Characters: Hisana, Rukia
Summary: Cries echo in my ears.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Soul Society arc
Timeline: Pre-manga
Author's Note: Some more Hisana-Rukia angst.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
We have been forsaken by our gods, little sister, and left in a cold world that will not sustain us both. I struggled beyond words to nourish you, but in the end there was nothing I could do to help you.
I myself wasted away, my bones prominent on snow-pale flesh. I could barely stand without shaking, my eyelids growing heavy. Everything I found in food I gave to you and had nothing left for myself as a result. You were still thin and I even thinner.
And eventually, with the cruel winter all the food ran out.
I tracked the streets of Inuzuri with you bundled in rancid rags in my arms, my begging for food matched by your wails, pain at hunger, discomfort at the biting cold that whipped in both our faces. My fingers and toes grew numb, the latter from trudging through the snow and sleet and mush barefoot. No one answered our pleas. We went the winter surviving on the scraps I scrounged from the garbage cans or stole out from under the noses of others.
And when spring arrived, I could weather no more.
I did not want to leave you, little sister, and I would have taken you with me if I could. But I could barely feed myself, let alone the two of us. I was at wit's end—I knew that I would not survive for much longer in the slums and barren places of Inuzuri—and I knew of only one way to save myself.
So I left you behind, and moved on for a place where I would find food and, maybe, hope.
But I never forgot you, and even though I found food, and a new life with a man I called "husband", I never found hope.
Because a sea of guilt drowned me, drowned me every second I could breathe, and there was no hope to be found in its depths.
Wherever I go, your cries echo in my ears.
Even though I have not seen you since that day, you are still with me every waking and sleeping moment of my life.
You have never left me, little sister, even if I long ago forsook you.