The Garden of Everything
By Jun-Ko

"I cannot say
which is which:
the glowing
plum blossom is
the spring night's moon."
~ Izumi Shikibu

"Why can't you just tell me the story without starting another story?"
"Because there is no story that's the start of itself, any more than a child comes into the world without parents."
~ Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

It started on a night bright with moon, once upon a time, a long time ago.

Her skin was damp from the rain and she had been standing with her back to him, dripping drops like crystals from her skin. Her yukata was wet, clinging, showing here and there beneath it; he could have traced out the shape of her spin with his eyes closed. She had been standing in the middle of a deserted road with her face, moon-white, tilted up at the moon, that had appeared like a spell almost immediately after the rain stopped. Then she turned around and looked at him with eyes the color of bruises and he saw her face for the very first time.

It started the way fairy tales do - in the middle of the night when nothing seemed extraordinary; to a man who thought he had everything until he saw her face for the very first time.

When she looked at him, her eyes were wet with light. (They spoke nothing of the darkness she had hidden away, the darkness he would later discover for himself.) She watched him watching her. She smiled. He almost expected her to shimmer into mist and disappear.

He took in the sight of her hipbones haunting through the cotton of her robes, the way the cloth outlined her slim thighs; considered the strain of the tendons at her ankles and how they faithfully held the weight of her body. Every time he looked at her, from that moment and each moment on, he felt as though he knew something of nymphs and sprites, of girls kept prisoner in tower rooms, of boys born too beautiful. Her face felt like a bedtime story he couldn't quite remember.

So that had been the night when he first saw her, when she looked back and smiled at him from beneath the cyclops gaze of the moon. Even now, he sees her still - moving in and out of his vision like a ghost - though to believe in ghosts in a place like the Soul Society is completely ridiculous. He knows she is gone now but it does not stop his heart from skipping a beat when he sees her emerge from the shadows with that familiar brightness in her eyes - the start of laughter, or the start of tears. Her arms open wide and envelope him in a burning embrace.

She had come to him on the first night, eagerly toting her wares and it had been all he could do not to give in to her charms. She had come to him no virgin, a mockery of herself, of him, and he opened his arms to her every time. Whenever he felt the weight of her body, he felt the weight of this falsehood too, against his chest. Acting like the spoiled child he once was, he ignored her secrets that were plain as day, choosing only to recognize the happiness her presence brought him. She had been both the devil and the bargain, and now she was gone.

It had been so unclear to him in the past, but since her absence he had gained a new perspective - why had wanted her, so much, and over and over. She was not immaculate. They both knew this. She was deceptively delicate. When she smiled, she smiled red at him. She was dirty under the fingernails and he had been surrounded by only fine things his entire life. She was imperfect and it made her divine.

Now, her hands are branding irons. They find the ivory of his vertebrae through the paper of his naked back, which is soaked in sweat. The light is an operation on his skin - "But my lord, the light is off. See?" Still, lightning splits the sky and he winces in pain with every bolt. The heat of the day has not vanished into the night, and her fingers lick his forehead like tongues of fire. And still he moans her name, longingly, hanging his head in shame. And when, through the swirling universe, he finds her lips, she turns away and kisses his hands instead, running her rosebud mouth along his knuckles. For the first time in years, he hears her voice say his name.

"Byakuya."

Like a magic spell, she whispers it and that's when he realizes that she is different somehow. Her hands, her hair, her mouth are not as he remembers. He tries to piece it all together but his thoughts flounder pitifully in the dark. His eyes refuse to stay open.

Then he thinks, just what is it that I remember? He struggles to get up but her burning hands push him back down into the folds of sleep. Had I truly known her at all?

It started the way fairy tales do - though, truth be told, Byakuya knew very little about fairy tales.

Throughout the deception that was their life together, Byakuya remembers bits and pieces of happiness - rare, and fleeting, as is anything worth feeling but it had been happiness nonetheless. Though he knew exactly the circumstances under which they met, though she had flattered and schemed her way into the marriage bed; though he never denied any of this and resolved to accept it, if only to please himself, the memories of when laughter bubbled from her lips were the most precious things he owned.

There was a day, not long before they were married, when he took her to the grove of fruit trees his mother had left him. It was a garden that the servants were forbidden to enter, flourishing under the care of a single gardener, behind the high walls of his compound. The weather that year was perfect for fruit, and the two of them had worked together to gather plums before they became too ripe. Sweet and plump, still damp with morning dew, they were firm but yielding to the touch, bruise-colored, the color of her eyes. She'd tied her sleeves back and he called for a ladder to be brought to them. She had laughed and clapped her white hands as he balanced on one foot to reach the highest clusters, showing off for her as she pointed to the tops of the trees.

Sometimes, she made him behave very oddly.

Afterwards they sat in the shade, separating the plums - which ones were for pickling, for drying, to be made into candy or wine, to be eaten right away. He took one and broke it before her, feeding her the pieces with his fingers on her pink lips, her little tongue stained from its juices.

"They are very sweet!" she smiled.

He swallowed hard and willed himself to think of other things.

When she first fell ill, it was came as no surprise, although he'd felt as though he had been slammed into a wall. The house, which had been scattered with servants' whispers like little pebbles, became filled with unease and stifled panic. Doctors were summoned, salves were spread, potions were brewed but nothing helped. But even in those last few frantic days, he could not bring himself to feel angry with her. He did not, whenever he heard her creep from her bedroom late at night, nor when he wondered what other beds had burned in the darkness when she had gone. It wasn't until she had died then did he feel the rage that had been building for years. When she died, he hated her for the first time.

Still, it was the knowledge that she had once existed that made it bearable for him to continue as he did. Although she was gone, she had left her imprints on everything - her favorite cushion, her wedding kimono, her porcelain teacup, the tree she had rested her hand against one day while seeking shelter from the rain. He thought, she is gone but the things she loved, the things she used, live on. The world spins, contracts, shrinks into these few object and is contained within a single word - Hisana. (The word he gasps out in reverie, in pleasure, in pain.) There is something of her on these things that allow him to move forward in the bleak world she had once made colorful. It had been these things, and the promise she'd wrested from him on her deathbed - selfish as ever - that kept him going.

"Do you think I am selfish?" she whispered then, allowing him to take her hand as the February wind howled through the withered, fruitless branches.

As he watched Rukia standing in the garden with her back to him, her hand on the first plum tree, that terrible silhouette burning in his eyes - he wondered if Hisana had at all be aware of how hard it would be for him, to have her sister in his presence. He could not blame her entirely; perhaps she hadn't realized that they would look so alike. Though she had not grown up in her care, Rukia still had the same mannerisms as her sister; the same slant to her eyes, the same way she bent at the waist to retrieve fallen objects, the way she clipped her words, the same ankles straining to hold up the weight of her whole self.

"You are the most selfish woman I have ever known," he whispered, to the photograph of her smiling face.

But it had been so easy then, being with her. Laughing, smiling, gathering plums, reading back to back as lovers do. It had been so easy to be alive.

Had been.

To be continued

Rewritten June 2012