A/N: This is another piece from the "Good Wife" universe, kind of anyway, that takes Byakuya's perspective. Kind of. Um, yeah.
Disclaimer: Kubo-sensei's, I'm just playing.
"Don't weep insects-
stars, lovers themselves
must part." - Kobayashi Issa
Hisana stares up at him the way she always does: head slightly bowed, half-smile on her face, the slightest hint of hesitation in her gaze that he would only identify years later. Tonight the fall of the moonlight at his back shadows her features and in her eyes he reads judgement. It is just as well, he should have known better than to make her his confessor.
The manor around them is silent. Rukia is still out but Kurosaki is in, fast asleep in his room, snoring with his mouth wide open, sprawled half-off the futon when last Byakuya checked. His reiatsu is steady; the nightmares have not started yet.
"Hisana," Byakuya breathes over the little shrine, and imagines her responding with a soft "Hmm" back still turned as she focuses on her embroidery. If she were standing in front of him now, facing him, that half-smile would widen into a full, true one, that lights up her whole countenance and short-circuits his brain. Even now, years later, her effect is palpable and so much so that not just his thoughts but his courage momentarily flees. Not that anyone would blame him really. How can a man confess to his wife that he has fallen for another?
"Hisana," he says again, and as if in response a night wind blows gently over the estate and into the room, fluttering the petals of the bouquet—chrysanthemums, he realises only after he has entered the manor with them—and stirring the loose strands of his hair. Perhaps she already knows the truth and is waiting for an explanation. "Forgive me."
There is a limit to how far one can trace reiatsu and yet Byakuya is very sure he can feel Rangiku's somewhere in the vicinity of the Tenth, halfway across the Seireitei. Is she aware, in that way that women are, that he has been watching her?
He is not aware of it himself, not at first, not until Renji casually mentions one afternoon as they walk back from the training yard, "She's not seeing anyone."
In the act of observing her teasing one of his men on her way out of the Sixth, Byakuya asks, "Who?"
There is a pause where Renji stumbles, and then he hurries to stand before his captain, forcing Byakuya to stop. When he looks up at the lieutenant with a raised eyebrow, Renji returns the gesture with an added half-smile and replies, "Lieutenant Matsumoto, she's not seeing anyone. Lieutenant Hisagi tried to start a rumour that she was but no one believed him."
Byakuya stares at him a moment, and asks, "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because," says Renji, turning to look at his fellow lieutenant as well, "I'm not the only one who's noticed you looking at her."
"She is…" he tries, stops, looks over Hisana's smile, encouraging it is now, and he smiles back. He thinks back to the other woman, and maybe he should not think of her that way because there is not really anyone in her path really but he cannot help it because he is here with Hisana now and she will always be first. He begins again, still smiling, "Impertinent."
That put it mildly. The smile disappears as he focuses, continues, "And beautiful." Very much so, and she knew and flaunted it. "And confident." One had to be, to dress the way she did and still expect to be taken seriously. "And loyal." The last man who dared to test that learned at the point of her zanpakuto. "And kind." She did not mock Lieutenant Hisagi's attentions even as she ignored them. "And playful." Too playful, really, though he had to concede that he did not have many opportunities to see her at work. "And completely unaware of me," he finishes and smiles at Hisana's portrait again. "It is strange to be in this position once again, especially since unlike you, she knows who I am and where I come from and what I represent rather than 'that silly boy who keeps coming around to quote strange poetry at me'."
He can hear Hisana's voice saying the lines with him in head and there is the pain. No, his attraction to Rangiku does not mean that he has fallen out of love with or forgotten Hisana. It is impossible.
He looks away from her picture to the chrysanthemums again and says, "I have been informed by Captain Ukitake that she sometimes joins them at the theatre. She particularly likes traditional dance. It is curious, for a woman who seems to have baser interests to have such a refined one…I know, that was arrogant of me, and yet I cannot help it. What am I to do Hisana?"
To be petulant, this is the Kurosaki boy's fault. One of the many consequences of his invasion of Soul Society, full of filial rage and the fervour of the righteous is that Byakuya has been left to reassess a lot of his life. Byakuya is Lord of the Kuchiki and Captain of the Sixth Division, most powerful shinigami born to the family in four generations…but that is not all he is. He cares, deeply, passionately, wholly for the things that wander into his life and holds onto them with a will that would be obsessive if it was not for the fact that he is not alone in this. Most shinigami become this way, after a while, but having lost his mother as a child and his father as a young man, Byakuya develops it early.
He could not save Hisana. He wanted to, he tried, physicians from all over the Seireitei and a few in the Rukongai, exotic diets, experimental treatments, prayers to ancestors who would turn up their nose at the street rat he had dared make a lady, and none of it worked. She left him with nothing but memories and a younger sister who could have been her identical twin.
Rukia he could have saved. Pride, stubbornness, the safety of tradition and rules stayed his hand. If he could not save Hisana how could anyone expect him to save her sister?
And then there was Kurosaki, spouting the things that had left Byakuya sleepless for weeks and demanding, no commanding him to get up and do his duty. Not to the clan or the rules or the corrupt morass that Soul Society had become, but to that which mattered above all: family.
So where does Rangiku fit into all this?
It is by chance that she wanders into his path. After the war, when the Seireitei returns to its realm and the barriers fall and all hands are needed for many are dying and so few are capable of helping them, he is drafted into helping the Fourth Division lieutenant into tending the others for his kido skills. He is not the best healer, but she gives him the easy cases, those whose reiatsu needs just a little push. And so that is how he ends up at Rangiku's bedside.
She looks dead; he remembers thinking, when he stands over her cot. She has been shot through, as her captain before her, by some kind of light or fire weapon. Thankfully the effect has cauterized the wound it made so that she does not bleed out. It is a cruel thing, he thinks, to do to a woman who already has lost bits of her soul. And yet she breathes.
All he has to do is apply a little push and her reiryoku will do the rest. He stoops beside her and raises a hand over just centre of her left breast. The healing kido forms immediately, glowing brilliant green and moments after that he feels the pull on his reiryoku as her body starts to heal itself. He keeps the kido going until her eyes flutter open and she turns to him and says, "Cap…Captain Kuchiki…what…where is…"
He ends the kido at once, stands again and says, "Be quiet. You need to rest."
There is a touch of irritation in her voice as she tries again, "Where is…where is Captain Hitsugaya?"
"Resting, as you should be," says Byakuya, and then he walks away to go to the next bed.
As he settles beside the next patient, he thinks he hears her murmur, "I was just asking a question."
It is not the best run-in one could have with the woman they are to fall in love with. In fact, it is so inconsequential in terms of all that has happened to them thus far that he does not expect her to remember it. Against all the odds, she does and tells him so when next they meet, at a memorial for the fallen.
There are too many names to count, to remember. Byakuya cannot deny his relief that none of the plaques bear the names "Kuchiki Rukia", "Abarai Renji" or "Kurosaki Ichigo". But there are many others, some of who were friends, some of who were not even shinigami. What right does he have to be pleased to have these three spared when others were not even given a choice?
Captain Kurotsutchi's grin gleams against the black face-paint.
He is turning to leave, Renji and Ichigo ahead of him when she appears with Captain Hitsugaya. They exchange nods of acknowledgement and continue on. But just as she is passing, she leans her head to him and whispers, "For a novice, you did not do a bad job. Not even a scar."
He turns his head to look her in the eyes, and finds that she is smiling. Involuntarily his gaze drops to where the burn mark was and yes, there is no scar, no trace that she was ever harmed. When he lifts his gaze back to her face, her smile is wider and she adds with a wink, "See, perfect!" Then she hurries after her captain.
He does not see her again for two years.
A lot happens in that time. Reconstruction, a recruitment drive, reconciliation, trials, punishments, and surprise relationships. Okay, so the Captain Commander and Ise Nanao is a surprise to no one, nor Ayasegawa and Madarame, but Renji and Sui-Feng? The last is brief, appears to confuse both (though Yoruichi is thrilled and teasing) and ends without preamble or explanation. Well, war does create very strange bedfellows.
Byakuya hears nothing of Rangiku, does not even look, focusing instead on work and home and keeping Kurosaki's grabby little teenage boy hands away from Rukia. And then suddenly Rangiku is everywhere.
The first time he sees her in two years is when he tosses the Shinigami Women's Association from the manor. She walks out arm in arm with Ise Nanao, stopping briefly to give him a curtsy, holding his gaze the entire time. Then there is the Recruitment/Career Day at the Shino Academy. Shortly after that they have a joint training exercise in the Living World, followed by another in the Rukongai and then she starts turning up at the Sixth Division on the premise of watching Renji spar with his captain. Byakuya suspects that all this is part of some elaborate plan to get in his way, to draw his attention and he is beyond irritated to realise that it has worked. She fills his conscious thought in idle moments and turns up in his dreams.
He looks down at Hisana's portrait and says, "If I were to approach her…would you understand?"