She finds him face down in a pool of his own blood, the shattered remains of his sword lying strewn around him.
Well. That is certainly unexpected. He's hardly the person she's looking for at this point in time, but it looks like Ichigo will have to wait. Her first student needs her just a little bit more than Ichigo does.
It is with some difficulty that she lifts him onto her shoulders, or rather, leans his chest onto her shoulders, wraps his arm around her shoulders then clumsily drags his weight forward until her shoulder digs into his stomach.
She tries not to think about the wounds that she might have opened up - warmth is starting to seep down onto her chest and she does her best to convince herself that it is due to contact with him and definitely not due to the fact that he is basically bleeding out all over onto her.
Once she is satisfied that he will not fall off it takes her twelve steps to bring him to the Fourth, not that she counted.
She leaves him there, shooting off in search of Ichigo who doesn't really need to be carried but needs someone to beat sense into him, something she does with great pleasure.
She is told through the grapevine that he is awake and decides to wait two days before visiting him since she actually does have things to do in the real world.
That mentality lasts six hours.
Twelve hours after she's heard the news she is jumping through the window on the third floor into his room and onto his bed. She considers landing on him, but then quickly decides that it would be a bad idea for him to reopen all those wounds so quickly after waking up.
As it is, he stirs slightly and shifts an arm but doesn't open his eyes. He doesn't make any move to kick her off the foot of the bed either.
This startles her a lot more than it should, and instead of jumping up onto his chest and scratching his face (serves him right for ignoring her), she jumps off the bed, grabs a sheet from the linen closet in the hall, wraps it around herself as she transforms back into her human form and then sits down on the visitor's chair.
She doesn't really know why she doesoes it butshe reaches out and touches his arm and he still doesn't react.
Now she has to wake him up. Never mind rest. He's had plenty of that already. Never mind healing. He'll be getting plenty of that. She needs to see him awake.
She shakes his shoulder gently, feels that there are no bandages under her hand, and shakes him a little harder when he doesn't move to respond except to turn his head, although whether that is due to her shaking or to him actually responding, she does not know.
She keeps shaking his shoulder and his head lolls with the motion. A sudden fear grips her and she leans over, hands braced above his shoulders on the bed, cheek lowering towards his nose. The warmth hits her then the slightest inhale-exhale.
She exhales audibly,turns her head and moves to sit back up straight when her eyes meet his for a fraction of a second. She's not sure which of them is more startled.
He closes his eyes for a moment, opens them again.
By then, she is sitting properly on the chair, sheet tucked neatly around herself.
"Hey," she avoids the unspoken question in his eyes, "how are you feeling?"
He looks away for a moment, turns back and says, "What are you doing here?"
"Thought I'd drop by and see how you were doing." She injects levity into her voice, but it sounds awfully fake even to her.
His eyebrows raise.
"In a sheet?"
Now this is territory that she is very comfortable in. She smirks, leans in closer, "Would you have preferred nothing?"
His eyelids flit shut, the tiniest ghost of a smile comes to his lips. He does not move.
Before she's had too long to panic, he opens them again.
"Thanks for coming."
She whacks his uninjured shoulder and he tries to glare at her but has not the strength to put force behind it.
It is two weeks later, after all the hustle and bustle that always comes with aftermaths starts to die down, that she manages to find some semblance of an excuse to visit him.
The servants lead her around the winding corridors - not that they really would have needed to, she knows where his study is, where his room is, and where it was before he got married. She also knows where the kitchen, the main dining hall, and the dojo are, though that knowledge is far less relevant.
As it turns out, she does need their direction, as they take a right where they should have taken a left, and go down a flight of stairs that she is absolutely sure does not lead to the kind of place where Clans put their leaders.
She is told to wait outside the closed shoji doors, but she doesn't hear any embarrassing sounds, so after the servants have left, she sidles up to the doors and slides them open just a fraction, just in time to see him wrap up what is definitely his Clan seal up in wax paper and pass it to the Clan Elder in the room.
She soundlessly slides the door shut and goes back to twiddling her thumbs, back leaning against the other side of the corridor, just in time for the door to slide open. The Clan Elder gives her a dismissive look as they sweep past - they all do, anyway, so that doesn't matter to her, but he is scrambling to wipe all traces of shock off his face at seeing her.
"Hey," she says.
He turns away.
"I haven't told Rukia yet."
"Does it matter to her?"
He turns to look incredulously at her.
She hurriedly retracts part of the statement, "She'll figure something out. She's got people to put her up in places. You know she's always got a place in that boy's home, and besides, she's out on a mission for the next few months. And Ukitake would never let her die out in the cold. He's not that kind of person."
He nods, accepting her correction, then turns back to face the window.
"What are you going to do?"
She watches his back tense, watches his fists clench and unclench. He looks up, probably to the clouds in the sky.
He says, "I don't have any plans," but it sounds a lot more like, "I don't have anything," to her.
She wants to comfort him, but doesn't really know what to say so she says nothing.
She is at the Captains' meeting when he turns up ten minutes later than Renji, who has looked extremely confused, worried and anxious for the duration of the meeting. She all but hears jaws dropping around the room - for most of them, this is the first time they have seen him in casual attire. For her, this is the first time in years that she has seen him without any trappings of the Clan on him.
To his eternally tactful credit, Shunsui bless his heart doesn't try to crack a joke when he walks straight up to the Captain Commander's seat, then kneels and raises a bundle of cloth above his head.
Zaraki isn't saying anything either, which is highly unusual for him, usually finding all possible excuses to drop in a surprisingly intelligent snide comment. Abarai looks like he wants to say something, but Ise not-so-discreetly elbows him in the ribs and he retreats like a wounded puppy that has just been abandoned.
Shunsui takes the bundle, quickly skims the letter resting on the white folds of what is undeniably a Captain's haori.
The room stills.
Shunsui's eyes close, he sighs.
"If that is your wish."
"That is my wish," is all he says before rising, bowing, and leaving the room forever.
She definitely doesn't run after him. Renji's far too eager to do that, in any case.
She can hear their argument from outside the office building, which, as far as she is concerned, has got to be a record for him. Shouting is very much unlike him, which is why it still makes sense that she can only hear Renji's half of the argument.
"You can't just leave us like that!"
The division quiets.
"No, I mean, of course you can, but we need you!"
Someone ducks their head and shuffles off into the next room, clearly uncomfortable with this.
"There has to be something…"
A resounding crack - the sound of flesh on flesh, then the sound of someone colliding with something, and everyone stiffens. The door flies open, and Renji marches angrily from the room, long pointed strides, reiatsu spiking madly.
He comes to the door silently and swiftly shuts it. She is sure that no one else caught the red smidgeon along his jawline.
She sees that Renji has come to the same conclusion that she has.
Rukia learns of it the moment she steps out of the Senkaimon and almost crashes into him. Rukia blinks, confused, disoriented, and then like the breaking of dawn, it clears in her head and everyone can see her realization. Of what, some are still unsure, but she watches as Rukia throws her arms around her brother, and maybe, maybe it clears the air for some of them.
"I need to speak with you," his voice doesn't carry, but she's had practice picking it out from a room,
She gives them their privacy, and doesn't return till the next day.
The Young Master has left, she is informed at the gates. They do not know where he has gone. She resists the urge to blow up the ungrateful bastards' main gate. After all he's done for them (He's done a lot for them, right? She realizes that she doesn't actually know.) this is how they discard him?
Clans shed the chaff, the voice in the back of her head whispers, and old clans that have survived through the years are quickest to do so. Remember what they did to you.
Renji does not know where he might have gone. Renji is still very obviously hurt, but it is frustration and not anger that rolls off him in waves. She catches a tinge of worry, but quickly discards it before it begins to remind her of her own.
She finds him haggling with a furniture store owner in the first district, almost walks right past in search of her favorite noodle place, when that too-familiar baritone floats over in the wind.
It is a tea table, and she has seen it in his room before, and all of a sudden the urge to either cry or beat something up courses through her. It's not fair, the voice hisses, this is not fair, and if there is anything you hate, you hate it when things are not fair.
She marches up to them.
His jaw clenches when he sees her, his knuckles grow white with their grip on the tea table.
"Ya goin' ta take it or not?" The merchant says, flicks his eyes over to her, "looks like this lovely lady wants it too. It's a pretty antique thing, after all."
She imagines his hackles rising, then rests a hand on his shoulder, feels the muscles tense under her fingers, "I'll take it."
Realization dawns in the merchant's eyes, and he slides the record of sales over to them in return for the three gold coins.
He doesn't speak to her through lunch, doesn't try to pay for lunch. They eat their noodles in stilted silence, the tea table straddling the space between them.
She invites him to lunch.
The sun beats down on the rafters, but where she is standing, half shadowed by the eaves, is strangely cool. It takes him moments to find her, moments he spends standing in the doorway of a shop that sells water, moments that she spends not realizing that she now needs to pick him out of the crowd.
The warm buzz that used to accompany his presence, no matter how hard he'd tried to hide it, is absent, and it is the sounds his feet make on the dust, his hand almost on her shoulder that make her jump.
He raises an eyebrow, "Getting old?"
She whacks his shoulder. Hard. It might even leave a bruise.
"You're too sneaky," she snaps.
A shade passes over his eyes, she would have missed it if she had blinked, but it is gone before she can comment.
He is looking at her now, with an intensity that makes her want to jump up and shake him by the shoulders.
"Just what," she says, "is it that you're looking at?"
"Hmph," he says, the corners of his mouth turning up fractionally, "you're still pretty sneaky yourself."
They start. Kisuke because he can't turn down a challenge, she because this disturbs her and she does not like to be disturbed.
The book-reading comes first. Then they talk to Kurotsuchi who is extremely displeased to be proven wrong.
"Not wrong," he says with that high pitched wily voice of his, "the subject is an anomaly. Normally one stays dead."
She does not smack Kurotsuchi in the face despite how much she wants to.
"How did you manage to shake her off," he says, dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief.
"Soifon?" she says around a mouthful of noodles.
He stirs the bowl to shake up the red chilli oil.
"Sent her off to Ukitake for the afternoon. She'll have fun dealing with the third seats. Rukia's still in the human world."
He nods, pushes aside the half full bowl of noodles. Her gaze lingers on it just a moment too long, she can see that he caught her looking.
"Renji's fine," she says, pauses, "but he did forget to turn in the joint training report. Ise had to remind him."
He sniffs but his eyes are smiling,"Standards sure have fallen."
"You have unrealistic standards."
"Lieutenant Ise didn't seem to think so."
"You're being ridiculous and you know it."
She thinks that the way the sunlight catches on his chopsticks and plays across his fingers is kind of stunning, but it passes as the clouds shift overhead.
"And Hitsugaya won't say it but he misses your company."
He sniffs.
"He needs to learn to drink," he says, pulling his teacup closer.
She laughs. He smiles from behind the rim of the teacup.
"And how are you doing," he says.
She shrugs, "Could be better, could be worse. I'd forgotten what Soifon was like."
He snorts,"Have you now?"
"She's really not that bad," she says.
He laughs, "She really isn't. All bark, very little bite, but not that you would need to know, she adores you."
"Hey," she slurps at her noodles, "just because your pet misbehaves doesn't mean you get to make fun of mine."
"Abarai is not my pet," he says, smirks, puts the teacup down.
"Any pet of mine would not be so poorly behaved."
She starts taking small mental notes.
Ate less than half of the regular portion for lunch.
Ate two bites of rice.
Turned down a sweet.
Drank tea.
Drank only water.
She knows he knows something is up. His eyes dart away from her when he notices her looking. His expression cools, the air stills about them, he tries to eat. Forces his fingers to move. His fingers once had a grace that she never mastered, but now even she can see that he is trying. His hands are not as fluid, his movements are not as smooth, there is a tightness to his shoulders that he tries to hide from her as he tries to eat.
The crackers crumble between his teeth, she watches him swallow out the corner of her eye, can feel the dry crumbs scratch their way down his throat as if it were her own.
She sees him try to eat and slowly, slowly something crumbles.
They meet again, and again, and suddenly her calendar is blacked out for lunches on Monday and Thursday. Soifon frowns, assumes it is clan business and does not make any passing comments. Omaeda is still deathly afraid of her and Kisuke is too busy doing Kisuke things, so no one asks any questions.
Standing under a tree by the East Gate, she thinks he would have easily called her out on it - her doing clan business during lunch twice a week is preposterous. She would never. She imagines he would scoff if he were the type to scoff in public. Probably just think himself very sharp, that smug bastard.
The sun beats directly down as she makes small talk with Jidanbo who by now is used to her standing around. Perhaps it is a good thing that Jidanbo hardly socializes with most of the other shinigami - it saves her from a lot of trouble.
She feels eyes on her that do not have to do with her Captain's haori or shinigami garb and it takes her a second to find him watching her from the shade of eaves of the small noodle stand across the road.
"Gotta run," she says to Jidanbo.
"Have a good lunch, ma'am," Jidanbo grins at her. She does not know if he is grinning because he knows something she doesn't, or just because Jidanbo is naturally happy. She'll stick with the latter.
"So," she says, sidling up to him.
He says nothing, watches her walk closer then stands.
It's only been four days, but she realizes that she's missed this kind of silence and can't quite keep the smile from going to her face.
He looks, she knows he notices, also knows he wants to ask her what she is grinning about but will not. The thought makes her grin widen.
The first few times she keeps good time in leaving - her division needs her in their growing adjusting state. Then she realizes there doesn't need to be that much work to be done. She tells herself it has nothing to do with how much she likes eating lunch mostly in silence and she starts sitting around for longer.
Winter melts into spring and blows into summer.
It is a slow, stuffy, humid afternoon, the cicadas chirp outside on the tree under their lunch table on the upstairs porch of a ramen place. He sips from a glass of cool water, the only thing he has touched since they sat down. She is sprawled across the cushioned bench, haori hanging half off her shoulders, head resting on his shoulder.
They have been here for hours.
"Don't you have somewhere to be," he says finally.
The back of her head rumbles, she lets it loll onto his chest, hears the lub-dub, "Probably."
She hears him sniff in amusement, turns to look at him, "Are you trying to get rid of me?"
They play this game every time, draw gradually closer and this time is no exception. He bites at the bait, leveling her with an amused look, "Do you want me to?"
"Do you want me to answer that question," she says, feels the air cling to their skin, hears the cicadas' sound sharpen to a point. Does she want to answer that question? Does she have an answer to that question?
He finishes the glass of water, says, "Soifon's going to start missing you."
"She'll send a search party," she waves a hand.
His smile reaches his lips, "Do you want me to be here when the search party arrives?"
She thinks that he will throw the glass after her if she leaps out the window in cat form right now.
The last, smallest mouse is still alive. They've been nursing it back to health for three days now, but there is no denying it. It's alive and the reiatsu monitors respond to it.
It works. It works.
She doesn't know if she wants to laugh or cry but her body decides for her and the next thing she knows her head is in her knees and she is shaking.
Kisuke has a hand on her back.
"They've found a way," he says over her eating dinner in a small room in an izakaya by the First District frequented enough by shinigami that she does not feel out of place. There is no way the waitress by the door is not listening to their every word but he dismisses the waitress with a hand without looking - that much charisma he still has.
She knows. Kisuke told her first. Never mind patient confidentiality and all that jazz, but Kisuke is another one of those that she reads like a book. Besides, Kisuke gets his best ideas under some form of pressure and she had been more than ready to apply that pressure.
She helped too. She recorded observations, kept them in her head, talked to Kisuke. They theorized, experimented. Hell, she'd even been the one to ask Kurotsuchi for those mice. Those ten mice, of which only one is still alive.
It has reiatsu now and it is alive, but it is one of a hundred and the others are dead or still sleeping. There is a way. Kisuke has found a way to return his reiatsu to him.
She just wishes the way did not have to be this.
She pours herself a full cup of the warmed sake, downs it in one go, feels the heat wind its way down into her belly. He is watching her, she knows, but the dim candle-lamp casts soft flickering lights into his eyes and she cannot read them.
She picks at the skewer in front of her. He hasn't had anything today. Hasn't had anything in weeks, she knows. Of course she would know. She's been telling Kisuke the very same thing for weeks now.
"I'll do it," he says as the lamp flickers in his eyes, low, soft.
She knows he will. She's known that he would say this. The mouse is still alive, she knows, but the feeling of dread doesn't go away. At once she knows and does not know why she is afraid.
"It's-"
"I know," he says, "Kisuke told me."
She cannot look at him. She cannot. She can hear it in his voice, can hear the light-headed, flighty whisper of hope. She knows she is going to hit him if she looks. Hit him or run. Like you've always done, the voice whispers in her head, that is how you've always dealt with your problems, isn't it. Run away, you coward. Run, run, run.
"Thanks," he says in the next breath, "He said you helped."
Her eyes flick up before she can stop herself. He's smiling.
She wants to hit him. She doesn't want him to be smiling. She doesn't want him to be hopeful. She doesn't want him to think about how it's all going to be alright. She doesn't want him to think about how it'll all be fine. She wants him to be afraid. She wants him to be afraid the way she is afraid. Afraid that one day she is going to wake up and he's just not going to be there at all.
Instead, she settles for gripping her cup tightly in the flickering candlelight, nods.
They ask her to ask Rukia.
"It makes sense," Kisuke says when he is alone with her at lunch on a Thursday in his division. She stops poking at her food when he says it.
"It's cruel," she says.
Kisuke pulls at his fringe as he does now when he doesn't have his hat, "it's the best way."
"Did he say we should ask her," she says.
Kisuke looks out the window, "it's the safest way. He's not a mouse."
Half. Not even one. They sit at the table knowing that it isn't a full percent. He knows too, Kisuke told him, so he's known all along.
The problem has never been with the reiatsu. That was never the problem. Gathering large quantities of reiatsu is easy. Kisuke could do that in his sleep. She could do that in her sleep. Any one of them could.
It's the cooling.
"Well," Kurotsuchi putters about in his lab, "the source of reiatsu is the beating heart. As long as it's beating, it emits reiatsu. Simple as that."
She wants to say that his heart still beats, that she's heard it, but they all know that. Kurotsuchi levels her with a gaze that cuts into her.
"Yes, his is beating. I know," Kurotsuchi rounds a table, "and trust me, I've checked."
"Does he react to reiatsu," Kisuke asks and the two of them turn to her.
She nods.
Humans are a lot larger than mice. It's a lot harder to cool one down quickly yet slowly enough. Their newest systems work, sort of - two mice are alive out of the thirty they've tried - the others just don't wake up.
Rukia would help, she knows. She's read that report that he wrote with his own two hands. It's getting stupid, how much she's avoiding him now that even reading his writing makes her want to leap up, run over to him, shake him and tell him that it's not worth it. But it's not her place to make the decision, and she has helped. She's already helped.
Now it's just a matter of asking, of giving enough detail so that Rukia will know what to do, without telling her exactly what it is she is doing. It's like a firing squad - no one knows which gun the bullet come flying out of - except it's not. They will all be complicit.
No one will be innocent.
"Sure," Rukia says when Yoruichi catches up to her over dinner at the Kurosakis, "Captain Ukitake wants a report every so often anyway, so I could fit in an hour when I head back next week."
Ichigo is too busy fighting with Karin, Yuzu too busy trying to keep the rice cooker upright from her siblings' war, but Isshin looks straight through her.
"Talk to me," he says later at a bar that they both know Ichigo and Rukia would never been caught dead in.
They don't know each other. Isshin being not of the main house and her being the heir to the Shihouin means that they've at most exchanged pleasantries. They don't know each other and what little he's heard of her is through Rukia - what little she's heard of him is filtered through Ichigo and while she's sure that Rukia is nice about it, Ichigo is far less flattering.
But a man that stupid could never raise children like this, would never have been able to work with Kisuke for that many years. She's seen him around the shop when she'd been in the town but they've never spoken in this form.
"What is this about," Isshin says, putting the half-empty glass of scotch back onto the small table.
"Kisuke needs her help," she says.
"Mm," Isshin says, "I could get you a machine to do what you need her to do. I know, I shouldn't know, but I get people to sneak me things once in a while now that they don't hate Ichigo up there anymore."
"No," she says, "you can't."
Isshin's eyes narrow and she remembers that he is a doctor in this world, that Rukia may be Byakuya's sister, but the Kurosakis have already adopted her as daughter.
"Who," Isshin says to the bottom of his glass and the way the shadows play on his eyes is all wrong.
She looks away, downs half of her own glass in a gulp. He says nothing, turns away to listen to the soft jazz in the background. The door to the bar opens and the short cold blast of a rainy fall day sweeps in and tickles her ankles.
"You should tell her," Isshin says when she leaves, "of all people, she deserves to know."
He should have picked a less crowded tree. It is a big, ancient being that towers over the Sunday market. Unlit lanterns dangle from its branches, small flags wave in the breeze, people are yelling all around as the smell of oil is churned into the dust. It turns out that he is not the only one that has had this same idea.
There is a family standing in the shade, a child licking away at a candied fruit stick. There are countless others leaning against the tree trunk. She walks quickly past, does not want to be called out by any of the shopkeepers. No, she does not need a new bracelet, nor is she in the market for a new tea set. She does not see him - there is a young man seated by the foot of the tree that has his eyes on her. Short black hair, grey eyes that look like they could be familiar, but other than that everyone else's gazes are drawn elsewhere.
She has made two rounds around the tree when she hears a laugh behind her and turns.
He stands there, leaning slightly on a walking stick, wide grin on his face.
"You cut your hair," she manages.
"All the better to fool you with," he says, laughs.
He frowns.
"You're a lot larger than a mouse," Kisuke says. She bites her lip. They rest their elbows on the smooth stone surface that he will be lying on next week.
An amused huff, "Indeed."
"Most of the danger associated with the procedure comes from the cooling and warming processes," Kisuke says, "introducing the reiatsu, healing the soul centers, those are easy."
Kisuke points at his chest, "Yours are damaged but not entirely broken. That you are still alive and standing before us means that you still have reiatsu, that you are merely unable to gather it around yourself and use it in a meaningful way."
He looks away to the instrument boxes they have set up.
"It's fading," he says finally, fingers closing on the walking stick he has by him, "I'm fading."
Kisuke's eyes narrow.
"Some days," he continues, looking at the stone, "some days I wake up and my body is not mine." He turns his hand toward himself and they all watch it tremble before he lowers it to the table.
She knows Kisuke wants to ask more questions, but he is unlikely to answer any of them and they both know it, so Kisuke does not.
A wry smile as he looks up at them, "Thank you for doing this. You don't know how much it means to me."
Kisuke tips his head and his hat. She looks away, chest tightening with every passing moment.
He stands, "No matter what happens, I think it will be for the better."
She closes her eyes as he leaves the room, feels her heart beat in her ears. Kisuke pats her on the back.
She sits by her desk as the sun rises, legs propped up on the wooden surface, a small cup of tea in her hand. She tried sleeping after she dropped Rukia off with Ukitake the evening before but that did not work.
It's an irrational fear. She knows it. Kisuke did the math again with what little he knows of Rukia's bankai. Thereabouts of half, he said last night when she went into the lab to check on the equipment only to find him already there tweaking the settings and testing the lighting.
Thereabouts of half is already so much more than what they had before, but she cannot shake the deep sense of dread in her heart as she checks in on the still sleeping mice. There are still so many unknowns, so many complications. There is so little that they understand about him and his condition, so little control they have over what Rukia can and cannot do. Everything can vary. Nothing is known for sure.
Even the healing - what he said last week has been weighing on their minds - Kisuke is unsure if that is in line with what they think the problem is. She knows he wants more time to look through all of this but they've already taken a few more days, looked at more of the data.
There is no certainty.
She downs the now-cold tea in a single gulp as the sun pokes its head out between the hills and the trees.
His choice of deep navy means he blends in with the shinigami. He is sitting by the door to the main office as she arrives, rises slowly, leaning on the walking stick as the unseated officers bow to her.
"You're early," she says, opening the door to Kisuke's lab.
He smiles, "I took a walk last evening."
She shows him to the shower room. Her feet step onto the rubber mats in the depressed shower area. No one else is here but them and the rows of lockers. Kisuke passed her a key for one of the larger ones yesterday, said that he would be spending most of the time making preparations so she should help him get ready.
She turns away to let him get undressed and get into the shower, "You did," she says to sounds of cloth rustling.
She hears the clunk of wood falling and the clink of metal on tile then an audible breath.
"I'd appreciate your help," he says quietly.
She turns, finds his fingers fumbling around the locker knob. His hands are shaking, the key skates on the surface of the lock, but instead of looking away as he would have done, he is looking straight at her.
She takes the key from him, takes his hands in hers for a moment, runs her thumb along the back of his and unlocks the locker door. It swings open smoothly between them.
The shower starts and she leaves the room to make her own preparations, smoothing her hands on her clothes to stop their trembling.
She hears a sneeze from outside the door as she is helping Kisuke with some last minute wiring, then another. Kisuke puts down his end of the instrument, tilts his head, and she heads into the room.
"Hey," she says.
He sneezes again from where he is lying on the stone table, thin cotton sheet covering him from the waist down.
"Hello again," he rubs at his nose.
"Cold?"
He turns his head to her, smiles - she's still not entirely used to the smiles and they make her feel warm inside, "you think?"
Hers is a little thinner, "I'm scared," she says.
The smile drops from his face as she takes one of his hands in hers. He looks at their hands, looks back at her.
"I'm sorry," he says. He makes no promises - she does not expect him to - and there is only the soft whooshing of cool air flowing into and out of the room.
He sneezes again, squeezes her hand as he does. The timer on the wall ticks down.
It goes off without a hitch. She stands in the corner behind the screen with Rukia, keeping her just far away that she cannot see, and just close enough to affect him, monitoring his vital signs.
The temperature of the room plummets, she watched the heart rate monitor slow, watches the ECG peaks smooth out flat.
The monitor sounds long and continuous, he's dead, he's dead, it says but it don't know what it's talking about.
She watches Rukia. Rukia has come a long way now, standing there eyes closed, a brilliant statue of ice and control. She knows why he's so proud of Rukia, it's clear, so clear.
The heart rate monitor and Kisuke's voice in her ear are the only access points she has to what is going on and the silence is terrifying. She can hear every beat of her heart in her ears, feel every tremble in her hands.
"We're done," Kisuke says. Statue Rukia slowly comes thawing back to life and the room gradually warms.
She catches Rukia as the other falls to the floor.
"That was more tiring than I thought it would be," Rukia says, "you should let me know how it went."
"We will," she says, helping Rukia to her feet, "we will."
He doesn't wake up.
He's alive by all counts, heart beating, slow breathing, his chest rises and falls. His reiatsu is back, how much of it has returned they have no way of measuring, but sitting by his bed feels like sitting by him used to feel. This is a different kind of silence, broken only by the monitors and not by the birds, and she thinks that it may have all been a mistake.
Maybe they shouldn't have tried. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe there was nothing wrong at all. Maybe they just panicked and did things when they didn't have to, and maybe, maybe he's never going to wake up. There are mice that aren't dead but will not wake. She doesn't know what she will do if he doesn't.
She watches the slow rising and falling of his chest, sinks her claws into the beeping of the monitor. It's probably creepy. If she were to step back and think about it, she knows she would find it creepy that she manages to make time to visit in the evenings after dinner, to sit by the bedside of someone who doesn't know she's there.
It started after a dream, strangely enough. She'd gone to sleep and woken in the dream world to find he'd just passed in the night, the monitors gone flat like they had done in the operating room.
Then she woke into the real world, rushed to his side to breathe in the now familiar reiatsu.
The monitor beeps soft, regular - where it once would have cut into her thoughts she now finds it comforting. He's still alive.
But for how long, the voice in her head whispers soft and treacherous. Not one of the sleeping mice has woken. Their reiatsu are soft warm spots but they do not wake and only one by one pass quietly into the deep night.
She cannot bring herself to think about it even though everything points to the fact. The fact that the surgery was a success, that he has his reiatsu back, that he sleeps now and will not wake.
The wind is low, a still, barely-there breeze floats the scent of flowers in through the window. The moon hangs lower still and casts her shadow onto the opposite wall. She sits by his bed, sits and breathes.
Then it starts getting faster, it takes her two beeps to realize that it's going faster and isn't just a figment of her imagination.
Her heart pounds in her ears, her hands shake and she stands there unable to do anything, thoughts crashing like waves until all is reduced to dust.
Kisuke bursts into the room, takes a single glance at her and pulls the curtains shut between them. It is all she can do to stand stock still and listening to the beeping in time to her heart.
Life slowly melts back into normalcy. Renji gladly gives the post back after half a year of backed up reports - not that anyone but Lieutenant Ise had an issue with that, of course.
She hasn't seen him since he moved back into the mansion which was about two months ago. Rukia says he's doing fine. She thought Rukia would have been a little more unhappy, a little more displeased, but Rukia had just nodded and said that she understood.
This time she senses him before she sees him - the whispers confirm her suspicions when he sweeps into the restaurant. She still isn't used to the short hair. As much as he's been growing it back, something just feels different about it. She doesn't know if it's a good kind of different.
He sits down stony faced, lets the waitress pour him a cup of the plum wine she's been having. As the waitress leaves the table, he downs it in a single gulp, putting the cup back on the table with more force than is strictly necessary.
She smiles, "That bad?"
He makes a face, sighs.
She laughs.
He smiles.
"You may find it hard to believe," he pours himself another cup, "but not everyone is glad that I'm alive."
The smile widens on her face.
"Huh," she says, "It must be your charming personality." She takes a sip from her cup, feels the warmth slide down her throat.
He swishes the liquid lightly, its light amber glow threatening to escape from the lip. He looks up at her, eyes smiling.
"You don't seem to mind it."
"I have a special place for you in my heart," she wiggles her eyebrows.
He snorts.
He offers to walk her back. She lets him, knowing his penchant for long walks in the night.
The moon is barely visible through the clouds, the spring air having cooled into a brisk refreshing breeze. As is their usual, he says nothing and she pads silently by him.
Then, around a corner from her gate, he stops, looks up and away.
"I don't believe I thanked you," he says, turning back to her with a small smile.
She shrugs, "Wasn't much." She says nothing of the evenings she spent at his bedside, the weekends she spent helping Kisuke work on the equipment, the disapproving looks Kurosaki Isshin keeps sending her way.
His smile grows into a slight smirk but he says nothing and looks instead back to the moon. She still doesn't get what it is that he finds so fascinating about the barely-there moon behind wisps of cloud and is instead thinking about whether it would be a good idea to kiss him goodbye when he makes the first move.
She hides the growl of frustration when his lips brush her cheek, but she supposes it's a start when he steps back, giddy and grinning and she thinks that this isn't very fair. How is it that he's getting what he wants and she isn't?
No reason why not, the voice whispers in her head and she gives in to the urge, grabs him by the collar and kisses him the way she wants to.
When they break for air, his grin has found his ears.
"Well," he says, "well." A lightly trembling hand goes to his lower lip.
She likes it, smirks, "I'll see you tomorrow?"
"Yes," he says, and she does.
A/N: This is a story that's been stewing for a long time, ever since that time way back when Kubo should probably have kept him actually dead. It's an AU that I thought could be fun.