Characters: Hisana, Byakuya (mentioned)
Summary: Two types of cold.
Pairings: ByaHisa
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Soul Society arc
Timeline: Pre-manga
Author's Note: I despise winter.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
Hisana has always wondered, and never really received a satisfactory answer, why everything looks so different in winter. Sights and sounds that she would immediately recognize in any other situation are alien to her with a layer of ice and muffling snow on them. Even the faces of people she knows seem as strangers to her, bundled up in woolen garments with their cheeks chapped by the icy winds and their noses bright red.
But she's not observing winter's gift—or curse—to men from the outside world. If Hisana feels something cold and wet on her cheek then it is only her imagination that tells her it's a snowflake, and the water that she catches with a flick of a pink tongue tastes of salt.
Instead, she is inside, blankets wrapped around her slight frame. There is a cold sitting on her bones, heavy and inescapable, and it can not be melted by the hearty fire crackling merrily at the hearth.
The books have been read, steadily sifted through like the careful weaving of a tapestry—Hisana is not a particularly strong reader but she's more literate than she used to be, enough so to now make her way through the volumes—and the rounds have been made around the estate. Finding that watching the jump and leap of scarlet flames are no longer enough to absorb her attention and dull memory for just a few moments, Hisana, in the silence that threatens to bury her, turns dark eyes on the window, drinking in with the sort of numb thirst that assails a sailor surrounded only by salt water the sight of the snow outside.
The winter snows are particularly thick and dense this year. The snow has been shoveled neatly away from all the stone paths and walkways of the many gardens of the Kuchiki estate, but Hisana fears that when the snows finally recede and melt away much of the rose bushes and myriad shrubbery will have be found to have died after being engulfed by snow for so long. After all, without sunlight, how can they hope to survive?
Hisana knows that that doesn't just apply to plants.
On the trees, on cherry and ash and birch, there is a layer of ice. Thin, spindly branches appear as though crystallized, swathed generously with clear frosting by some great, invisible brush. These too, Hisana thinks, more than a little morbidly, are in danger of grasping the even icier hand of Death, unless it is somehow warmer beneath the frozen ground where the roots lie.
All that there is of light is the gray half-shadows that come in the afternoon when the sun is forced to shine through a filter of cloud. The cold of winter ice stretches exploratory fingers under the glass door only to be rebuffed by the fire, but there is another cold that only grows stronger as time wears on.
He's gone again. Hisana is used to this, or thought she was—Byakuya is, for all intents and purposes, in charge of the Sixth Division, and has a great deal of work to be doing at any given time. But the hours grow long, and dark. He said he would be back home before nightfall, but that is only another promise for Hisana to watch shrivel like dry paper thrown in the fire.
She misses him. Hisana has always believed that she has no right to miss anyone, but her heart starts to writhe at these long hours spent in solitary, alone. All the shadows take form and move, and she opens her mouth and starts to stand, heart leaping, thinking it's her husband, but it's not.
There's no one to talk to. Absolutely no one. No one to thaw the silence and bring a shy bloom of a smile to Hisana's pale face. Byakuya could do all that and more if he was here.
He's not.
Hisana inches closer to the fire, holding her hands barely far enough from the flames to avoid being burned. She is trying to inject warmth back into her body, to let it melt across her skin and seep into her bones.
But the ground under her feet still feels frozen.