Characters: Byakuya, Rukia
Pairings: ByaHisa
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Soul Society arc.
Timeline: Pre-manga
Author's Note: This is an AU in which Byakuya finds Rukia before Hisana dies. I'm sure this plot has been used before, but here's my stamp on it.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
The ramshackle little tenancy house, with its thatched, leaking roof, trembled and shook under the force of another almighty thunder clap, monstrous and demanding the attention of all those in Inuzuri.
Groping in the darkness for a dry surface to kneel on, Byakuya frowned at the grim roll of thunder, and prepared to settle in for what would most likely be a very long night. He'd resume his search when the storm settled down, when the morning came and the wan sun shone with pale, watery rays of light. For now, it would serve him nothing but ill to be wandering the streets, in the cold darkness of a stormy night.
Pulling his cloak more closely about him, Byakuya folded his hands beneath the firm wool folds, and wondered if Hisana had ever had nights like this. If so, he was never letting her out into Rukongai again, he decided firmly.
If she recovered, that was.
A tear of lightning, like deep bluish gray paper being ripped in half to reveal a stark white background behind, momentarily illuminated the tenancy house. There were two pallets, by now drenched with freezing rainwater at the other end of the small rectangular, one-room house, near an iron-wrought wood-burning stove that still had wisps of warmth coiling away from the surface of the single grill. Byakuya realized that the house wasn't as unoccupied as he had thought.
"Who are you?" And at that moment, the flimsy wooden door creaked open, a small figure whose features Byakuya couldn't make out in the darkness, slipping in with the feline grace of a small, supple alley cat. The voice was soft and feminine, with a light note which made Byakuya think that the newcomer was probably a young girl. She had the inflection of one who had spent a large portion of her life, if not the entirety, holding her ground by shouting at people much bigger than her, but that voice, with its clear enunciations, seemed oddly familiar somehow, in a way Byakuya couldn't place.
Knowing that his height could at times be intimidating, and having no desire to be chased back out into such an awful, wet night, Byakuya did not stand, though he did straighten at the back and lift his eyes to meet the curious gaze of the newcomer. "I was traveling through this part of Inuzuri when the storm hit. I took shelter in this house, believing it to be empty," Byakuya answered her honestly. He did not voice a plea to be allowed to stay, though it was self-evident in the quiet tone of his voice.
The girl nodded cautiously. "We don't get many visitors to this neighborhood—for obvious reasons," she added with the faintest hint of the sardonic in her voice, and Byakuya thought of the eye-opening squalor he had been exposed to for the past few days "—but you're welcome to stay here until the storm passes, at least."
"Thank you."
The door was latched shut against the wind and the pelting drops of water that were fizzling against the stove. "You should come over here," the girl called, as she settled on her knees in front of the wood stove. "We haven't got any more dry firewood at the moment, but it's still a little warmer by the stove."
As Byakuya got to his feet and crossed the short distance to sit in front of the wood stove, he almost smiled at the thought that absolutely no one from Seireitei would have recognized him now. Out of uniform and out of the fine clothes he normally wore around the Kuchiki estate (it was better not to stand out in Rukongai), he was cold and sodden, his long black hair sticking to his pale, narrow cheeks and his neck, fingernails uncharacteristically ingrained with dirt, the hem of his brown cloak coated in mud.
It was warmer, he silently conceded, though not by much. His fingers began to thaw out.
There might have been a smile on the Inuzuri girl's face. Byakuya could not discern the expression of her face, but there was a smile in her voice, as she ruefully commented, "Me and Renji, we have a matchbox, but matches don't do much good if you haven't got wood to ignite."
Byakuya briefly wondered who Renji was. Either her husband, her brother, or a friend. It didn't really matter, as long as he didn't cause trouble when he came back.
Byakuya was momentarily alarmed when the girl put her hands on the stove right over the door that would be opened to throw more wood in, but it didn't seem to hurt her, and he couldn't detect the telltale aroma of cooking flesh. "The stove's still a little warm," she explained, "but it's not hot enough to burn your skin. See?"
At that moment, a small hand, warm from the stove, seized one of Byakuya's wrists and pressed his hand up against the iron surface of the stove, with surprising strength out of such a small person. The touch too was familiar; he just didn't know how. She wasn't lacking in boldness, he had to give her that.
She was right. The surface of the stove was hot (uncomfortably hot, Byakuya noted), but not enough to burn.
"I'm going to take it that you're not really from anywhere around Inuzuri, right?" the girl asked as Byakuya removed his hand from the stove and hid it again beneath the folds of his cloak. Her voice was incisively shrewd; if there had been enough light, Byakuya had no doubt that he would have seen a calculating gleam glimmering in the back of her eyes.
Feeling the need to be polite, he nodded in concession and murmured, "No, I'm not." Anything else would have been simply superfluous.
"I didn't think so," she murmured. "Something about your voice, and the way you string your sentences together…" Her voice was growing blank and distant, like a ship far off at sea. Then, she seemed to straighten and clear. "I didn't think you were from around here. But you're from closer to the interior, right?"
"Yes." It wasn't a lie, exactly, but Byakuya knew better than to simply divulge all the secrets of his past and present life up front to a young woman whom he had never met before.
There were a few moments of silence; Byakuya was naturally laconic, and the girl didn't seem to have anything to say, apart from an awkwardly muttered, "Renji will be back soon. He said he was going to take a different way back home."
Unsure as to how they had suddenly had the veil of painful silences descend upon them, Byakuya saw no reason to break back into conversation. That wasn't what he was there for, and he wanted nothing more than for the storm to lift, so he could rest a few hours then resume his search.
"What's it like?" came a sudden, curious inquiry. She sounded almost as a small child still inquisitive of everything, wanting to know everything, and Byakuya found it oddly endearing. "Living near the interior?"
Smoke gray eyes swept over the deep shadows, across the sullen ruddy tendrils being cast by the shadow of fire upon the wall. Rain continued to leak through the straw thatching of the roof in places, as thunder rolled grimly and the smells of rainwater, burning embers and wet hay filled Byakuya's nostrils. The antithesis of his native world, and Byakuya thought with a small pang of the soft, rosy scent ingrained deep into Hisana's worn, white silk handkerchief.
"It is…" Byakuya searched for words, no longer looking at her "…very different." His thin mouth settled into a slight, discomfited line. "Near the gates of Seireitei, Rukongai is much more civilized. There is less crime, and no squalor as you see here." Those words were not a lie either, but the truth from what Byakuya had experienced of the First District; it was a clean, orderly place. Byakuya thought it to be quite ideal living conditions. But Inuzuri, on the other hand…
"In truth," he admitted, "I understand little of this place." Inuzuri was an alien world, vast and desolate, and Byakuya at times despaired of ever finding his young sister-in-law in such a place.
"Well, if you're from the interior, than I suppose you're not used to this." Now, her voice was exceptionally bitter. "And no one likes to think about the outer districts anyway. They're just the places that everyone else would like to forget ever existed, and we're just the people no one ever wants to see."
Byakuya was forcibly reminded of his first meeting with Hisana. She had gotten to further within Rukongai, but she was still malnourished with her clothes hanging off of her shoulders, and she had seemed as no dweller of Rukongai, small and nervous, living every day of her life with her ears pricked and her eyes wide open for danger. No one, Byakuya decided, should ever have to live like that.
"I have heard," Byakuya murmured, very softly so that his voice barely carried over the rain, "that life is very hard here."
"It is." She spoke immediately, growing hard and rigid, bitterness replaced by a frigid cold. Large eyes turned on him in the dark, a deep shade of violet with the faintest tinge of blue. The same shade as Hisana's eyes, Byakuya noted dully. "Tell me. What's the hungriest you've ever been in your life?"
He frowned. In truth, Byakuya couldn't remember a time when he had ever really been terribly hungry. If anything, right now was the hungriest he had ever been, not having had any food since yesterday, and that having been a meager bowl of rice whose rice grains had been only half-cooked.
Taking his silence as an inability to answer the question, the young woman launched back into her informative bout of speech. "In Inuzuri, you don't count by the hungriest you've ever been. You count by the least hungry you've ever been. Or, if you're not spiritually sensitive, like me and Renji, and like you," she added astutely; Byakuya felt a jolt when he realized that she had sensed his reiatsu, "you count by the least thirsty you've ever been, though that's not so bad considering it rains so much here.
"Have you ever heard of that old belief?" she asked, distant and rhetorical. "That after a while, you learn to ignore the pain in your stomach. I wish I could say…that that's true. But it's not. It never goes away, gnawing at you, as your skin gets stretched more and more tightly across your bones and your ribs start to poke out, and there are only two things that can make it go away. Death, and food.
"After a while out here, you start to do things for food or drink that you never imagined you would." Her wistfulness filled up the tenancy house; Byakuya could barely find the audacity to breathe, listening to her voice fluctuate and ensnare. "I'm probably the only girl with a halfway decent face who hasn't turned tricks at least once for money or food. But you get to the point, that you'll do just about anything to stop the pain in your stomach.
And then, even though it was dark, Byakuya was sure she was glaring, though not at him. Glaring at whatever power had seen fit to drop her in one of the worst districts of Rukongai, had seen fit to dump her in a miserable cesspool of humanity. "However easy you think it is to live out here, it's not. However hungry you've ever been, I can top it. Out here, the rules of law don't apply. The men are savages, the women whores, the children little better than animals. Maybe even worse.
"Anything you can get your hands on, you steal, because it's the only way to survive." Her eyes flickered away for a moment, then refocused on Byakuya. "Me and Renji, we weren't always the only kids in our group. But we are now." There was a terrible note of finality in her voice, which closed off that strain and hid it deep inside. "He and I have wanted to be—if you can believe this—Shinigami since we were kids."
Byakuya stopped and frowned at that. The girl wanted to be a Shinigami. And when he tried to sense her reiatsu, he could certainly see that she had the spiritual pressure for it. But she would never realize her dream, living out in Inuzuri.
"We have the spiritual power for it." She was talking again, looking down. "But up to now, we haven't been able to start heading towards the interior. "We're…" The girl was whispering, and broke off, straining for words "…we're just the kids who never had a chance. The kids without family, who don't matter to anyone, who'll probably be dead long before they get to be fully grown. It's probably a miracle that we've survived as long as we have."
Left speechless, Byakuya didn't know what to say to what he had just heard. It painted a very stark portrait of her life, and how it would end. He was left wishing more than ever that the storm would clear, so he could resume his search, and maybe forget.
"So what are you doing out here?"
Byakuya stared at her blankly.
Violet eyes were slightly exasperated now. "Nobody comes to Inuzuri to sightsee. And personally, I can't see why someone from the interior would choose to come out here, unless they're out of their right mind, or unless it's very important."
Again, a close-mouthed response, of utter silence.
Violet eyes went from exasperated to incredulous. "Please, sir." Her voice was perfectly civil, but contained a challenge in the undertone. "You're under my roof. I think you owe me an explanation for why you're under my roof, sitting beside my stove, and talking to me while we are waiting for my roommate to come back."
She was right. If Byakuya wanted to be polite, he knew he would have to tell her why he was there, and Byakuya, a stickler for politeness, felt obliged to answer.
"Alright," he murmured. "Let me first say that I do not come from Rukongai. I am a resident of Seireitei."
"You're a Shinigami?" the girl blurted out, slightly awed, eyes widening.
Byakuya held up a hand. "Yes, I am. But please allow me to continue. I am…" the words were painful "…looking for someone."
She continued to press. "Who?"
Eyes gray as smoke, glazed and distracted, stared beyond her to the far wall. "My sister-in-law." Feeling more questions rise in her, Byakuya said, "It's complicated. Let me explain."
"My wife hails from this district of Rukongai. When she first died, she was sent here with her infant sister." Now, Byakuya was drawing entirely from the story Hisana had, shamefaced and weeping, told him so long ago. "She struggled to care for her sister, but eventually, it grew too great a strain to care for both herself and a baby."
"So she left the child here, and left Inuzuri to find a better life closer to the interior of Rukongai?" came the incisive question.
"She had little choice!" Byakuya snapped, bristling on behalf of his wife almost automatically.
"I'm not judging her." The patronizing inflection irritated Byakuya, but the note of truth calmed him. "It's hard enough to live out here even when it's only yourself you have to think about." The direction shifted. "So… You and your wife are still looking for her sister."
Byakuya nodded. "Yes. My wife would be here…but she is very ill." His eyes scanned the thatching of the straw roof again." And if I had known for myself the conditions of Inuzuri, I would not have let her come out here, not by herself."
"How ill is "very ill"?"
Byakuya didn't answer.
After a moment, small, light fingers probed the top of his exposed hand, a gesture clearly meant to comfort, though Byakuya could take no solace from a stranger's sympathy. "I am sorry," she said, "about your wife. But I'm afraid that the possibility of finding your sister-in-law is incredibly slim."
He looked up.
"Inuzuri," she droned, "is a vast district. The woman you're looking for could be anywhere, and if she's smart, than she probably did like your wife and left. If she's still alive."
Byakuya had entertained suspicions to that last effect since the day he learned he had a sister-in-law. He just personally could not see how an infant, even in Soul Society, could survive so long without sustenance, and he doubted that anyone would be willing to take on the burden of raising a child in the misery of Inuzuri.
"You said the girl was an infant the last time your wife saw her. Do you even know what she looks like?"
Reluctantly, Byakuya shook his head. The Inuzuri girl was only emphasizing what he knew so well: that his search was hopeless, if not impossible. "No, I do not. I have only her name, and that she would be fourteen years old."
Determined to be helpful, the girl asked, "Well, what's your sister-in-law's name? I hear things around here; I might recognize the name."
He didn't see what it could hurt, except that maybe the girl would lead him on a wild goose chase. Byakuya decided he would just have to trust her not to do so. "Her name is Rukia," he stated, not looking at her face.
Byakuya didn't see her face, but he could feel the way the atmosphere of the tenancy house instantly changed, grew thicker and considerably more tense. Like someone had suddenly let an elephant loose into the room.
"Do you know her?" he inquired quietly, with bated breath and praying that the answer would be yes.
In the darkness, Byakuya could hear the shift of the girl slumping slightly, her chin dipping into the hollow of her throat. "In a manner of speaking, yes."
Violet eyes met Byakuya's in the shadows again. "My name's Rukia."
END