Bleach Fan Fiction ❯ Moving Forward ❯ To Embrace It ( Chapter 6 )

In which she embraces her darkness and becomes one with her sin.

 

Warning: Violence, language, and some citrus.

 

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Descending me like flakes of snow

I embrace the cold

 

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There was, of course, a struggle, both physically and emotionally. Ichigo had always made her listen forcibly before - grabbing her by the arm and shouting in her face until she heard him - until she understood what he was trying to get across to her. She was older and wiser; but he was younger and brasher, and when he had physical force on his side, he stood a chance of making her see.

 

Now, all he had was his tenacity. When she slipped beyond even that - when she danced just beyond his grasping fingertips and threatened him with scorn as sharp as her blade (or perhaps it was the other way around?), what more could he do than step back - to shout and curse and stomp his feet?

 

And then, all she had left was her wisdom and the tears she would never shed.

 

He did not give up. He would never give up, she realized, belatedly, after weeks and dozens of attempts to get back through to her failed. Byakuya's house servants barely batted an eye at him now, and even when she left Soul Society to battle in Heuco Mundo everytime she felt him near, she now found him sitting impatiently in the manor upon her return.

 

`I will not back down,' his eyes said. `I will not give up on you!' When a few harsh words and a frown of disapproval was no longer enough to send him fleeing, she finally realized that he wasn't going to give up (something she should have realized all along), and because of that, she knew it was time for things to change.

 

Time for things to end.

 

For the first time since she had refused to die, Rukia wondered if it was too late to do just that.

 

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This time, when she heard the twin shrieks of two hollows ravaging in living world, Rukia cocked her head to the side and thought, `Why not?'

 

She swung her sword in a wide arc, and in the flurry of pristine powder and white and snow, a shadow emerged, and she smiled fondly as he stepped forward and straightened, squared his shoulders, twisted his lips in a cocky grin that was both achingly familiar and not. There was something different about the way he smiled at her these days, she had realized, but she could not quite place her finger upon it; she did not have the time to.

 

“Kaien,” she greeted, and she no longer winced when she said it. What else was she to call him? He was not Aaroniero - and nor was he really Metastacia anymore. He was not Kaien-dono, either, she knew, but she left off the `dono' and pretended that made a difference.

 

It was a borrowed face. Why not borrow the name as well?

 

His head was cocked in askance, and he was just opening his mouth to ask why she had summoned him when, as if summoned, another hollow's shriek tore between them. His mouth snapped shut again and he nodded. She wondered why she felt an odd twist in her stomach at the sudden muted expression on his face.

 

“Your wish,” he said simply. `Is my command,' lies unspoken, because it would have been too cheesily romantic spoken aloud. With a perfunctionary bow, he leapt into action, and then they were flying.

 

`The thrill of the hunt,' Renji had once said, and she had only scoffed. There was no thrill to be had, she had argued - and there hadn't been, for her. She was weak, and the weakness perpetuated itself as fear in her heart. She did not want to die. She did not want her companions to die. She executed what she had to efficiently, but it was not her joy.

 

Now, for the first time in her life, she thought she might understand.

 

They descend so quickly that the hollows hadn't even a chance to sense them first. It was less a fight than a slaughter, and yet she could not bring herself to care. They were loathsome things, bringing them to hell a guiltless therapy. It might not bleach her soul again, but it at least painted her in lighter shades of gray.

 

He twirled Nejibana in his hands as if she was forged for him. His high stance perfectly complemented her low, and he dodged out as she dodged in; he weaved left as she weaved right. Their reiatsus' flare, his a part of hers but somehow separate, somehow bolstering her - his presese a flicker of excitement in the pit of her, another sword in her separate hand, and in that moment, they fit, and everything was right.

 

But then one hollow shrieked, and there was black, black blood splashing over her, weighing her down in soggy filth. As her quarry dissipated, he leapt over her shoulder and slammed Nejibana down on the second's mask, and then it was over. She was surprised that she felt disappointed for their dance to have been cut so short.

 

There was an awkward moment as he hovered before her, and the hollows dissipated back to nothing, leaving no more reason for him to be here. He turned back to her and bowed at the waist. She liked to think he looked a little disappointed as well.

 

He meant to fade back to the inner world again, as he always did after they were done practicing, after she was done using him as her weapon. This was the first time she called him in the real world, but there was no reason for him to think it would be any different here than in Soul Society or Heuco Mundo…

 

(There was no reason for things to be any different… but then, she had stopped caring about reason months ago, hadn't she?)

 

He was just about to fade when she spoke; her voice uncharacteristically hoarse, even in her own ears, and she would have winced if anyone else was to hear it. But somehow, it didn't bother her that he did.

 

“Would you give me company for awhile?” She wondered if the words sounded as needy as she felt. She didn't even realize she had reached for him until she felt the muscles of his forearm twitching beneath her fingers.

 

He was frozen; very carefully, neither of them looked to her hand. “I would give you anything,” he replied. The honesty in his voice tickled a painfully sweet ache inside her.

 

“Then stay.”

 

His breath caught oddly in his throat, but it had nothing to do with exertion. Their eyes caught and held, and that tickle inside was almost unbearable.

 

“I would stay for as long as you would have me,” he vowed, and then her other hand was burying itself in his hakama, dragging his face down to her level, and she was pressing her lips over his.

 

The moment might have been too sweet, if it weren't for that overlying tang of copper and salt and slimy black stuff staining her. Suddenly disgusted, she shoved him back, and wiped frantically at her face with the back of her hand.

 

“Goddamnit,” she hissed, only now remembering the hollows' blood covering her. There was none on him except that smeared on his lips from hers, she noted, and it only made sense. He had killed his hollow with a clean slice to the mask; she was ever more vicious, and had found it necessary to skewer hers in two first.

 

The sticky stuff only smeared under her cuff and she scrubbed harder for a moment, frustrated, when he caught her wrist.

 

“Please,” he whispered hoarsely; he was leaning over her, and she delighted in the way his form was solid - in the way he blocked the sunlight from touching her porcelain skin. It was so metaphorical - so fitting, it was almost painful…

 

“Please,” he whispered again, his breath warm on her face, “Allow me.”

 

His tongue was scalding, trailing so slowly over her cheek. And even though he was licking up blood, she could not bring herself to feel disgusted by it.

 

Something coiled and wound within her; she shuddered and smothered strange whining noises in her throat. They had done this in her mind's realm, but never anywhere else - something about it being here, in the human world, made it that much more sinful.

 

And she wanted more. She wanted to immerse herself in that sin - paint herself with it, bathe in it… become one with it.

 

She yanked his hand that was holding her wrist down, hooking it beneath her knee as she wound her leg around his slender hip and crashed into him. She wound her other hand into his dark locks and slanted his mouth down for her to cover with her own. He opened it without her even asking, and this time, she did not flinch away from the taste of copper and salt and blood, but rather sought it out - sucked it greedily off his tongue, and when there was not enough there, bit viciously into his lip and tore so that they might fill their mouths with more.

 

Blood. Sin. This was their flavor. It was only right.

 

She pressed harder; he stumbled back a bit, and his feet caught up with hers, and they both crashed hard to the ground. A rock bit deeply into her knee, though she scarcely felt the tearing skin; if he was hurt, nothing in the eagerness of his mouth gave it away.

 

Her hands were inside his hakama, pushing and tugging and yanking. When his obi caught and hindered her advances, she growled and tore viciously at it -

 

He chuckled then, and were he anyone else, she thought she might have bristled at the way he so calmly placed his hands over hers and guided them through the intricate knot at his waist. But he was not anyone else. And though she bit off the -dono at the end of his name, it somehow felt right that he was teaching her yet still.

 

But then she slid down him, and her mouth was laving down his chest, worshiping in the peaks and valleys of taut muscle. His skin was smooth porcelain, warm in spite of his lack of true life, but even if it was false it was hers - all of it, hers, and only hers, and she knew that no other had seen him this way, touched him this way. Slow, hot, open mouthed kisses, lower, to his stomach, and his knowing warm chuckle became a dark, needy gasp, and she wanted to laugh and laugh and (cry).

 

She noted only absently that she had left a trail of crimson down his chest, when she peeked up with curious eyes to watch the way he sweated and panted and flushed as she laved her mouth over him. They hadn't done it this way in her mind, and absently, she wondered if this will count as losing her virginity. True, they were in the real world - but he was already a part of her, and everything else aside from that was so shallow and pale by comparison.

 

She was desperate and almost angry in her minstrations; he was just the same in the way he tensed and held back from bucking into her as she took him into her mouth and worshipped (punished) him with her mouth.

 

It was the wrong place and the wrong time and the wrong person - but if everything was so goddamn wrong, why did it feel so right?

 

She whined again in the back of her throat, and told herself the stinging in her eyes was from the discomfort as he lost control for a moment, his hips jerking abruptly and unbalancing her perfect desperate rhythm. She only sucked harder then, and raked teeth, hoping to bring tears from him to match her own.

 

She pulled back when she was short of breath, and it seemed only a formality when he took her by the shoulders and guided her softy (so softly, so gently, worshipping) onto her back, and parted her knees with such loving guidance, and pressed into her with slow, talented fingers, and knelt between her legs and licked and sucked and laved with patient tongue until something inside her snapped, and the world erupted into only fireworks and the warmth pooling in her belly.

 

And when he was above her, and she was looking over his shoulder into the sky and gasping for breath for the first time since she had died, as their hips rocked together patiently and frantically and softly and roughly in turn, she wondered when they had fit together better: when they were fighting or when they were fucking.

 

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She was one with her darkness now, she realized, and wondered if that wasn't as she was meant to be all along.

 

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On the third day of the seventh week into summer, her portal into Soul Society was blocked by a surprise (if not unexpected) visitor. She darkened immediately upon seeing him; her clothes were still stained in sticky, cool Hollow's blood, and she wanted nothing more than to scrub it off so she might more quickly enter her meditations.

 

The hollow's blood on her cloaks did not bother her so much as the fact that her skin beneath was tell-tale clean. Her thighs were sticky and warm with something else entirely, and when she faced him, it was hard to stand tall and proud and not blush guiltily in the cheeks. She wondered if she was marked anywhere where he might see.

 

Secretly, she hoped she was.

 

“How pleasant of you to greet me at the front gates, Yama-gii,” she cooed, the pet-name ringing with a cryptic mocking she once never would have dared taken with the first commander and General of all of Soul Society. “Have you finally come to finish that which you failed to so long ago?”

 

If she expected a rise from him, his unwavering even stare denied her of it. Absently, she wondered if she had lost her touch with derisive tones, of if rather he had been born without a sense to appreciate such baiting.

 

A long moment passed before he sighed. “You know the verdict sentencing you to death that time was by Aizen's crafting, Kuchiki. That was not Soul Society's justice.” For some reason, his answer was bitterly disappointing to her. His voice was an ominous thunder rolling in the distance; gravelling and low, though now ringing more of weariness than warning. The old man towered over her in height, and yet somehow, it was Rukia looking down at him this time.

 

Slowly, forgetting for now the way her thighs twinged, still barely alight with the after effects of arousal, she paced a wide circle around him, her hand resting too casually on Shirayuki's hilt. Yamamoto, however, made no motion to move his hands from his gnarled cane and assume a defensive position. Instead, he watched her with all the worn sageness of one who had seen it all.

 

His confidence disgusted her; ignited something stifling deep within her that she didn't fully comprehend. “The apology note must have been lost in transition,” she finally goaded, when she realized his lame apology was all that was forthcoming. “I'm sure it was quite thoughtfully crafted.”

 

She expected him to fold. She expected either apologetic words of defeat, or angry ones of admonishment. Instead, she got neither. “Is it an apology you wish?” he sighed, and for the first time she cared to recall, Yamamoto sounded tired - tired in the kind of way that transcended the physical, and dipped into something else entirely.

 

Rukia stopped in her predatory pacing. She felt robbed of something, and irritated by that, she frowned. “What use would I have with your hollow words?”

 

His reply was quick - too quick, cutting to her core. “Perhaps you could tell me. You seem to find use for hollow things, these days…”

 

She narrowed her eyes. “I'm shock full of them, old man. But to get to them, you must first kill me.” `They are my nakama now - look at me, filthy, dirty, only made full by consuming that which is more hollow than myself. Kill me, Yamamoto-taicho, I conspire with them.' She didn't expect the sudden surge of self-hatred - the sudden spark of hope that perhaps he, the most powerful of them all, could kill her. It surprised her; she had forgotten what hope felt like.

 

If he heard her sudden desperate burst of desire, he certainly gave no indication. “The mobile corps informs me that you only leave Soul Society for the purpose of slaying hollows. You are not shinigami… but you are not an enemy. I will not attack you.”

 

She wanted to scream at him for his audacity. `I am lower than our mortal enemy, Yamamoto-taicho - can you not see? At least they strive to drag down something above them. I… I drag even the damned down to sully them with my stains.'

 

“Did the mobile corps also tell you that I kill little girls?” Rukia bit out, and the words were like salt poured in her rawest wounds. She rubbed it in deeper, viciously reveling in the way it ached and throbbed. She deserved that pain. Needed it. “Did they tell you how taking life has more meaning to me now than saving it?”

 

Yamamoto had somehow become steel even without sacrifice as great as hers; not even his eyes faltered as he stared with cool indifference. If her words came as any news to him, she would have been greatly surprised. “And how is that any different than a member of the eleventh?” he prodded, gently, as if guiding a student to the right answer.

 

She was not his student. He did not deserve to speak to her as if she was something worthy of guidance.

 

She choked. “They have souls…”

 

He closed his eyes, and his sigh was once again that distant rumbling thunder, so weary. “The authority to judge you is not mine, Kuchiki Rukia. The jurisdiction will no longer come from the Central 46, but this time, from God's Realm itself. And should there be executioners, they will not be shinigami… but something above.”

 

“Above even me?” she whispered, and wanted to believe more than she had wanted to believe in anything before. She hated this - hated being something above all others, when her life had always been spent looking up and straining to get there. She was tired - so very tired, with only her shame and the thousands of monsters within her to share it.

 

She was tired.

 

Yamamoto did not reply, and so, after the silence stretched on to the point of discomfort, she wheeled her gaze back on him, her voice sardonic once again. “You came here to warn me - why?”

 

“To give you time to make your peace,” he replied, and there was nothing left between them to say. He turned to depart and she watched him go - watched until he turned around a corner, and for a full mark after even that.

 

“Peace is not meant for the living-dead, Yamamoto-taicho,” she finally replied. “They do not deserve it.” And though she had only just come back to Soul Society, she immediately turned around and opened back up the gate to the living world.

 

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Author's Notes: Thanks to Kilonji for beta-work (and wonderfully inspiring fanfics) and to denebtenoh for the artwork inspired by this story (links on my profile). Two, maybe three more chapters, depending on reviews (and I actually mean it on the numbers this time!).

 

Your reviews will be kept on my shrine of eternal gratitute; threats will be printed and kept close to my heart.