Title: Heavy
A/N: Yeah, this is definitely going to have more chapters than I previously thought.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
Ishida Soken has seen it all before, but experience doesn't stop that heavy feeling from invading his bones. Maybe it's just arthritis or a cold setting in, but he knows better.
There's childhood illness, and early death, and the horrors of war. Nagasaki was the worst of those horrors that he had to experience, and he can still hear the screams in his sleep in the warmest of the summer nights. It is forgiven and accepted, but never forgotten.
The loss of a spouse; moreover, the loss of a wife before she even hit forty, and Soken knows exactly where his gray hair came from.
So many other things too, but they all blur together in the span of the past sixty-one years.
But it's still weighs heavily, all of it. Even if he knows how to let go, it still weighs down.
My… Another name to add to the list of the dead.
And Ryuuken with his thirty years isn't nearly as prepared to handle grief as his father. Too rigid, too unwilling (either too proud or just too stubborn) to bend when the wind blows, and too defiant of the whole process of death in the first place to accept it when it comes.
His son's skin, still wet with the remains of weeping, is exceptionally cold beneath his hands. A bit like a melting block of ice that still retains its frigid temperatures, and Soken can't help but think that Ryuuken looks about frozen solid now.
Soken's trying to talk to him (And why shouldn't he? No matter how estranged they are he's still Ryuuken's father and Ryuuken is still his child.), and Ryuuken has his eyes firmly shut. He rubs his son's moist cheeks, trying to chafe warmth back into the gelid skin as taut as stretched canvas and reddened as an open wound, and Ryuuken says nothing, enduring but not welcoming it. His pain is etched into his skin, a lifetime of broken faith converging on one place, but he won't say a word.
I'm so sorry—This should never have happened to you—Too young, too soon—You must see; it isn't forever—If you need me…
Those are the words a father usually speaks to his child after that child has endured a loss. Even if that child is an adult, because, Soken knows, a parent will always see their child as a child, even if there are gray hairs on the head of their son or daughter. Those are the words, he supposes.
And Ryuuken isn't hearing a word of it. Even now, whenever Soken opens his mouth, he closes his ears.
Soken supposes he shouldn't have expected it to be any different. That heaviness that comes when Ryuuken grits his teeth and jerks himself away still hurts, though.