, bearing gifts and embraces and then vanishing forever.
There were grandparents, the ones on his mother's side, whom he only passively knew existed but had never met, and the ones on his father's side. His paternal grandmother had been an important figure in his early life, more of a maternal figure than his mother was, fostering within him a sense of childhood that the Kuchikis would otherwise have had quashed. She was his first memorial, set up clumsily in the corner of his bedroom, decorated religiously with gum wrapper chains and dandelions plucked from the garden in the early hours of the morning. She was also his first funeral, ashes scattered in the wind, floating away like sakura petals into the orange evening. His grandfather was a more recent loss. He outlived even his son, who would never have been strong enough to replace him in captaincy. He was strong, even in age, and distant. They did not speak much in his adult years, and occupied different ends of the compound, but the elder Kuchiki curiously passed on only after Byakuya made a stunning, widely gossiped display in battle of his not-so-newly-won bankai and spawned rumors that promised him the next available captain's seat.
There were also his parents, proud, always proper, somewhat distant, but loving. His father had attended the academy and climbed all the way to third seat, but when it became clear that he would rise no further, his lineage earned him a council position and removed him from regular action. His mother was a mid-ranking member of the Kido Corps, preferring to use her talents to assist in healing rather than in research or combat. They died together, coughing up blood, shortly after falling out with their son and his lower-class wife.
Byakuya had never understood how disease could exist in a world essentially devoid of physical form, but he began to suspect the answer was divine retribution when, shortly thereafter, the same ailment claimed his wife, Hisana. Then again, he had also never understood how their world could justify class distinctions when, for all intents and purposes, the population of the various districts was entirely random. Innocent children landed in both the worst districts of Rukongai and the best, and more than a few "noble" clan members were certainly far less than reputable. Byakuya refused to associate with people who used such shallow things as membership in an arbitrary clan to set themselves on an otherwise unmerited marble pedestal, and if people called him arrogant for that, well, so be it. After all, people did not originate in Soul Society, and when it came down to it, there were no true blood ties. Strangers in one life could be family in the next, and two people that died together, at the same instant even, might never find one another in the afterlife.
The trouble with thoughts such as these, however, was that, no matter what conclusion he came to on his own, it never changed the stark reality of how the outside world functioned. Byakuya had been raised in a high noble family. As such, he had been taught that because of his station in life, it was his right and duty to philosophize and anguish over the state of society as a whole and cast judgment accordingly. However, the only socially acceptable outcome of his musings was one that supported the feudal hierarchy that made so little sense to him. The dramatic irony of the situation would have been laughable had he the right temperament. However, he did not, and instead continued to exist in the precarious balance that came with a life like his: meting out impartial justice while still participating in social politics that saw him and his "noble" ilk on a distinctively higher plateau than the other inhabitants of Soul Society.
So how was Byakuya to react when his adopted sister, who had previously fit so well into his objective, duty-bound life, abruptly vanished into the living world, only to reappear months later, despair welling behind her dark eyes, mourning a past she could not change, and resigned to surrender a life that had never truly belonged to her?
Her carriage had screamed "martyrdom" in its every posture, and her silence had dripped with guilt so thick it stifled the air around her. The attitude got under Byakuya's skin. It made him grit his teeth in irritation even upon reflection now. What had she to feel guilty about? She had climbed from one of the worst parts of Rukongai into a noble family, earned skill worthy of a lieutenant, and until her unexpected disappearance, did her duty commendably and to the letter. Her late vice-captain, on the other hand, had foolishly allowed his emotions to interfere with his duties as both a shinigami and a leader. Now, after following his wife as he had so longed to do, Kaien's death had poisoned her enough that she would willingly donate her reiatsu to a mere boy, just because he looked like him, and then march calmly to her death, full of self-pity that reeked of entitlement.
The whole affair was so wholly outside Byakuya's realm of experience that, quite honestly, he didn't like thinking about it. Between conflicting oaths (which he really should have expected, given the voluminous history of literature on that very subject), the boy storming in, shouting about things like friendship and family and love, and then the undermining of the system to which he had subscribed his loyalty and his conscience, being beaten by the boy, and then having to admit that he had been wrong… No. Byakuya did what he always did when he began this train of thought: stifled it with a stern internal reprimand, stood up gracefully, piled his paperwork neatly at the corner of his desk, and swept out of the office without a word to his subordinates. The tiny, nagging voice in the back of his mind, which claimed that his obstinate, unquestioning loyalty to his superiors was really just a cowardly refusal to take responsibility for his own actions, was silenced by sheer force of will.
It was early afternoon, by the sun's high position in the sky, and Byakuya made the sudden, uncharacteristic decision to have lunch at the Kuchiki compound rather than over work in his office. The fact that Rukia was confined there for the next few weeks, unable to do anything other than the most menial of paperwork due to both her condition and her rank, of course, had nothing to do with it. Neither did the fact that he had left Aburai with so much work that he likely wouldn't be able to leave the desk at all today, much less visit with Rukia like he normally did at this time. As Byakuya strode gracefully across Seireitei toward the compound, emitting his best "don't touch me, don't look at me, don't get in my way" rays, he was not thinking about having lunch with his sister, even if they just so happened to arrive in the dining room of their shared home at the same time she did every day.