Characters: Shunsui, Lisa
Summary: How it will always be now.
Pairings: Shunsui x Lisa
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Turn Back the Pendulum arc
Timeline: Post-Turn Back the Pendulum arc, pre-manga
Author's Note: Shunsui x Lisa with gasp no Nanao! A rare occurrence, let me assure you.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
She's only real to him at night, now. Night is when the memories refuse to be ignored, when every mistake he's ever made can not be denied any longer. At the night all he has is his heartbeat, his eyes wide open in wakefulness, and memory that won't quit.
Shunsui at times wishes he could—would—forget. Nothing like an old ghost to distract him while in the waking world, and Lisa's is the ghost that will never die. The future is something to look on to, but never find. The tomorrow Shunsui keeps telling himself about, the tomorrow when he won't have to remember Lisa and see the way things could have been… It never comes.
So forgetfulness is obtained by sake and wine that never works forever. The days that move on are static and unchanging and carry all sort of cracks in which memories can emerge, since Soul Society is dead as dust and has been for millennia. There's no way for a dead world to have a future, no way for it to ever forget.
It was a mistake to let her go on alone. Lisa's only real at night when she ought to have the sheets beside him curled around her fingers and wrapped tight around her thin body, but she still plagues Shunsui during the day in her transparent-as-smoke invisible form.
He thinks he can see her everywhere, hears her low voice, sees her cool jade eyes, smells the somewhat pungent perfume she would occasionally rub on.
Lisa won't let him go.
And Shunsui supposes she shouldn't, since he let her go a long time ago, never saw her again, and has yet to really let go of her.
She can't leave, can't go anywhere until he relinquishes his grip on the past.