Memories. She had always tried to ensure she was too busy to look back. It served no purpose, sifting through the past, and yet, when she was alone, memories were all she had to while away the dark. And they were so bright compared to this world.
Six weeks had passed since her last night in the world of the living. She was still in the holding cell in the Fourth Division barracks and had received no visitors and no word from the outside world. In here, a week felt like a year, but her strength was returning and, with it, a little of her spirit. The longer she was given to recuperate, the less likely a death sentence seemed and the more absurd Mayuri's words. True, she had been stupid, but, was she forgetting, she had once committed a far greater crime and been found innocent.
She pulled her mind back from that corner. She would not let it trick her into remembering. She was careful, oh so careful with her thoughts here. Some of them were still brittle and she could not risk letting her mind wander with nothing but these four walls to moor it.
She let herself think back, instead, to her time in the living world. It had taken on a strange brilliance in the darkness of the holding cell. She sometimes let herself believe that, for three months, she had lived. Actually lived.
Each day, her sole visitor was a boy from Fourth Division. He brought her food and water and mopped the floor of the cell. He was young for a shinigami, which meant that he was probably talented within his own right. Fourth Division, as a matter of course, refused to treat menial tasks as menial and were therefore willing to assign almost anyone from their squad to duties that might be considered beneath those of a similar standing in other squads.
After the first few days, when he had come and gone in silence, Rukia asked him for his name.
"Yamada Hanataro," he replied with a start. He turned wide eyes towards her and she could only look back at him. It had been so long since anyone had spoken to her and time seemed to have slowed down in the cell. "I'm pleased to be of service, Rukia-sama."
"Just Rukia, please."
If it was possible, those eyes widened still further.
"Rukia-san," he said, settling for a compromise.
They had spoken a little every day since then. He wanted to hear about the world of the living and she was only too happy to relay her experiences. She told him about the packet of drink that she couldn't break into and how Ichigo had shown her how to reach the liquid inside. She told him about coffee, which tasted repugnant, though all the humans drank it. Even Ichigo. She told him about Kon, about the house where she had stayed, the books and magazines she'd read and the things she'd learnt.
"I would have been afraid to spend so long with a human," he said. He had stopped sweeping and was kneeling on the floor beside her.
"Oh no. Ichigo wasn't like that. I don't know why, but, within a day of meeting him, I knew that I could trust him."
"How did you know?"
"I'm not sure, but I knew."
"You talk about him a lot," said Hanataro warily. She didn't answer. In the window high above them, dusk was falling and soon he would leave her alone with her thoughts again.
He stood up and began sweeping.
"I did a terrible thing to that boy," she said suddenly. He faltered only once, but went back to his task as if to admit he was listening might cause her to fall silent once again: "I wasn't strong enough to save his family, so I transferred my powers to him. But I changed him. I twisted his fate and turned him into something less than human."
"Rukia-san," Hanataro said softly, responding to the sorrow in her voice.
"Why did you think I was here, Hanataro?" He didn't answer: "I did a terrible thing and, if he lives, he will never forgive me for that."
"Please don't be unhappy, Rukia-san," he implored her, but she had fallen silent, gazing at the gathering dark outside the window and, eventually, he returned to his sweeping. If he wished her farewell when he finished the task, she didn't hear him. Her thoughts were far away.