"well, That's more like it!"
The enormous manikin made of craggy rock loomed above us and I pushed isana back a little bit, shooing her off my imminent battleground. She looked for a moment like she would have argued about it but I gave her another shooing motion and she subsided and walked off a little ways. I was here ta do the fightin' after all.
The rock-creature pounded on the ground with one of its massive fore-appendages right where i would have been if I hadn't seen it coming and flash-stepped out of the way. Not discouraged in the least it tried again. Its form was powerful, but its movements were ponderous and slow. If I was able to run circles around it, the Captain would have run laps.
:This enemy ain't gettin' any deader with me just playin' dodge an' chase with it,: I thought.
A little bored that it was so easy to maneuver around, I charged in for a swing to sever a limb, not even bothering to shikai Zabimaru, and was caught a little bit by surprise that the edge of my sword bounced right off its tough granite hide with a small metallic ping. It looked like this enemy of mine had his own defenses... good, I hated picking on wimps.
"Howl, Zabimaru!" I commanded, the enormous, sleek hourglass-curved blade sprang into being in my hand.
I flashed in and swung again, Zabimaru nicked its shell but ricocheted back without causing serious damage. I quirked my mouth to one side, annoyed. This guy would be easy to beat if I could figure out a way to get past its tough rock-skin. All it was (or seemed to be) was rocks held together and animated by magic, rather like the Captain's shikai was a bunch of sharp little razor blades held together and manipulated by his own reiatsu. I wasn't going to haul out my Bankai for a minor enemy like this, even if Snakey wasn't still out of action for the time being (it would have been an insult to my fighting ability to do so).
Besides, I need ta start learnin' my way around howl-form Zabimaru. I told myself.
I wasn't getting any more proficient with it, or learning how to use its strengths and abilities just by taking out small fry. Granted that everyone had to start somewhere, and I had certainly started with small fry when I'd been a Twentieth Seat Forty years ago in Fifth Squad, but I was already way past the point of small fry on even a bad day at my present level. The enemies I'd been facing did nothing for me, and they certainly didn't help me learn about Zabimaru's new form, I should use this opportunity to get some practice in.
I studied my enemy for a long moment, then studied the blade in my hand, silent, listening. As I had known it would, the knowledge of how to begin to use the abilities of my new shikai trickled into my mind a moment later. That was often the way it was between Zanpaktou and its wielding Soul Reaper, each a part of the other, and once a sense of communion was reached the wielder would know the things about his or her swords abilities when they were ready to know them.
The first and most basic ability I would learn, the one that would be the basis for many of the rest, would be the Raikou Ken (lightning blade). I very slowly and very carefully pried open the seal on the sluice-gate of my lowest chakra. I kept that one only half open and the rest of them sealed with binding marks as I was accustomed to because dealing with more reiatsu than my usual amount required more concentration than I had time to put into it right at that point. I felt my own personal power rush into me and pushed it into a collecting pool. It fought me, as usual, the stubborn stuff flared and pulled as much as it ever had and I grappled with it for a moment, and finally wrestled it into obedience. I gathered my reiatsu and pushed it down my arms into my blade. The matte-steel knotwork of tribal sigils that matched my tattoos that ran down much of the length of the tang of the blade flared into scarlet light. I pushed upwards and outwards and my reiatsu formed a diamond edge all along the double blades of my zanpaktou. Crimson flame formed a small halo of fire around its edge and sparks of lighting flew off here and there, like tiny snakes of light, crawling up and down its length being born and dying in the air. This was the blade of my will, and it had the power to cut through anything that could be cut through.
Seems as good a time as any to try it out, I thought.
I flash-stepped in close to the rock-golem and swung for its nearest limb. It didn't take much effort on my part, it seemed, Zabimaru sliced through the limb of the rock golem like the proverbial knife through butter. When it fell to the ground the arm I'd just lopped off was sheered, the surface of the cut stone was as smooth and shiney as polished glass. The golem swung at me Again and I waited for the blow, bringing the edge of my blade out before me and letting the golem do all the work of cutting its own arm in half. To finish the mater I swept down and in a circular slice neatly tok out its legs. Sadly for it, it wasn't the kind of creature to regenerate its form on its own. The peices moved and wriggled (creepy) but did not reform themselves.
"My name's Renji Abarai," I told it as a courtesy when I walked over to its exposed neck.
It had given me a good fight and I was a little sad to have to do this, but that was the way of battle. It had done its duty and I would honor it by giving it a quick, clean death.
"I thank you for your courtesy, Renji Abarai," the creature answered.
"Hey! Wait!" Isana called, rushing in where she wasn't wanted.
She juxtaposed herself in between me and the creature I was about to slay and spread her arms out protectively, glaring at me.
"You've already defeated him!" she scolded me. "You don't need to kill him too!"
I sighed irritatedly, annoyed that I had to explain it to her.
"This guy here is a sworn vassal servant to whatever being created it," I said patiently. "Its sole purpose in life was to protect that gate up there from being trespassed on. It had failed that purpose. It cannot face its master again with honor. Death is the only way for it to atone."
"Atone? For you being stronger than it? That's nonsense!" Isana scoffed.
I shrugged. I sort of agreed with her, but I didn't make the rules.
"The Soul Reaper is correct, Mortal Woman," the Golem replied, unperturbed. "Though my master has long abandoned this Realm, I have pride in my duty. I was fairly bested and I do not wish to continue to exist without a purpose."
"What if you got a new purpose?" Isana pursued doggedly.
"Only someone with power to create or to bind my kind can do such a thing Mortal," the rock golem informed her sadly. "Since there is no such person nearby, the best thing for me is to let the Reaper finish his work."
Isana gave a small dismissive little sniff, and gave me the same shooing motion that I had given her. Bemused, and willing to lay aside my blade to see if she really could figure out a way around the annoying chore of dealing the finishing blow to a defeated enemy, I backed off. Isana closed her eyes and a circle of green lines of light interlocked in intricate patterns I could not even begin to decipher the meaning of appeared in the ground around her. The severed pieces of the rock-golems body hovered in the air and reassembled themselves, its shape became more defined this time, less man-like and more like an enormous, slightly friendly-looking mastiff made of stone polished to a glassy finish so that the innate beauty of the stone could be seen. There was even a lovely collar with a tag around its neck that said "Bruiser" on it.
"I accept it," the new dog rock-golem said in agreement to a wordless pact spoken between them.
Isana held the disk-charm from the bracelet that the Courts had given her permitting her to use a spell that would bind elementals of all four courts and held it before her. The disk floated up above her palm and expanded, its shiney mirror-surface glowing with green light. It got large enough to form a portal for the rock-dog to walk through and it did so, fading into the depths of the mirror. The charm shrank back down to normal size and attached to her bracelet and the circle of light faded from around her.
"He said he'll come to my aid and fight for me when I call him," Isana said smugly with a little flip of her waist-length dark hair.
"Good," I said. What else could I say?
Isana went to take another step down the path but abruptly swayed on her feet and brought a hand to her head.
"Whoa there Missy," I said, quickly catching her elbow before she could fall.
If she fainted and cracked her head on a rock, Captain would crack mine. Permanently.
"We've probably done enough traveling for now," I said.
It had been a long journey so far, over many different Realms since I'd woken and we'd gotten on the road. I was getting tired too and we should both rest.
"After we travel across this gate, we'll find a quiet place ta make camp an' get some shut-eye," I said firmly.
It was probably more due to her weariness than my powers of persuasion that the little missy agreed without argument.
We made a camp in a clearing that looked safe enough, on a world where nothing had come leaping out of the bushes. I made a fire with nearby deadwood, then walked over to a small lake swarming with little fireflies dancing over the surface and tried to see if I could catch us some dinner. When I returned with two small, headless, gutted fish, I found that Miss Isana had erected a small domed tent that closed tight with those neat Mortal Realm devices called zippers (which were even better than buttons) and there was a small pot with canned soup bubbling over the fire. I spitted the fish and stuck the other end of the stick into the ground, wedged up to where it could cook in the flames.
We sat down to wait for dinner, and I tried not to think about old times. She looked so much like Rukia, I could almost pretend it was her sitting there and not her reincarnated older sister.
"So," she said into the silence. "We've been traveling with each other for a while now and I hardly know anything about you, other than that you're a good fighter and you hate being trapped in a mortal body."
What was to tell? There were a lot of things I wasn't gonna tell her, our connection being the first among 'em.
"I'll tell you what," she said after another long silence to her lead-in (when it became pretty obvious I wasn't sayin' nuthin').
"You can ask me any question you like and I'll answer honestly, but then I get to ask you one."
I shrugged. I wasn't really long on playing twenty questions, but there was nothing else to do either.
"Fine," I grumbled assent.
I didn't really wanna admit it out loud, but I was kinda curious about her. Was there a part of herself, a part of her soul, that remembered her former life, that remembered bein' married ta my boss, that remembered lookin' fer Rukia until the day she died? I wasn't a nosy kinda guy, but I did wanna know. I guess there wasn't anything wrong with findin' out a little more about her.
"Ya got a kid," I said as a preamble. "Where's yer man?"
I meant her husband of course, I was sorta figuring that he wasn't there seeing as she wouldn't have been so desperate to turn to me if there was anyone else she could turn to.
"I don't have one," Isana said plainly, with a note of defiance in her voice.
Touchy subject then. I sorta wondered what happened, but I really didn't want to pry. A moment later, when she started talking again I realized that i had once more under-estimated that female propensity for jabbering on and on about their feelings or whatever.
"I wasn't always so poor," she began.
She was gonna tell me her life story. see, this is what i got for asking.
Women, you ask an inch and they'll talk the proverbial mile.
"I actually come from a family that's fairly well-to-do, I mean, we're not millionaires or celebrities or anything, but we had a grand old villa with a cook and a maid, and I went to the best schools. The vineyard's been in the family for generations, so I guess you could say we're a little old-fashioned. Anyway, I had this female cousin that I grew up with that I was really, really close to. She was just like a little sister to me, and we were best friends all through our lives. Well she fell in with this... guy. You know how it is: "don't worry baby, I'll take care of everything..."
I winced, that had never happened to anyone I knew, but in my long association with Human's I had observed that it was a common enough theme. Ouch.
"Well, she winds up pregnant and they guy runs off, may he rot in hell. So she's pregnant and unmarried, and normally that wouldn't matter in this day and age, but the family's really, really old-school so her father, my uncle, disowns her and the others won't speak to her. Well, Alexandra and I have always been close, and their behavior pissed me off, so when she left the family, I left with her. I was in my third year of nursing school by then, the family was paying for it of course, so when I defied them they'd pulled my funding and I was stuck without any money and no degree, my sister was heavily pregnant and we had no place to stay."
"Rough," I agreed.
I knew all about that 'having dependents with no place to stay' problem. It had happened to me when one of my boys caught the Riverfront Ravage; we'd been tossed out of our flop house (because the rest had been afraid of catching it) without anywhere to go and a sick kid on our hands. Rough times.
"We both landed menial work, I got a job as a waitress, and she worked in a convenience store, and together we pulled in just enough to get a small place. I got a scholarship and some grants so I was able to continue my schooling to get my degree in nursing."
"Wait a minute," I said, feeling puzzled as something occured to me. "So yer kid isn't really your kid?"
"He's my son in all of the ways that matter," she said with a cool sort of regal aura, as if mildly offended that the issue of whether or not she'd borne him herself would invalidate her claim to motherhood.
"Hey, easy," I said. "I'm all about makin' family where I can find it. I don't have any blood relatives at all."
She just gave this pitying look that I pretended not to see. The last thing I wanted was some mortal woman I barely knew feeling sorry for me.
"So anyway, as you can guess, my little sister's health was... fragile. I tried my best to make sure she'd make it through, I even urged a cesarian section, but she wanted to have her baby naturally. Her little body couldn't take it though, and she was one of those few cases where she didn't make it through the delivery. I took that baby boy home from the hospital and I made a promise that I'd raise him and love and protect him as my very own son."
Her voice was getting tight and there were tears in her eyes, oh maaaan, she was gonna start crying.
"So it's just been the two of you?" I asked, trying to head off the flood.
She blinked at me, looking at me with that peircing Healer's Look that she was sometimes capable of, like she was looking into me and not at me, then she smiled wryly at some thought or other she didn't share and said in a more normal tone
"Yes, just Alex and me all this time."
I gave her a long, considering look. Maybe I was biased because she looked so much like Rukia, but she didn't look terrible to me. Attractive enough anyway, I didn't see a reason why she shouldn't have got herself a man if she wanted one. I'd heard that a lot of women let themselves go once they got kids (I didn't know if it was true or not, and I valued my skin right where it was too much to ever ask one about it) but she looked fit enough, like she kept in shape, and her shape was feminine enough. I didn't see why she wouldn't have a man. She apparently saw the look of confusion on my too-readable face and added
"You don't seem like you know a lot about the way things work in the mortal world," she said dryly and with some amusement. "I'm a single mother trying to raise a young son, I work long hours at a nursing home to support us both, and what little time I'm not working or making sure my son does his homework and gets off to school just fine is always filled by a billion other details like grocery shopping or cooking dinner or the billion work-related things that follow me home. That's not exactly a life that's conducive to dating, verdad? I mean, there's been one or two over the years, but they never lasted very long. Alex will always come first in my life, and I'm still at the young age where the men are all still self-centered and want the relationship to be all about them."
"Just date older," I replied sensibly.
"Tried that," she said with a sigh. "I love my pretty young men too much to be attracted to the distinguished older gentleman type."
"Ah, so you have a type huh?" I said, trying not to sound like I was curious.
Isana flushed a little and said
"I'm afraid I lost my heart at a very young age... to David Bowie."
I looked at her for a long moment. I'd been in the Mortal world during the Seventies and Eighties so I knew whom she was talking about. I also knew one very pertinent detail about the famous artist that was sure to put a damper on her little fangirl crush.
"You're ah... you're definitely barking up the wrong tree there missy," I said dryly with a grin. "You do realize that the man is ah, strictly dick."
Isana blushed further and this happy little smile came across her face. I was fishing for information and there wasn't any better lead-in to see if there was anything of her old life lingering in her new one. She'd been married to Byakuya freakin' Kuchiki fer heaven's sake, I didn't think that that was the sort of thing that wouldn't stick with a woman, even in between lifetimes.
"Oh, I don't like David Bowie in particular, I just fell in love with this role in a movie he played. Jareth, Goblin King from the Labyrinth."
I looked blankly back at her. Rukia might know it, seeing as she spent so much of her time in the mortal world actually playing mortal, so she soaked up the culture a lot more than I ever had. I just went there on assignment to kill Hollows and pass on the passed-off. Meanwhile, the young mortal woman was melting into a puddle of fangirl right in front of me, she looked like Rukia in a store full of Chappy merchandise.
"He's just so cool!" she went on. "And I mean cool in the original sense of the word, he's got this... this aristocratic-cool vibe, like he's seen it all and it's just so passe."
She pulled her face into a reasonable impersonation of what the Captain's face looked like when he was being his most Kuchiki-ness and said in a cool tone (obviously quoting from the movie)
"What's said is said..."
Still smiling, she went on, clearly warming to her subject.
"And even if he was sort of mean to his underlings, he just had this elegance in the way he pushed them around that just sort of made you want to admire him a little for it... 'And Hoggle, if she ever kisses you, I shall turn you into a prince... Prince of the Land of Stench!"
Greeeaat. And just who did that sound like?
"From one lifetime to the next," I muttered.
"Huh?" Isana asked me inquiringly.
"Nothing," I shook my head.
I smiled a little at that as I turned the spitted fish to cook on the other side.
"So how about you?" she asked curiously. "I know you live in another world and all, is there a Missus Abarai waiting for you?"
I snorted at that.
"Nope," I said, trying not to sound wistful about it.
There was only one woman I wanted to give my last name to, one woman I'd ever wanted to make a family with, and my chances with her had already gone over the horizon. There'd probably never be any missus Abarai for me.
Oh crap. I was doomed to spend the rest of my afterlife by myself!
:Provided all this mess doesn't result in me being executed anyway,: I muttered inside my head.
"That's all, just nope?" she pressed. "A handsome fellow like you? C'mon, there must be somebody."
I looked at her from the corner of my eye. I shrugged and told her the truth. Why not?
"There's always been only one person," I said. "But she..."
"Oh, she doesn't feel the same way, huh?" Isana said empathically.
She opened her mouth and I held up a hand to shut her up before she could start spouting platitudes at me.
"Don' start in about "plenty o' fish in the sea" or that any o' that crap," I told her. "I ain't innerested in other fish, an' it don't matter if my fish doesn't want me. That's how it is, so deal with it."
I said it firmly so she wouldn't mistake me. Isana looked surprised, then smiled a little. I tried not to let her see how much it bugged me that her smile looked like Rukia's.
"Some guys are like that," she acknowledged. "Like swans, they mate for life. I wished my ex-boyfriend was a lot more like that."
I barely restrained a snort. The only ex of hers that I knew of was definitely like that, he still had a shrine to her in his house. Now that I'd met her living reincarnation, I found the whole shrine thing maybe a little creepy. It was okay to mourn a memory of someone who'd passed on, but this girl was very much alive. They didn't know that of course and I was bothered again by the question of whether or not I was supposed to tell anyone about Isana. I mean, a Soul Reaper's responsibility was to keep the balance between the souls of the living and the souls of the dead, didn't interfering in reincarnated souls sort of cross a line somewhere? Wasn't it her right to experience her lives separately so that she could atone and her soul could learn whatever lessons it needed to evolve towards peace? How was she going to do that if she had a bunch of people from her old life (that she didn't remember) showing up and trying to dig things up?
:Gaaaah! Too damn complicated!: I thought in frustration, shelving the internal debate for later.
I was in the middle of an (accidentally) extended assignement right now, I didn't have time for morality puzzles.
"So you're in love and you don't have anyone waiting for you back in your home," she said. "How about family?"
"No," I said shortly. "I have no family."
I'd kinda had one once but they'd all died and Rukia had moved on to bigger and better things, leaving me to chase after her.
Isana looked at once both horrified and pitying.
"That's terrible!" she said. "I just can't imagine it. To me, family is everything!"
I carefully kept the longing look off my face. I wished I had people like that. I guess there was Kira and Momo but...I didn't wanna interfere in their lives.
"Sounds great, so why don't ya call home? You could call 'em fer help and they'd be right there, right?" I asked.
The question slipped out of my mouth before I even realized it and I knew that it wasn't Isana I was asking, but myself. Why didn't I call home? Why didn't I contact my friends? They'd rush to my aid if I asked them to.
:And that's why I won't,: I knew it in the next moment.
I wouldn't call on them because I knew they would come. I wasn't sure where this was going and I didn't want to burden them with my problems. I didn't want them to have to lie for me, or loose face because of me. I was mortal, and if any of the higher-ups ever found out that they knew about it, it would be thier jobs on the line for protecting me, possibly even thier lives on the line. The Captain, I knew, would be honor-bound to seek me out and destroy me for breaking the rules, whether it was voluntary or not didn't matter. Byakuya Kuchiki wouldn't flinch...
:And Rukia might hate him for it,: I thought next.
Normally, I'd say "well good! I hope she hates him, that prat!" but deep down I knew that wasn't the way I felt about it at all. Captain Kuchiki was my rival, and the man who'd stolen my Rukia away from me, he was the stick I used to measure myself against and there were times when I just despised him. But in the end he was still my Captain, and he was a worthy one too.
:Hating the man who'd made her part of his family would just tear her up inside.:
I knew this too. Love wasn't about what I wanted, and it never had been fer me... love was about what was best fer Rukia.
I quietly took the fish from the flames and served it up along with the soup she'd heated and the metal wrapped potatoes she'd put to baking in the coals and we fell to, quietly.
This was my problem and my fight. Still, part of me felt really bad about not being able to at least send in a report or something. Anything that would let them track my progress or make them aware of the danger that might come sneaking up from behind when they weren't looking.
:I mean, what if Uruhara doesn't get my letter?: I fretted a bit.
Or what if he got it, but couldn't figure out the code and Rukia wasn't there to translate it? Okay, okay, so that wasn't very damned likely. But still, what if he dismissed it, or thought it was a hoax, or thought I was crazy or making stuff up?
"I guess I just didn't want to worry them," she said after a long moment. "I can take care of myself and Alex just fine. Granted, we might not have the best of everything, but we get by. We have each other."
I tried not to feel jealous about that either, for a lot of reasons.
"I'm going to get him back safe and sound, mister Abarai," she said with quiet ferocity. "No matter what it takes or how far I have to go, I'm going to bring my baby home."
I said nothing, but I didn't need to. We had the same goal after all, she needed her kid back, and I needed that Shadow to get rid of this mortal body. Once I did that, I could go back and report.
:It might not be a bad idea to have something to report though,: I thought. :Something that'll show 'em that, even though it looked like I'd abandoned my post and went AWOL, I wasn't ever really gone and I'd never had any intention of staying that way.:
"Hey, " I said as I finished my meal. "Ya got any paper on ya?"
"Um yeah, sure... why?"
"I just need to write some stuff down, that's all," I said.
She fished inside her travel tote and pulled out a notebook and some pens. Captain Kuchiki was always complaining about my messy handwriting, and it probably wasn't going to look any better being written by firelight out in the feild, but maybe he'd be understanding in this instance.
:Nah, he'd probably make me do them over, if he doesn't kill me first,: I smiled to myself at that, oddly.
I stared off into the distance, trying to figure out exactly how I was going to word it so that I got the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of space. Captain Kuchiki liked his reports concise and to the point, but not skipping any important details. He wanted facts, not conjecture, and he liked to hear everything in order. He also had a great dislike of personal asides; the Captain didn't want to hear someone's whiney sob-story, he wanted to hear who killed what, where and how, and was there any collateral damage.
"I guess I should turn in," Isana said after cleaning her plate.
"I'll be out here keeping watch for predators," I replied absently.
"Are you sure? You should get some sleep too Renji," she protested.
"I'll probably doze a bit, but I sleep like a cat anyway. I've been on feild missions tougher than this. Don't worry."
I shooed her off and she reluctantly unzipped the door to her tent.
"Goodnight," she said.
"Good night," I replied.
:I wonder if I should write Rukia a letter,: I thought to myself as I tried to get my thought in order and snap into mission report mode.
But what wold I say to her? How would I start it? I dismissed the notion from my mind for the time being, chances were she wouldn't want to get one from me anyway. But what if I didn't write one and she saw that her brother got mission reports and she didn't get even a note to say hello, would that make her angry? I didn't really know. I'd think about it later.
:Okay, mission report, mission report...:
~Involuntary Mission Log, Sixth Squad Lieutenant Renji Abarai...~ I wrote after a long pause to gather my thoughts.
~Investigating the matter of the disappearances in the Rukongai, I visited Kuukaku Shiba, a resident of West District fifty-seven and well-known source of information to compare notes...~
There, found some extra time to get this one mostly edited. I had to actually write in the scene witht eh rock golem because I'd somehow managed to loose it somewhere. (I just know I'll find it next week when I don't need it). I hope you all liked this chapter, let's hear it for Labyrinth references! Anybody? I'm still not happy with the fight scene, it just feels too quick and easy for Renji, but we'll say that thats only a testament to his growing strength... heh heh heh... Um, yeah. I may have to go back and re write it if I ever have time. I hope you guys enjoyed it anyway. I'll try to find time to post again real soon.