Author's Note: A story of Hisana and Byakuya. Special thanks to everyone following the tale and honorary mentions to reviewers….. OMG, Chelly, you're still here! Thank you! Your review made me immeasurably happy. ^^ Thank you also to Icyangel, Splitheart, Kaze, Sky1011 (hello there) and Ashes2ashes. And also to the anonymous reviewer. I hope it is romantic enough for you. :D
Hisana has been staying in Byakuya's house for a little under a year….. (If you like this story, please check my profile for others in the sequence).
She returned to the mansion a little after nightfall. The search had been fruitless.
As soon as she had entered Rukongai, she had traded one of her fine dresses for something made of sack-cloth and hemp. It had not been so hard to blend back in after that.
She had thought she might feel some nostalgia for the dusty streets, festooned with lost and hopeless-looking souls, but, instead, she found herself glad that she no longer had to stay here, that she could return to a warm bed. His bed, she realised. How quickly she had come to rely on Byakuya's world, and how completely he filled her thoughts. It was only Rukia's presence, in a corner of her mind, that gnawed at that happiness, tainting his kindness, staining her memories of the night before.
Nearly a hundred years ago, she had left the little girl on somebody's doorstep. She found the alley again. The houses on one side had been torn down and ragged men and women were picking their way through the rubble. The doorway itself was crumbling, but she sat down on the step nonetheless, just as she had done a century before.
All these years wanting to believe she'd done the best she could. A child herself, she'd not been fit to raise another. The girl had surely had a fighting chance of survival, and better here than being hauled around by a sister who couldn't take care of her.
Hisana put her head in her hands. Who the hell was she kidding?
She'd wanted rid of the child. No matter how she justified it, though justify it she must for the sake of her sanity, the overriding truth was that she'd grown to despise the screaming, howling thing. It hadn' t been her sister, just something unwanted and resented.
Hisana looked up as a bunch of children ran fleet-footed down the street.
How old would she be now? If she had strong reiatsu, and Hisana had good reason to suspect she did, then Rukia might appear to be in her early teens by now. Would she know why she aged slowly? Why she hungered?
"If I'd known, I could have told you. I could have taught you," she said aloud. Because that was what big sisters did. They didn't leave you behind.
This was Rukongai. Could a child really have survived alone?
She wandered the streets of Inuzuri until sundown and, though she eventually found the courage to ask, no-one knew the name 'Rukia;' no-one recalled an abandoned infant. Most people couldn't even remember that there had been a row of houses standing on the other side of the street.
And so she returned to the mansion after dark, still dressed in the sack-cloth garment she'd bartered her good clothes for.
She stood in the garden and listened to the sounds of a heated argument. She'd never seen Byakuya angry. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but the bitterness in his voice made it difficult for her to move from the spot. She stood on the lawn, just outside one of the main rooms in which torches were lit. Through the paper screens, she could see figures. The nearest was Byakuya. He walked the length of the room, turned and paced back again, keeping up a constant flow of low, angry words. The other would answer gruffly or issue something like a barked challenge, to which Byakuya responded with greater venom.
As the argument reached a fever pitch, Byakuya turned and tore back the paper door:
"Do it then! Do whatever you see fit!" he told the other, and snapped it shut behind him with enough force that the frame shuddered. He hadn't yet seen her. A few paces down the decking, he ripped open the door to his own apartments. Hisana ran to reach him before he could slam it in her face, and he looked down in surprise, letting her duck under his arm to get into the room: "Where have you been?" As coarse as the question sounded, he didn't seem to expect an answer. He strode to the end of the corridor, stopped, and paced back.
Hisana pressed herself back against one of the walls, her head down, her hands over her belly. Her mind was filled with the streets of her childhood and with the empty eyes of the hundred or more people she had stopped and asked for help. She had no intention of letting him know what she had been through, but she did need him here. Now. Attentive. Aware.
He stormed past her: "My grandfather is foolish! He sees only what he wants to see, and then he tells me that I am blind! Me! He thinks this is a selfish whim on my part, as if I'm the one who's spitting on my parents graves! My father loved my mother. What does he know! And, anyway, it's nothing to do with them or with him! How can laws govern something like that? How can laws tell me who I'm to marry? I am the head of this household and if he wishes to leave then that is his decision. He has nowhere to go. He will come to respect my choices or he will not be a part of this family!" In all the noise and staccato of his words, Hisana had heard only one:
"Marry" –
He turned to look at her, his face unreadable:
"You've been under my roof for nearly a year now."
"Well, I don't think that means that we have to!" she cried, not entirely sure of what she was arguing for. As she raised her voice though, a greater part of the certainty drained from his features:
"Have to – No – I didn't mean" –
"Were you planning on consulting me?"
"I was going to ask" -
"Asking might be a place to start! Or should I hear it from him? Maybe we could wait until I'm in front of the priest. Or years from now, you could just tell me we've been married for a century and I never noticed. We could do it that way!"
He stared, caught entirely off guard by her anger, and, after a moment, walked past her, untied his sword from his belt and laid it on a table. She watched the number six rise and fall on his back with every breath. He had never intended to mention marriage, she thought. Now, he was furious with himself for having spoken out of turn. She knew he didn't carry emotions well. They came and went like squalls in a storm. More tentatively, she said: "Ask me, Byakuya-sama."
"Not like this," he said.
"How then?"
"Another way. I'd planned it. It was going to be - good." He turned back to her, his face calm and unreadable once again. And then he approached her, took her hands in both his own and spoke with such sincerity: "Hisana, I've never known anybody like you and I need to ask" – Something caught his eye. He frowned suddenly: "Where did you find that dress? That is very ugly!"
"That's your question?" she cried.
His face fell as he realised what he had said and so exquisite was his crestfallen expression that it caused a tremor of laughter to bubble up in Hisana's throat. She smothered it with both hands, but still, after a moment's gasping, she began to giggle uncontrollably. He watched her for a time. Then asked:
"Are you happy?" She snorted with laughter and folded up against the wall. "You're still laughing."
"Try it again," she said through tears.
"No. Now you're laughing at me."
She was. And she did, for a time, while he watched her as if she were a stranger who had entered his home. Eventually, he turned away. She went after and caught his hand:
"Kuchiki Byakuya, marry me!"
"No."
"Marry me!"
"No."
"Nothing makes any sense to me unless I'm with you and you're the only thing in the world that makes me smile." He stopped. He was staring straight ahead:
"And laugh."
"Yes."
He looked down at her hand curled into his:
"Then you may ask me one more time."
"Kuchiki Byakuya," she said, and her voice softened as he took her other hand: "Would you do me the great honour of marrying me?"
He picked her up, so that, when he kissed her, she was looking down into his eyes. They seemed old in so ageless a face. Calm waters on the surface of a rolling ocean.