Characters: Uryuu, Soken
Summary: Finding not what he was looking for, but what he needed anyway.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Timeline: Pre-manga
Author's Note: I just had this picture (stupid pun) in my mind.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
He stares at the old house he hasn't seen in five years and will, he hopes, never see again after today. The memories that assault him when he stares on this familiar sight are like a punch to the stomach, and he doesn't think he can come back here anymore; he comes too close to the inside when he's here.
Uryuu's reason for coming is a prosaic one. The apartment he's rented is furnished but doesn't possess any silverware or cooking utensils. It feels a little like stealing but his grandfather's dead; he doubts Soken cares at all. Now to see if there's anything of use left in the house.
Uryuu's eyes narrow as he drinks in the sight of the small, old house beyond the sea of green spring grass swaying before him. The house has grown dilapidated, seems even smaller without his grandfather living in it. The whole house, from wood plank to weathered wood plank has an air of decay about it, heavy in the air, that was never there before.
Or maybe it always was, and he just never noticed because he was so happy to be here.
A soft wind blows through the huge, gnarled oak tree that dwarfs and towers over the house (that, at least, seems unchanged), and Uryuu sucks in a deep breath, licking dry lips, before taking a step forward.
This had to be done eventually.
.
There's a mingling of anger and pain when Uryuu realizes that the house has been ransacked and probably looted since his grandfather died and left the house permanently empty. What he was about to do was hardly any better but the invasion still galls, especially since, apart from the silverware, they certainly wouldn't have found anything of value in Soken's house. He had lived on the bare minimum.
The house, empty with papers strewn all around on the floor, the letters faded from the sun, seems hollow and somehow funereal, his footsteps echoing on the braided rug in the small living room. Paper crunches under his feet.
Then, Uryuu remembers something, and leans down to pull a heavy box out from under the sofa.
It's a shoebox, filled with bits of paper scribbled on with a ballpoint pen, Soken's notes, Uryuu knows them to be. He rifles through with little interest, until he finds…
Pictures…
Until he finds photographs in the shoebox, along with the notes.
Uryuu frowns, finds it a little harder to breathe, then smiles, as he remembers how much his grandfather hated using a camera. Actually, he didn't hate it as much as he couldn't figure out how on Earth to use one; he'd had to show him how.
There are photos of the two of them, of course, but older black and white prints and faded, dulled color prints as well. His grandfather, as a much younger man. A woman who was probably his grandmother, with straight dark hair and a facial structure similar to his father's. A boy who is probably Ryuuken as a child, looking far more cheerful than Uryuu ever thought he could. Other faces he doesn't know, will probably never know, on photos so old that they threaten to disintegrate in his hands.
Biting his lip, Uryuu looks around the living room. Underneath the papers, he starts to see other photographs there too, yellowed by contact with the sun that comes through the brittle window and prematurely aged, dulled, the colors nearly washed out.
He picks one up, off the ground, staring at it intently.
His own smiling face greets him.
He'd almost forgotten he'd once smiled like that.
Uryuu scoops the pictures off of the ground and tucks them into the shoebox, before pulling the top over the box and tucking it under his arm.
Silverware has been totally forgotten. It's all been stolen, anyway, so there's no need to trouble himself with it.
As he leaves, Uryuu thinks he can hear voices—echoes—but in a moment, they are gone, and there's nothing but the watery spring sunshine.