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10. The Blue Heavens

"Take off your waraji, come on," she urged, and he hesitantly obliged, kicking off his shinigami sandals and white socks. He looked down at his suddenly bare feet, stark and pale against the green of the grass. It was a funny feeling. He wasn't used to being barefoot; back then, in Karakura, he'd been warned of garbage, dog deposits, nasty things left about for some reason.

Here, in Soul Society, there weren't such things.

It was a funny feeling, but it wasn't bad. Rukia was already dashing about with glee, clambering up a hillock and finding a stiff-necked tree to rest a hand on.

"Ichigo!" she called, waving her hand. "Come here!"

He half hopped, half strode toward her, still adjusting to the oddness of prickling grass against his feet. He liked it, though. It was strangely nostalgic and bright and sweet.

He seemed to be moving too slow, for she ran back a short distance and grabbed his wrist, pulling him up the hillock. "Come on, tawake," she pressed, and flashed him a sudden grin that made his heart jump.

"Why're you so happy?" he grumped at her.

"Because," she said vaguely, and plopped down on the grass, elbows on her knees. She began to pick daisies, humming lightly under her breath.

"That doesn't help," he sighed, and settled beside her. He watched as her delicate fingers began to weave a daisy chain. Engrossed in the careful task, she did not answer. Quite used to the silences that liked to stretch between them, he only huffed lightly into his arms and picked at the folds in his black robes and wiggled his toes in the turf.

"Toes look sort of like grubs," Rukia observed suddenly.

There was a pause.

"Ew," they chorused, and laughed.

There was another contemplative silence.

"They do look like grubs," Ichigo said darkly. "Disturbing."

"Naa, Ichigo," she said quietly. "Why is the sky blue?"

"...Huh?! What kind of question is that?"

"But do you know?"

"Well, there's a real complicated reason for it that I don't wanna try to explain right now," he grumbled, averting her eyes.

"Aha," she said smugly. "You don't know."

"I do know! I-I, it's, it's like, reeeeeeeally complicated and you wouldn't understand a whole bunch of stuff -"

"Then tell me with words I will understand," she retorted.

"Tha - Rukia, that's my point! You can't explain something like this with words a shinigami would understand!" He pulled at his bangs exasperatedly.

"Well, I think you are simply covering up," she said wryly.

A silence.

"...Why can you read me like this?!"

"Mm." The sound she made was so maddeningly smug.

"I have a feeling I learned why it's blue sometime ago," he muttered sheepishly. "But I have no idea now. Something to do with the atmosphere and the ozone layer..."

"O-Ozuun?..."

"...Never mind."

"I think the sky is blue because someone decided a black sky is horrid," she said lightly. "So that person went and painted it a nice blue. But some other people liked it black, so they decided to make it equal, with night-time a black sky and day-time a blue sky."

Enthralled, he watched her spin out the story, and as false as he knew it was, it was so graceful, so quaint, so Rukia-like, that he couldn't help but believe it.

"Sometimes, when the night-people got tired of their black, they decorated the between-time of night and day with bright oranges and reds, and purples, and golds... And the day-people liked that idea, so they took the mornings, and turned them pale rosy pinks, like cherry blossoms, and even put dashes of the lightest blues and purples..." Her eyes were closed now, a gentle smile illuminating her features.

"And the sun needed a say in it all, so he felt like he should help out with making the day very bright and pretty, and began his rounds of coming up and going down, to light up the nice colours they painted on the sky... And some bits of paint fell into the oceans, and coloured them too, so they would match the sky. Then those night-people and day-people went up to the sky to hang up the stars and clouds, and -"

All her breath escaped in a surprised squeak as Ichigo fell onto her, arms around her, and they both knocked over onto the grass.

"Keep going," he whispered, smiling into her hair. They were both stiff with awkwardness, but something flitted so joyfully within them that they couldn't help but want to ignore the self-consciousness of lying in the grass with - oh dear, he was hugging her, wasn't he? His mind was a-blunder.

Rukia flicked gently at the trembling blades of grass beside her face, smiling and smiling.

"And then the moon came up, and found the sun."

With that, she picked up his heavy arm across her and slipped the daisy chain onto his wrist.

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