Hisana spread out the papers around her and stared at the words. Byakuya had taught her the art of calligraphy and dictated the poems she had written. In neither of her lifetimes, up until this point, had she ever created something beautiful. The lettering was hers though. The clothes, the books: she could leave them behind, but not the poems. She had meant to pack, but somehow she had wound up here, kneeling in a pile of papers, sifting through memories of sunny afternoons. That was how he found her. "Are you ready?" the old man asked. He could see that she was not and his cane thundered on the wooden floor as he approached. He grunted as he laid eyes on the calligraphy: "My grandson has a love of this kind of writing."
"It occurs to me that, if I leave and offer him no explanation, I will hurt him greatly. Yet if I tell him you required me to go, then, with all due respects, I may shame you, Sir."
"I have every intention of telling him the truth," he said gruffly.
"He will come after me."
"You are insolent, Child."
"I'm realistic."
"Insolent to think that you mean so much to him."
"With all respect, are you blind, Sir?"
Ginrei snarled, took her by the arm and jerked her to her feet so that she staggered:
"Get out of my house!"
"Where should I go?"
"Anywhere. Away from here. Back to Rukongai."
"He will come after me."
"If he does, he will break with this family." She looked up for the first time as he continued: "Byakuya is the last of a pure bloodline. His strength, his reiatsu, his very being are bequeathed to him by this family and, if you believe I would allow this line to be sullied by a human soul, you are sorely mistaken, Girl." She shook him off and snatched up a handful of the papers on the floor, flinging them at the old man as if her anger could change his mind:
"He's your family! Why can't you let him choose?"
"He shall. He'll choose between you and us."
"And if he chooses me?"
He laughed unpleasantly:
"Why would he? What can you offer him?" She didn't answer. She knew that he loved her. It was a strange thing, but it had given her the strength to keep living and start believing in this world beyond Rukongai. Yet she knew too that she had nothing to give him in return: not even the affection he showed so freely. She felt so cold sometimes, as if she was staring at the world through sheets of glass. "What do you say?" asked the old man.
She stepped past him and she didn't look back.
Outside, the garden was covered in a crisp new layer of snow. She had little to protect her from the cold save for a fur stole she had flung over her shoulders. Had she known she would be leaving for sure, she might have planned better, but, as it was, she was forced to pick her way carefully through the icing sugar garden to the gates of the mansion.
The street outside was covered with a thin sheen of ice and frost glittered in the trees. She began the long walk towards the gates of the sereitei, but before she reached the end of the road, she stopped.
She couldn't go back.
It wasn't even that she didn't want to, but, dressed in the fine linens and furs Byakuya had bought for her, she would stand out a mile in a Rukongai street. She guessed that she would be attacked within inches of the checkpoint if she attempted to re-enter Seventy-ninth dressed like this.
She glanced around her: shinigami, servants and messengers. Was there anyone she could ask? Anyone she could turn to? They weren't questions she was used to asking herself.
She settled on the one man she knew Byakuya trusted.