Author's Note:
Story so far: Hisana went to the human world to find Byakuya after he went missing in action. She found him, but while the other shinigami fought, he was forced to use Hisana's reiatsu to supplement his own and defeat a hollow, hurting her in the process and draining her soul. Though she has recovered well and returned home, he has remained for treatment at the Squad Four barracks.
And the story continues…..
She ran across the night-time garden, not caring that the gown she wore was too thin to protect her from the freezing air or that she was barefoot and the snow, painful after just two steps. She nearly lost her footing several times. Then came to a halt, panting, on a miniature bridge that crossed the lake where it was narrowest. On the far side of the water, beneath the weeping willow where they had always sat to write, Byakuya was kneeling.
He looked up and, seeing her, rose, slipping his haori off as he did so. He met her on the bridge and wrapped it around her shoulders.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
She had sensed him. The moment he had entered the garden, she had known. It had woken her from a deep sleep. Perhaps, even in her dreams, she had been waiting for him. Two weeks since they'd been found in the real world. She had made a swift recovery, but Unohana had insisted Byakuya stay at the barracks until he was fully healed, and it had taken longer than she had imagined. She had not expected him to return in the middle of the night. Were it not for the cold, she might have thought this was a dream.
Without speaking, she stepped forward, pressing her cheek to his chest while still holding the haori around her shoulders. And, after a moment, he put his arms around her: "Hisana-san." Her name sounded like an incantation.
"Byakuya-sama."
He didn't answer. His embrace was lighter than it had been before. The first time she wanted, even needed his arms around her, he barely held her. "What's wrong, Byakuya-sama?" Again, no answer. She pushed back from him. He was looking out across the garden, across snow stained lavender by the moonlight. It seemed that he had forgotten she was even there: "Byakuya-sama?"
"Why did you come?" he said to the garden. It took her a moment to realise he was addressing her. "Why did you come to the human world?"
"To find you." His face was empty. "Byakuya-sama."
"I lost fourteen men. I should have been leading my squad and I – I" – He lurched forward. She had never heard his voice so raw and, though he had stumbled into her embrace, he didn't return it. She dug her fingers into his robe:
"Even Ukitake couldn't foresee what those hollows could do," she said.
"And that's why he had no right to bring you."
All at once, he had stepped away from her, his footfalls crossing the bridge before she had so much as turned, her hands outstretched to where he'd stood in her arms. Now, she pulled the haori tight about her shoulders and looked after him:
"Where are you going?"
"To bed."
"Byakuya-sama" –
"Do you realise," he asked, turning back: "That what you did saved the lives of nineteen men, myself and Ukitake?"
"Are you – angry?"
"I'm ashamed."
"But it was you!" she said, scampering after him: "You saved us! I didn't know what I was doing!"
"You should not have been there." He was striding towards the house and she followed, the movement forcing some warmth back into her frozen feet:
"Byakuya-sama, what are you saying?"
"I wish that you had not come."
"You would be dead!"
"So would the eighteen others. But you would not have been hurt. I wouldn't have been the one to" – His steps faltered. She had followed him onto the decking that ran along the side of the mansion and now, when he spoke, it was more to himself than her: "I am Kuchiki Byakuya, Captain of the Sixth Division of the Gotei Thirteen. And I would sacrifice my men for my own personal vanity." He slumped heavily against the door-frame.
"But you didn't. You didn't sacrifice them. You did what you had to."
"I nearly destroyed you!" he cried. She caught the anguish in his face before he dropped his head into his hands. This was not the man she knew; this was a tower with the foundations torn out; he was breaking apart before her very eyes. Even to touch him now felt like trying to catch water as it streamed between her fingers.
"But you didn't," she said desperately.
"I am either a terrible captain or a heartless man."
"You are neither of those things."
"What I did" –
"Byakuya-sama." She tried to steel her voice as she reached for his hand. Though he didn't return her grasp, she placed it at her waist, an action that caused him to turn towards her. "I'm here," she said: "Right now. And I'm not so fragile as you believe me to be." Tentatively, he put his other hand on her cheek. She let him draw her close. Then she reached up and pulled his head down until their lips met.
He didn't respond at once. Then, it seemed to her that the differences between them began to fracture and crumble. The heat of his body remained where all else fell away.
She had come to believe she needed him, but now she understood that his need for her was equal to, if not greater than her own.
When she pulled back, she caught a glimpse of his uncertainty. Confusion. He hid it quickly; his mouth a flat line; the lids fell over his grey eyes. But she had seen it. She smiled in the knowledge that she had surprised him, and his brows knitted a little as if he didn't quite understand the joke:
"Are you cold, Hisana-san?" She nodded. He took her hand and led her a few more yards down the length of the building, then pulled back the screen door to his quarters and let her in.
Like every other room in the mansion, his apartments were largely undecorated. There were books everywhere. There were papers and a writing desk. In one room, there was a shrine to his family. In another, a fire-pit, unlit for several weeks. She wandered after him through room after room, and the one thing that struck her was that there was no heart in this house. The room she had stayed in as a guest felt more lived in than his quarters and, eventually, she felt moved to ask:
"Why have you never furnished the house?"
He stopped and stared at her, then glanced around as if seeing the space for the first time:
"I live alone here. It would seem – indulgent."
"But you keep the garden looking so beautiful!"
"The garden lives, it grows, it changes." He stepped through into the bedroom and drew aside the door to a cupboard set in the wall: "Nothing in these walls lives or changes." He offered her a blanket: "To keep you warm. The haori doesn't suit you."
"No, it doesn't."
"Ukitake says he would take you in as a member of his squad. You aren't strong, he says, but you're resourceful. That was the word he chose: resourceful."
"What did you say to him?" She discarded the haori and wrapped the blanket round her shoulders. Byakuya came over and kissed her on the cheek:
"I told him to go to hell," he said. He teased her hair out from where it had become caught in the folds of the blanket: "Why don't you ever brush your hair?"
"Ukitake-taichou acted with the best intentions."
"You could wear it up. I've never seen you wear it up."
"It hardly seems relevant" – She lost her train of thought and shivered as he kissed her neck.
"It is most – relevant," he whispered in her ear. His lips traced the line of her collar bone and he slipped the blanket back from her shoulders, then pulled aside the kimono with the crook of his thumb.
She sunk into his kisses, her body responding to his every touch with involuntary tremors as he pushed her back onto silk sheets. This time, there was no hesitation in him and, for a time, it was as if the substance of her self meant nothing to him. Beyond the soul of a man who was, at times, so gentle, so careful, so enamoured with her, there was another who believed he had had a right to her from the very beginning. To this second, she gave herself willingly, discovering that, within him, there was little that was gentle.
She had wanted to be someone different; she had wanted to be braver, stronger. She had never realised that he could, in the anonymity of his desires, break apart that old self so completely and remake her.