Chapter Text
The moon looks lonely, he thought as he looked up at the gleaming orb in the sky. The white light it provided seemed to perfectly complement the lowering temperature in this region. His lips turned up at the corners against his will.
He had been asked to investigate the strange temperature phenomenon after all.
This deep in the Inuzuri district, no one was truly sleeping at night. Every second was a struggle for the inhabitants here. A pitiful existence, but that was the way of the world they lived in.
The buildings here were run down, no more than a storey tall. This gave him a good bird’s eye view of the world around him as he ran and hopped across the rooftops.
But it wasn’t his sight that he was following.
No, he had sensed the random reiatsu spikes that were followed by voids. These were followed by the temperature dropping quickly. Right now, the temperature had dropped to about 10°C. It was already fatal for most. He needed to track down the source quickly.
It took him a while, but he was able to pinpoint the source to an alley behind a few ramshackle huts.
He stepped slowly into the darkness, his hand over his Zanpakutō. It was silent, except for the rustle of leaves and clothes in the wind.
Which is probably why he heard the quiet whimper.
Curiosity getting the better of him, he stepped closer to the source of the sound.
It was a bundle of pink cloth that was squirming on the ground. He crouched down to take a better look when the cloth shifted and out popped a tiny face with a mop of black hair on top of its head. Its mouth opened in another quiet cry and the air froze over.
“What the…?” he exclaimed, completely caught off guard.
The infant swaddled in the cloth cracked an eye open. In the darkness of the night, it glowed a rich violet. A tiny pink hand wriggled out of the blanket and reached out to him.
Against his better judgment, he reached out to touch the finger…
… and reared back to see the tip of his numb finger covered in hoar frost.
Not just that, but there had been a desperate visceral pull against his reiryoku.
He looked at the babe again. It looked a bit gaunt and exhausted. It’s starving, he realized, It’s pulling in reiryoku to survive.
This poor thing should have been dead by now, having been obviously abandoned even after dying so young. Yet, here it was, not only strong enough to manifest its reiatsu, but also manifest it into a conceptual ability.
He reached out for the bundle again, this time careful to not touch skin. As he assumed, the pull was significantly lower without the skin contact.
The infant gurgled in protest, reaching out with tiny hands and wriggling fingers, but he just held it up until it was eye-level with him.
“Well, this is quite the conundrum you have left me with”, he said jovially.
It was then that he noticed the shape of the dirt smear on the cloth. ‘Rukia’ it said in katakana.
*****
“In a playground covered in snow, adorned by a sea of white grass, with frosted over slides and swings, stood a pale white tree. Cradled under its frozen boughs, she woke up with white ice crystals adorning her skin. She looked around and smiled. The frost became her jewels, the snow her silk and the playground her kingdom. And when she looked up, the moonlight shone down on a single silver bell tinkling from where it hung on a white ribbon from a leafless white branch. She looked up and smiled at the moon, her Lady.”
*****
The shadows spread across the white sand, like ink on black paper, forever seeking that which cannot be found within themselves. Some small drops of the shadows reached out when they saw a spark of light. It had been a long time since they had seen something like it.
And through the tear between worlds they flowed, until they were falling, like rain from clouds, and crashing, like fallen stars.
And where it had been empty and silent before, now the expanse before them was filled with sights and sounds and scents that battered against their minds and brought out a hunger from deep within them.
And so they looked to the light in the sky and roared.
The moon shone its light down to the town below as a black butterfly fluttered up to a lithe figure silhouetted against it. “I sense strong reiatsu close by”, the figure stated as she jumped off the light pole and took off into the heart of the city.
*****
His hands came to a stop in its motion of moving the pen across the paper. To anyone who didn’t know who he was, he would be staring at the paper he was pressing his pen down on. However, his senses were reaching out to perceive things far beyond the scope of a normal human.
“Well now”, he said with a wry smile as his straw blond hair curtained his eyes, “There’s a presence I haven’t sensed in a long time.”