Work Text:
Ururu was the kind of child who touched things in lieu of speaking—an impossibly shy little girl who fisted the grass in her hands and, without any grass around, did it with her hair. Brushing it back hadn’t helped because she’d always take her sticky little palms and pat it right back in front of her face. A makeshift curtain that always evoked a certain fondness in him.
Sometimes Kisuke took her to the park, amidst the human children— and Ururu was a perfect daughter who giggled and fell down and wailed—come now, come now, let’s get a band-aid on that. Even if she didn’t need one; he was not so sentimental a father, that he would imitate even human fragility.
But it was nice, the look of it. A translucent hello kitty band-aid on a perfectly healed knee. A crushed-up butterfly in his daughter’s fist. Dust that had been alive once, had known how to shimmer.
-
His life was a bisected creature. There was the before, and there was now— and between these two things lay a singular night that was as sharp as a scalpel. A bone-white moon. A knife that was also a man.
Yes, Sousuke Aizen had ruined his life.
“Your anger is something that…” Hirako-san was gesturing in the air with a lit cigarette, and the smoke was making shapes that lingered even as Kisuke closed his eyes. “It’s something I don’t understand, and ergo, it scares the shit out of me.”
“My, my.” He yawned. “You wound me. Compared to Hiyori-chan, I’m ice cold, you know.”
“No, that’s the thing. You should be angrier.” He was looking far away, towards the orange cell phone towers that were popping up at the edge of the town, like mushrooms after the rain. The human world, like everything else, was ceaselessly evolving. “That would be understandable. Whatever you’ve got going on just weirds me out sometimes.”
“Ah, well.” Kisuke smiled. “This isn’t too bad. Let me light that for you again.”
(It was harder to be angry at the knife than it was to understand it. Comprehension came to Kisuke as easily as dreams came to milk-drunk children.)
-
Ururu and Jinta had in them the undercurrent of something unsettling.
“Those kids were pulling the wings off dragonflies at the fireworks.” Yoruichi was saying. “I didn’t know if I should tell them off. They’re your kids.”
It hadn’t been something Kisuke had purposefully put in them—it was rather something he’d forgotten to do. In the absence of things like fear and hesitation, a strange apathy towards violence floated towards the undisturbed surface. An oversight? Only if the goal had been the imitation of human children or a happy human family.
Yoruichi lay on the floor, glossy with the summer evening. She exuded humid, heady smells like damp earth. Kisuke could think of her as his dearest friend—friends who love and make love to each other— but the idea of Yoruichi as a wife made him laugh.
It was too hot for telling jokes. She clumsily kicked his hand away when he went to touch the sharp nudge of her ankle. Sleep well, Yoruichi.
-
On rainy days Kisuke thought of Sousuke Aizen.
There was no sharpness of feeling to that remembrance. Kisuke only wondered if there was anyone else in the world who could understand that man. It was like a chore you could only do when stuck inside the house, like airing out the attic. Like an attic full of dust that knew how to shimmer.
Kisuke had to think of Aizen because there was no-one else in the universe who could do it.
Smoking a pipe and looking at the edge of town. So many cell phone towers. Ceaselessly red.
-
He had never heard such agony before.
Kisuke was an unwitting connoisseur of suffering, even if he’d never been a sadist—that pedestrian psychosexual complex of which Mayuri Kurotsuchi was a victim. Kisuke had bore witness to the damp underbelly of the afterlife. He had been the warden.
But physical suffering was dimensionless. It was not intimate the way Aizen’s had been.
The man was angry with him. Oh dear. When were people angry with each other? When they owed each other. The agony in his voice had been the agony of incomprehension. Kisuke knew that he would never hear it again, but the idea that Aizen would come to curb his expectations of him was somehow unpleasant.
Oh dear. That’s too much to saddle a poor shopkeeper with.
Still, Kisuke thought of airing out the attic. An attic full of shimmering dust or maybe even butterflies—beautiful and splayed open, their bodies pinned to the display case.