The rain has been constant for days.
Rukia glances out Renji's office window and watches as raindrops race down it, leaving behind long, water tracks that leave her unable to see anything. It's started to get lighter today, so much so that she only felt a little cruel sending Kiyone out to run drills with the rest of their Squad.
Ordinarily it's one of Rukia's duties, something she inherited from Renji, who is usually too busy filling in for Captain Ukitake to see to his own duties as lieutenant. And now Rukia's passed it onto Kiyone, who is just barely a seated officer. Assigned designations in Squad Thirteen hardly mean anything anymore, when duty has to pass through two or three posts before someone can actually see to it.
Rukia sighs and rubs her eye with the palm of her hand, her vision blurring when she tries to blink the soreness away. It's been nothing but paperwork since Renji left, his, the Captain's, and hers, all piled onto her desk. Most of it is routine busywork, basic assignments that she's practically able to finish with her eyes closed at this point: budgets for the barracks, requisition forms for new equipment.
Mission status reports.
Rukia glances over at the corner of her desk, where a blank report sheet is waiting. If Renji isn't back tomorrow, she'll have to fill it out, providing an update on the status of his mission, despite the fact that she'll have nothing new to report.
She's completed three so far since Renji left, one for each week he's been away from the Seireitei. Each one of them has been the same: no contact, no response.
No indication of when he'll be back.
It isn't unusual that a mission to the world of the living turns out like this, though. Hollows are able to mask their presence with little trouble, and a mission to eradicate one specific hollow can spread out across months, even, as they pop in and out of Hueco Mundo. Trying to track a hollow without being caught sometimes requires that a shinigami do everything to mask their presence, including dropping all contact with their squad until the mission concludes.
Renji is experienced enough to be able to make that determination all on his own, but the fact that Renji has been gone so long without so much as a word isn't normal. His silence has slowly passed from annoying to frustrating to worrying, and even Rukia herself is unable to say what comes after that. Freaking out? Full blown panic?
With a grumble under her breath, Rukia stands and begins finger-combing through the file, looking for the bare bones report Renji had drawn up before he left on his mission. Renji, as a general rule, is always scant on his reporting and light on his documentation, preferring to keep everything up in his head instead of writing it down.
Idiot.
As predicted, the report Renji prepared before leaving is laughably short. There's no name to the hollow, meaning it's either avoided detection long enough to avoid having its name be recorded, or it has yet to be connected to one of the many that have already been identified.
The description Renji provided is equally vague, and equally frustrating. There's no description of its abilities or physical appearance, though Renji attributed several deaths of shinigami and humans to it, with several more suspected. It's evaded detection so efficiently that a lot of the notes are marked with question marks to indicate Renji's own uncertainty.
There's a note, though, that its alleged activities have been centered around one specific location.
Karakura Town. Rukia scrunches her nose. The name is somewhat familiar, though she thinks it's been a while since she would have last passed through there. If the hollow has realized it's being tracked, though, it could already be halfway across Japan right now.
Rukia shifts uncomfortably before slipping the report back into Renji's accordion file, where she'll probably be digging it out again tomorrow, when her report is due and Renji still hasn't contacted them.
Outside, she hears Kiyone's barking as she herds the rest of the squad back into the barracks from the courtyards. She can see their blurry forms through the streaked window, despite the darkened skies.
It's still raining, and the rain has hardly stopped since Renji left.
As a general matter, Rukia is rarely ever at ease when Renji is away for too long on a mission, especially when she has no way of knowing when he'll be back. He'd mock her if she ever confessed something like that to him, but it's true: Renji is the closest thing to family that she has. That she's ever had, excluding Kaien, and Captain Ukitake.
She's made more acquaintances since she joined Squad Thirteen: Kiyone and Sentaro have both clung to her, more like children than friends, and she's gotten familiar enough with Renji's friends, though she wouldn't call them her friends either. They're close, but not close in the way that she and Renji are close, and things are harder for her, being alone without him.
But still, something doesn't feel right, in a way that's more than just her typical anxieties when he's gone.
Renji hadn't made the hollow sound like too big of a deal, though she doesn't wonder if at least some of that hubris was him downplaying the danger of the mission for her benefit and to set Kukaku's more protective instincts at ease. It may very well be a routine hollow hunt for all she knows, and an elusive hollow doesn't always equate to a strong one, once it's confronted.
With a sigh, Rukia gathers her remaining papers into a neat stack for later and slips out of Renji's office, closing the door behind her softly. She's not afraid to leave work for him to get to once he's back, especially if he's been wasting his time dawdling while she's been buried under work.
Still, it'll be nice to have something to come back to later, to take her mind off of her worries.
Rukia finds her replacement for the day in the common area, wringing water from her wet shinigami uniform. "Kiyone." The fourth seat jumps, as if she'd been caught at something. "Is everyone settled? Did the drills go well?"
"Yes, ma'am!" Kiyone snaps to attention with gusto, her hand audibly smacking against her forehead in a vigorous salute, sending water droplets flying. "Trained, fed, and finishing up in the showers right now as we speak!"
Rukia smiles softly at her enthusiasm. "Thanks for your help. I'm sorry to be passing my work off onto you."
"Not at all, Miss Rukia!" Kiyone replies, with another sharp salute. She relaxes, then shakes her head with a smile. "Anything to help out while you're covering for Captain Ukitake and Renji both."
"I appreciate it." The gratitude she's able to muster feels inadequate, but Kiyone seems willing enough to chalk it up to merely being tired.
More shinigami from their unit are starting to matriculate back to the barracks, some of them throwing curious glances at both of them. She isn't as close with the rest of the squad as she is with Kiyone, but she still puts on a smile - a bigger, better, more convincing one - and waves to them as they pass through, if only so that she can put them at ease.
In her mind, though, she's thinking about the columns on the budget acquisition forms, the number of uniforms they'll need when the upcoming class of shinigami graduate and are split between the teams.
Rukia had held off on it at first, believing that Renji would be back in time to go through it himself, though she knows if she doesn't get started within the next day or so, they'll be scrambling to get it all done in time.
"Rukia?" Kiyone asks. As Rukia turns back to her, Kiyone sets one gentling hand on her forearm. "It's gonna be okay," she says, giving her a light squeeze. "The lieutenant is gonna be back before you know it."
Rukia's face burns. "I'm not worried about him, I—"
Kiyone gives her a knowing look. "It's okay to be, Rukia. We all feel the same way any time a mission goes on too long, regardless of who is involved, It's perfectly normal."
Rukia shakes her head. "Renji is a strong shinigami. Whatever is keeping him, I know he'll be okay."
But Kaien was a strong shinigami too, and so was his wife. It hadn't made a difference for either of them, and Rukia doesn't know if she can handle another loss of that magnitude again.
When she lost Kaien, Renji was all she'd had left—Renji was the one who looked after her, who pulled her out of her darkest moods, when the guilt and grief became too much. If not for him, Rukia doubts that she would have ever had the courage to face the Shiba clan again after Kaien's death.
She can only imagine how things might have turned out if he hadn't been there for her, if he hadn't pushed her to visit the Shiba family and offer her condolences and explain what had happened when every impulse she had was driving her further into her own grief.
It'd been the right thing to do, and Renji had understood that, much better than Rukia had. Kukaku had been quick to take both of them under her wing in the aftermath, throwing her protective mantle over them both with all the force of an incoming tidal wave. She hadn't given up on trying to make it official to match, though Rukia doubts she and Renji would ever agree to it.
Renji, she knows, will follow her lead in whatever it is that she does, though Rukia knows that her mind will never change, regardless of how persistent Kukaku is. Becoming a Shiba, being taken into Kaien's family like that—
It's too much, and Rukia could never handle it.
"There are just a few more things I want to finish up tonight," Rukia says. It's at least half true—the work piled up in Renji's office will take more than a few nights to get through, and Rukia will definitely spend her night getting to it, but Rukia has one detour to make before then. "Thank you again for helping today," she tells Kiyone, before she turns around and heads back towards Renji's office.
When she's far enough away that she knows Kiyone won't be able to see her, and that she isn't following behind her, Rukia ducks out the next door way and exits the barracks, heading off towards a place she's never once gone uninvited.
Her destination is a little over a mile outside of the Seireitei, where the firm ground gives way to water. The rain out there is only a light drizzle, though the sky is the same dark, dishwater grey as it was near the barracks. She steps onto a wooden dock stationed by the water, her footsteps beating against the boards as she hurries along to the opposite end.
The door is shut when she arrives, though she hears a faint stirring of movement on the other side. Rukia kneels before the door and knocks once, firmly, before she begins to speak.
"Captain Ukitake." Her voice is a little uncertain, and at first, it wavers. It isn't often that she's seen Captain Ukitake at all, especially lately, let alone sought him out on her own.
Still, Rukia sucks in a deep breath and holds her shoulders high, mustering the same strength that Renji has always carried for her. "Captain Ukitake, I would like to request your permission to go to the world of the living to locate and retrieve Lieutenant Renji Abarai."