WINTER
It was not madness, as he would come to realize much later, but the hollow taint of guilt that had darkened her eyes. Still she clung to it, during the worst of her agony and bereavement, as it rattled her bones and even long after her heart had begun to wither from illness. Loss, she had taught him, was something more insubstantial than love and something far more powerful.
Loss could hurt. Loss could destroy. Love would defeat him when nothing else could.
Hisana.
It skirts across his skin like vapor, more a whisper than a name. Perhaps a memory, some might say, the ghostly tendrils of yesteryear curling like smoke around the edges of his mind.
It is when the sky exhales that he begins to speak.
"Rukia is doing well," he says, almost conversationally. The words are rehearsed, remembered; he dictates them with the monotonous ease of a man who has long since given up on frivolity. Words, he believes, are of little meaning and value except when delivered in prayer, and in his mind he has yet to be proven wrong.
His gaze drifts forward, settling on the small bowl holding two burning incense sticks, unable to look past the space behind it and at the picture frame that fills the void.
"She was sent beyond the gates again, with the substitute Soul Reaper. He saved her when I was unable to."
Is it possible to lie to the wind, he wonders.
"I doubt you'll forgive me."
A hand flicks to his side, and he palms a small yellow rose still wet with morning dew. This he places by the bowl in silent offering. It is not much, but it is all she would have wanted. He is not an opulent man despite his nobility, and like him her tastes had tended towards the simpler things in life. Quiet, delicate and unassuming had been his Hisana. He prefers to remember her that way.
The wind picks up around him, fragrant with the scent of nearby Sakura trees.
But in the world inside his head, it is not Spring, but Winter. He remembers seeing her empty bed, and the hours of desperate searching; he can recall with dim clarity the moment he found her, a wild thing slumped by the side of the snow-laden road, her face pale with arctic fever. He'd knelt down, gathered her up in his arms, and swept her away.
He remembers each flash step back, and her touch; her cold hand curled against his beating heart, her lips blue with frost and her breaths quick, jagged, and feather light. Her spirit is weak, Unohana had said upon cursory examination. Make her as comfortable as you can. The gentle captain had looked at him, her expression filled with kindness and the unease of a mother unable to tell her son the worse is yet to come.
In his hands, Hisana's fists had seemed as small as a child's and twice as breakable. There, in that little room, as he watched the shadows sway closer to her bed, he finally vowed to her that he would find her sister. With two words, he made the decision to set her free.
I promise.
Her eyes, almost fully black with sorrow, had glittered briefly. Then death swallowed her whole, and she was gone.
He bows to the picture frame, thinking of promises fulfilled, and then turns away to begin the day anew.
Sometimes he thinks of winter, on nights when the moon seems just a little too far out of reach, and how its touch remains rooted somewhere deep in his soul.