Bleach Fan Fiction ❯ Moving Forward ❯ To Interlude ( Chapter 7 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

By: melitza

In which she sets the stage.

Warning: Some citrus.

Soul Society was comprised of spirit particles. The miniscule particles of energy helped sustain a shinigami - had once helped her regain her powers much quicker after being stripped of everything by Ichigo and the tower of penitance. Though she was no longer shinigami, the spirit particles still bolstered her. She still fed on them, was energized by them…

Not as much as by absorbing hollows, however. While Soul Society provided trickles of power here and there, each time she defeated a hollow and absorbed it was a torrent of insane, rushing energy.

One world was a constant trickle of strength; the other was sporatic torrends of unimaginable power. In the worlds of light or dark, she glimmered as an untouchable thing in various shades of invincibility. Heuco Mundo was her strength. Soul Society was her strength.

That was why she chose the real world as her new shrine of penitance.

The next time she calls him out, there are no hollows. He does not question for even a moment when she beckons him to her with a crooked finger, a knotted stomach, and something strange in her eye.

“Rukia-sama,” he whispers, loving, as his mouth traces lines of delicate kisses along her jaw, lower, down her neck.

Sometimes she wants to hear him worship her like that. But not today. Today, she wants to pretend - today, instead of reveling in the darkness, she wants to pretend she is in the light, if only for a moment.

“Rukia-sama,” he breathes, and she winces at the last two syllables. When he opens his mouth to say it again, she groans and shudders and mauls her mouth over his, lips and tongues tangling and fighting for dominance. They stay like that for some time, even as they fall to the ground and tangle and grasp and tug. But when she pulls away, he sighs again,

“Rukia-sa -“

“Just Rukia,” she groans; pants, as she rolls her hips urgently over his. “No honorifics; just Rukia.”

Because that is what he would call her.

Maybe then he understands the strange sharpness to her gaze; the rough urgency to the way she marks him with vicious bites and claws at him. The way she goads him to be aggressive, rather than tender.

She sees the brief flash of understanding on his face - thinks she sees a moment of hurt, but it is gone just as quickly, and then, he smiles that bright strange-but-familiar smile at her. `I would do even this - I would help you pretend I am another for your happiness; that is how much we love you,' that smile seems to say, and it cracks something inside her.

“Rukia,” he whispers, and suddenly she wants to be sick.

“Don't say anything,” she snarls; clenches her eyes shut, because she cannot bear the dark shade of his hair. She would have liked to pretend she did not feel the hot tears burning at her cheeks, but then he is kissing them away, and she cannot deny them.

“Your wish,” he whispers, and bites back all but his pleasured groans for the remainder of their time together. Something shifts in him then, and she knows he understands, because he is a bit rougher - a bit more uncouth. He treats her like a girl rather than a goddess, and he allows himself to fumble a little as if he is a boy instead of a perfectly devoted beast.

Perhaps it hinders his enjoyment of the carnal acts that come after, and again after that, and later still.

Rukia cannot bring herself to care.

If he thinks it odd when she grabs his arm and orders (begs?) him not to go afterward, he certainly says nothing. Instead, he only sees that she has snapped back to herself, and now she is looking at him and not through him; she is not pretending, and that (however little) is enough for him.

It is almost enough to break her heart.

He has no need of sleep, but he approximates it well enough with closed eyes and steadied breath and quiet meditation. There's something both comforting and discomfiting in the sudden normalcy between them. In the recesses of her stormy mind, she imagines that they are living a normal life. That she is a living girl, and he a normal boy, and that they are lying on her bed after a long day at high school, or after a particularly grueling training session at the Academy, the biggest worry on their minds being her overprotective brother coming across them, or his overzealous father bursting through the door.

She imagines that his hair is orange, and her eyes are violet, and that she smiles and he frowns instead of the opposite.

If he feels her eyes roving over him, feels the way her entire body trembles with trepidation and excitement and horror, not one of his perfect muscles flinches to indicate it.

If he feels his strength waning, subtly, slowly, like so many grains of perfect white sand through that emptying hourglass… it is only subconsciously. Of that, she makes certain.

She trails a cold finger along his bare chest and muses. “I wonder if we shall go to heaven or hell?” As soon as the words slip from her mouth, she regrets. She realizes that they might have been too much; she was giving herself away, and desperately, she wishes to retract the words, less he discover and find some way to thwart her plans -

But he trusts her more than he trusts the sun to rise in the east each morning, and he does not tense nor pause. He speaks with honesty (too much, far too much), and, she hates to admit, love. (She hates to think that she feels sorry for him to be tethered to her, rather than the other way around.)

“We are already in heaven,” he says, and the `we' refers to him and the thousand souls embedded within him, not specifically her. This is not her heaven; this, he knows. It pains him sometimes to realize it, she thinks.

“Then to hell, I suppose,” she murmurs, and wonders if it is delight that thrills up her spine at the thought. (Hell. Surely, in the fires of hell, her sins could be burned away… surely, the suffering would allow her to transcend this delectable sin…)

He is quiet for awhile before he replies, “So long as we are together, I cannot imagine the difference.”

Her heart twists, and her cold fingers dig into his arm.

If he feels their power draining together, spiraling in an elegant crash course like all things that got too close to the sun did, then he had somehow managed to lie to himself and make it not real again. Nothing would spoil this, their brief and imperfect interlude. They deserved this, before that terrible finale. Maybe he felt it approaching, too, if only subconsciously.

“We will be together,” she replies heatedly, and it is not a lie. Sometimes, she might like to pretend - but she does not believe in her piper's dreams (lies). Rukia is nothing if not logical, and though in her fantasies she imagines him as another, in the end she always opens her eyes and comes back to him.

This is the first time she has fully confirmed this as something between her and him, and not a pale-shade imitation of something between her and another.

He smiles, and his eyes are warm and soft for her (only her) as he touches her face, traces the delicate line of her cheekbone - presses his touch hard across her jaw, her chin… her lips.

“Promise?” And his eyes are not those of a hollow - not even those of a man, but now of a boy, full of naivety and devotion, and she almost regrets what is to come (almost, almost).

She laves her tongue over his finger, twisting around it before sloppily covering it with her mouth. She bobs eagerly over it, watching with relief as those boys eyes turned back to a man's, and glinted with sinful excitement and anticipation. She lavishes her ministration over another finger before pulling him from her mouth, pressing his wetted fingers to smear the saliva back over his mouth's previous path over her face.

“We will be together,” she promises, and images of what is to come flash ominously behind her eyes. Were she a creature with even a bit of good left, she should have felt guilt at the way he contentedly accepted her promises, leaning forward and trailing sloppy, eager, wet kisses down her face - the way his reverent bites marked at her shoulders, then her breasts, and then lower, even as she imagined their pending doom.

“We will be together,” she breaths, again and again, and those words are his pleasure, even as he returns it tenfold with eager hands and mouth, made skilled by practice and desire. And even as she arches and cries and peaks, the images of their spectacular end play like a movie over and over again in her mind.

And Rukia laughs. “Together, together, together…” It is a promise.

They are one now, after all, and interludes could only last but a moment in time.

She imagines Byakuya, Renji, Ichigo and the others have realized she has been missing for quite some time by now. But she is nothing if not skilled, and even as her power waxes and wanes and slips through her fingers like so much sand, her iron control remains the same. While she and he-who-is-not-Kaien lie together and watch the sky (even when they rock together and watch each other instead), she crafts the shields around them in so many perfectly woven, carefully tucked strands. For all intents and purposes, they have disappeared from all worlds - and soon, so soon, they would…

If he wonders why she is so adamant that no one find them, he does not ask. It is simply enough for him that they are together. And for her, it is simply enough to know that it was all about to come to an end.

It was six weeks after Yamamoto's warning that they come for her. The leaves, just beginning to turn the faint yellows and oranges and reds of early autmn, stir and rustle and whistle to announce God's soldiers arrival.

The curtains were drawn, and she could not have set a better backdrop had she tried. The interlude was complete, the finale was beginning at long last, and Rukia couldn't help but to wonder at what a beautiful day it was to die.

Author's Notes: And the stage is set.

Thanks, as per usual, to Kilonji, my awesome-awesome beta who has kept me going on this one. Go check out denebtenoh's picture dedicated to this story (link in my profile), and also Concerto in G Minor by Atramentous Love (in my favorite stories), which she so graciously dedicated to me citing inspiration from this story. I could not be more honored.

And lastly, thank you all so much for all of the wonderful feedback. I hope you enjoy the finale.