Requested by AnimeLuver4everandevr- thank you
Sojiro x Toushiro
(Sojiro Kusaka is from Bleach: The DiamondDust Rebellion)
Because nobody wants to be the last one there
Because everyone wants to feel like someone cares
Someone to love with my life in their hands
There's gotta be somebody for me like that
Nickelback
Someone
There were always parts of the Academy that people tried to forget.
That first feeling of blood on your hands, and the first bite of bone mask against your blade. The first time you dared to look deep into the eyes of a hollow as you killed it, and saw the lingering remains of something that was once, a long time back, a lot like you, looking right back at you. The first time you saw someone walking towards you, carrying the dead body of a shinigami that only minutes ago, you had called 'friend'.
The sight of that first battlefield the morning after, stretching out into the horizon, full of carnage. The Shinigami had had many enemies over the millennia, and although not every group of graduating Shinigami saw active battle before assignment, there were some that had.
Toushiro Hitsugaya had.
He remembered it, too, vividly.
It had been a nameless foe: some outcast former twelfth division shinigami had been trying to breed a superior race of hollow, mixing genetic strands of animals with claws and tusks and thick hide with the strange cells of hollows that pulsed under microscopes with something that was not life, or power, but something in between. The things she had created were monstrous- they had no conscious thought, simply the ravenous single-minded intent of massacre that they had not been anticipating.
He closed his eyes against the remnants, and he knew that this morning there would be more than one of the painfully young and inexperienced students that felt that last branch of innocence break away from them.
Many of them grew up that morning, and grew cold with it.
Toushiro, his eyelids shielding the sight, had felt a hand around his wrist, anchoring him tight to the world.
Someone warm, who said nothing, and simply breathed silent relief onto his skin as light kisses were dropped onto his exposed and wounded shoulder. That someone had not minded the taste of Toushiro's blood, but then the air was so thick with the smell of it that he himself could feel lingering copper and rust on his tongue.
And that someone had cradled him against his taller body, and Toushiro had felt a few silent tears drop onto his skin as his wound was kissed, and still he did not turn around, because he understood that in a life such as theirs, to rely too heavily on the other was to condemn yourself to death: to succeed, you needed single-minded strength. That was why, at that hardest point, they would not look at each other, nor speak.
So he breathed in and out until he could ignore the taste, and forced himself to open his young eyes again, and although the sight the second time was no better, with carrion birds feasting and pink and red tendrils of the rising sun on the horizon lacing through the darkness, it also shocked him less. It seemed to have already become part of the scenery, part of the background: he realised that he was already become immune to the sight of death.
It was then he turned around, and pressed his body against the warm one behind him. Sojiro's eyes were as tightly closed as his had been moments before.
He let his eyes shut again, too, no longer worried. He knew he could face it, now.
He only hoped that Sojiro, too, could weather the storm.