Bleach Fic: In Another World [G, Ryuuken, oneshot]
Title: In Another World
Author: memopanda
Rating: PG
Pairing/Character/s: Ryuuken
Word Count: 1140
Warning/s: None.
Summary: In another world, Ryuuken would have lived life very differently.
A/N: I really should be revising for exams. Hah! This fic is also available on fanfiction.net.
Feedback: Yes please! Be gentle.
Disclaimer: Bleach belongs to KT.
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I.
In another world, Ryuuken would have been a much more precise man. He would have awoken at 6AM every day and only spent five minutes smoking every morning instead of fifteen, and his day would have been divided into equal segments instead of slices, getting thinner and thinner and more meager until it wasn't there at all.
II.
In another world, Ryuuken's life would be a simple routine of sleeping and eating, and pumping life back into people in between. As it was he didn't get much of the first two. The first was because he didn't keep a clock in his room (he hated the sound of time ticking away in the silence) and because of the dreams.
Ask a doctor and he'd tell you that dreams were the just the result of a phase of REM sleep; ask a man who suffered recurrent nightmares and he'd tell you they were ghosts from the past. Ryuuken often found himself jerking awake and watching those ghosts, splattered against the ceiling, his hands clenched in the sheets.
They sometimes spoke-
"Father!"
"Goodbye, son..."
"Oh, Ryuuken."
He had once had a disturbing dream in which Uryuu had died repeatedly. The dream had ended with a flash of pure white. He'd told the boy not to go to Souken after that: it hadn't done much good.
Sometimes Ryuuken had that same dream, except Uryuu was older, taller, still as innocent as ever. And sometimes he'd wake up and he'd be paralysed with fear, the fading image of his dying son burned onto the back of his eyelids.
These would be Uryuu's dreams one day, if he managed to live. They were a burden of being the sole survivor of a centuries-old war between the living and the dead, the burden of embodying the fears and hopes of a massacred race. They were the burden brought forth by the powers of the Last Quincy. If he wanted them so desperately, Ryuuken thought bitterly. He could have them.
III.
The lighter made a short, sharp zzst! as he lit a cigarette.
In another world, Ryuuken's fingers would not look so grey in the early hours, and the morning would be filled with warmth and sunshine instead of the concentrated heat of a lonely bed and pale, wintry shadows. And the strip of light that fell across his sheets would not fall through him, leaving him empty, hollow.
The bedroom was huge, the space made daunting by its bare, white walls. Ryuuken had been in moratoriums more cheerful than this room, or any of the rooms in this house, save for the one little room that had been carefully painted in eggshell blue fifteen years ago.
In a house of this size, the whiteness was troublesome: dust gathered in the corners and stained the shadows, and the doors were patterned with ash-coloured fingerprints. Ryuuken regularly spent hours on his knees cleaning away the grey to leave the white spotless again, but it never lasted. It was his own fault for smoking indoors, of course. (The smoke settled everywhere, leaving the air hazy and grey.) It was a habit he had given up after his son had been born. But. That had been in the past.
IV.
Ryuuken used the singed remains of the first stick to light a second.
V.
The water filled the bathroom with a roar that was deafening. Steam hissed as it curled off his skin and his hair clung to his forehead. Hair which, in another world, would not have turned grey so quickly and so easily. It was a stark, rather sad reminder of his own mortality. It was one thing to see the spirits of dead people, and to witness living people dying; it was quite another to see your own body grow old, fall to pieces and turn to dust.
He shivered at the sharp sensation of icy water trickling down his neck. The water was always steaming hot for five minutes, before turning cold: it was a test of endurance, perhaps, or the fact that the water supply was so notoriously uneven. Ryuuken swept his hair out of his eyes and turned the faucet off.
The water gurgled down the drains, the sound echoing off white marble, taking evidence of smoke, dirt and sin down with it.
VI.
ven though he owned a car, Ryuuken tended to use Hirenkyaku to get from place to place, simply because it was more efficient. It was also a way for him to keep up his powers, which were barely used otherwise. He had stopped responding to surges in Hollow reiatsu after the first time he had felt Uryuu going after them.
In another world his car would have been used more often and his wife would still be alive; in another world, his parents would have been locked up in a retirement home. In another world, his son wouldn't have been a hero.
I have never cared for other worlds anyway, Ryuuken thought, as entered his office via the window. He had stopped bothering to check whether his secretary was inside.
Ryuuken had a history with secretaries. He had fired two in the last month, a new record: they had spent most of the day sitting in his office and staring at him, and occasionally sighing: doctors had diagnoses for that sort of thing and they called it idiocy. (And frankly, Ryuuken had better things to do than to fulfill the fantasies of people who wore that much pink.)
So the new secretary was male. He was never on time for work, let alone early; he was short and balding (despite his young age); he was sometimes forgetful and often nervous; he was fine at answering telephone calls and telling people to go away. He was also very apologetic, and had cultivated the habit of leaving a cup of tea on Ryuuken's desk when he got in.
"Idiot." It had been an hour since he had come in through the window; the teacup had been sitting untouched on his desk for fifteen minutes. "I hate peppermint tea."
"S-Sorry sir."
"Just go away, will you."
The cup of tea was left to go cold as Ryuuken stood up and took a cigarette from his pocket. In another world he might have quit: but as a man who saved lives on a daily basis, he felt he had earned the right to throw away his own.
He always opened the window of his office when he smoked. (He wouldn't go outside- why should he have to loiter on the steps of his own hospital?) Then he'd rest one arm on the windowsill and lean out, closing his eyes and lifting his chin as he took the first taste, the best. And then he would look down with a bitter smirk, laughing, a king looking down upon the world.
End