Rating: PG-13
Summary: Rukia is haunted by her past.
A/N: This one does have a metaphor, which I stole from Shakespeare. What can I say, Will is just too good (yes, Mr. Shakespeare and I are on a first-name basis). There will be a continuation to this chapter somewhere down the line.
I wrote this chapter about three times before I liked it enough to post. I kept trying slightly different writing styles. All the while, "form follows function" was thundering through my head. But I just couldn't seem to find the right form.
Thank you so much to all of you who reviewed. I'm sorry I didn't get to respond to the reviews personally this time around. I'll be better next time, I promise.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Lady MacBeth I
Like a steeple on the worn rooftop, she stands, a white figure clothed in black. The fallen husks of autumn-struck leaves are strewn around her in splashes of yellows and browns and reds. Reds. Reds like the bleeding of a wound. Reds like the lips she licks with a pointed pink tongue. Reds like she imagines the color of her heart would be if she had one.
In her hands, she holds the white line of her sword, splitting the swollen, overcast heavens in two. The air is thick with moisture and the premonition of life-fluid falling from an open gash in the sky, down…
down
down
down to the ground below where a man is standing on a street corner with a sly smile and licentious looks, talking (not with words but with wandering hands and hungry lips and guttural moans) to a woman in high heels and bright makeup and a skirt so short that it distracts enough to hide who she really is.
Sometimes being bold is the best disguise.
Through half-lidded eyes, Rukia gazes impassively at the blade in her small, little-girl hands.
She is a figure of death, expressionless, unmoving, and ethereal.
But inside her mind there is violent motion.
Sode no Shirayuki.
She wavers a little, as if in a trance.
They say you are the most beautiful of all the Zanpakutos in Soul Society. A Zanpakuto of the purest white, like a crystal of ice.
She smiles, a bitter expression that looks harsh and cruel. Below her, the man and the woman laugh suddenly, the sound intertwining with the whining of the wind and the whipping of her robes and the falling of the leaves. The sounds make her feel invisible, hidden. Though she knows that's a lie.
Do you remember? Do remember that time we killed that Arrancar in Hueco Mundo? Do you remember as he lay in a pool of feathers and blood from his severed wings, he told us that the moment before I struck him with your first release he saw a bright flash of light, so clean, so pure, that he thought he was looking into the face of a god.
And I told him he was mistaken.
How long ago had that been now? Two years? She couldn't keep track of the time. She couldn't count the number of times the trees had stood bare, the number of times the world had draped itself in a cover of ivory snowfall. Time was strange in this human world. It came in cycles, in sets of routine that didn't exist in Soul Society.
Would it be easier if I understood time? Could it carry me on, take me out of the past and bring me forward to something new? Is it like that for Ichigo?
Do you remember it, Sode no Shirayuki? Do you remember that first time he saw you in your released form? Dumb idiot stared like an awe-struck child.
"It really is all white," he said once. He doesn't get it. I don't know why, but I expected him to see.
You are not all white. You have a spot of blood on you Sode no Shirayuki.
You've had it since the day I killed Kaien, when I was just a little girl. I was too young to be wielding a weapon—not because of what I did, but because I couldn't handle doing it. I still can't handle it, even after all these years. Does that mean I'm still too young?
I remember trembling in mind-numbing fear as I stared at his body on the muddy ground, stared at the crimson river of rain pooling around my feet. I held you up to those teardrops of heaven, hoping to wash it all away, to see white again, but it didn't work and I've never seen white again.
You are stained Sode no Shirayuki. My soul is stained.
She swings the sword around quickly in the air and drops soundlessly to her knees, laying the blade flat across them. With smooth, practiced moves, she loosens the sash of her robes and slips one pale arm out from the sleeve, unwrapping a layer of her chest bindings and ripping the fabric with her teeth.
Stained. Marred. Abhored.
She wraps the material around one hand, the other supporting the tip of her sword in an open palm. There is the sound of laughter from below again, but this time she hears it as an accusation, as a coded whisper of a jaded word: murderer.
Dirty. Unholy. Tainted.
The first brushes of the cloth in her hand against the metal of her sword are slow and forceful, deliberate. Through squinted eyes of vivid violet, she watches her own movements.
Blood. Spot of blood. Undimmed by time.
And it grows. With every stroke of my hand it grows. Always, it grows.
Her scrubbing is more frenzied now. Not deliberate, but desperate. She's losing herself in the action. She can't even hear the couple below the rooftop anymore, oblivious to the exchange of money and the moans of pleasure. She doesn't need to. She's a harlot herself.
She's plunged her sword into the heart of two men. One died and one is alive and watching.
She feels him a few rooftops away and even after all these years, he still has no idea how to mask his reitsu. She's known he was there from the start. He's the only one she's ever allowed to watch her clean her sword.
And it's his blood on the blade too, and the blood of everyone he's ever killed.
Out spot. Out. Out.
Out.
Out.
OUT.
Palm warm with the friction of her scrubbing, she closes her eyes and all she sees is reds. Her body shakes, knees grinding against the shingles on the roof. All she wants is to wash it away. All she wants is to be clean. But she opens her eyes again and she knows that's not possible, because her Zanpakuto is not white like everyone thinks and it makes her sick inside to know that she hides it so well.
When she finally stops scrubbing, body bent over and fingers raw, she sees her blade completely covered in reds. And she knows the red wasn't the spot, the white was, and that this is what is underneath.
A stained soul.
&&&&&&&&&&&&
A/N: Yes, I know that was short, but for some reason, it was difficult to write. Anyway, thanks for reading!
