Tolkien'sInkwell's ideas: *fly away* Inky: *cries* NUUU COME BAAAACK!
Because everyone knows the last month of summer is reserved for whining ... eheh. Anyway ... oh bizarre Hitsu/Hyou fic, how I've missed you ... even if no one else does ... *goes off to write something that actually makes sense*
Toushiro is a newly-minted Shinigami, still intrigued with his solemn black uniform and its accompanying aura of maturity. His inner world is long-since familiar to him, but he looks at it now with a little more understanding.
A tendril of cold air slides around Toushiro's body, seeming to hold him for a second before whispering away. Toushiro recognizes the faint tinge of reiatsu in it. Wind is never simply wind here. This world belongs to Hyourinmaru; he is the master of everything in it.
The ice dragon himself lets him be and flies lazy circles above his head.
Toushiro presses his hands absently against the hard ground and a thought slides into his mind. It is a thought he has had many times before and one that surprises him each time nonetheless.
I think I died here.
Sometimes he wonders if what he really means is I think I will die here. He used to worry about that, about dying on an empty plain where no one else could ever find him. Now he thinks there are far worse places to spend his last hour than here, in silence with the cold wind embracing him 'til the very end.
He knows a part of him is dead and gone already, and has been since the day he first put on an Academy uniform. Maybe he will keep on dying, then, piece by piece, until one day he finds himself vanished and a stranger risen to take his place.
Toushiro glances up as the dragon's shadow falls over him, its owner barely making a sound as he lands. Out of the corner of his eye Toushiro sees his long neck curve down until his head is almost resting on Toushiro's shoulder. There is such a degree of odd devotion in his posture that Toushiro prefers not to think too hard about it. Instead, he reflects to himself that Hyourinmaru has gotten quieter and gentler lately. He grew up, Toushiro supposes. He grew up when I did.
Toushiro automatically leans closer to him.
Once Toushiro vowed that he would never come back here again (though he broke that promise the very same night). This is a cold, dangerous place, he decided, a place for destruction. It's strange and empty and it does not belong to him.
Only … it does, and always has. The plain of ice feels like his as much as his zanpakuto's. Theirs, the same way the house in Rukongai used to be his and Granny's and Momo's.
"Why … does this feel like home?"
The question slips out abruptly and awkwardly, and it is not precisely the question Toushiro intended to ask.
Hyourinmaru answers anyway. "I want you to have one."
And briefly Toushiro remembers being a lost, angry child not so long ago, hating the zanpakuto he believed capable only of taking things away from him.
"Thanks," is all he says aloud, though.
Someday, Toushiro promises himself, he'll find a place for himself in the world outside again. Somewhere he can bring people to visit if they ask him. A place he can call his own and come home to at night without having to fold inward into his mind.
But even if he finds one, even if he lives there a thousand years, Toushiro knows for certain where his first home will always be.