Chapter 52
Word Count: 835
Timeline: pre-series
Warnings: Vagueness, ahoy.
Fun Author Babbling: So you know, whenever I go on "unplanned hiatus" it's not because I don't WANT to write anything. It's just the Universe throwing around metaphorical walls for me to bang my head on. I'm very unproductive like that. BUT I will always come back (like a good zanpakuto, or a bouncy ball). Take that, Universe.
The old woman has a proper name and a history. No one is close enough to her to ask for them, though, except her children and they just call her Granny and accept the care she gives without asking a lot of questions. Once she might have minded, but she's old now and a bit tired, and content to stay in her little house and let her long past fade away behind her.
And anyway, she has her children to watch over.
She senses things, this old woman does, that you might not expect her to. She might have made a decent Shinigami, if her life had taken a few different turns. Any powers she may have had are withered with disuse now; still, she can sense heaviness in the air that means a Hollow monster is passing nearby, enough in advance to call her children in and shut the doors tight.
And she senses, with a bone-deep certainty, that both her children will be Shinigami, powerful ones, some day. Even little Toushiro, who still scorns all things spiritual.
In fact, Momo is almost there already; any day now she'll leave for the Seiretei. That saddens the old woman, but she's lived a long time and raised many children, and they all had to go out and make their own lives sooner or later.
She still worries, though.
Momo is one of those people who just somehow glows, no matter what, her inner light as bright and constant as the sun. And even after surviving in the harshness of Rukongai, it seems like Momo knows very little about how black the world can be; that sometimes it's better to let that inner light dim a little, because the ones who shine brightest get singled out.
So the old woman worries that unless Momo learns to guard that brightness inside of her, someday one wrong person will come along and snuff it out for good.
And she worries too about whether Toushiro will be alright once he's on his own, without his sister-figure.
If Momo is bright like sunlight, then Toushiro is like moonlight on snow – beautiful, but cold and a little bit unearthly.
Jinx, demon, the village children whisper about him, but of course the old woman knows better than that. He's only a quiet little boy, she defends him silently, and pretends she never has to repeat it to convince herself.
In the village they all describe him in ice metaphors, without fail. It's true that the temperatures that have everyone else shivering around their fires don't seem even to touch him, but ice is solid and stationary and he is neither of those things.
So she says to him, smiling, when he comes to her with a face full of innocent worry. She never continues that she would rather compare him to other things – to winter moonlight, to icy wind. He doesn't need to hear her strange ramblings.
She treats him like an ordinary child out of compassion, because she knows he is not strange or cold the way the villagers mean it. But the truth – Toushiro is not "only" anything – not normal, not ordinary. The fact that he has high reiatsu is not in itself so remarkable, but what he has is not, even now, the average reiatsu that makes an average Shinigami.
Like the moonlight he is drawn to the dark and unknown, in love with empty spaces (she sees how his eyes stray upward at night to rake across the sky, tracking signs invisible to all but him). Like the snow over the ground he keeps a shroud around his heart that even she, his family, is hard-pressed to see through. Like the wind his sharp mind refuses to be still, even when the only place to go is in futile circles around itself.
Put together, all of that makes a dangerous combination.
And this is the old woman's fear: when the world of the Shinigami finds Toushiro, as she knows it will, they will see him and forget (maybe intentionally, maybe not) that an extraordinary child is still a child, and in their eagerness to have him, they will break him.
Maybe, in his eagerness to belong with them, he'll break himself. She knows her child – she knows his stubborn, perfectionist nature.
She knows he wants something, something he'll never find here. It's been creeping up on him for years, the same way Momo once started staring and smiling at every lamp and cooking fire.
Toushiro stares at the night sky. He stares toward the horizon, wearing the expression that means he's working something out in his mind; spends evening after evening up on the roof, where he can be surrounded by nothing but the air. Sometimes he stares at nothing at all.
And sometimes when he stares absently into the distance, his eyes turn blank and introspective and the old woman suddenly imagines a huge, empty space behind them.
She worries that one day, he'll get lost there.
