Finding You

“Please, help her,” Byakuya said: “Please.” The tall woman turned towards him, her eyes a little wild as she saw just one more desperate figure standing amidst the carnage.
The Squad Four barracks were in chaos. A fire had started in one of the poorer districts of Rukongai and, hot on its heels, riots had broken out in the streets. Security forces in the Rukon were being stretched. On top of that, an unsuccessful mission in the human world was bringing in a steady flow of casualties. And Byakuya was no-one special here. There were other officers who needed urgent treatment and, if he was but an officer, then the girl he was carrying was no-one. He saw that in the way Kotetsu looked at her:
“We’re overrun – ah” -  
“Kuchiki,” he reminded her. The name she did at least acknowledge with a nod and a glance around.
“I can’t take her here. You’re Sojun’s son, aren’t you? With Sixth Division?”
“Yes.”
“Could you arrange for your captain’s barracks to be opened” –
“I can open my own house if it is space you need, but I beg you” –
And at that, she had taken the frail bundle in her arms. That was how he had found himself here, back in his own home, but seated in the corridor outside one of the guest rooms. The servants had brought him a folding chair before they had hastened away to open the southern wing of the mansion to receive casualties. He hadn’t wanted to stand. The thoughts and images in his mind seemed to scrape about the inside of his skull. He pressed the balls of his palms into his eyes, trying to press away the tiredness, but the moment he shut them, she was there: the woman he had pulled from the fire.
She’d not been burned, though her skin was black with smoke. Yet when he’d lifted her, he’d discovered the horrible truth: that her face was caved in on the right-hand side. With so much blood, it was impossible to judge if there was any way she could survive. He thought first that the building had collapsed in on her, but there were no debris, and the angle was wrong. Something had struck her from the side. Something. Someone.
He’d been angry. He’d been furious.
He’d been too late.
Too late to save her from the beast who had done this. Byakuya had found his body, but it meant only that he had escaped death at the young soul-reaper’s hands, which was disappointing because Byakuya had savoured the thought of putting his hands round that neck and squeezing. Taking his life a little at a time with every narrowing breath. Slowly. Yes, it would have been slower that way. Slower than the fire. Slower than the blade he carried, which would have been too good a death for that filth.
“Kuchiki-sama?”
He raised his head from his hands to see Kotetsu standing before him. Of course, he already knew the outcome. He could no longer feel the reiatsu of the woman he’d taken from the flames:
“It was a foolish hope,” he said: “I thought that I could save her.”
The medic blinked:
“I did the best I could. Her lungs are damaged; there’s little I can do on that count. But I’ve worked on the head injury. We won’t know for sure until she wakes, but I think she may make a fair recovery.”
Byakuya stared at her, then at the doors to the guest room:
“But her spiritual pressure” - ?
“Oh, you won’t be able to sense her. Not for now. I gave her a strong sedative. With a wound like that, you can’t run the risk of a patient waking during the healing; the shock alone might have killed her. But a side effect of a sedative” - she turned and watched him as he walked past her into the room – “Is that her reiatsu is dampened.”
Like most of the rooms in his house, it was sparsely furnished: just a low writing desk and a bed. He approached the latter cautiously, uncertain of what he would find.
“No scarring,” he said.
“No. Cosmetics is the easy part,” said Kotetsu, stepping into the room behind him: “The injury to her skull was severe, but so long as tissue is not actually destroyed, it can be repaired.”
“You said her lungs” –
“- Were damaged from the smoke. That’s different from healing a physical injury; it’s more like a poison, and there’s very little that we can do for such things. She is lucky though,” she said, joining him in gazing at the woman on the bed: “The damage is minimal. Will there be others, Kuchiki-sama?”
“Others?”
“Will men from your division be bringing other casualties from the fire here?”
“No. Just her.” When she continued to stare at him blankly, he added: “Squad Six was not required for relief duties today.”
“Then” – Kotetsu’s eyes widened– “You went alone?”
“Yes.”
“Who is she?”
He considered the question. It had been inevitable and he had prepared an answer, although now he found himself wondering why he had felt any need to prepare. His answer was, of course, the truth. He had nothing to hide:
“Her name is Hisana. She is an aquaintance. My family have had dealings with her over the years.” He need not admit that, on some level, their lives had become irrevocably entwined. He’d lived a long time. Since their first meeting there had been years, even decades, when he’d never caught a glimpse of her. Then, one day, there she would be, standing in the dusty street, just the same as the first day he had laid eyes on her. How this one soul from the Rukon could have gradually invaded his life, he didn’t know. And nor could he explain the series of events that had led them to meet again and again: chance encounters, coincidences, the universe turning in such a way that it had finally tricked him into doing something foolish. Into bringing her here.
“Do you know who did this to her?” Kotetsu asked timidly.
“Yes, and he is dead.”
She let out a long breath and then seemed to pause for as long as etiquette might demand in light of this revelation. Then, quietly, she said:
“They will need me back at the barracks.”
“Thank you, Isane,” he said, calling her by her first name and, when he turned, it was to see that her cheeks had flushed an elegant pink:
“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she said.
He waited until she was gone, then drew up a chair beside the bed. It wasn’t nothing, he thought.
Hisana was something.
Their brief encounters in Rukongai had never given him much opportunity to study the girl. Now that she was in no position to accuse him of impertinence, he decided to take full advantage. This was a human soul; the first he’d ever come to know as anything more than a passing filament in the fires of life and death that burned on the edge of his perception. Kotetsu had cleaned the ash and soot from her face. He’d become accustomed to seeing her stained by the dust of Rukongai, which cleaved like a second skin to its inhabitants; yet, even so, he had always been aware of how thick her dark hair was, how its curl outlined a delicate face, how her skin was pale beneath the layers of grime. She was pretty. Not beautiful. Beautiful suggested a flower in full bloom, but she was like the buds on a winter tree, and, seeing her now, it seemed a wonder to him that she had survived this long at all. So who was she? Really? Her body was frail and yet she had lived. Whatever strength it was that had brought her through intrigued him more than the delicate slant of her lips, although, he realised, that would probably have been enough.
He was enamoured with her.
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It was dusk outside. The soul reapers had talked well into the evening, and now Ichigo leaned back in his chair and stretched, almost tipping himself backwards onto the desk behind him:
“So, where are you guys staying?”
Renji’s eyes drifted up to the ceiling and the light fitting they’d disconnected to get into the room. Ichigo rocked forwards: “No! That’s my loft. First off, you wouldn’t all fit and, second, my father goes up there sometimes.”
“Here then?” tried Renji.
“We don’t have the space!”
“Just one of us could stay,” said Rangiku.
“No.”
“Oh please!” she cajoled him and, delicately, began to unbutton her top. Ichigo threw up a hand to cover his eyes:
“No! I’m not that kind of guy! Your wiles won’t work on me!”
Behind him, Rukia snorted:
“It’d be more convincing if you weren’t peeking through your fingers. But, more importantly,” she said, glancing up at the other soul reapers: “Where will you go?”
“We’ll find somewhere,” muttered Ikkaku.
“I’m going to ask that sweet girl,” said Rangiku: “She strikes me as the kind who doesn’t say no.” Rukia frowned:
“You mean Inoue? Strictly speaking, that’s taking advantage.”
Even so, it was clear that their meeting had come to an end and they began to disband. Rukia went downstairs with ichigo to bid the others farewell. In the end, there were just three of them standing in the street: Rukia, Ichigo and Renji. The red-haired man seemed oddly reluctant to leave:
“I guess I’ll head over to Urahara’s,” he said. She nodded and, having no more excuses to hang around, he raised his hand in a farewell and turned away from the two of them. Ichigo was standing beside Rukia, his arms folded:
“What about you? Where are you going to stay?”
She flashed him a broad grin and bolted into the house. “No!” he cried: “Rukia, my dad’s already seen you!”
Of course she could stay though. Of course she would stay. One sob story later and Ichigo’s father was convinced she had been left high and dry by her own family and would be on the streets tonight were it not for his son’s thoughtfulness. She was welcome in their house, he said, for as long as she had need of their hospitality.
Indeed, it was all going in Rukia’s favour, right up until Isshin Kurosaki showed her to her room.
A fold out bed had been squeezed in between Yuzu and Karin’s. A small card on the pillow read ‘For Rukia.’
“Why am I sleeping here?” she demanded of Ichigo. He’d been sulking a little ever since Renji had broken his lampshade; now that things hadn’t gone exactly to plan, he actually looked a little smug:
“This is where normal house-guests sleep, Rukia. You’re a girl. Girls sleep in the girls’ room.”
“I’m a shinigami. I’m sleeping in your room, just like always.”
“No, you’re not.” He moved to block her escape: “That would just be rude.”
“But I brought some things to spruce up that dingy little closet o f yours. A picture, a reading light” –
He laughed:
“You don’t decorate closets. Did you just call it ‘dingy?’ You were perfectly happy there back in April!”
“Yes.” She bounded onto the bed, turned round and sat down, chin on her knees. She smiled up at him: “I was.”
“It’ll be easier this way. At least I won’t have to steal food for you.”
“And I won’t have to put up with your complaints about being woken for shinigami duties,” she retorted: “I assume you can handle that all by yourself now.”
“Oh yeah, and I won’t have to keep looking back over my shoulder for the next shinigami who makes it their mission to find you and cart you back to Soul Society.”
“And I won’t have to explain every damn thing to you!”
“That’s my line!” He jabbed his chest: “I won’t have to explain every damn thing to you!”
“Don’t flatter yourself! We both know who was training who!”
“Oh, I’m not talking about shinigami stuff,” he said, taking some sheets out of the cupboard and throwing them to her: “I’m talking about school, homework, packed lunches” –
“Are you claiming that introducing me to boxed juice drinks is comparable to my training you to combat the forces of evil and avert the coming apocalypse?” He barely faltered:
“- Polite conversation, human social customs, schoolfriends, days out, taking time off, chilling out, relaxing, enjoying yourself” – A pillow hit him squarely in the face, thrown with enough force that it made him stagger and Rukia fell backwards onto the bed, laughing. Her missile sailed back with less force and a poorer aim; she batted it aside:
“I know how to enjoy myself!”
“I meant without resorting to violence, Idiot.” Ichigo ran a hand back through his hair and shook his head: “You really are something. Well, make yourself comfortable. Tonight I’m going to introduce you to family dinners.”
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Kuchiki Byakuya, the Fifth Seat of Sixth Division and the Twenty-Eighth head of the  Kuchiki Clan had aquainted himself with a number of officials within the judiciary body of the Central Forty-Six. He had connections to the royal household too, where the name Kuchiki still bore resonance. He knew people who knew people who knew people who were barely people at all because, at some stage in the spiritual hierarchy, beings ceased to have visual form, but existed, undifferentiated, in dimensions that even he could not enter. When he had first taken stewardship of the clan, he had been brought into contact with such powers and they had unsettled him. There were infinities that he could not conceive of and yet he had experienced them in the presence of these things, and they had jarred within him, disrupting what he understood of the world. There was this world, he realised, and there were others, and there were some in which he would never have authority because, in the great scheme of things, he was barely a mote of dust caught in a beam of sunlight.
It had taken him some time to realise that knowing this was a power within itself.
He would never be able to manipulate the higher authorities in the way he could play games with the nobles of Soul Society. Yet it was these very games that had led him to understand how political manouevering worked. It wasn’t about power. It was about pressure points. And where he could squeeze the Central Forty-Six, they could, in turn, require the Royal Guard to look the other way. There were pressure points all the way up. You just had to know who to trust.
Byakuya played by the rules. He’d never had cause to lust for power; he’d never needed anything beyond the rights and priveleges his position imparted; he had never, in all his life, felt a need to question the laws that governed his world: the balance between the living and the dead. For that reason, his reputation was flawless. He was trusted and he knew who he could trust. In the end, it had come down to something as simple as this: a bribe.
“My master told me, ‘we will abide by whatever he requires because his motives will be good ones, regardless of the task.” The man speaking was seated on the other side of a partition wall. Probably the servant of somebody’s servant because Byakuya had insisted he have no talent in the detection of spiritual energies. Even so, Byakuya still hid his own. He’d claimed he would not come in person, but, in the end, had decided to involve no others from his household.
The item, an heirloom from his family, was placed in a small alcove, accessible from either side of the wall. Opening the wooden hatch on one side would automatically close it on the other; the exchange would be discrete and anonymous. “There is one thing he required of me though,” the servant continued: “He asked that I question you as to what your master’s purpose is, if you are at liberty to tell me.”
“What do you know?” Byakuya asked.
“Only that he is the head of a noble clan.”
“And what makes you believe I am aware of his motivation?”
The servant chuckled nervously and Byakuya fingered the artefact wrapped in fine cloth: a medallion with an ancient family seal: one of the extinct bloodlines of Soul Society. Since it had ended up in the Kuchiki family’s possession, it was probably wise not to question too deeply how they had become extinct. “Well, you may tell him that my master is saving a life that might otherwise be lost.”
“His own?”
“Another’s.”
There was a long silence, then the servant spoke again, his voice serious:
“These papers are for the transfer of souls between districts of the Rukon. My master and I are not prithee to the knowledge that assigns souls to certain districts.”
“Nor is mine.”
“But it is certain that such an act would require an adjustment of the balance.”
Byakuya winced. Even the servants of these people tended to have more knowledge of the soul cycle than ordinary shinigami. He was dealing with a man who probably understood his vocation more than he did.
“It would,” he said.
“My master could effect this, but he could not foresee the form it would take.”
“I – That is, my master, understands that.”
“This life? Is it worth so much?”
For the first time in his life, Kuchiki Byakuya was gambling, and he didn’t even know the odds.
“Yes. It is worth it.” Then he closed the hatch and waited.
It was, he thought later as he sat by her bedside, too easy. Only those with the spiritual pressure of shinigami could be granted entry to the Sereitei.That was the law. Yet the papers he was now carrying transferred a woman from the Seventy-Ninth district of the Rukon to the Central Sereitei. No explanation  given. No questions asked.
Hisana’s reiatsu was not weak. Her soul was a little stronger than most others in Rukongai. But she was not a shinigami; she was merely an aberration.
Still, he was glad he had found her, this aberration.
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It was easy for Rukia to work around the routines of the Kurosaki family because, so far as she could see, there was no routine. This was what she remembered. Outside of the girls’ room, the hallway was filled with the sounds of various family members screaming at each other to hurry up in the bathroom or go and do their chores. It was all good-natured, if loud. No-one was in charge. Certainly not their father. In the kitchen, Yuzu ruled with an iron hand, but, even then, mealtime without servants was a raucous affair, far more akin to messtime in the barracks than anything Rukia had experienced in her own home.
She was sitting on the bed now, switching through messages on Urahara’s mobile device. Bulletins from Soul Society discussed, at length, the upcoming war and the power of the hogyoku. It was strange to think they were talking about the same item that Aizen had retrieved from her own body just months ago; the events on Sokyoku Hill seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Rukia!” The door slammed open and there was Ichigo, a toothbrush sticking out of the side of his mouth. He grunted acknowledgement of the girl curled up on the bed: “Just checking you’re alright.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because” – and he delivered his next words in a loud voice over his shoulder – “Karin won’t get out of the bath!”
“I changed earlier,” Rukia said, effecting disinterest: “I’m just reporting in now.”
“Finally!” he cried as Karin ducked into the room under his arm, dressed only in a towel:
“Ichi-nii, you’re so rude!” She said: “And what are you doing, bursting in on Rukia? She might not be decent. Get out now! Get out!”
Rolling his eyes, he turned away towards the bathroom, but threw up his hands as Yuzu streaked past him:
“Hey! I was going in there!”
“Rukia, would you shut the door on my idiot brother?”
“Of course.” She put down the hollow detector and climbed off the bed, flashing Ichigo her most charming grin as she shut the door in his face: “Good night, Ichigo!”
“Oh, Rukia,” said Karin, behind her: “Your phone’s going.”
Her heart sunk. Indeed, behind her, on Karin’s bedside table, the detector was beeping frantically: “You get lots of messages,” Karin commented while ducking to dry her hair. When she looked up again, Rukia was frowning at the device. “Is it bad news?”
“Huh?”
“Is it bad news?” The young girl repeated and Rukia glanced up:
“Er….. No….. It’s….. Please excuse me.” And, with that, she left the room.
“Hollows!” Ichigo cried, as soon as she entered his. She’d forgotten that Ukitake had given him his own version of the hollow detecting device: a shinigami badge that made a repetitive howling noise when a hollow entered the human world: “Can you sense them?” he asked: “They’re strong, aren’t they? Arrancar. How many?”
“Four, five, six,” she said, reading the screen on her own detector. She swore under her breath: “They’ll target individuals with high spiritual pressure.”
“Renji, Hitsugaya” –
“They can look after themselves, but your sisters” – she saw his alarm – “We’re here with them so they’ll be fine. Rangiku is with Inoue….. What about Chad?”
“Chad!”
“Go, find him. I’lI make sure everyone is alright here.”
He used the shinigami badge to step out of his body and she watched him stand up on the bed where he had just been seated. He’d never learnt to thin out his own spiritual form to move through matter, so he opened the window as if he were still solid and stepped out onto the air, pausing once to turn and look back at her. She was kneeling on the bed by his now still body.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“Go!”
And he did.
She looked down at his human form. She would need to find Kon and put the mod soul into Ichigo’s body, then he would be able to protect his sisters, leaving her free to go and join the fighting. In the meantime though, she reached over and closed his eyes so that they no longer stared, unblinking at the ceiling. He hated looking as if he was dead, he’d told her once, and she’d argued that it was just a body; just a gigai made of flesh and blood. His attachment to it was almost entirely sentimental. It was a vehicle for his life; that was all.
And that was why it really made no sense that she had closed his eyes.
This boy, this strange boy. In all the worlds she knew, though she had faced death in a myriad of forms, and dealt it too, he had brought her a kind of peace.  Silence amidst the noise. Even if they were to fight side by side tonight, her head would be clear and she would be focussed. And that would be enough. “I’m glad I found you,” she whispered and smiled because she knew he wouldn’t hear.