Characters: Ryuuken
Summary: What living in the real world costs.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Timeline: None needed
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
For Ryuuken, having his feet planted firmly on the ground meant being a fish out of water among the people he associated with. Trying to help the dead was all fine and well, but, by definition, it was beyond the ability of the living to truly help them at all.
He could see that. It was so clear. Why couldn't anyone else? They were all dreamers, his father, Sayuri, and in later years even Uryuu, while these dreams were to Ryuuken only distant and impossible to understand. The language was lost to him.
It was easy enough to give up the life of a Quincy; he had never had any real enthusiasm for the lifestyle, had always been ambivalent to it, at best. Ryuuken had learned the lessons his father taught him and learned them well, if only because he had been a child who knew no other route than obedience and because he didn't believe in half-measures. He was either going to do something right, or not at all.
He had known quite well what it was like to grow up hungry, watched his parents struggle to make ends meet and his father struggle even more acutely after his mother was gone. Ryuuken had no desire to force anyone else into the same situation, not for any reason. He had no desire to make any child of his sit up in the dark and wonder if this would finally be the night his father didn't come home.
And he had no partiality to the lifestyle of his forebears. Hunting Hollows was, he supposed a legitimate profession but it couldn't sustain a family in the day and age in which Ryuuken grew up. If anything it often proved to be the ruin of families.
So he simply gave it up.
Not entirely, at least not at first. Ryuuken was no bleeding heart, especially not compared to, again, his father, and his wife and his son—especially his son, he was later to learn with shock—but he had a conscience and there were certain situations in which he simply could not turn a blind eye. Eventually, however, he was blind even to that which would have turned his stomach in youth.
But he did fall away from the Quincy, to the point that he began to forget how to see that other world superimposed on top of theirs.
Living in the real world brought more security than he had ever known as a child. Ryuuken liked a neat, orderly world, with nothing out of the ordinary and no surprised. Ryuuken hated surprises, just as he abhorred and avoided problems he couldn't solve. He saw no life beyond the one in which he lived.
The real world was the only niche Ryuuken had ever felt comfortable in, but living there may have ended up costing him his wife.
No one was ever quite sure what it said about Ryuuken, that for all that he claimed to revile the existence to which his father adhered, he ended up marrying another Quincy. The last child of another Quincy house, Sayuri… Sayuri had been exactly like the others, a dreamer, head in the clouds and certainly not grounded like her husband. She still heard the language of her dreams and still understood what her dreams said to her.
And when her dreams took her life Ryuuken had no comfort because, seeing only the world in which he moved, he didn't have the eyes to see that there was anything beyond that.
He tried to give what little of his heart he had left to give to his son, but balked, lost his nerve, backed away, frosted over when he saw the same gleam in Uryuu's eyes that there had been in his mother's, and in the end it might have been better if he hadn't tried at all.
Uryuu was of that other world that Ryuuken had walked away from so long ago, his mother's child to the life and far more his grandfather's than he had ever been Ryuuken's. He was a dreamer, lived in another world, and there was no room for that world or anyone in it in Ryuuken's life. Better to harden his heart against someone who was just as likely to die young as any other Quincy—Soken had been the first Ishida to live to see old age and Ryuuken suspected that he himself would be the last.
So it cost him his son, too.
And Ryuuken wasn't sure that it was appropriate to regret it, since Uryuu had never been his child to begin with.