Bleach Fic: The Crimson Princess
Benihime’s inner world was surprisingly simple, for all that it had given a young Academy student nightmares the first time he’d seen it. A starless obsidian sky, and red grass as far as the eye could see, save for a single, dead and blackened husk of a tree, under which he saw her for the first time.
She wasn’t red, which he wondered about later, but this first meeting with Benihime he’d not known her name, so it hadn’t mattered. Under that black tree, under the black sky, sitting in a circle of torn red grass, Kisuke’s sword spirit had shone like the golden sun.
And she was golden. Straight gold, waist length hair, skin powdered sunlight, and a brilliant orange kimono covered with rays of golden sunshine. Only her eyes were naturally red, a deep crimson akin to her name.
But for all that she was a sun, she was also the bloody sunrise, for the torn red grass she was sitting in leaked crimson blood that stained her hands, face, hair, kimono . . . it made her all the more beautiful, and for weeks after he’d had nightmares where he was drenched in blood, screaming under an obsidian sky awash with purple and red streaks of pain and joy.
The first time he called her name he thought ‘oh, that’s perfect, why didn’t I realize that before’ while Benihime screamed triumphantly in the back of his head, obsidian sky glowing yellow for the first time that Kisuke knew of. Minutes later, when the Hollow he’d been fighting fell before his sword, the sky in Benihime’s world became the color of her eyes, and it rained red on his sword spirit as she danced, drunk and gleeful on blood and power and victory.
Kisuke himself couldn’t help grinning. “I’ve just realized.” Kisuke told Yoruichi, when she asked. “I like the rain.”