The first plum blossom of the season blooms, unnoticed. The fresh scent of spring is masked by smouldering sticks of incence. The household rhythm is disrupted by a funeral. For a while, reality is suspended and is superceded by mourning.
Somewhere deep inside, a rash, impetuous, headstrong boy experiences a terrible, terrible, wrenching grief. On the surface, he merely mourns, for the prescribed duration, in a dignified manner. As is proper and befitting the head of a Noble house.
...
Inorexably, life goes on. Duty calls, if not the steadily accumulating paperwork, and he goes back to the office, heart numb but otherwise functional. His subordinates tread carefully around him, a minor detail which he barely notices as he tackles his work with a quiet efficiency.
He knows that the clan elders approve of his change of heart. They've let him know, in no uncertain terms, that they thoroughly support him getting his life back together. That they're happy he's finally managed to put this whole 'little indiscretion' of his behind him so as to get on with his promising career.
...
He keeps her portrait in a private shrine; the elders do not protest this extravagance, much. It calms him to speak to her in this way. As much as he hates to admit it, he feels strangely freed by this sentimental gesture.
After each conversation, he takes care to shut the slatted doors of the shrine. To close the past behind him so that he can step forth into the future.
The action doesn't quite shut the boy within up; he tends to go on and on, sotto voce, about a promise, a promise to his dead wife. He does his best to ignore the nagging. If nothing else, he tries not to let it show on the outside.
...
In this way, time passes for him, days carefully proportioned into managable segments by the routines of work, that and the intricate social dance that he was brought up to perform. As a result, very little changes from one day to the next.
Until one morning, she passes him in a flurry of black trainee robes. Like a rather rowdy apparition, drifting out of the past, sending ripples into his future.
She looks so much like Hisana, that a younger Byakuya would almost certainly have called out her name, almost certainly making a fool himself and embarrassing everyone else within earshot.
Thankfully, he stops himself in time. It would not do for a captain to be seen acting this way in public. As it is, he notices with some irritation that his pulse has become unusually fast.
...
As he pauses by the window to collect himself, the weight of an oath sworn to a dying woman lies heavy on his mind. His younger self would not even have stopped to think at this point, but with age, comes caution and a knowledge of repercussions.
As he hangs in an agony of indecision, he happens to look up. Once again, the plum trees are blossoming. As the nostalgic scent washes over him, its hard to believe it has already been a year .
His resolve firms.
I won't forget.
The elders are probably not going to like this.
Across the years, the rash, headstrong, impetuous boy makes a rude gesture, stating in no uncertain terms what he think the elders can jolly well go do.
The man he has grown into is far too controlled to think the same. It would not be fitting for the head of a noble house to even admit to knowing such... things.
Still, spring is in the air. It is a time of new beginings. As he looks back at the person he once was, a boy flush with the vitality and the confidence of youth sticking his tongue out at all authority, he does think that he might just perhaps, just this once, allow himself a tiny, tiny smile.