Disclaimer: not mine.
A/N: This was originally meant to be a companion piece to For the Sake of Practicality, but while I waited for the idea to mull in my head, canon went and ratified itself on me. So that's my excuse for why things/characters are changed around, kthxbye. Also: I skew time for my own purposes:3 mwah
A Decade of Decadence
One would assume that something so inexorable would come in three, but the rules of his life are two: obligation and expectation. He's forgotten, over the years, to whom he owes these unbreakable codes, the laws of his existence; who exactly it is that owns the fount of his soul. The list is not long, and he is not old, but the boundaries between memory and reverie have always been obscure for him. He is the eldest son. Recollection ends there, begins there. Childhood is a time of learning, and whence this process is done and over with and perfected with an edge of excellence, he is a man. He is twelve years old.
He is an ideal. Besides this, there is nothing left for him to understand of life. Ideals are to be unmovable things, unshakable in their conviction and impervious in their nature. He is not young, and he is not rigid. He is what he understands himself to be: ideals live up to their names. Ideals are the reason for names and he has a name. Kuchiki. Young Master Kuchiki. Byakuya. He is thirteen, and knows single-minded assuredness that his name will be whispered from beyond a hundred thousand generations.
He's sent to school where, disregarding the sudden absence of watching eyes, he keeps his hands clean from adolescent filth and the drawers of his desk cleaner. In his first week, there is a practical joker who tries to curse his books and his inks with a minor demon. In his first week, he establishes his reputation of having little patience for fools. He keeps a piece of frayed white cloth in a drawer, pressed between empty scrolls. If questions had ever arisen about this, he's never heard. He is fourteen and perfectly respected.
When spring arrives each year, he is called back to his family compound for the season; the months of bright nights and fragrant trees would amount to satisfaction, had satisfaction been a thing of name and presence. He studies but rarely at home, for by then, his instructors will have conceded that, if not for his age and his inexperience, he would have made a fine teacher himself. His father speaks with him, the first day of his return, and again, the day he leaves. He will always marvel at how coarse the man's voice is, as he has become accustomed to smooth strokes of his brush on paper. He is fifteen years old and had spoken to his father six times to his memory.
The girl's arrival was announced in the middle of his third term. His sister, who had been born five years prior, is being formally accepted under her name. He is called back for the occasion, an invitation he declines respectfully, writing to say that he is very busy. Which he is. Distant lords arrive every decade to procure their protégé from the youngling scrap that is the Academy. They may have been three years premature in their coming, though there is no comment. It has become known that the Kuchiki House has produced a curiosity which was to be beheld, but which was also sixteen years old, ten years too early to bring sword to chain.
Had she not been especially quiet, Byakuya doubts that his sister would have been anything but a very young, very pale, very little nuisance. But she has only tried to throw her arms around his knees once, and her eyes are very dark, and very wide when she looks up to realize that it had not been the coat of her old caretaker that she has latched on to. He lets her go gently, her bird wrists and neck too brittle for anything more. He does not remember being so young, he says to his lady mother from across his tea. She smiles and tilts her cup to her lips and tells him that he never had been. When he replies bemusedly that he is fairly certain that he had, his lady mother does not look from beyond the shadows of her eyelids when she says that he is seventeen, and thus can not be certain of very much at all.
He has found that the fine cloth of scarves and the bone china of headdresses compounds with evasion, not attention. He has not walked through the halls of the Academy for months now, for the politics of the Kuchiki and the endurances of the Divisions has kept him very far from idle since his untimely graduation. He finds it strange that he can come to find eyes from the trees when he practices, early in the mornings, and ears from the walls while he works, early in the nights. For the nights were always early when he chose them to be. Where he keeps within his books a piece of threaded cloth, he keeps within his bedcovers a piece of threaded blade. He is eighteen, and can be no more cautious or wary.
There is always the taming of the sword when one achieves such a merit. What is your name? he murmurs under the fading trees. He can feel the blade quiver through his palm and vibrate against his wrist. He calls upon it again: Tell me your name. The bright tip sweeps in a clean arch above his shoulders, the tassels of the scabbard swinging in perfect symmetry to his actions. The tremors become more pronounced as he coaxes the sword into another form. Step now. Slice upwards. Slide across the dust of a thousand cherry blossoms. The gleaming edge has stopped next to his face when he sees in its reflection a girl padding across the courtyard in time and step with the quiet humming of his blade. Her robe is a brightly colored white, and there is a motif of flowers across her sleeve. Her white face shines in contrast with the pinned dark loops of her hair, and when she presses rose-tipped fingertips to his straining wrist and whispers, Senbonzakura, Senbonzakura, Senbonzakura; he has little choice but to let those fingers slide across his and melt into the blade. He holds her before him, some time later, a sunset later, and says: Byakuya. He is nineteen and wry enough to appreciate the irony.
She has been little concern to him through the years, a little nagging splotch in the back of his mind waiting to be addressed. She waits for him on a garden bench across from where he practices, and he waits for her to cross over when he has finished before he asks her what she wants. She's grown larger in the years, more perceptive, and more respectable. Her eyes are still too large and too dark, and her fingers re but tapered extensions of her fragile palms. Honored Brother, she murmurs, and stands in a rustle of skirts and sleeves. Her eyes are downcast and her hands are properly folded against her gown. It has been said that this one may find you here. He spares her his attention before he solemnly confesses that he does not recognize her, for her to state her name, please. She looks up, startled, and he realizes she is still quite young. This one…she looks down again. This one wishes to apologize for her behavior. She bows. He frowns. He is twenty now, two decades into his life, and hadn't the faintest idea that he had been so integral in his sister's life, while she had been but a passing figure in his.
The offices of the Sixth Division are a series of white walls and well-polished floors. The captain had been a grand lady, who'd retired with the goodwill of the Council and had taken many of the Division members with her. Their replacements are young, but the captain is younger than expected. The former captain regards him from across her office, which was nearly bare now, save for a few cushions on the floor and a tray of tea. So you're the one who's replacing me, she inquires with reserved patience. Yes, is her reply. The woman sighs. Young man, she asks, do you have any idea what you're getting yourself into? He understands: says Byakuya, and continues before his predecessor can interrupt; that this lady chose the symbol for this Division, is he correct? The woman's mouth closes, and she nods, skeptical. How fitting, he murmurs, and drinks his tea. The woman pauses. How odd, she says. Yes? is her reply. She snorts ungraciously into her tea. That you're twenty-one…
There have been few women in his life. His mother had been first, though she is but a memory to his occasional recollection, a swimming image of red cloth and black hair that surfaces without a face. His sister he's barely encountered, and he can recall her image at her wedding with more clarion than he can recall the curve of her fingers, the shadow of her face. His predecessor is to be respected, venerated perhaps; and his sword has been a quiet and constant variable, though her graceful neck and white voice meant very little in the end, so long as she was loyal. So when he comes across this girl, whose hair as neither long nor soft nor white, whose hands are small and wiry and weathered; who does not huddle from the rain on his doorstep but stares up into it with a look of wonder in her gray eyes. She turns to him as the sky trembles in thunder, eyes heavy with a look of familiarity he knows is most certainly undue and unwarranted. Her clothes are rough and patched, and her feet are bare, nearly swallowed by the rain. He does not known who had let her in, or how she had passed the guards into Seireitei but she smiles then, and laughs, and holds her hands up to catch the rain and feel the thunder. It has been ten years since he has begun to remember, begin to plan – but amidst the tap of rain on his umbrella and the tap of dancing footsteps, he realizes he has lost himself in the rain. All the grooming and posturing and decadence of his twenty-two years trickle away in with the water, as he smiles back and no longer feels remarkable.