[fic -- BLEACH -- For This Once, Never Again]
Title: For This Once, Never Again
Author: cccpirate / Karlie
Characters: Hisana, Byakuya, Gin
Word-count: 6,120 OMG LONGEST FIC I EVER WROTED YAEY
Rating: PG? No more than PG-13, surely.
Summary: Gin hates sad stories. Hisana's life was full of them.
Based on a theory about Rukia.


I really, really hate this fic. I’ve been writing it for like, two years and I was all-but-ready to jack in Bleach fandom altogether, but then Kubo turned Starrk and Lilynette into even more untold holy batshit awesome, and so I’m stuck here. halp. plz.




When Hisana was fifteen, she was engaged. She was a good daughter from a good Kyoto family, one of the few to have survived the revolution and the war, and her husband-to-be, well, he was older, a well-known general from an equally good family with a scarred face and rough hands but a gentle way of speaking – to her, at least.

Their marriage was in the early summer; the day auspicious and warm. Her new husband held her hand in his, rough, calloused fingers curling around hers in promise, and when he kissed her during a brief moment of solitude, his lips were warm with the ceremonial sake. When he led her to their room, Hisana was not afraid, though she had heard stories; brides bleeding to death on their wedding night, the fact that it would hurt.

But her husband, he understood. His hands, the fingers long and calloused from reins and a sword, were gentle, taking her layers off one at a time, his hands sliding beneath silk. When she was naked before him, he took a cloth, soaked it in lily-water and cleaned the paint from her face in slow, cool swipes. "There," he said when he was finished, and caught a stray droplet on the back of his finger as it sailed to the hollow of her throat. He held it to her mouth; it tasted of flowers.

The following spring, just after the trees had blossomed, he was called away to battle. Hisana never asked where he would be; it was not her place. He came to her in the night, his yukata loose and his hair and eyes dark in the shadows. He kissed her mouth, her breasts, her belly, and stayed until she woke in the morning, kissing her goodbye.

She watched him mount his horse, not crying, because that was beneath her, but the keening loss in her chest was bitterly felt, especially in the night-time, when her bedding still smelled of him and her and them and the air was thick with camellia and cherry-blossoms.

Towards the beginning of summer, when she expected he would be home, he did not arrive. Instead, he sent one of his younger soldiers to guard her and the house, a man who, he felt, was reserved enough that he felt he could be trusted with Hisana. He had taken a particularly vicious slice to his left arm and right knee, the soldier said, and though they had not bled much, the letter said that Hisana's husband wanted him to recuperate somewhere else than the noisy medical tents.

Hisana was quite smitten. The soldier had impeccable manners, was friendly and courteous even to the house-staff, and had an amiable, teasing manner. When she spoke to him, he listened quietly and then replied, just as quietly, as though he understood just how lonely she was, even though she didn't tell him in words. Sometimes he would go wandering around the area, especially at night, and once or twice he said he went to visit family near Otsu, returning with something he said he thought she would have liked, and always looked much healthier than he had when he left. He was handsome, which was always a benefit, tall and pale with eyes perpetually closed in a smile. His hair was colourless, the colour of steel; he had laughed when she said that, in that strange high voice of his, and corrected her: it was the colour of silver.

At the turn of the season, he was healed and well, and called back to the field.

She went to his rooms that night.

He looked surprised, and then smiled, reaching for her with long hands and a teasing look in his eyes. In the morning, he had already gone; he had folded Hisana's cast-aside yukata carefully next to the futon, and laid a small, skeletal leaf on top. Her pillows smelled of soil and persimmon; it was not an unkind smell.

In the mid-winter, Hisana caught a chill; only a very minor one, they assured her, and was confined to a thick, warm futon. Every hour, a maid would bring her hot soup and rice, enough for her and the child, particularly if it was a boy; wouldn't it be a wonderful thing for her husband to come home to a healthy wife and a baby boy waiting for him? they asked, and how could she disagree? the baby was not due until the second month, and wasn't he due home in the summer? A conversation with the household washer-woman told her that he needn't know the exact circumstances of the birth; when babies were young, it was difficult to tell their age.

The bleeding two weeks before the New Year was unexpected, but it did not last long.



----



The woman who came to collect Hisana and her baby was taller than Hisana, but still small, with wide green eyes and dark hair. She spoke with a broad accent that Hisana couldn't place, and explained something about chains, and swords. "I'm sorry," she said, sympathetically. Hisana blinked.

"What for?"

The woman shrugged a broad shoulder; she reminded Hisana of the washer-woman, just without the harsh voice to match. "I just hope you two end up in a decent place."

"I thought—" Hisana said, curling her arms more firmly around the small, pale bundle of flesh that nestled in her elbow. "But I—" The broken chain at her baby's chest clinked accusingly at her. The baby stirred, a bubble forming at its' mouth that popped wetly. "I see."

"It won't hurt." The woman reached to her side, drawing her blade and brandishing it, the blade held to the moon. Light ran down it, and for a moment, it looked entirely beautiful, rather than menacing. "It's just a little tap; you just need the marking, and then you can go on." She looked regretfully at the baby. "I'm sorry. Does he have a name?"

"She," Hisana said, watching the shinigami brush the heavy chain aside and press the cap of her sword against the soft forehead. "...no."

The hilt rose; Hisana followed it with her eyes. "Well," the woman said, "you'll be able to think it over when you get to Soul Society. You might want to close your eyes for this," she added, brushing Hisana's forelock away with calloused fingers, and Hisana had to wonder just what sort of heaven it was where women were soldiers, not men.



----



Of all the names Hisana had thought to name her son (Hajime. Takahiro. Strong names, good names, worthy of a general's son), she could not think of one for her daughter. Hikari, she thought. Yukiko. Sumiko. They didn't quite fit the small (too small, she had come too early, the impatient little thing) baby, pale but for the shock of black hair and bright blue eyes.

If there had ever been any call for proof of her paternity, Hisana thought bitterly, there it was. She wondered, briefly, what the house staff would tell her husband (widower, she corrected herself) about how she had died, and then thought that a wife dying before her husband was already bad enough; a wife dying while in childbirth with a daughter was worse, and there really were no words for a wife dying in childbirth to a bastard child.

When she finally got her bearings, she started walking, and began to understand what the soldier had meant when she had mentioned places, and decency. A roughly hewn sign told her the name and number of the district she was in, and then she kept walking. The baby grizzled once, but slept comfortably in Hisana's arms.

After three days, Hisana knew that this wouldn't work. When she woke up on the fourth morning, her baby was squalling, loud, irritable, hungry cries, and there was really nothing else to be done. She wrapped the blanket she stole from a small stall at the beginning of the district around her, silencing her by pushing her own thumb into her mouth. When she was quiet, she picked her up again, and started walking. She would leave her where she would be found. If she was found and taken in, then that person had more of a right to name her than Hisana did. If not... then it would be easier to live with the fact that she hadn't even had a name. Hopefully she would be born again to somebody on the other side more deserving of her.

The grass she found was soft; Hisana's baby stirred once when she was laid down, the blanket tucked carefully around her small shoulders, and once Hisana was sure she was far enough away that her running wouldn't disturb the ground, once she was sure that nobody had seen her (she couldn't imagine the shame if somebody had) she broke into a sprint, and headed north.

The further she walked, the more Hisana learned. She learned that water sufficed, rather than food, and that people here didn't need to eat, unless they wanted to, and that most only did it for the flavours. She learned that water – good, clean water – was not found, but bought, or stolen. And the further she walked, she learned that there were only two other districts worse than the one she had left her baby in. By the time she had reached the upper districts, the loose skin around her belly had vanished with hunger – for some reason, though Hisana felt better drinking, it never satisfied her hunger enough, like the others – and she was left with thin, ugly stretchmarks across her abdomen that were pale against her skin.

She found work in a small Rukongai tea-shop in the fifth district. Her small hands and quiet nature were ideal for tea ceremony, the owner said, as she watched Hisana pick the tools up carefully. She remembered – oh so very vaguely now – sitting by her mother's side, playing with the whisk before being hushed with sweets, and then sitting quietly while her mother would perform the ceremony for neighbours, and read the tea-leaves afterwards, predicting strong sons and happy brides and promotions and windfalls all drawn in the strange little splotches of old plant.

She worked there quietly for... weeks, months; she found herself losing track, and the patrons she spoke with barely remembered their lives before they came here. It frightened her, that she was forgetting small details – the colour of her father’s favourite kimono, the exact way her favourite maid twisted her hair up, the gravel of her husband’s voice in the morning. She forced herself to think of the details she needed to keep – her family’s name, her husband’s name, her brother’s name.

Her daughter’s birthday.

It helped a little, but only a little.



----



Hisana was a hard worker, once she realised that this was the way of this world, but she was careful to keep her hands unblemished, with all of her scars kept hidden beneath her clothes, and though some of the work she did would shame what status she remembered she had, she did nothing that would disgrace it. She moved from the little tea-shop in the fifth district to an upper-class one in the first – one that the higher-ranked shinigami and the nobility sometimes went to for tea-ceremony. The owner loaned her a smart spring kimono and – when she had worked there a month and a half, her own tea-whisk, and for a long while, Hisana was oddly content. She stayed in a small lodging house a short walk away from the tea-house and the park-square, where people knew her name and she knew theirs and anything else was merely a pleasantry, and she was happy for it to stay that way.

At least four springs after she first arrived in the First District (it couldn’t have been less than four, it had to be more, surely), Hisana arrived at work to find two of the nighttime workers still there but drinking coffee to keep themselves awake, and all of the servants rushing around making sure obi were uncreased and there were enough fans to go around.

The most experienced at the ceremony, Kudawara-san, as well as some of the other girls, had taken ill – spring fever, or something like – and Hisana was given a seasonal kimono (hitched up with a fold beneath the obi so she didn’t trip over it), and Kudawara's tea-box, and taken to the gardens – late; her attendees were already seated and waiting. The serving boy who carried the tea-box for her told Hisana quickly everything that she needed to know about her guests, they had already eaten, and Kudawara-san was very fond of one of them, so if Hisana could be so kind, please could she not do anything to upset them (not that he thought she would) as the tea-house quite liked having them as customers. She rested a hand against the shoji and waited – she could hear them talking, and it would be rude to interrupt them mid-flow, especially as they had been inconvenienced already.

"–their sweet-ass time."

"Then perhaps we should leave."

"Uh-huh. Right. No."

"I don’t want to be here."

"You want," the other man said, guilingly, "some female company."

"I need some peace."

"So we’re doing tea ceremony. And afterwards, we’re going drinking."

"..."

"I’m bigger than you, older than you and I outrank you. I’ll drag."

"..."

The boy opened the door and Hisana shuffled in, pigeon-toed beneath her kimono before she first sat in seiza, then pressed her hands against the floor in a low bow. "Please accept our most humble apologies," she said in her most respectful voice – they were being inconvenienced, they were shinigami, they were nobility (or at least, one of them was). She managed to catch a look at them before she bowed again; one of them had long hair, the other had hair long in the back but shorter on top, and both of them had pale eyes. She could not tell on face-value which one was the man from nobility and which man was not. "Kudawara-san has been taken ill unexpectedly, and will not be able to be with you gentlemen today."

"Ch’," the shorter-haired man muttered; Hisana was not sure whether or not he meant for her to hear - but he smiled easily, so perhaps he was not entirely serious. "Told you drinking was better."

"You," the other man said, ignoring his friend, and Hisana blinked, startled, when she realised he was talking to her, and giving her a look that she could remember seeing once before, but she wasn’t quite sure when or from whom. "What is your name."

"Hisana."

He blinked, then, when he had realised what her name meant, gave her a Look (was he amused? She couldn’t tell) – and almost smiled. "I see," he said, and then paused. "Hisana. Do you like cherry blossoms?"



----



They married in winter. Byakuya-sama’s family did not like her, nor did they have any reason to like the fact that their heir was marrying somebody so utterly beneath him. They fought with him, denied him the right to use the family shrine for the wedding, threatened to disinherit him, and when Byakuya-sama bulldozed over all of their opinions with his own plans, they relented, but only just.

Byakuya-sama had courted her gently; there were times when she thought that he must have been very impetuous as a child – he reminded her of what little she could remember of her brother – but he was charming, kind, affectionate within the rules, and Hisana had no reason to refuse him when he proposed. It was bad enough she was from Rukongai, she thought, but for someone from the Rukongai to refuse Kuchiki Byakuya - she couldn’t do it, not to herself, and least of all not to his pride.

It was a little selfish of her, too – she had forced herself to remember her station in her past life: her family was a good one. She was not the Rukongai dog the Kuchiki family thought she was.

Her wedding kimono was heavy across her shoulders, it was a family heirloom that Byakuya-sama had fought for her to be allowed to wear, and she had forced her shoulders straight beneath its weight as the priest married them. The reception had representatives of all of the Noble Houses, and selected shinigami – Shiba Kaien grinned at her from across the room, and she ducked her head shyly in reply. People treated her with respect – Byakuya-sama made sure of that.

When it was acceptable for them to leave, they left. Byakuya-sama led her away from the outer buildings and to his own rooms in the inner house, dismissing the servants and closing the shoji to his bedroom behind them. She kept perfectly still as Byakuya-sama stripped her – it was different compared to what little she remembered of her first wedding night. Byakuya-sama was careful with her, just as her last husband had been, but there was something different that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He was nervous and trying to hide it, which was apparent when he got his arm stuck in one of his own sleeves, but she could overlook that.

No, there was something else.

When he kissed her, he was forceful, but not possessive. And then she realised. He did not want to own her; he wanted to be loved by her.

She thought, as he slid the final layer of silk off, that she would try.

When her kimono was folded and set aside, he took her small hand in his and led her towards their bed, his grey eyes narrowed slightly as he looked at her for the first time, and when her knees hit the futon, Byakuya's hands drifted concernedly over the light scarring over her hips.

Hisana lowered her eyes. "There was an incident, Byakuya-sama," she lied quietly, covering what skin that had not vanished beneath her husband's hands with her own. "Hisana was not strong enough. It was how she died."

"I see," said Byakuya-sama, and Hisana hoped, in her heart, that he did not; that he was young enough, naïve enough, to not know. "Nobody will do this to you again," he added, voice so low that Hisana thought it could class as dangerous, and she hoped, in her heart, that he would.



----



The first time Byakuya-sama took her somewhere as his wife (outside of her presentations, and her debut into society) was an officer's ball to celebrate Shiba Miyako's promotion to third seat. He had been invited at Ukitake-taichou’s request, and very few people ever refused an invitation from the man who was practically father to the entire corps.

The hall was buzzing, lower-ranked shinigami darted around ferrying trays and glasses; Hisana felt quite overwhelmed by the amount of sheer activity – it was a far cry from the quiet placidity of the Kuchiki manor.

("Hey Byakuya! Have a drink, you stiff bastard!" Shiba Kaien had yelled, and Byakuya-sama had grown so very still that Hisana had been worried before he touched her gently on her elbow and excused himself.)

Hisana knew nobody; everybody was so military, or so familiar with everybody else already, and so she kept herself near a large potted plant – enough that she could hide away, but not so that she was completely removed, and sipped nervously at a drink that a lower seat offered her, their eyes held in a firm gaze at the floor out of manners – she was Kuchiki, she reminded herself when she felt puzzled, of course they would pay respect, whether she felt she deserved it or not. Byakuya-sama felt that she did, and very few people argued with Byakuya-sama. Most of the time, he was right.

It was some time after Byakuya-sama had left her that she felt brave enough to step a little further into the room. She told herself that she was Kuchiki, now, that these people in the room would have no reason to (they wouldn’t dare) slight her, nor have any reason not to talk to her. She was more finely dressed than many of them would ever rise to afford, she was perfumed and beautiful.

She knew that they all knew it, and that was why they barely wanted to be near her, in case they slighted somebody as powerful as her with their presence.

She knew that they all knew of the rumours surrounding her, too, and so instead of talking to people (some of the conversations were so animated, so lively, but she couldn’t bring herself to join them), she held herself the way she had been taught, held her cup the way the elders all did, and did her best to make sure that Byakuya-sama would have no need to worry about her.

She was Kuchiki now.

She was Kuchiki for yet another ten minutes, until somebody brushed past her – and it was a deliberate motion, such was the space around her. Even though the serving girl was nearer to Hisana than the crowd, there was more than enough space to walk around her. She wondered what Byakuya-sama would do – surely he would rebuke them, surely he would fix them with his steely grey stare. She could not bring herself to that much; instead, she cleared her throat, deliberately.

They turned, and she felt a chill race up her spine even though she wore heavy silk.

"Have we met before?" he asked politely, and he was only being polite; it was not polite for Hisana to curl her hands up in her sleeves, even though that was her reaction.

She forced herself to look away from his face, to the tight wooden plaque on his arm, and recalled everything Byakuya-sama told her about his colleagues during their journey over to the Thirteenth Division; this man was Ichimaru Gin, second-in-command of the Fifth Division (the knot was tied tightly on his armband, precisely, his arm was surely much too thin for so tall a man), served with Byakuya-sama when both were just seated officers, almost certainly came from Kansai before he died.

"Hisana does not believe so," she said quietly, her gut rolling.

"Gin! What kind of date are you when you won't even bring me a drink, hmm?" a woman's voice called from across the room; Hisana looked in its direction but found her way blocked by too many tall people. 'Gin' bowed politely, excused himself, said 'perhaps we can talk later?' and smiled that smile and Hisana felt as though her stomach was going to bottom out on itself completely.

How could he be here?

Why would he be here? Of all places?



----



A week after the party, Ichimaru-fukutaichou called on the Kuchiki residence and asked to leave a message for Kuchiki-taichou with his wife; ah, the stresses of being Aizen-taichou’s subordinate, he barely had ten minutes to meet with an old friend anymore. The message he left was a time, and a place, with a small dead persimmon blossom tied to the note.

She had it burned in the hearth; the second, and third, time he tried, Byakuya-sama was with her – nobody would dare speak a slight in front of him – and they spoke about nothing at all.



----



By the third year of her marriage, she had not yet borne Byakuya-sama a child, and the elders were growing concerned. She heard the whisperings at the family meetings – were they trying? Was she barren? Was Byakuya? – and Byakuya-sama always took her aside afterwards, always told her quite firmly that their marriage was none of their business, and she should not concern herself – but of course she did. If it wasn’t her lack of child the elders spoke about, it was the fact that she was Kuchiki at all, and she knew more than he did how much Byakuya-sama had given up so that she could be his bride, and she couldn’t even give him a son.

But she could give Ichimaru Gin a half-breed bastard daughter.

And let her die twice.

It wouldn’t do. It couldn’t do.

Not anymore.

At first, it was just little excursions, tests. How far could she get from the main house without being followed? How far could she get without being recognised? In her finery, she would never get past the front door, but Hisana knew of the Rukongai – of what people wore, how they dressed, how they acted. Byakuya-sama had paid for the finest teachers to educate her in the finer subtleties of society, but she had never forgotten. She stole a kimono from her maid’s room that would allow her around the upper districts (the Kuchiki family never hired anybody from a district with more than one digit in the name), and shoes from the gardens, and left just as the sun rose.

When she realised she could get to District 10 Eastern, she was more daring, and headed south.



----



In the fourth year, an illness hit the lowest districts – fever, Hisana heard, through the frightened whispers of her maidservants. Fever, and it rotted the lungs and left people drowning in their beds miles from any river. Hisana did not worry about it.

(That was a lie. She did, but ignored it, and when she returned from the middle-South with a pain in her chest and a heavy cold, she passed it off as a minor winter infection, drank her soup and took her powders like a good wife, and learned to stave her coughs by tightening her throat and chest while Byakuya-sama was in the room.)

She found herself on the border of the seventy-seventh and the seventy-eighth. There was a small market – small being the operative word. There was little food here, compared to the upper districts; what there was barely looked edible when compared to what she was used to, and the rest of the wares – clothes and pottery – were so plain that Hisana wouldn’t even give to guests as an insult. It reeked of mud and night-soil, but she took measured gulps of air every few paces though her mouth, rather than through the nose, and kept walking.

"Found you, you little bitch."

She froze, her shoulders squaring beneath the weight of the plain travelling kimono she wore, and turned. The man’s face was bruised, he was missing teeth – he looked exactly how the upper-classes described the residents of the Rukongai – twisted, broken spirits who really needed to just move on already. "Excuse me?" she asked quietly.

"Don’t you act like you don’t know who I am," he growled, seizing her arm beneath tight, bony fingers. Hisana yelped, both in fright and horror – nobody was supposed to be this close to her but her husband, didn’t he know decorum?

Of course he doesn’t. Look at where he lives, she then told herself firmly. Poor soul.

"—all the shit you little punks've done," he went on – he sounded half-drunk. "You think you can just get away with it?"

Hisana felt her stomach chill. Did he know her? she wondered. Did he know what she'd done? "I-it's possible," she replied slowly, carefully. "Hisana is sorry that she doesn't remember you."

The man sneered and leaned closer. One eye was milky, the other watery as though he had a cold, and Hisana held her breath – the man smelled. Then his snarl lessened somewhat, and he dropped his grip on Hisana's arm. "Huh. Looks like I got the wrong girl. Go on, get lost."

Then, as abruptly as he had came upon her, he thrust her arm back at her and turned back into the crowd. When Hisana left, she passed a small group – perhaps four or five – of jeering boys, waving hands and fists at the man’s back, and she gave them a wide berth; a cough was knitting itself in her throat, and she had seen with her own eyes what the lower districts did when they saw a weakling among their numbers.



----



"I heard you were ill," Ichimaru said one day, his brows and the corners of his eyes pulled down in concern (or perhaps it wasn't; she wasn't sure). He had caught her after she had attended prayers at a nearby shrine, one with jizo lining the grounds with bright red bibs around their necks. She had never tied one, though she had watched another mother, once, and wasn’t sure whether it was better or worse to know whether or not your child was actually dead. "That's terrible."

"It is just a cold. Hisana will bear it," she replied, bowing, and then straightening up. "If Ichimaru-fukutaichou will excuse Hisana, she has somewhere she needs to go."

"Of course. Going to the South today?"

She turned around. He smiled. "You didn't think that Kuchiki Byakuya's wife going into the Rukongai every day wasn't going to attract attention now, did you?" he asked, dropping some coins into the offering box. He shook his left leg out and then smiled at her, or rather, the look on her face. "Really, I think the only person who doesn't know is the good Lieutenant."

There was something in the way he said her husband’s rank that riled at Hisana, deep in the core of her. "Hisana... thinks that it would be better he not know," she said carefully. "Byakuya-sama has been good to Hisana."

"Mm," Ichimaru agreed, nodding. "but if you're sick, he's not going to let you out of his sight, never mind out of the city."

And that much was true; when Hisana had had a cold a few months back – only a silly little thing, enough to bring fever and a couple restless nights sleep – Byakuya-sama had called for a healer, sat by her bed for two days until the fever had broken, pressed cold cloths against the backs of her wrists and the sides of her neck. At night he had held her, her cheek pressed against his cool skin, and she had felt his heartbeat thrum gently, never sleeping until after she had. "Hisana has told her husband that she is quite alright."

"But how long's that gonna last, hmm?"

"As long as it lasts."

He smirked, then, the pale of his face bleeding into the stretch of his lips. "I could always give you a hand."

"That is very kind, but Hisana does not believe Ichimaru-san knows what he is looking for."

"I think I do." His voice was quiet, serious. "How old would they be?"

"Hisana does not know what Ichimaru-san is talking about."

"That's not supposed to be possible, you know." Quietly, he looked her up and down, and, looking up, Hisana could see his eyes darting over her frame from behind their almost-closed lids. "A shinigami and a human, I mean."

"Hisana," she replied, feeling anger dart through her chest, "did not know Ichimaru-san was a shinigami at the time."

"But does that change the fact? Hmm?" A hand wrapped around her arm, firm but gentle, and Hisana wondered just how it could feel so different from the man she had known in Kyoto. "If they're out there, then don't you think I have the right to know?"

He spoke so calmly, with the thin, placid smile still on his face, and abruptly, Hisana just hated him, for having gone to her husband, for coming to her house, for letting her into his bed and then leaving her with his child. And she hated herself, too, for not having the foresight to trip down the stairs or tie her obi too tight or take a too-hot bath, for even considering those options, because why should her baby pay for her crimes? "Why," she began, her voice treacherously tremulous, "was Ichimaru-san even in Kyoto?"

"A mission for my captain," he replied instantly. "Sometimes, if we're going to be in your world for a long time, we take a fake body."

"Ichimaru-san never went to Otsu, did he?"

"Once. I brought you back those shrine talismans, didn't I?"

"And the rest? Why was Ichimaru-san even—"

"Business. Trade secrets," he added, a little teasingly. "Can't tell you otherwise Aizen-taichou'll get mad."

"Oh," Hisana said, wondering how he could try to be teasing during a conversation like this. "Of course."

"Did you name them?"

"No."

"Well. That makes things harder, doesn't it? Assuming they're even still there. What if you've already walked past them?"

"...that does not mean Hisana will stop looking. She'll know," she added, firmly, catching the doubting look on Ichimaru's face. "she is sure of it."



----



A week after the conversation with Ichimaru, Hisana crept in through a kitchen door and, slipping her dirty shoes off, came face to face with Byakuya-sama. He gave her a short look, looking odd and out of place in the kitchen, and nudged a pair of house slippers to her with his feet. "You've been to the Rukongai again," he said, without any preamble. "Haven’t you?"

She looked down. "Is Byakuya-sama angry with Hisana?" she asked.

"No," he replied. "Merely... irritated." He paused. "If it was assistance you needed, you could have asked for it. It is not—"

"—proper for Hisana to be going into the Rukongai alone. She has been told this."

"That wasn't what I was going to say."

"...oh.”

"It is not beyond the means of your house to assist."

It was the use of the term your house that arrested Hisana, her eyes widening and looking at Byakuya-sama, who looked impassively back. That was true – he had fought so hard that it would be her house, and even though she didn't deserve the silks and lacquer and wines and foods, it was still hers in name. "Oh," she said quietly.

"I... am sure that if I put every guard of this house on full alert, you would still find a way into the Rukongai districts. But I am your husband, and not your keeper. Unless you want me to be. The least I can do is offer you protection."

"Hisana is grateful for everything Byakuya-sama has done for her," she said quietly, "in more ways than she can express."

"...I see."

"But Hisana does not think that the Kuchiki house can assist her in this, and nor would she ask it of them."

The look he gave her could have been impassive to outsiders, but not to her; there was a slight wrinkle in his brow, a creasing in his eyes that spoke to her. Eventually, he sighed. "Will you at least tell me why? Or what it is you're looking for?" he asked, and there was a note in his voice that he only ever used with her.

"Hisana," she said quietly, "is sorry for keeping secrets from her husband."

It was as close to a 'no' as she dared to give him. The thought of him knowing that she had given Ichimaru Gin something that she couldn't give to Byakuya-sama, the thought of the look on his face...

"You're ill, Hisana," he said then, giving her a sharp look. "I can feel it."

"Hisana is sure it will pass, Byakuya-sama."

"And if it doesn't?"

No, Hisana thought then. That look was worse.



----



When Hisana awoke on the last day, Byakuya-sama was sitting next to her, reading official looking papers with a small frown. He did not appear to notice her, but Hisana knew that he had. Byakuya-sama was like that.

"Hisana has a request to make," she said, quietly, humbly, pressing her hands into the thick covers and looking away when Byakuya-sama's soft grey gaze turned on her. "The truth is, Hisana has not been entirely honest with Byakuya-sama."

Byakuya-sama set down the papers; he did not move otherwise, or at least, not that Hisana could see. "Go on," he said. He did not sound unkind.

"Hisana did not come to Soul Society alone." She did not look up. She imagined Byakuya-sama's eyes to widen, perhaps, maybe silently he would have started to hold his breath, the soft thrum of his heartbeat would quicken, and she had never seen Byakuya-sama so much as dab his forehead on a hot day, but perhaps now his hands would be clammy and soft, the way her own had felt the day he had asked for her to be his.

"There was... one other. A girl. She—"

She will be beautiful, Hisana thought, and her throat hurt. It was probably the sickness. “She was—” She felt Byakuya-sama's fingers curl into her palm, and he lifted her hand into his. His lips burned the backs of her fingers. She had never deserved him. And delicate.

And if she is lucky, she will be nothing like me

"...Hisana's sister, Byakuya-sama."




–end–

i told you it was shit lol 8D

songs used to write this: ‘burn your life down’ – tegan and sara; ‘after hours’ – we are scientists; ‘lydia (piano version)’ – f.i.r., a shitload of stuff by the gaslight anthem, ‘ichi-go, ichi-e’ – nakajima miyuki among others. you should download them all.