A/N: Oh man, I haven't updated this fic in aaaaages! So much thanks to LazyNezumi for giving me really nice praise and ideas and everything oh my god you are the best. This update is for you.

"Do you think I could do it?" asked Juushiro, hugging his knees on another academy break. Autumn in Seireitei had its perks, and though he still cringed a little at the sight of his stark white hair, it was good to feel the breeze again.

"Of course you can!" exclaimed Shunsui, smiling so hard that his eyes crinkled into curves, and in a slightly disturbing way, Juushiro was reminded of Retsu's eyes. But much less delicate, and much less masculine. He backed away.

Shunsui caught him by the shoulders nevertheless. "That's what I've been telling you the whole time, Juu! You go up to Retsu, you ask her, will you take tea with me? And then you kiss and have a happily ever after and produce thousands of honorable children with magic fingers."

Juushiro turned away, a groan trapped in his throat. "I shouldn't have asked you. I think I just threw up a little in my mouth, Shunsui. Excuse you."

—

The water faded in and out of his dreams, a deluge of black that alternately drowned him, suffocated him, strangled him. He drew his shining zanpakuto, screamed for help through a completely constricted throat, and wondered if anywhere, there was anyone who cared.

And then he opened his eyes, only to find a grinning Shunsui sitting on his knees. "You make funny sounds when you sleep," he said, leaning closer.

Juushiro jerked up instinctively, his elbows digging into the thin pillow at the head of his bed, and almost screamed for help—

—until his throat tightened and something heavy and dark rose at the back of his neck, and when he lifted his mouth to cough, there was blood on the white sleeve of his robes.

Oh no.

He looked at it in disgust, disappointment, fear. This wasn't the first time his body had betrayed him—but it was not, was never a good time. When everything was going well, when he was finally caught up in his classes, on the brink of graduating, and meeting beautiful girls who smiled far too softly—he fell. And though he could always pick himself back up, it never meant good news. It wasn't an obstacle that he had to overcome to be a better person. It was an enemy that could never be defeated, that threw him back day after day, attack after attack, from which he could only hope to recover and survive again.

"I'm sorry," said Juushiro, his voice a harsh grating in the emptiness of the morning—night? He looked up at Shunsui, whose eyes were squinting in confusion. "What time is it?"

The sky outside was half dark, and Shunsui sighed as he drew the blanket off of Juushiro's chest. "Evening. Too late for you to be asleep," he said, casting a sideways glance at the blood-stained sleeve. "And you should be sorry. You never told me it was this bad."

Juushiro only shook his head, another cough rising in his throat. "No point," was all he could choke out before his mouth was pressed to his sleeve again, and he hoped the blood wouldn't be too much this time.

A cool hand was pressed to the back of his neck and he was lifted up off the bed, his chest seizing up in spasms as he coughed and pressed his eyes shut, still coughing. "You're so light," a distinctly feminine voice whispered, and he was being carried up and around, and the ache in his lungs was sizzling and fading, though the burning in his throat still flamed. Who was that voice? Whose hands were those? They couldn't be Shunsui's—he was never this gentle. Juushiro didn't think he had it in him.

He pressed his fingers to his throat again, and in the muted dusk, the blood was strikingly black against the white sleeve, the even whiter hair.

A hand reached over to brush the strands out of his eyes, and the voice spoke again. "Don't talk, Juushiro," she said, as her blue eyes met his, and the braid coiled over her shoulder came into view. "Just let me take care of you." Her face was so close to his, and her hands on his skin—he couldn't tell whether she was trying to take his pulse or keep him up.

The pain rose in his throat again, but before it could surface, something sharp and sweet filled his nostrils. He gasped. The last thing he felt before his world went black was the brush of her lips against his ear—something cool, something soft, something whispered that he couldn't quite understand.

—

Fever dreams were bad, and worse than they had been any time before. They had always been about the family he'd left behind and couldn't protect, the times when he'd been sick before. And especially painful the heartbreak in his mother's pretty round moon face when she saw what he'd become, frail on a sickbed in a room flooded with too much white—the color of a wedding which he would probably never have, the color of a death that was sure to come.

But now the dreams had shifted, and he wasn't sure why. In one version of events Juushiro knew he was dreaming: that everything was terrifying and dark but that certainly, eventually, there was a way of escape. But the other part of him succumbed entirely, and so when he saw the flash of a brilliant zanpakuto and the swinging of a long thick braid, and the narrowing of blue eyes that he had almost lost himself in hours before, he wanted to scream—but that was impossible, of course, because he was screaming, had been screaming this whole time for everything to stop.

So from the sidelines of his nightmare he watched Retsu battle demons, slicing neatly through them and whirling around, always calm, composed, efficient. And then the rain started—cracking lightning that pulsed through the air and lit up events in a terrifying strobe.

One hollow fell to the ground, she turned on another. Their wispy corpses littered the ground around her. And finally he watched as a Menos Grande emerged from its curtain of mist and slid gently over her, until she was lost in its blackness, gone in its shadow.

Juushiro screamed and coughed, and though in the back of his mind he knew it was impossible, tasted blood. And then he was washed away by the torrents until he could not even find himself.

—

"He's burning up," she said to the brown-haired man with big soulful eyes, the one who had been sitting by the patient's bedside for hours now. "I don't know what to do."

She tried to keep her voice soft, but it was harder now, harder now that they were too close to be certain at all."

To her complete surprise Shunsui did not look worried, only resigned. He stood up slowly and slid the door open. "Thank you, Retsu," he said, looking around, and she wondered a little perplexedly how he knew her name. "You're the best he could have. I think he needs some more time alone with you."

As the door slid shut again and the room filled with white, a throbbing, sinking sadness filtered through her. The weight of her braid against her back had never been heavier. She brushed a dab of blood off of his cheek and wondered why, on the first day they had asked her to help out in Division Four, she had been assigned to save the life of someone she knew.