Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

After the war, Kuchiki Isamu languished in a private bed, in the care of a dozen nurses, for one hundred days. Then he died. Now it’s been another hundred days, and another memorial is in order.

Like many of Isamu’s cousins, Rukia is dressed in uniform black for the occasion, but her arm does not bear her vice-captain’s badge, as any whisper of the 13th and its late Captain Ukitake would only be a distraction. She is here only as the Lady Rukia. Her tekkou are silk, white on white, the finely woven pattern of Kuchiki crests revealing itself in the turn of light.

Or it would, if Rukia were in the light. If she were part of the processional through the courtyards with Isamu’s immediate family and his most immediate branch families and the families closest after that, their kinship obligations blooming outward like chrysanthemum petals. It would, if she were among those sitting under the great gold lanterns in the memorial hall, light dancing as the swell of reiatsu makes the lanterns waver. If she were part of the full delegation of Kuchiki chanting the litanies of the dead.

“Rukia! What are you doing here?” exclaims Chef Kuchiki Masami, before bending low enough to kiss Rukia on the forehead as she flutters past her, tall and bird-like. “That work station isn’t stricken yet. Careful of the rice flour—your blacks, my love. Your blacks.”

Rukia brushes her fingers over the spot where Masami’s lips had been.

Chef Kuchiki Masami is not part of the regular battery of chefs employed by the Kuchiki family, who are hired help. Rather, she is the third-born daughter of a daughter of a branch family that belongs to the forest understory— the kind of Kuchiki daughter that, if she will not take a husband, must take a job. For the Kuchiki, “job” usually means either swordsmanship or art, but Masami had wandered into a culinary middle ground that, if neither swordsmanship nor art, certainly involved sharp objects and all things artisanal. But even for this kind of Kuchiki, "job" has a fluid definition. From what Rukia can tell, Masami does quite a bit of travel and only an occasional amount of cooking—generally for people she likes or parties the Kuchiki would like to impress.

For instance, she’d prepared the tasting menu for Rukia’s promotion ceremony. There were rumors Masami had slaughtered the black pork for their shabu shabu dinner herself. Rukia doubts this is true; in fact, she knows it can’t be. But she does not doubt that Kuchiki Masami, safely ensconced in the best private security money can buy, had traveled clear to Sakahone to devise her special 13th Division Promotion menu. This is more than most in the Seireitei will ever do to understand Rukongai, and far further into it than most will ever go. Rukia likes Masami. (Where her promotion banquet was concerned, Rukia was fairly certain she’d been a person Masami liked, too, but the 13th had still been very impressed.)

While Kuchiki Isamu’s Hundred Day memorial is probably meant to impress, Rukia gathers that Isamu must also have been a person Masami liked. Very much. It’s the crying, mostly, that clues Rukia in.

Masami sounds like she is drowning. She sounds like she has been drowning for a hundred days, and has just now made it back to air. She has a tray of manju in her hands, their steamed skins white and shiny. She lifts her arms as though she means to slam the tray onto the floor.

Rukia immediately throws one hand underneath, for all the good that will do. Her other finds Masami’s wrist.

“Don’t, Masami-san, they’re beautiful,” Rukia blurts out.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. The good ones are already out in the banquet hall. These ones are off center.” She flutters a hand over the white manju, which have the Kuchiki crest branded onto their tops. Rukia can’t tell that anything’s amiss.

“He deserves better,” Masami moans, though she relinquishes the tray into Rukia’s hands. “We had duck frozen, and a little pork, but he should have fish. He should have something fresh! But the suppliers—”

There are no suppliers. There are only storehouses, and fewer of those than there had been, before the Wandenreich paid its visit. Another gasping moan erupts from Masami, which masks the sound Rukia’s stomach makes at the mention of duck. She is grateful.

“He was just a dumb baby,” says Masami, quieter this time. Kuchiki Isamu had fathered at least one child who was old enough to have graduated the Academy before Rukia had even been adopted. Isamu might even have been older than Masami, though Rukia can’t be sure. She had never personally met him; she’d only studied his name. But Rukia gets it. If he was Masami’s big dumb baby of a cousin, then of course he was.

Rukia makes unintended eye contact with the nearest station chef, who is arranging gleaming morsels of duck onto small maple-leaf shaped plate after maple leaf-shaped plate. Rukia tries to convey control over the situation, but she does not think it works. The station chef focuses on the duck.

“Rukia, you remember, that one time with the forks. His father brought back those forks from the Living World, and Isamu— But then Byakuya-sama, he was so little, he hadn’t even started growing his hair out, but he already knew exactly who he was, and what worms we were, and he said that the forks— So then Isamu—”

Rukia, of course, does not remember. She cannot picture a small Byakuya. As far as the Kuchiki illustrated record is concerned, Byakuya has always existed as he is, clan head and 6th Division captain; portraiture was for the dead or the stationed.

Masami stutters through a dozen more half-told Isamu stories, most of which were more recent but which Rukia still had had no part in. Yet Masami carries on as though she had, and Rukia holds the trayful of white manju; and all at once, partway through Masami’s partial telling of Endo-san’s daughter’s birthday, Rukia realizes that Masami has been assuming Rukia was there, that Rukia was always there, because why else would Rukia be here?

“It means a lot that you came by for me. It’s so nice to see you,” Masami says, blinking rapidly. Her makeup is running, but she lets it streak. Isamu’s banquet needs its finishing touches, and hers will be the hands that make them. She must keep them clean.

Rukia considers dropping the tray of manju. Really hurtling it to the ground. That would create a disturbance and she could run away, it’s not too late, except it is. Because two things are true.

One: Rukia likes Masami. She does. Masami is the first cousin who’d actually seemed to like Rukia, as though liking her were a natural thing to do.

Two: Masami is not why Rukia had come here. Not to heal Masami’s broken heart, in any case. She hadn’t known. She hadn’t even thought to know. That's why she should be here, but she’s not. This is the kind of person Rukia is.

“It’s really nice to see you,” Rukia agrees stiffly. She feels vile, especially because Masami is the kind of person who remembers stupid lies like “Inuzuri ultraspice,” which makes Rukia not want to lie to her about anything that matters.

“You’ll miss the ceremony. You might’ve missed it already— I kept you, I’m sorry,” says Masami. “Here—” She trades the tray in Rukia’s arms for the gift of four white manju, packed in plastic like in the World of the Living. “You’re right. I shouldn’t throw them out. It’s wasteful.”

She presses the manju toward Rukia’s heart. “Let me kiss you again?” Masami asks.

On the cheek this time. Their skin brushes, and Masami’s is supple and wet. The salt will itch.

“I love you, you know that, right? My sweet Rukia. Thank you.”

A kiss, an ‘I love you’, and a thank you—with each blow, Rukia sinks deeper. By the time Masami ushers her out the door, apologizing yet again for making Rukia miss the ceremony, Rukia is the one who’s drowning.

Then she has sunk all the way into the memorial hall with its swaying lanterns, with the full delegation of Kuchiki chanting. She is ushered to a place of honor, even though she’s late and they weren’t actually expecting her. They make room.

For you, Lady Rukia.

In memory, this will be easy. She will have seen the shadow of a hand leap to the heavens, and she will know the body (no longer his body) the body that has fed it is only a vessel now. It will hold no more heartbeats and no more breaths. (She will think, DON’T WASTE THIS SACRIFICE.) That’s the only directive she will remember, and it will be obvious what to do next. She will concentrate reiatsu between her palms and she will be joined by her colleagues. She will be joined by their comrades. They will be joined, even, by their enemies. That is how important this gate will be. She will know exactly what to do, and she will know that she can do it. She will not feel absence and she will not feel darkness. She will feel only certainty.

The way she will choose to remember this, the rest will not come until later.

Only once he’s truly gone.

Isamu’s is only the second memorial Rukia has attended since the war. The first was Captain Ukitake’s. That one had served as a catch-all for all the Gotei’s dead, thousands of memorials in one, but that’s all Rukia remembers. She doesn’t even recall who’d stood beside her, though it had felt like no one. She thinks maybe Renji had been there, staring from across the aisle. Renji, beside her brother.

By comparison, in the last six months, Byakuya has attended several hundred—if not a thousand—memorials: The funerals, the 49th days; even some of the intermediary seven-day rituals, if the deceased were of particular standing. That’s what the head of a mourning family does.

What the head of a mourning family does not have to do is attend Kuchiki Isamu’s hundred-day memorial, six months after the war that killed him. Not when Isamu’s line is more of a twig than a branch, and his only daughter has already married and taken the name of another. Kuchiki Isamu is of no particular standing.

The sister of the head of a mourning family, who hasn’t had to do anything this entire time, doesn’t have to be here, either. Frankly, she is not supposed to be. She didn’t even know Isamu. But she sits through the last of the chanting and she tries to ignore the knives pushing through her stomach, which are trying ravenously to reach the manju cradled in her lap.

She’s here because she’s stupid.

She’d just felt—

She’d needed—

(She wanted to see a friendly face. She’d wanted to be kissed and told she was loved and to feel like she was welcome somewhere where she did not also have to be in charge.)

None of that had anything to do with Kuchiki Isamu, or anyone who mourned him.

The chanting ends. There is a song. Isamu’s daughter sings it. She’s trying to sing a traditional dirge, which is supposed to deploy all the usual seasonal imagery associated with the time of the deceased’s passing, but Isamu’s last months had been very confusing in that regard. It had been June. Then it had been June, but winter. They’d had spring in July and maybe summer in August. In any case, it seemed to have evened out and they were back to fall now, but rather than make poetry of paradoxes, Isamu’s daughter simply sings very quickly, smashing as many lyrics into each measure as possible to account for every season. There’s a kind of poetry to that, too.

Masami’s menu seems to agree that it is fall now: The first dishes arrive, elegant but vanishingly small, mere insinuations of maitake mushrooms and pumpkin, shishito peppers doused in chestnut sauce, pickled radish and root vegetables. Rukia could probably fit the entirety of the three in the palm of her hand, but it is lavish compared to the recent barrack rations. And she knows eventually there will be duck. The next course reveals more mushrooms, dashi-simmered eggplant and matsutake. The next, steamed pork and lotus root, all wrapped in a lotus leaf. Rukia’s stomach roils and whines, both entranced and enervated by the richness of it all. If she weren’t already so disappointed in herself, she’d be disappointed for having let herself develop such a weak constitution. Her child-self would laugh.

But that’s just it, isn’t it. Why she’d really ended up here.

A long time ago, Rukia promised herself she would never again go hungry, and Rukia keeps her promises.

She takes a gulp of tea, as though taking it hot and fast burn her stomach out of her, and tries to focus on Isamu. The non-memory of him.

Perhaps she and him are playing at fine dining, and there are forks, there is a small, wispy-haired Byakuya. But no, that’s too far beyond her ken. Maybe instead she is sitting with him on an engawa, overlooking a courtyard filled with Endo and Kuchiki children. Or perhaps the adults outnumber the children, which is how she’s noticed Seireitei birthdays tend to go. Or maybe it’d be easier to imagine Isamu climbing to the top of that robot in Odaiba, their gigai heavy and the ocean far below, but the robot keeps getting taller and taller because Isamu’s ahead of her, she knows it’s him, but she can’t quite see him, and everything feels weird in a gigai—

Rukia’s imagination fails her.

(Nah, she wouldn’t do you like that, said Renji. Your imagination’s just telling you to go the fuck to sleep. Here, let me help. He’d been doing this—coming over to repeat whatever dry report Byakuya brought back from his captain’s meetings, flavored by whatever Renji gleaned from his second, not-Byakuya’s-VC job, which was apparently serving as Soul Society’s living messageboard. He’d rattle information at her until Rukia was bored into slumber. He’d told her about the strange weather over the Seireitei, which Rukia paid absolutely no attention to; about the dangai, same attention; about the food rations and how their diminishment was related to the war and the weather and the dangai, which made no sense without having paid attention to the other two. He told her Rangiku-san said— Hisagi-san said— Iba-san said— Kira said— If she’d heard any of it, she’d have been better informed than ever before, even more than when she’d actually had a captain and the 13th had been privy to things. But mostly all she thought about was her world spiraling inward and how her only way of stopping that was to hear nothing, know nothing, focus on her work, and muscle through—)

Rukia tries to focus on the people in front of her, the ones who are alive and whom she does not need to pretend into existence. It’s better than having to see the shadowed corners of her empty head, and much better than simply staring insatiately at her empty plates.

She is seated in the first row, the furthest end of which she suspects belongs to Isamu’s immediate family: His parents, a wife, the songstress shinigami daughter, and perhaps a sibling? Other wives and husbands, other children. She recognizes almost no one in this room. Her harried memorization of the Kuchiki family tree is forty years stale at this point, and the Kuchiki of her day-to-day tend not to be these ones.

She will need to figure out how to offer her personal condolences to the family before she leaves. Rukia realizes that situations like these might be why Byakuya sometimes sounds like an insane robot person, because she cannot think of anything she can offer that doesn’t sound exactly like that.

If Masami loved her so much, why hadn’t she been at the someone’s daughter’s birthday with her? Why didn’t she know her dumb baby cousin Isamu? Obviously because Rukia has never thought about Masami being connected to anyone else. She’s just Masami. Masami, who likes her. Rukia is selfish like that.

Rukia can feel herself veering into self-pity, which is possibly the only thing worse you can feel at a stranger’s funeral than a feral desire for duck, so she does her best to stop the bleeding.

She is spared by the elderly man to her left, who leans over to whisper, “We're honored by your presence, Rukia-sama. We weren't expecting anyone from the main branch.”

“I'm sorry for your loss,” Rukia replies mechanically.

The duck arrives, its glimmering cuts and their verdant bed of shiso leaves offering no indication that their chef had wept over them. Rukia’s helping is double anyone else’s.

She also notices that there are eyes on her, just as hers have been on them. Most of the glances are fleeting. Nevertheless, they impress upon her the unmistakable sense that she is being read and scrutinized. What is the Lady Rukia doing here? Why has she bothered? Who does she think she is, coming unannounced? Who does she think she is, coming at all? Not everyone has willingly authorized Byakuya’s pattern behavior of taking in strays. Still more have changed their minds about her in recent months, now that the war has taken so many of their own.

Why are you still here?

Rukia is working up to offering her condolences when one of the waitstaff bows before her. “A message, Rukia-sama,” he says. Rukia assumes it will be from Masami before he continues, “This hall is only open to Kuchiki. The messenger is waiting outside. Her missive is from the office of the Captain Commander, for 13th Vice Captain Kuchiki. She says it is urgent.”

Rukia’s stomach roils anew. Urgent missives from the Captain Commander are never a good sign. And Rukia has no concrete evidence for this, but she suspects that Kyouraku considers things with urgency more sparingly than the late Yamamoto Genryuusai Shigekuni had. So this feels double bad.

Rukia stands immediately and bows in the direction of the family, whom she will not speak to after all. She entered this memorial a strange and unexpected guest and she will leave even more strangely. As she makes her way to the door, a child dressed in the smallest head-of-household hitatare Rukia has ever seen shouts, “Why does she get to leave?”

His nurse slaps him. “Because she doesn’t have a role to play here. She’s not like you.”

She won’t think, in that moment, that she can stop Aizen. She will know only that she must. Then she will feel a hand on her shoulder. It will be Kyouraku’s. Amidst all the driven self-assurance of this war—real or only remembered—his hand will be a raw uncertainty that manages to slip through her armor. In that moment she will not know whether she feels betrayal or not. Her unknowing will stem from the fact that, at the exact moment she realizes that she understands what has happened, why Aizen is here, who brought him to the surface—she will think, This is a fight for life, then. Because it surely isn’t one for honor.

She will have already turned these options over in her mind for decades—fights for honor versus fights for life. They will be tumbled smooth. The betrayal she feels will have nothing to do with Aizen, actually; it will not have anything to do with what Kyouraku has or hasn’t chosen to do with him. It will be because Kyouraku choosing life over honor will mean that such a choice is possible.

This will be a problem, because she will have thought, only moments before, that Ukitake had shown the world that you should always choose to fight for honor. That’s what that shadow of a hand will have meant, for those scant seconds. And then it won’t.

Then it won’t mean anything at all.

If she runs too fast, she swears she can see smudges in the sky where the Wandenreich’s buildings used to be, still superimposed in the emptiness where the Seireitei has not yet been rebuilt. The reconstruction has been slow-going. Recently Byakuya has volunteered himself to the task of getting things built quicker.

Rukia does not know what tasks she has been doing recently. Dine-and-dashing memorial banquets. Sitting alone in Ukitake’s office. Reorganizing everything so that she’ll know where things are and what to do with them. Putting everything back exactly as it had been.

One of the very few graces she has been afforded recently is that much of the 13th's day-to-day leadership was already largely autonomous, because Ukitake had always been ill and Kaien had long been dead, his office empty. That the two of them are now gone entirely feels like something the division has been preparing for for decades. But when Rukia had become vice-captain, Ukitake encouraged her to make a project of anything she wanted: To do things that were new and different and vociferously Rukia—to make the 13th synonymous with “vociferously Rukia” and not just, in his words, some old thing no one’s dusted in a thousand years. Unfortunately, she had done this. And that’s what is now falling apart.

Now it feels like if she only undid these things, the 13th would be fine, things would work more smoothly; they wouldn’t need her to do and then fail to do this job. It would remain exactly as everyone so fondly remembered it, and it wouldn’t need her.

Except that’s not true at all. At some point, Rukia had learned how to delight in her invisibility and now she finds that sometimes she cannot stop. But as much as the 13th has been braced for the absence of practical leadership, it is not and could never have been ready for Ukitake to just be gone. His absence is peeling from the walls. The 13th is without, and they need her badly. But between being who her division needs her to be and what it needs her to get done, Rukia would rather be the what.

She does not want whatever Kyouraku needs to tell her. She does not want to learn any new, sordid thing about Captain Ukitake. She doesn’t want to know what the 13th must look like from the outside, how shiftless they must appear. There’s been rumors of consolidation—of no longer being the Gotei 13, but perhaps the Gotei 9. Everyone is dead and even if they can get their numbers built up, it is better to have a core of strong leaders rather than an armload of inadequate ones—like the “I was unseated two years ago and I became a vice-captain somewhat less recently than yesterday” ones. The “I’ve had bankai for six months and I’ve used it once” ones.

Maybe Kyouraku has found her a new captain. Maybe they can be the Gotei 10. She can’t imagine where Kyouraku would pull a new captain from—(should she have worn her vice-captain’s armband for this meeting? It’s back at the 13th and she’s still dressed like a mourning Kuchiki)—

Rukia can’t imagine where Kyouraku would pull a new captain from, like a rabbit out of a hat, but she entertains a brief nightmare that it is Renji.

There’s no reason this should be a nightmare. The 13th could certainly do worse. Rukia rephrases: Renji would absolutely be the best on offer, and he would make a stunning captain. And they work well together. Better than she and Kotsubaki have been doing, she admits. (Maybe better than she and Ukitake had, too. But if only they’d had more time—)

Byakuya had once insinuated that she and Renji were not, in fact, a “dream team,” citing a disproportionate ratio of ribaldry to strategy whenever she and Renji got involved with one another. But that had really been more of an observation than a critique; and to be honest, the 13th has been sorely lacking in ribaldry for decades. Still, Rukia can't imagine the 13th becoming Renji's. And become his it would, as all things in Renji's orbit tend to do.

If Renji became 13th Division captain, it would happen while Rukia was rearranging Ukitake’s office. She wouldn’t have been invited to the announcement or to the ceremony, so she’d be spinning through a Rolodex or something and Renji would burst through the door in a white haori and he’d put everything she’d already put in all the wrong places in different wrong places, and then she’d have to sneak back in under the cover of night to put it all back the way it had been before they’d both destroyed it. Then she’d probably be arrested and executed for “willful withholding of information from a superior officer” and Renji wouldn’t be able to run her off Soukyoku Hill this time because he’d be a captain, and captains must show decorum, and she’d realize too late that this was going to be one of those times where Renji becomes, instead of the other way around, and—

And Byakuya would be there, too, watching all of this happen.

So maybe she can imagine. She just doesn’t want to. Not that Renji would want to take the 13th's captaincy, anyway. For whatever insane reason—and Rukia's personal interpretation of the situation fills her with equal parts secondhand embarrassment and incredible pride—Renji would sooner die as Byakuya's vice-captain than leave him.

But there is not much room nor reason for pride these days; and for the past six months, very little has been voluntary. If the 13th receives a captain, it’s not going to be about anyone’s wants. It will be about need.

By the time she makes it to the 1st, she’s left Kuchiki Isamu behind entirely—Isamu and Masami and Masami’s kisses, and that duck, and everyone’s stares—and replaced it all with a host of new discomforts and attractively fatal imaginations. She’s at work.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t feel any more a shinigami than she does a person. She’s just the dread.

The empty.

Before the broad, tall gates of the 1st open before her, Rukia tries to empty her mind of all her macabre whimsy.

The first thing she thinks on the other side of the doors is that the room is morbidly dark.

This has to be an effect of reiatsu. Rukia knows the room is as well-lit as every other room in the Seireitei. Every room in the Seireitei has the same walls, floors, windows. This one should be brighter, really, with its west wall open to the sky. The sun has set and the Seireitei is dusky, but there is still purple low in the clouds, and punctuations of windowlight from the city below. This must be Kyouraku’s reiatsu.

It should be easy to tell. It used to be easy to tell. But lately it’s like that part of her sensorium has been bludgeoned into a new shape she doesn’t know how to use anymore. Unseated officers continually sneak up on her, the faintness of their pressures indiscernible, as though they are not matter, do not matter, do not exist at all. Even here, before Kyouraku, Captain Commander, she can see the effect of his reiatsu suffusing the room, but it’s like it’s a script she cannot read.

This can’t be normal. After bankai, everything feels different. After the Royal Realm, everything feels different. But Rukia refuses to believe captains live like this, in a cottonmouthed version of the world. She misses its old sharpness, where she could sense the wispiest spider threads of someone’s spirit ribbon and all the people around her actually felt real. If this is how everyone with bankai lived, Captain Ukitake never would have noticed her, Byakuya’s sister apparent or not. She could have been plopped right in front of him and there’s no way she could have mattered, if this was what the world felt like to him. She’s done this wrong, somehow, she’s sure. And suddenly, she wants desperately to ask Ukitake about it.

She could ask any captain. She could ask Renji. She could ask Kyouraku, given that he’s right in front of her. But Kyouraku feels alien, even setting aside his reiatsu. She’s not used to seeing him where Yamamoto Genryuusai should be. She’s not used to seeing him at work at all. She knows him only in the casual company of Ukitake, and perhaps what she feels most in this room, where all the light and pressure would normally be, is Ukitake’s absence. She wants to ask Ukitake about everything.

“Vice-Captain Kuchiki,” says Kyouraku. “Out of all that, what will I need to repeat?”

Rukia stares dumbly at the floor.

Repeat?

She lifts her gaze and understands, though, that this is not a reprimand. Kyouraku is looking at her like her brain has spilled out onto his floor, except he’d known it would, and he’d come ready with a mop.

Rukia tries to anchor herself in anything that feels of this moment: Eyepatch. Breeze. Clammy fingers as the night air pools in, cold and wet. Splinter.

“This conversation is going to keep having that effect,” Kyouraku offers.

Everyone must see Ukitake in him, she realizes. Every conversation he has must go like this, feel like this. The realization feels like a hard, swift kick to the gut. She has no idea what she wants him to repeat, but breathing around the kick, pain lighting up her muscles, she refuses to not guess. She can’t feel this helpless.

If Kyouraku had just told her Renji was her new captain, Rukia’s pretty sure she would have heard that, so she tries, “You have some business with Kurosaki Ichigo?”

Kyouraku chuckles, and Rukia returns her gaze to the floor.

That was a stupid guess. To think they would need her consultation regarding Ichigo. To think their friendship would serve a utility to Soul Society any longer. If they want him, they know where to find him. Even if they do not know the smell of his closet, the tinkle of city sounds outside his bedroom window, the hum of the light that was never quite the same after Renji and the rest of them came through it. They don’t know the walk to his campus or the color of the floor tiles at Karakura High or the fact that an egg sandwich costs 177 yen and that if you sit in the tree behind the gymnasium you can watch all the other students buy their drinks and chips and sandos, too.

Rukia thumbs the splinter she’d found earlier. It appears this conversation will, indeed, continue to have that effect.

“I can think of several young humans who would be very upset if I came back to ask Ichigo-kun for this. I suspect it would come to blows again,” says Kyouraku.

Rukia’s brow furrows. Back? Again? Blows? But the questions matter to her for only fractions of a fraction of a second longer, because the next thing Kyouraku says is, “This meeting concerns Shiba Kaien.”

This time it’s a blade that twists her gut, not a kick. A blade she hadn’t even known was still there to twist. She thought it was only a scar. She’d moved past this, once. Now, past is present again.

Splinter. Cold, wet. Night breeze. Rukia’s head jerks up (eyepatch—)

Kyouraku’s face remains placidly impassive.

She is not going to think about shriveled heads suspended in glass casing, holding Nejibana. She is not going to think about that trident through her stomach. She is not going to think about wide empty sockets staring down at her, or a mottled tongue thick and wet against her cheek. She is not going to think about where her own sword went or about standing with Ukitake in those woods and she is not going to think about a rough hand dragging her through a garden and dropping her at Ukitake’s feet as if to say, hey! Notice this one! and she is not going to think about Ukitake, either.

That’s who Kyouraku must really want. He wants to talk to his good friend about his good friend’s dead vice-captain and instead he’s left with his dead friend’s alive, replacement vice-captain. Rukia finds the formalities for this and says, “It is my honorable duty to serve as proxy for the late Captain Ukitake. I humbly ask that you repeat your request.”

“Kuchiki-san—” he drops her rank; now she’s just Kuchiki— “I didn’t ask for Ukitake. I asked for you.”

He lets her take a breath before he asks, “You’ve accompanied Shiba Kaien to the western forests, correct?”

Rukia nods. “We trained together on Mount—”

Kaien showed her the humiliation of launching the full force of her shikai at him and seeing it effortlessly stopped. Fighting with her did not make Kaien and faster, or stronger, or more invincible. It did not keep him safe. They had not trained together.

“Vice-Captain Shiba trained me,” she revises. “He took me to Mount Koifushi in Hokutan, West District 3.”

Now she can’t stop it. She does think about Kaien. She remembers everything, all at once.

She’d tried to train him, too. She’d wanted not to be useless, and she’d shown him how to build a snare. She knew how to catch rabbits, sometimes ground birds. He’d listened closely, and immediately started musing about catching boars—about ways to take her little snares and make them fit for things that were stronger, faster, better. Then she'd spoken shyly about the stars, which shone bright over even the most desolate of Inuzuri's alleyways, though they’d always been prettiest from the high mesas above. Again, he’d asked about all her constellations, then made up some of his own. Bigger and better ones—stories about nobles, kings, political intrigue.

He’d been kind about it. He made sure to set these stories in her world, made reference to her events, her characters. There was even one where a bunny met a prince on a banana farm that was being HELD HOSTAGE by the BANANA BANDITS of Inuzuri, which was dreadful and juvenile but, as far as Rukia was concerned, all the more brilliant for it. He’d always been bigger.

(Splinter. There is a splinter from the floor of the 1st Division receiving hall.)

This conversation continues to continue to have that effect.

“You might have heard that there’s a sea beyond the mountains of West Rukongai,” Kyouraku tells her, once she’s gathered herself.

Rukia’s throat goes tight. There weren’t many stars to be seen in the forest, but Kaien had spoken of that sea, and the way the moon's reflection fragmented against the choppy swells.

She ungathers.

“I've only seen the sea in the World of the Living,” she mumbles. “I don't know anything about our own.”

“No, no one really does,” Kyouraku agrees. “However, the western sea is well aware of us. My suspicion is that the business of the Wandenreich's invasion must be known to them as well. This is not ideal.”

They’re headed for another war, then. They are weak, easy targets, and there are any number of things capable of finishing what the Sternritter started. An ocean could splash over the mountains, flood them out. And that would be the end of Soul Society.

Kyouraku must read her misgivings, because he says, “Luckily, the kingdom of the western sea is not our enemy—at least, historically they haven’t been. That truce was brokered even before the founding of the Gotei 13, between the Four-or-Five Noble Families. You know, one of those big, classical important things. It’s the one that’s traditionally been the purview of the Shiba Clan. I assume you’re familiar with Nejibana’s elemental affinity?”

Rukia nods. It’s how Kaien had got to talking about the ocean in the first place. Explaining to her what shikai was, because nothing says you’ve meritoriously earned your appointment in the Gotei 13 like not knowing what shikai is. It had been too arcane a mystery to tackle in Rukia’s first-year slow class at the Academy and too obvious a principle for her Kuchiki tutors to think of bothering to remediate. Not that Rukia thinks their lessons would have helped. But Kaien talked about shikai like he’d never picked up a textbook in his life, and this was not better. You should practice talking to yourself. Aloud. I’m serious! I’m not just trying to make you look foolish. Where’d you get that idea? Haha. Talk to yourself. Sort your brain out. Make it all go still like a mirror—so still you can see the moon. Make friends with yourself. The heart that forms—that’s shikai. Hey—maybe that’s where we should start. Where is your heart?

At least, it was not better until it was. Nejibana is why, when Rukia releases her own shikai, she still thinks about that moon. So Rukia understands where Kyouraku must be going with this.

He’s wrong, though.

“I have no affinity with any sea,” she says. “I am not a Shiba. You may still need Ichigo for that.”

“And what affinity does Ichigo-kun have with the sea?” He’s singsong-ing her now, making light of her misgivings.

“If you fed him to it,” Rukia replies frostily, “I’m sure he could find one.”

Kyouraku does her the favor of taking her seriously again, though his expression is so fathomless, his one eye drilling through her bones, to her marrow, that Rukia regrets this. I’m sorry, she thinks. I didn’t mean—

Kyouraku says, “Rukia—” Just Rukia, now— “Ichigo-kun may be Kaien’s blood, but he did not know him. This was Shiba Kaien’s duty, and you were his last protégé.”

“Kuukaku-san—” Rukia starts.

“—is a sister, but not a protégé. And—!” he adds, returning to lightness, “Technically, she is also no longer noble. This is a dealbreaker in some circles.”

Rukia frowns. She draws on the most Kuchiki fibers of her being when she says, “Is the ocean a body of water, or a body politic?”

Kyouraku chuckles at her worldplay. “Oh, I wouldn’t imagine the sea cares whether you’re noble or not. That would be egregiously petty! The Noble Council, on the other hand, cares very much. But as you are a member of the still-noble Kuchiki house, they’ve deemed you eligible to succeed Shiba Kaien in this duty.”

“Wait, what duty?” Rukia asks. Had she missed something?

“Renewing our truce with the western sea,” Kyouraku repeats.

“Yes,” she allows. She remembers to bow her head. “But what does that entail, specifically? What does that even— Specifically, who is—”

Kyouraku lip curls into an almost-smile—amusement, slyness, sadness, it could mean anything. All he says is, “Kaien never did say.”

Rukia stares at him with a moon for a face.

“You mean to tell me… Kaien-dono— Vice-Captain Shiba simply neglected…”

“Secret acts not recorded, or something to that effect,” Kyouraku dodges. “The Gotei and Noble Council have never trusted each other enough to fully develop a protocol. I gathered that this is something the Shiba meant to pass down through experience. That’s why they chose you. It’s not about blood.”

Rukia chuffs. Not about blood, her foot. She is Byakuya’s sister, but if she dies the Noble Council won’t be losing any more blood; not really. Maybe they figure that’s reason enough. If all they want is a sacrifice, she can probably pull that off, actually. If they want anything else, then that will be a problem, because she hadn’t learned fast enough and she’d never known Kaien well enough to know he’d ever seen the sea, much less what it would look like to broker truce with water. Did he speak with mermaids? or negotiate with crabs? Before he died.

(It’s always about blood.)

She’s being stupid again. All she has to do is figure it out when she gets there. And if Rukia’s being honest, she’s always preferred to have no puzzle pieces than too many. Truth be told, this isn’t that much more ill-defined than the usual Gotei summons, she assures herself. This is fine.

The only difference is that this one has Kaien’s name on it.

It’s fine.

“I have one more question,” she says.

“Only one?” Kyouraku finds this amusing.

Rukia ignores him. The Noble Council doesn’t know her, and she doesn’t know them. She wants, at least, to know their names. “Who approved this mission?”

Obligingly, Kyouraku produces her official summons. Rukia takes it. The front is stamped with so many seals it looks as though it’s made a full tour of the Seireitei.

“Like I said, the Noble Council chose you to be their champion.”

Rukia brushes her finger over an upside down seal. “This noble didn’t. Who’s that?”

Kyouraku isn’t generous. “The Noble Council does not require unanimous decisions,” he says. But he adds, “Shiba Kaien chose you long before they ever did. I’ve chosen to trust in that. You would do well to, too,” and maybe that is generosity after all.

Unfortunately, Rukia is not in the mood to be romantic about bonds and trust. Kyouraku’s other half once trusted in a world like that. A world where Shiba Kaien had a pride to protect. A world with a mission with his name on it, and his alone. And where is Kaien now?

Where is Ukitake?

“Now I have one more thing to ask of you,” says Kyouraku.

Rukia resists the urge to parrot, only one? but Kyouraku still says, “Yes, only one,” which makes Rukia think if she’d been Ukitake, she would have made the joke. She should have made the joke.

Kyouraku says: “Under no circumstances should you confirm to anything out there that the Captain Commander is dead.”

That’s true. The Captain Commander is not dead. Because Yamamoto Genryuusai is not the Captain Commander—Kyouraku is. But some say Soul Society is nothing without the inferno that birthed it; they say all that remains is shadow. Kyouraku wants her to be the smoke and the mirror, pretending it is not. And maybe she’s right for this job after all, because her first impulse is to tell him that he is the Captain Commander! Yamamoto Genryuusai trusted him! Act like it!!

The impulse surprises her—it rips out of her like a ghost, and silent as. She hadn’t even felt it there. Hadn’t known it was still inside her. If she’d let herself shout that, it would have been as though she and Kyouraku were together in this. They are both stand-ins, picking up the pieces, brothers in inadequate arms.

But Rukia already decided she prefers no pieces to too many and she’s already said all the wrong things, and so here they are sitting across from one another, a deep unerring chasm between them, and he is the Captain Commander, not Ukitake’s friend; and she is no one, as she’s always been; and they are both still alone. She’s not going to ask him, do you feel empty, too? Are you spilling onto the floor? because it doesn’t matter. They won’t reach each other, either way.

Rukia takes her summons and leaves.

He will tell them that he’s had a god’s teeth in his lungs this entire time, and she will believe it. It will be hard not to, when the same god is leaking out of all of him, right onto the floor. It will be a reminder that there are older things than Soul Society—to someone, it will be a reminder. To her, it will only feel like nothing ever gets old enough. He will not be old enough. Their time will not be old enough.

She will remember being scared, but only in brave ways. On that day, she will only remember how to be scared in brave ways.

Eventually, she will only remember that she used to be brave.

It’s easier not to think about anything. Or at least, to get as close as she can. If all she can do these days is think stupid, she might as well stick to the basics.

According to the summons, Rukia is to report to the Seireitei’s West Gate at seven o’clock tonight. These instructions are clear enough, except that she hadn’t even received the summons until eight. At seven, she’d still been at Kuchiki Isamu’s memorial, eating duck. She'd started this mission on the wrong foot before she'd even started it. All the same, Rukia pitches frantically in the direction of the Kuchiki mansions once more, dead opposite the West Gate. If she’s already an hour late, what’s another? With the sun gone the air has settled into a deep chill, real autumn, and if they’ll be crossing the mountains she has to pack something, she can’t just—

“Renji!” she shouts, a split second before she crashes into him. He’s overdressed, his kariginu square-cut across his chest, sleeves billowing. Her face sinks through several layers of winter padding. He feels like falling into a futon.

“What’re you doing here!” she sputters.

“Kotsubaki came by the office!” Renji sputters back. “He was basically in tears, said a messenger had come for you, urgent, all that, but you’d gone to some banquet and he couldn’t find you!”

“It was a memorial service, not a banquet,” Rukia mumbles churlishly. Not that she needs to justify herself to Renji—Renji who’s not listening and doesn’t even hear her, he’s busy straightening out his coat—but Kuchiki Isamu is dead and she did memorialize him.

“—told him I didn’t know where you were, either, but he wouldn’t leave until I—” Renji emphasizes the bundle in his arms— “So I packed you some things. I don’t really—”

“You went into my room? Without me?”

Renji blanches. “Should I not have? No one stopped me. I’m gonna be honest, I think all your servants are scared of me.”

She’s doing it again. Saying things on autopilot, like a robot. She is an anonymous face speaking to another anonymous face. She’s not real, and no one else is, either.

Even so, Rukia sees the pack on Renji’s back and puts it together with the quilted monstrosity he is wearing and she is stupidly, stupidly, stupidly glad that Renji must also be coming on this mission.

She still can’t think of anything to say to him that’s really to him. Her brain feels like sorbet. There’s a bowl between her and the rest of the world, a ringing in her ears, and her thoughts melt inside her.

She can’t just say, I’m glad you’re here.

She can’t.

To buy herself some time, she pulls out Masami’s manju and shoves all four at Renji. “From the banquet,” she says. “You can have all of them.”

Renji’s attention hits them like an arrow, and the first manju disappears whole.

“Fuck, that’s good,” he muffles, tongue working around the thick bean paste center. Rukia is not the only one who promised to never go hungry.

“I mean, very funereal!” Renji assures her pointedly. So he’d heard her, after all. “But also good.”

When Rukia makes to hurry them along, however, his free hand shoots out and grabs her shoulder. She can’t dodge it. She’s not sure if she tried to.

“Hey, you okay? You look—” Renji frowns, still chewing. He's three manju in. He’d taken the bait but he hadn’t fallen for it.

Whatever she looks like, though, it must be something Renji recognizes, because he stops prying as quickly as he’d begun.

“I think we’re late,” he says instead, trading the manju for his own summons, the empty cellophane crinkling against his chest. He slaps the summons against his thigh to smooth it out. “Oh, yup. Fuck, I didn’t think we were that late.”

“Do you know who else is coming?” Rukia asks, donning the coat and pack Renji had collected for her.

Renji doesn’t have a clue. But he says Byakuya made it sound more like covert ops than a parade. Small group, high firepower, in and out. “So at least there’s that,” he says. “The Captain said something about the team being suited for speed. I don’t think anyone’s supposed to know we’re gone. I mean, like, anyone who might want to come invade us, or whatever. Not sure who’s left on that front, but I guess I wouldn’t put it past us to have more pocket enemies no one told us about.”

“What else were you told?” Surely not everyone received a story about Nejibana and the seas Kaien had not actually had the time to tell her anything about.

Renji looks away.

Rukia jabs her thumb behind her and he nods.

They make a run for the West Gate.

After they find their pace, Renji says softly, as though maybe his words could be swallowed up by the pounding of their feet and that could be okay, “So… Shiba Kaien.”

Maybe they’d all been told, after all. Maybe everyone had been told a story about Nejibana and hearts and how that was all they needed. If the official summons told everyone that Rukia and the power of friendship will save the day, go help her!, she will murder the Council of 46 herself. She will murder the Noble Council.

It’s not that Rukia doesn’t believe in the power of friendship. Of course she does. But like all things, it has limits, and so far all this talk of her, and Kaien, and experience has only made her feel—not enough. Like they’d been not enough. She’s not sure how much more of that knife she can take.

So she doesn’t respond right away. Their feet pound over the streets.

Renji’s never asked about Kaien before. Maybe if Hueco Mundo had ended with Hueco Mundo, Rukia would have had to say something about him then. (Renji had already told her his side, though it had mostly been about Sado and Ishida and how much he liked both of them.) But Hueco Mundo had not ended with Hueco Mundo, there’d been a Disc 2, and Ichigo had been hurt, and then she was gone to him, and then everything had been busy, and different, and then it hadn’t mattered what happened in Hueco Mundo anymore.

“So, Kaien, what? What did the summons say about him?” Rukia snaps, and time snaps backward with her. There was no pause. She responded immediately. She still is and is not talking to Renji. “As usual, I wasn’t told anything of import.”

“I mean, it didn’t mention him by name,” Renji says, startled. “It just said you’re the client. Well, it listed you twice, as the client and as a member of the escort team, which, I guess, for billing purposes— But it’s not hard to connect the dots, if you know enough about the dots.”

“What are the dots?” Rukia demands.

Renji clears his throat, as though their jog should preclude all this talking. Rukia glares at him, indicating it does not. Not even in his puffy coat.

Renji harrumphs.

“Dot One: A ‘former noble house’ with affiliations in the west and a diplomatic agreement with the kingdom of the western sea. Dot Two: A proxy agent who’d trained closely with the former executor, and who will be renewing the ties. Kinda read like a crossword.”

Renji pauses.

“The Captain told me he was important to you, that’s all. I don’t think you have to get into it with everyone if you don’t want to. I don’t think anyone’s going to question you.”

“They should. I don’t know anything about any of this. Apparently Kaien-dono and I did not train closely enough to unlock all these great secrets I’m supposed to have. We will probably all die.”

Renji doesn’t push, and Rukia is grateful. But part of her wishes that he had. If she were forced to share, maybe the pressure would crystallize a perfect story. Something that would prove, unequivocally, that she is the person for this job. Instead, she feels like she’s holding a rope that’s tethered to nothing.

So she changes the subject. “How did you have all this time to do your summons crossword and settle your affairs and deal with Kotsubaki and pack my bags, anyway? How long have you known about this mission? I was just in Kyouraku’s office. How come you got yours so much earlier?”

“I didn’t! I only got mine a couple… well, several, hours…” Renji trails off. He tries again. “I know the courier! Did her a solid once, and she always brings me my mail first thing,” excuses Renji, but the look Rukia gives him must be severe enough he adds, as his third swing at it, “I mean, the usual admin bullshit, I assume. I didn’t have to go all the way to the Captain Commander’s office to hear about this. I was already in ours, so when Captain Kuchiki came back from the meeting, he just told me. And later when the courier— Whatever. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Renji doesn’t think the subject’s changed, and maybe it hasn’t.

Rukia purses her lips, comparing the long edge of her summons to the remains of Renji’s. His had borne only a couple seals in a couple rows, probably captains’. Hers is a nest of dozens of inscrutable permissions. The Noble Council may not require unanimous decisions, but there’d been a lot of upside-down ones. A lot of no.

The seals don’t bear the clan’s names, or even their crest. Summons like these use a secondary set of seals, which are meant to be secret. Even Rukia doesn’t know what Byakuya’s is. She has never attempted to sleuth it out. Byakuya takes these types of things very seriously. Anyone else, she’d decode in a heartbeat if given half a chance. Unfortunately, she has not had that chance. As such, it’s impossible to know whether the proposal had come from a family within the Kuchiki’s auspices or without; or to know how many seals belonged to families of station and how many were hangers on, or perhaps had had their support bought by bigger fish with deeper influence.

“Does it matter?” Renji asks.

He’s not stupid; there’s no way he doesn’t know what kind of nests of motivations every summons claws its way out of, especially when the nobles get involved.

“This is substantially more complicated than you’re imagining it,” Rukia says anyway. If Renji wants to pretend the surface is the only thing that matters, then two can play at that game. But her words come out more testily than she means them, and she hates that she sounds so mean. Maybe she can’t play, after all.

“—you fool,” she addends, a softener.

“Why does it mean so much to you right now?” Renji says.

“Because it does.”

The Kuchiki are not an easy family, even by blood, but it‘s been some time since Rukia had felt like a true outsider. In fact, her purported treachery and then botched execution had somehow helped her familial standings. But after the war, it's different again. Rukia feels eyes on her when she walks the halls, and she knows every one of them is thinking, Why not her? Why is she still breathing when my son, my mother, my beloved, is not even among the bodies?

“They're not all thinking that,” Renji reassures her, because apparently she's been maudlin out loud. But there’s a difference between ‘not all’ and ‘no one.’

Rukia stops running. Renji plows into her back.

“Why are you letting me get away with this,” she says.

Renji shoves her pack. He shoves it again, and again, until Rukia starts running again. They’re late.

“I dunno. You have a lot on your plate,” he pants, once they’re in motion. “Oh! Speaking of plates, those were great manju.”

“Masami’s. I’ll let her know.”

“Didn’t she wrestle a boar or something?”

“She certainly did not. You shouldn’t, you know.”

“Wrestle boars?”

“Let me get away with things,” Rukia gulps.

“I’ll get tired of it eventually,” he says airily. But then he says, “At which point, believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”

That’s a different Renji. Those words are solid and toothy, metal-made, and immediately, Rukia wants to fight them.

“Anyway, fuck 'em!” Renji says, and his words still have that razor edge. He’s edgy pre-deployment or perhaps already, finally, annoyed. After all, self-pity is repetitive and dull. Even Rukia’s.

“If the Kuchiki and whoever else chose you because they figure you’re a chip they should’ve lost, then fuck ‘em and do the thing. Then you win. And if you do fail, then like you said, we all die, and they all die. And more importantly, it will be their seals on the order and their fault, and if they’re the reason everyone dies, maybe they’ll all be stripped of title. And what could be worse than that?”

Rukia can't “fuck 'em.” In fact, she is certain Renji has also never fucked them—with the exception, perhaps, of becoming the 6th's vice-captain in the first place.

It doesn’t matter. This is different. Deeper. Because it’s not just about the Kuchiki not seeing her as kin—it may not even be mostly about that. This is about Rukia. It’s about Rukia feeling now more than ever before that they are kin, because they are in mourning together. They are in the kind of mourning that runs so deep it wishes someone else had died instead. The kind that wouldn’t shy from a trade, pride be damned.

That’s fair enough, she thinks. Rukia knows exactly how that feels. Which brings her peace until it becomes guilt, maybe shame, maybe something else.

Fair enough, she thinks again, and this time leaves it at that.

The West Gate pops into view like an apparition, a trick of winding thoroughfares and blind corners. At its base, the rest of their party is waiting. They’re in kariginu, too, colorful in contrast to the usual Gotei black and white—like a fall wood, or a troupe of minstrels. There are only six of them, not including her or Renji, and Rukia imagines this pales in comparison to the traditional entourage. Before the war, even the transportation of minor artifacts of the nobility required a full procession. But like Renji said, this looks covert. It would probably have been more covert if no fewer than three vice-captains and three captains hadn’t been waiting by the West Gate for over an hour. It’s not as though anyone has the time or freedom to linger in the streets to ogle and speculate, but still, it’s a lot of firepower to be sending out beyond that gate, especially when the Seireitei’s defenses are as attenuated as they are. This is a full third of the remaining captain slate.

Still, Rukia gets the impression their roster looks more impressive on paper than in reality. Though the bulkiness of their coats hides their body language, the colorful fabric only makes all their faces look whiter, the hollows beneath their eyes darker. Only Matsumoto waves as they approach. For the rest, she and Renji are not worth the effort.

“You’re late,” Captain Hitsugaya greets her.

She will turn to Renji just before they jump, toward his googles and his tiger print and his soft long hair, and she will think that they are done losing, though the war will have only just begun. It won’t be naivete, or even arrogance. She will have learned long ago what it takes to dance on the crown of a lightpost, even in unfamiliar places where gravity and atmosphere are simply not the same—which is to say, she will have learned to forget. Forget it’s possible to fall. If you don’t, then falling is all you will do. So she will forget all possibilities but survival. She will forget whatever she has to.

And when the war is won, she will forget how hard it is to forget. Then she will forget how to forget, which is when she will begin choosing how to remember. Maybe it will already be too late, even then.

Everyone is waiting.