Characters: Ryuuken, Uryuu
Summary: Rice paper walls let them hear everything. Whether they listened was another matter entirely.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers
Timeline: Entirely pre-manga
Author's Note: Not much to report. My muse refuses to leave me, I would like to say; it's starting to get a little annoying.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
"Make sure you have your umbrella. It looks like it will rain."
"Yes, sir."
Ryuuken never hated Soken more than the day his mother died.
His mother had been sick for months, and in the final weeks of her life was bedridden in the hospital; Ryuuken himself spent nearly every waking hour outside of school there; eventually the smell of antiseptics became both abhorrent and strangely soothing as he came to associate the smell with his mother. Soken, apart from a few shamefaced, quiet visits in which his fourteen-year-old son glared silently at him from the other side of the room, didn't visit much at all.
It took Ryuuken years to understand what his father was doing, burying grief, trying to keep his mind together but he would never forget the moment when his mother was dying and Soken wasn't there, nor would he forgive him, even if he could understand it, because he hadn't been there, not for her or for him.
Soken was simply, in his eyes, too unreliable to be forgiven, even if hot hate congealed to a cool ice given enough time.
Uryuu silently showed the slightly battered (it had seen long service) dark green umbrella to his father before walking out the front door, heading off for school.
"Don't step in any of the puddles," Ryuuken called after him. "You'll catch another cold." It was still summer, but as Ryuuken was so consistent about pointing out, one could fall ill at any time of the year.
In comparison, Uryuu never came so close to hating Ryuuken as he did in the days just following his grandfather's bloody death, when Ryuuken seemed perfectly capable of behaving as if Soken had never existed. When he seemed to be trying to deny his father's existence, blot out the memories. It was hard not to hate him, for trying to forget what he himself would always remember.
Uryuu came close to hating Ryuuken, but unlike Ryuuken with his own father, could never quite manage it. His father was all he had left, not that he'd ever had much to begin with; as unpleasant as the revelation was, it couldn't be denied.
This was a story that would never be told. All the people who might have said something were dead, or weren't talking.
-0-
It was the phone ringing at five forty-five in the morning that woke him up.
"What?"
There was very little light filtering through the mini blinds over the window; the sun wasn't quite over the horizon yet, and it was still dark outside. Uryuu blinked as he woke up, wondering what he was hearing.
It only took him a moment to realize what it was he was hearing, who it was he was hearing.
Uryuu was careful to be silent as he slid the sheets from his body and grabbed his glasses up from the nightstand. Curiosity gripped him, even though the very thought of peering into his father's bedroom to see if he was awake made him unbearably nervous.
He hesitated in the hall, outside Ryuuken's bedroom door with his hand braced on the knob. Uryuu could hear his father talking inside; his stomach started knotting itself, a painfully common occurrence now. Starting to wonder at how his father would react to see him outside made it even worse; he had no idea how Ryuuken would respond to this but had no reason to believe that it would be anything positive.
Then, the curiosity that had driven him to get out of bed in the first place convinced him that he didn't care about what his father would think of this, and pressed open the door a crack.
Ryuuken's gray hair seemed a little grayer as he sat on the edge of the bed inside, balancing the phone with the sort of expression on his face that indicated he regretted keeping the telephone inside his bedroom. His eyes without glasses over them seemed duller than usual; still wrapped in sleep barely shaken off, Ryuuken looked gray and haggard as he listened to the other end of the line.
Uryuu watched him with his hand braced on the door frame, silent as his father nodded, and nodded again.
"Alright." His voice was quiet and subdued, almost sounding placatory in place of his normal sharp tones. "Alright, I'll be right there."
He was being called into work at the hospital early, it seemed.
Ryuuken put the phone back on the receiver and sighed. It was only then that he noticed the child standing at the door, barely visible in the pre-morning shadows.
Nothing was said. Ryuuken held Uryuu's gaze evenly until the latter was forced to look away.
Still silent, Uryuu retreated back to his bedroom, feeling far more tired than he had when he got back up.
He could hear Ryuuken leaving fifteen minutes later, as footsteps hollow and brisk echoed past his door.
Another five minutes after that, he pulled himself back out of bed and started to get ready for school.
The house felt much bigger than it had before; even the slightest sound echoed off of the wall, and that was how Uryuu knew he was alone.
-0-
Ryuuken was greeted by the sight of Uryuu frowning at him as he came home from school. Blue eyes were, in particular, focused on the cigarette balanced between long fingers.
He raised an eyebrow at him. "Yes?"
Uryuu didn't mince words. "That's not healthy, you know."
That was entertaining, considering it was coming out of the mouth of a ten-year-old. Ryuuken didn't miss a beat. "So I've gathered," he murmured levelly, dry, contemptuous humor flavoring his voice slightly.
A sharp cough hit the air at the same time as pale blue smoke. Uryuu decided not to tell Ryuuken what he looked like at the moment, and Ryuuken forbore to tell him that on more than one occasion, his mother had said the exact same thing.
-0-
The silence maintained over the breakfast table that morning was hardly comfortable, instead tense and would have been noticeably on-edge if there had been anyone to observe what was passing between them.
Uryuu didn't pour a lot of cereal into his bowl, Ryuuken noticed. Just about halfway up, with enough milk to douse the cereal but not any more than that.
Not that he was at all concerned about his son's eating habits. He was just making an observation.
"I've been making a few observations," Ryuuken remarked clinically over his mug of coffee, the strong smell wafting all around the small kitchen. "And I have noticed—" clinical voice became coolly incisive "—that you have on occasion been coming home from school a good two hours after you should have. Would you mind telling me why that is, Uryuu?" he asked, voice deceptively mild.
The mildness was a farce and Uryuu, perceptive, could sense it.
He stared down into the cereal bowl and avoided his father's eyes, though he could no doubt feel his gaze burning into the top of his head.
Uryuu murmured something half-distinct and Ryuuken was about to tell him not to mumble when he suddenly decided that he was done with breakfast and poured out the milk into the sink before scraping the only half-eaten cereal into the trash can.
-0-
Later, Ryuuken followed Uryuu to the cemetery and discovered why Uryuu was coming home from school so late half of the time.
Caught in indecision, Ryuuken wasn't entirely sure what to do, standing at a distance as he watched his son kneel in front of one of the grave stones. Any sharp anger that might have been there was wiped out by bewilderment, and rang hollow on the sight before him.
It was nearly half an hour before Ryuuken realized it was starting to thunder over them, and that he'd just been staring absently at Uryuu the whole time. He'd lapsed into that half-aware state again, the one he'd thought he'd shaken off years ago when his mind finally cleared after his wife's death.
There couldn't be any more vacillation, not now.
Stepping forward, he was at Uryuu's side, tapping his shoulder briskly before he even knew it. The bloodshot eyes that stared up at him were suddenly stunned and fear-stricken, but Ryuuken had no time for anger. It was going to start raining soon, and they needed to get somewhere sheltered before it started to pour; he'd forgotten his umbrella and was sure Uryuu had too.
Putting a hand under Uryuu's elbow to draw him to his feet, Ryuuken wrapped an arm around his son's shoulders firmly as he led him away. "Let the dead bury the dead," he murmured, all he knew to say in such a situation. There would be angry words, arguments passed later, but now there was only a hollow emptiness, a counting of heartbeats between thunder claps.
Uryuu was silent, Ryuuken confronted only with shiny black hair; his eyes were firmly fixed on the ground. It was only when they got to the car that Ryuuken noted, surprised, that Uryuu hadn't tried to wrest himself free of his tight grasp.
He'd just gone quietly, leaning into his arm the whole time.
-0-
"Hold still," Ryuuken snapped irritably, and Uryuu flinched, though not from the pain of the cut having disinfectant swabbed generously over it. He'd hoped he could avoid this, at least this one time, but Ryuuken's eyes, for all that they were nearsighted, were sharp and discerning, and utterly unforgiving.
There wasn't a forgiving bone in his body, Uryuu had finally learned. He'd known it all his life, but hadn't really known it until now.
His stomach knotted itself as it always did, deftly and easily since the muscles there were flexible thanks to long experience of turning. Uryuu kept his mouth shut, trying desperately not to give in to the impulse to argue. For once, he could see the need to keep from making a bad situation worse.
Ryuuken didn't notice, of course. He was always blind to the way the tower was crumbling until it was in pieces around his feet.
"What are you going to do when you break a bone?"
He was getting angrier, Uryuu noticed. He always got angrier in a reliable pattern. The spikes of anger would get stronger, than ease out into a sharp, heated buzz, but after that it would fade.
He closed his eyes, and recited staycalmstaycalmstaycalm over and over again until the words were unintelligible from being recited so many times, so quickly, telling himself that he could keep his mouth shut until it was over.
"Are you listening to me, Uryuu? What are you going to do when you break a bone? Because it's not a matter of "if", but when."
Uryuu kept his eyes screwed shut—staycalmstaycalmstaycalm—and only opened them when Ryuuken finished with the bandages and moved away, taking his cold gusts of cigarette smoke wind with him.
-0-
"You're keeping late hours."
Ryuuken shot a sharp look at Uryuu as the thirteen-year-old shuffled into the kitchen, shoulders bowed, at two-thirty in the morning. The way the boy winced indicated that he had been praying Ryuuken wouldn't sit up waiting for him tonight. He wasn't injured this time; he'd been lucky.
Uryuu didn't look at him, bleary blue eyes glued on the refrigerator as he searched out and found the cold remains of chicken on one of the tiers—Ryuuken couldn't remember the last time they'd actually sat down to supper together.
And he didn't look at his father as he muttered, in a voice rife with accusations, "At least I always remember to come home."
He sat at the table tearing hanks off of the chicken breast like Ryuuken wasn't even there, and barely acknowledged him when his eyes started to burn holes in the back of his head.
Ryuuken didn't sleep for the night, wondering—but at the same time fully capable of knowing what Uryuu had meant.
-0-
Ryuuken started to notice the same thing Uryuu did: the house seemed bigger when only one of them was in it, sounds echoing and bouncing off of the walls.
He was sitting on the edge of Uryuu's bed, inattentively fingering a bit of cloth with cross stitching embossed on the top in his hands, remembering—he didn't know why he was recalling such an inane thing as that—that Uryuu had started sewing three years ago, as a means to relax.
To forget, he had said.
Two or three changes of clothes were gone out of the closet, along with the sewing kit—So he does have something he attaches value to, after all.
When the house was empty, and noiseless, the silenced voices—the things that had never said, the things that maybe should have been said, the things that never could be said.
And it was only now, now when it was a little late for anything, that Ryuuken started to listen to the silence, realize that there were voices whispering there and hear what they had to say to him.
Too little, too late. Too little, too late. He was just starting to grasp what that meant, what the words meant.
That was all the quiet had to say, in this house of silences.