6

Mask

It was almost midday.

Rose gazed up towards the sky, gauging the position of the sun through the shade of his fingers. The patrol he had sent out that morning to deal with a Hollow incursion on the southern border of Rukongai would doubtless be sending back word to the barracks soon, and, in his office, the pile of documents and papers that Izuru had left for him to sign had, for once, been completed with surprising speed and efficiency. He had slept well the night before, he reflected wryly, and, as such, had entered his office both early and with a level of focus that was often in short supply when a song was teasing at his senses. Izuru was more tolerant than his previous Vice Captain had been about the haphazard manner of his organisation and his work scheduling, but, in spite of that, he felt a little proud, knowing that, on this occasion at least, his adjutant would return to find no loose sheets lying around to be filed. The intrays were empty, the desks were clean and the members of Third Division not on patrol or on other errands were all hard at work attending to the various chores and duties around the barracks. With nothing at Third to attend to, Rose had left his Third Seated officer, Rikuu in charge, and had decided to take a stroll down to the nearby lake. It was fed by the same water source that surrounded the Thirteenth Division's barracks, but Rose knew that the Captain there was once more in poor health, and he had no mind to disturb his colleague by trampling too close to his land. Instead he took a less well trodden path, winding between the backs of the Tenth and Eleventh Division and out onto open Rukongai road towards the expanses of blue and green which, in a previous lifetime, had always brought him respite in a time of stress and chaos.

Not that I really understood what those things were, then.

He let out a sigh, sliding slender fingers into the folds of his obi and ducking beneath the branches of straggling pine trees, making his way to the water's edge. Being careful not to crease or damage the white haori that hung around his shoulders, he settled himself on the grass, gazing pensively down at the smooth, unrippled surface of the lake. The weather had been dry, lately, and thus he had no fear of grass staining the pristine fabric of the haori. For a while he sat there, watching the faint shadows of fish diving and swimming beneath the water. They were not aware of him, he realised, too intent on their own world to realise that he was watching them so intently from the bank. If he tried to touch them, though, he knew they would swim away; disappearing behind rocks and into crevasses at a moment's notice.

Ripples were like sonic vibrations, and Rose had always been fascinated by the way in which things stirred and lived in the world he inhabited. In the past, the lake had been the inspiration for both poetry and melody, but, in that moment, he saw the dank depths as a limited space, confined and isolated from the world of air and land. The fish did not need him, nor were they interested in him - the same way he had felt about the Real World, before his exile there, and the way that he had imagined Soul Society felt about him, and his companions, during their hundred year absence.

He loosened his fingers from his obi, trailing the tips lazily across the surface of the water, and watching as the view of the bottom blurred and disappeared beneath the whirls that span out across the surface. As he had predicted, the fish had pulled away at the sight of danger, but, although he had not yet eaten lunch, Rose had no intention of posing them any danger. Drawing his hand back, he watched as the water slowly returned to its static form, its glittering sheen like a mirror of light embedded into a frame of emerald green grass.

The distorted reflection settled and stopped, and he leaned forward pensively, meeting his own lavender gaze on the surface.

A familar face stared back, the fluffy strawberry blond hair not as long as it had been in the Real World, but still long enough to be artistic while not impeding the active nature of his duty. He had not changed or aged much in the past century, but the eyes held a greater understanding, and, maybe, acceptance, of all that had happened before. There had been times when he had seen this face, and hated it, rejected it, even...as the face of a stranger cloaked in the uncomfortable folds of a gigai. It had taken a long time to come to terms with betrayal, but an even longer one to accept the monster that had lurked within. Rose had been born in Seireitei, and he had trained from a young age to hold a sword against Hollows. Now, though, he was almost as much Hollow as he was Shinigami - and the distinction had become blurred. Killing a Hollow now was not the same as it was before. It was both more morally agonising and spiritually fulfilling, he thought, remembering the battle in the skies over Soul Society's Karakura Town, and the Gillian that he had shredded with the vibrations of his Arpeggio reiatsu. There were higher stakes involved, killing one with a spirit that resonated half in harmony with your own, and even the haori that now shrouded his slender body could not fool him that those darker instincts had gone away.

He raised his fingers, his gesture delicate and elegant, as though preparing to begin some kind of musical performance, but instead, he touched his index finger to his brow. Drawing the hand down towards his chin, he felt the now familiar sensation of condensing spiritual energy, and the tight, hard frame of the bird mask as it drew together into a vicious point at the front. He gazed at his reflection again, his gaze running over the curve of the beak and the pristine whiteness of the mask.

He had hated this, too, but now, after all this time, he could see the artistic line and the perfect form that his spirit had created. People had called it many things, but, to Rose, it was the image of the phoenix - the bird from his name that had, somehow, dragged him back from oblivion and death to stand as a Captain of the Gotei once more. The bird had changed his life, both destroying it and saving it in the same instant and, although it had been a long, hard battle, it had been a battle won.

He twitched his fingers together, and, like fragments of light, the mask disappeared. He sighed, watching the spiritual shrapnel disperse on the wind. His hollow self was fleeting as the cherry blossom or the dew, he thought to himself pensively. The mask was precious and beautiful because it was transient and incomplete, just like the life that glittered all around him.

"Yo no naka ni taete sakura no nakariseba," he murmured, brushing his fingers against the blades of grass as though removing the fine reishi dust from his skin. "Haru no kokoro wa nodokeramashi. Narihira-sama, as ever, your words engrave upon my heart...without unrest, we would not have beauty, but with such fleeting beauty, we are always aware of the brevity of life and how delicate our existence is."

He leaned back against the grass, closing his eyes as he remembered a time, long since past, where the mask had elicited a different emotion than that of reflection.

The headache was back.

Rose buried his head deep into the rough fabric of the makeshift pillow, trying to drown out the rough edged screeches that clashed and clawed their way through his spirit. The harmony had been broken ever since he had come to the Real World. To begin with, he had not had a moment of time or energy to devote to such things, caught up in a struggle for life and death that had encompassed his whole being. The dark agony of the inner struggle he had fought with the Hollow that had sought to consume him was now over, but, in the wake of the battle, he had realised something he had not known before.

There was a reason that this power was called 'hollow'. It was because, inside, he was now empty, and the broken fragments of Kinshara's refrain drifted and faded into nothing, their shattered cadenzas little more than an uneven scattering of sounds that no longer knew how to form a melody. The delicate balance of his soul and the music that underpinned it had been ripped asunder by Aizen's experiments into Hollowfication, and, while his fellows had begun to piece together the bits of their former selves, he had not known where to begin.

The melody was gone, and with it, the will to make Kinshara play.

True, he could still release his sword. The long, elegant gold whip still seared out from the hilt at the briefest mention of its name, but when Rose touched his fingers to the glittering surface, the answering note was in the wrong key, and, what had once brought him both pleasure and joy was now a bleak and empty sound, lacking in all spirit and life.

He was hollow. Kinshara was hollow. They were spiritually dead, in all respects - robots in gigai who could perform the functions of a shinigami, but could no longer remember their motivation for doing so.

It would have been better had we died. It would have been better had I died.

The headache would not leave, preventing him from sinking into the deep oblivion of sleep. Languidly he pulled himself into a sitting position, making his way slowly to the window and resting his hands on the grimy sill of the warehouse's upper chamber. On the dusty sand outside, he could see Hiyori and Lisa, clearly involved in some kind of animated dispute, but they were too far for him to hear their words. The cracked and smoky glass of the window resembled the barrier between them and him, since they had come here. While his companions had begun to accept their fate with pragmatism, for Rose, there was nothing but gloom and depression in his heart.

If he even still had one. It was getting hard to tell for sure.

He rested his aching head against the cold hard surface of the window, closing his eyes. In the back of his mind, he could sense Kinshara's spirit, but he did not try to force contact between them. Whereas they had once understood each other without words, now, Rose feared their communication. Kinshara's beautiful, harplike song had become underpinned by the darker, rougher edge of the hunting bird that had taken control of his soul, forcing its bone white features over his own and dragging his spirit power down to a darker level. From childhood, he had learned by instinct every single note, pitch and key change that music could offer, but he did not know this key signature, and he could not make the melody fit.

His music was no longer his, and it had left him bereft and alone.

"Are you going to sulk up here for the rest of your life?"

The rough voice of Aikawa Love made him turn, his fingers instinctively glittering with repelling kidou at the unwelcome interruption. At the expression on his face, Love let out an exclamation of dismay, striding across the room and grasping him by the shoulders before he could draw together the effort to fire the spell.

"Hey, who do you think you're gonna fire that at? We're buddies, aren't we? I'm on your side, and you blow holes in this warehouse, you won't be popular! Right now it's all we have, and there's grey clouds in the distance. Chances are it's going to rain."

"Leave me alone." Rose could not even muster the effort to make excuses for himself, and, as Love tightened his grasp on his friend's shoulders, Rose felt the tension slip out of his body. There was just no point in arguing, or even fighting to get free. There was no point in anything. Not now. Not any more.

There was a moment of silence between them, and though Rose did not attempt to meet his friend's gaze, he knew that Love was eying him thoughtfully, taking in much more than most people realised he was capable of seeing. Their friendship dated back to before the honours of haoris and promotions, and, while they were distinct opposites in character, Rose had always taken courage and comfort from Love's brusque, straight-forward manner and his positive approach. Right now, though, that approach was nothing but a nuisance. Between Love and Lisa's efforts to get him to leave the warehouse, Rose was sure that his lack of sleep and his headaches were being made worse by their unwelcome kind intentions.

"If we do that, you might decide to do something stupid," Love had clearly not liked what he had seen, for, far from releasing his hold on his companion, he shifted his grip to Rose's arm, reaching across to pick up the discarded and sheathed Kinshara and holding it out. "Here. Come downstairs. We'll spar. This is getting cobwebs on it, and you need the practice. We're all still getting used..."

"I don't want to," Rose pushed Love's arm away, injecting enough force into this gesture to almost make him drop the proffered weapon. "Kinshara and I don't want to. We're not in harmony. There's no point. It's not the same, and I don't see the point any more."

"Well, if you leave it to gather dust, no wonder," was all Love offered in reply, but he reached across, shoving the sheathed Kinshara through the loop in his companion's belt with enough force that Rose visibly winced. "I'm not leaving you up here. You're coming with me, like it or not, so be prepared. You've not eaten enough since we've been here for you to muster energy to fight me, and, honestly, I'm sick of seeing you float around like a ghost like this. We've all been hit by a hammer blow, and you're not helping anyone by acting this way. I'm going to take you down, feed you - by force if need be - and then we're going to talk. And spar. You don't get a choice in the matter. I've decided."

"Hey!" Before Rose realised what was going on, his friend was pulling him firmly and unrelentingly towards the entrance of the room, half dragging him down the broken steps towards the large open hall that comprised the bulk of their current shelter. Work had already begun on expanding the territory beneath the surface, but, for the time being, these holes and plans were little more than unconnected rabbit warrens, the layout of which Rose soon realised was the cause of Lisa and Hiyori's dispute. Their words drifted in from the space beyond, and the hostility in their confrontation only made his headache worse.

"I jus' said that if we ran it that way, we'd have more space!" That was Lisa, and Rose, groaned, covering his ears with his hands.

"Make them shut up," he begged. "If you're going to drag me down here, at least make it quiet. I have a headache, and I don't..."

"You shut up," Love cut across his protestations. "We all have to put up with it. All of it. Everything. Frayed tempers. Disagreements. You can't run and hide from it. This is the reality we live in now. Sooner you wise up and accept it, the better things will be. Lisa and Hiyori are workin' hard. Lisa's on edge because she's worried about you, an' she's taking it out on everyone, so I said I'd come drag you down to the world of the living."

"Living?" Rose finally wrenched himself free from Love's loosening grip, turning to face his friend with an incredulous look on his features. "This isn't living. We're stuck in a world we don't belong in, and we're more dead than we've ever been. You get that, don't you? There's nothing artistic about being a Hollow. There's no melody in turning into a monster. I don't want a mask, I don't want a gigai. I want my music...I want my soul back. Aizen took it from me..and no matter what you do, you can't bring it back. I can't hear Kinshara's melody, not any more. My sword is just a weapon, now. It's not what it was before. You might be able to move beyond it, but I can't. I don't have my music, Love - without that, I'm not alive. Without that, I'd rather be dead!"

The moment the words had left his lips, Rose saw Love's expression change. Shock, followed by anger glittered in the man's dark eyes, and then, before Rose knew what was happening, his friend had raised a fist, punching him hard in the chest. The blow was unexpected and not without force, sending Rose stumbling back. He slipped and tumbled onto the ground, winded and bruised, and Love moved to stand over him, glaring down at him with his hands on his hips.

"That hurt," Rose protested, rubbing his chest, and Love pulled Tengumaru from its place at his side, pushing the sheathed tip forward to touch against Rose's ribs.

"Of course it damn hurt," he snapped. "It hurt because you're damn well still alive, in there. Yes, it's a gigai, but if I release Tengumaru, I can still make you bleed. Don't you ever say anything so lame again, you hear me? We're not dead. We're here. We're alive. And you're giving up. That's not art, if you want to put it in those words. Aizen didn't win, dammit. He didn't destroy us, so don't you ever damn well say you want to die in front of me again."

Despite himself, Rose gaped at the uncharacteristic surge of anger in his companion's reiatsu, and Love sighed, pulling Tengumaru back and sliding it back through the sash at his waist.

"But it is shit, us being here like this," he added. "We only have each other, now. We don't know what we're going to do here. What we've really become. None of it, yet. It's all too new. And Aizen...right now, we can only leave that be, but you must know it's not over. It can't be...he's still up there, and he's not done. One day, that's going to matter. We know...and what he did to us, we have to learn to find how to make him regret it. It's all we have left. Everything else is up in Seireitei. All we really have left is revenge - but for now, it'll do. Don't you want that? Doesn't Kinshara want that?"

Rose numbly shook his head.

"Kinshara doesn't," he murmured, struggling to get to his feet, still rubbing his chest gingerly. "Kinshara doesn't, but the other...the...the hunting bird..."

"That does, huh?" Love eyed him keenly, and Rose nodded.

"I guess it does," he admitted. "but it's cries hurt my ears. It's out of harmony. I can't focus...and...I don't know what to do, Love. Without my music, I don't know what I am. Who I am. No matter what else I've lost or dealt with, I've always...had that."

"Then we need to find a way to get it back," Love said simply. "Or, if that doesn't work, we need to find you new music."

"New...?" Rose looked blank, and Love grinned.

"I don't understand a damn thing about it," he said evenly, "and I've never pretended otherwise. But I get that it matters to you, and so it matters - to Lisa an' to me an' to all of us. Shinji was talking earlier - in some ways, he's been screwed more than the rest of us, with Aizen being his Vice Captain and all, but he said that right now, it didn't matter if we were Captains or Vice Captains before. No more hierarchy. No more titles. We are just ourselves, first names, nicknames, all to the good. We don't belong with Urahara, and who knows if we can trust him - but we have to trust each other. Look out for each other. It's the only way we'll ever one day be in a position to threaten Aizen's position at all. And he's right. He's right, so that means you too. We all fought our Hollows and we all, so far, won, but we're still only beginning. The rules have changed. The past might have been one way, but this is now. And the old music you had as a shinigami, that's the past. You're not a shinigami now. None of us are. We're something else - a masked militia, not Hollow nor Shinigami, something inbetween. We can make our own rules. And you can make new music to go with it. Can't you? If you can't find your music now, it means you haven't written it yet. That's all. Right?"

Rose stared at his friend, seeing him for the first time, and Love laughed, clapping his hand down warmly between his companion's shoulderblades.

"You told me once that manuscript paper was just music that hadn't been written yet," he said frankly. "I think you were trying to be clever and poetic, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't make it true."

"Love? Is that you? Is that fluff-haired idiot actually alive still up there? I have something I found, and..."

The door of the warehouse clattered back at that moment, revealing Kensei, his clothes covered in dust. At the sight of Rose, he stopped dead, then offered a wry smile.

"I guess that answered my question. You decided you are part of this after all then, Ootoribashi?"

"Fluff haired...idiot?" Despite his earlier lethargy, indignation rippled up through Rose's skinny body at this clear insult, and Kensei laughed.

"Well, you've been one," he said unapologetically, "but I didn't realise you were here. Still getting used to how these gigai work...anyway, don't kill me. I found you something. It's beat up and trashed, but I guess nobody else wanted it. I thought you might. It's not much...well, to be honest, I don't really know what it is, but..."

He held up a sorry and dirty wooden object in his hand, and Rose took a step or two forwards, hesitating as he ran his gaze over the unusual item.

It was made of wood, the edges curved in a way that reminded him of the violin he had left locked away inside the Third Division's secret compartment, but the body was broader and the sides rounder. A long strip of wood was unmistakeably a neck, though, and the remains of what might have been a string was knotted folornly through the holes of what might have been a head, pushed through with wooden keys.

"I found it outside that foreign place on the city outskirts." Kensei scratched his head with his free hand. "People always seem to think I come from there, when they see me. Doesn't matter how well I speak Japanese to them, they still insist on shouting at me in some other language...anyhow, this was dumped in the alley outside. I think some kids were using it to kick about. It looks like that thing you had in Seireitei to me, so I thought you might want it. It's broken up - but, hey, we have time now. And you're not doing anything much else with that time, so..."

He waved it once more in Rose's direction, and Rose hurried to take the damaged instrument from his companion's grip, his disbelief growing with every passing moment.

"It's not the same as Candice," he murmured. "But...you're right, Kensei-kun. It is...an instrument. I never saw one like it before, but...but it definitely looks..."

"It looks like you," Love said bluntly. "Broken and with its music trashed up inside. You fix that up, and you'll fix yourself, too. There's your challenge. Kensei's bit of junk is your new project. If you can make that play music, then you can make Kinshara play it again, too, right?"

"I...suppose I could try?" despite himself, Rose felt a flicker of emotion stir in his heart, and, with surprise, he realised that it was joy. He raised his gaze to Kensei, a genuine smile touching his lips for the first time since they had arrived in the Real World.

"Thank you," he said sincerely. "And I'm sorry. I know...for everyone...yet I've just been worrying about me. You...have been worried too, and it's not like...it's easy for any of us. I'll try more. I promise."

"Then we need to feed you," Love sounded satisfied. "I'm serious about that spar, and Real World food is fine, once you get used to it. Then you can start up on your broken wooden box."

Who would have thought I'd come back to Seireitei, after all of that?

Rose opened his eyes, gazing back down at the lake with a pensive smile.

Well, Kinshara, we found our new music. We grew together, thanks to all of them. I suppose that's when we learned how and who to trust...and not to take everything onto our own shoulders. Sometimes I think Izuru still does that - but it's all right. There's time, yet. Much time, now that Seireitei has peace.

Author's note:
Credit to the ninth century poet, Ariwara no Narihira for the waka poem. A VERY rough translation
(If there were no sakura in the world, with their fleeting blossoms, our hearts in spring would surely never waver.)

Candice is Rose's violin, and it appears in the Rukia novel, "Death Save The Strawberry" - much to Kira's confusion and Rose's delight ;)