Looking back, she would come to realise that he never said yes. Assent had become unnecessary in the face of an inevitable tide. But they resigned themselves willingly. Both, in their own ways, had become accustomed to a lifetime of fighting. Giving in, then, was as close as either could ever hope to come to peace.
For a time, Hisana's happiness eclipsed all else, holding at bay her compulsion to resume searching Rukongai. Kaien Shiba, despite his arrogance, had apparently held his tongue on the matter and Byakuya was blissfully unaware. The little girl was dead, Hisana told herself. She would,in time, come to believe her own lies so long as she repeated them often enough. With her future, stretching out before her, filled with innumerable possibilities, what need had she to relive her memories? In refusing to lay them to rest, she hurt no-one but herself.
Yet she dreamed of her sometimes.
When she did, Hisana found herself filled with the certainty that the child lived; that if she just visited Inuzuri today, then she might catch sight of her, pass her in a street. One word might be enough. She wouldn't have to admit they were sisters or even that she had been searching. She just wanted to know who she was. The sound of her voice. The colour of her eyes. To see if her features were soft like her own or hardened by the things she had seen. If she knew those things, Hisana thought, she would sleep peacefully.
She started visiting Rukongai in the weeks leading up to her marriage. Every day that she could, she went: to Inuzuri in Seventy-eighth; to Seventy-ninth; even Eightieth. Not caring what she risked.
Something that had begun as a guilty secret evolved into an elaborate deception. She could afford to give less and less of herself to Byakuya. Each day, when he left the house, she would change into ragged clothes and wrap a scarf around her hair. She would leave through the gates of the sereitei and spend the day walking hopelessly through dusty, crowded streets. There was never a face she recognised; never a flash of blue eyes beneath a shock of black hair, or the piercing gaze of a girl she'd seen in her dreams. When she returned home, she would change back into the clothes Byakuya had bought her, and he came home each day to an obedient and demure companion. To a willing lover. To a woman who, at first glance, tried to give him everything, but, while every word on her lips was a lie, the only time she was truly at peace was while he slept at her side, his body pale in the moonlight. At such times, he seemed so beautiful to her that his presence was a phantasm she had started to believe. Yet it would not be real, it would not be solid, until she could cast off this one remnant of her earthly life, and bury her sister once and for all.