[aim log][byakuya & rukia][it's the thought that counts]
Rukia cut an unimposing figure in battered black, keeping her feet within the lines of a dirt path as she walked through the cemetary, the only living creature for miles.
Not quite true. Through the driving rain (began as a pitter patter and now matted her hair to her cheeks, made a fountain of the bridge of her nose) she could not see him, but this was where he would be. Rain or snow, until dark. She made a point of showing up just as the sky turned to twilight, didn't want to intrude but somehow knew that if she left him there he might just stand all night.
She had her own respects to pay, her own carefully clasped bundle of sodden yellow flowers. Wijnruit - it's name meant regret, and Hisana had once speculated that Rukia was named for it's common pronunciation - Rue. Mother-named, any real meanings were the secret of a different grave, but Rukia had never minded being a creature of remorse. She liked to think it was a catalyst for change. It confirmed her belief that she was nothing to be clung to.
Finding the graveside more by luck than memory, Rukia bent to lay her bundle before turning her face up to the rain and her brother. "It will be dark soon. Are you out of secrets yet, or should I wait a little more?"
He'd fallen silent on hearing Rukia's footsteps coming up on him. It couldn't be anybody else but her in this cold, wet weather. He continued contemplating the name carved into the marble silently a few minutes past her question. When he finally spoke, his voice was husky, a little hoarse from the almost constant litany he had kept up for the past few hours. "I am finished here."
Finished. Done. At an end. It sounded complete, and Byakuya supposed that it was. A life had been completed and then brought to rest in this sodden ground. His was still half-finished, and he supposed that meant that the earth wasn't meant to swallow him up just yet. He ran his hands through the slickly wet locks of hair that had been soaked from the last couple hours of on-and-off rain. He was partially soaked through, socks, dry at first, were now soggy, and it was starting to get chillier.
He took a step back from Hisana's grave, his signal that he was ready to leave. He might return on another day, when it wasn't raining. He tilted his head up at the weeping sky through the arching branches of the cherry tree. Yes, he would return when the cherry blossoms turned its crown a soft pink and rained delicately down on the headstone beneath the tree. Decision made, he looked around to Rukia. "We can go now."
With a nod of acknowledgement and a hand raised to say just a moment, Rukia took his place in front of the grave, crouching down to meet the lettering at eye level. She said nothing aloud (sentimental, and if the dead had ears they could hear the unspoken) but addressed a memory nontheless.
'I don't think he ever spoke to you this much when you were alive. He should have, you might have understood him a little more, but he speaks even less now. Is it strange to say that I miss you? You tried too hard with me and I was always uncomfortable, never sure what you wanted. Maybe I just miss the way he looked at you, and that's all. Do you hear him? I might as well ask if you can feel the cold in your bones when the snow heaps up at the graveside. No, I hope you've found somewhere warmer than that.'
She straightened up, turned to look him over with an unusually fond tilt to her smile. He hadn't even tried to shelter. "Look at you. We're both going to be puddles on the bus."
"Should have brought an umbrella." There was no indication who Byakuya meant by that statement. Perhaps he meant that they both ought to have brought one. He accompanied Rukia down the path towards the exit, silent (appropriately enough) as the grave.
There was little else for him to say. Everything important enough to speak of, he had already poured out to a person not of this world. It had become a little ritual, his little ritual. In a way, it was freeing for him, having Hisana there to hear him tell her his sorrows and pains, worries and guilts. He knew, of course, that she wasn't there there, but she had died as his wife, and in a way, that meant that she was still his to care for. It meant that she couldn't, no, wouldn't leave him. It was a kind of morbid permanence, this security in death. In some obscure way, Hisana's passing had allowed him to open up to her in ways he might never have, had she continued living.
For Byakuya, who said little and confided even less, this outlet was both draining and a relief at the same time. He'd not cried at her funeral, nor during the reception afterwards. He'd waited patiently for a week before returning to the new grave and speaking to her. He'd not realised, that first time, how much he'd had to tell her until dawn had turned to dusk at the end of it all. He'd cried then, and not again. This annual rite provided more emotional solace to him than perhaps he even realised.
He'd looked back once, before they started down the last hill, the shadow of tombstone and tree stark against the quickly darkening sky, and then turned to look resolutely forward. The bus stop wasn't that far from the cemetary entrance, and the bus arrived with shocking punctuality. He ushered Rukia up and paid the fare for them both before settling into the seat next to hers for the trip back. It was only then that he finally spoke.
"How was your day?"
Rukia wasn't certain why she hadn't taken an umbrella. It had been raining before she left the apartment and she certainly considered the idea - however incongruous a baby blue umbrella replete with two upright rabbit ears and painted cartoon eyes might have looked traipsing through a graveyard, it would at least have kept her dry. Hadn't seemed quite right, though. Rain was appropriate for this kind of anniversary, she had always maintained than people shouldn't die on sunny days, and trying to keep dry would have felt like hiding.
Besides, she was certain he would have stood out there in the apex of a thunderstorm if it came to it, at the very least he would be as wet as she was. Something to share.
He shooed her onto the bus like a child (and she always felt younger with him, strange since the childhood she'd had was spent trying to be older), squashing her up against the window as he took the seat beside hers, sodden winter coats taking up more space than their two bodies. How was her day? She allowed him the mundanity of the question, his mind trying to pull itself out of the past. And she couldn't very well ask about his.
"Classes finished before lunch time so I went home to look over my lines. I think I have both musicals down, songs make everything so much easier to remember, but some of Thomasina's theory is giving me trouble. Anyway I assumed that I would have ample time to get ready before meeting you, but of course Renji decided to stage a medical emergency five minutes before I left. Did I tell you he'd burnt his hand the other day? It seems like it was worse than he'd admitted to, and his idea of a plan of action was to sit there and let the wound fester. Honestly I'm amazed he hasn't developed gangrene long before now..."
Distraction was one technique Rukia could easily claim to be a master of. Particularly when it could be achieved through talking.
It was a skill that Byakuya was grateful for, especially at a time like this when he dearly needed the distraction to drag his mind out of the past and into the present. Rukia's brook-like burbling provided him the perfect excuse to stay quiet and let his mind absorb the emotional intensity of the day, settle and come to rest. Meanwhile, all he need to was nod and make wordless assents at the appropriate times.
He shifted a little, trying to give her more room and not crush her between him, his sodden coat and hers. It really was going to be a wet ride back. He wouldn't have brought an umbrella with him, no matter if it had been thunder and lightning outside, anyway. It just didn't seem right to do that somehow. He'd have braved the elements to see Hisana, come rain or snow. Rukia knew that, he thought, looking down at her, seated next to him, continuing on with her chatter.
She was going on about classes and her plays and musicals and Renji and gangrene... Wait. "Gangrene?" He raised a brow then. She really did have the darnedest friends. That loud mouthed Kurosaki with the bright hair, Abarai with the even brighter hair and the tattoos. She'd met them at the public high school she'd been so insistent on going to. He'd slowly gotten used to them, of course, though they could be irritating at times. Sometimes, he didn't know what she saw in them, but he supposed that if she thought them good friends, there had to be a solid reason.
"Gangrene. It's what happens when you leave an injury to rot, Bee." she explained, as though the question had been scientific in it's nature and not merely bemused. "He just won't take care of himself, although I don't know quite what part of the male ego forbids one from seeking medical attention. Really I think he just burst the blister that formed over the burn, but he should have had it seen to properly in the first place, I'm sure he wouldn't have even cleaned it if I hadn't insisted."
What would her friends do without her? Probably have vital appendages dropping off all over the place, that was what. At least in Renji's case. Rukia glanced up sideways at her brother, and offered a smile, tugging at his arm when he stood up as the bus approached their connecting stop.
"Not yet. If it's all right with you I was wondering if we could stop off in town before going back to the apartment?" It was dark by now, too late for any shops to be open, but she had other motives for wanting to Byakuya to come with her. Knowing this anniversary was approaching, she had made plans for them to do something other than go back to a silent apartment where he could stare at blank walls all night.
Byakuya had opened his mouth to inform her that he did know what gangrene was, but she was off and running, and so he shut it again, listening to her ramble on about male egos and burns. When she tugged at his arm, asking to go to town, he sat back down, wondering what she wanted to do there. Few shops were open, some galleries might be, if it were their late night, and the restaurants for sure. He frowned a little in mild disapproval."Did you need to get something?"
If she did, he really didn't know what it was that she'd wait until this late in the day to get. Well, it wasn't as if he had anything better to do, anyway. He had a small mountain of papers to grade for the class he was TA-ing, and another stack of readings to do. Uncharacteristically, he had purposely put off doing the grading, if only to take his mind off tonight. Anything, however, was better than wading through a hundred sheets of undecipherable chicken scratch masquerading as algebra. He could always do it when they returned later that night, the papers were unlikely to run off and disappear, unlike the slip of a girl next to him.
"Hmm, not get, really." Rukia wrinkled her nose in deep thought for a moment before shaking her head and dismissing the idea. "No, I don't think they sell souvenirs at classical concerts, which really is a wasted merchandising opportunity. I can get you a programme, though. And one of those little hideously overpriced tubs of ice cream."
Unbuttoning her coat, she dug around in one of the mercifully still-dry inner pockets for a moment before producing two slightly battered looking tickets. It was hardly a night at the opera, but the Cathedral in the city was staging a season of classical music and tonight the piece being presented was Brahms' Intermezzo Opus 76. Rukia vaguely remembered it being part of Byakuya's old collection. The pianist was somebody from Europe she had never heard of, but the reviews seemed to be good, and she had dashed in to pick up the tickets on her way back from college.
"Here. I hope it isn't a bad choice. You like Brahms, don't you?" Music was perhaps the healthiest way of losing oneself that Rukia could think of, and while she would offer to work through her range of showtunes for her brother's benefit, the idea was that he might prefer this instead. She didn't mind sitting through it - though there would probably be a lack of Brahms commemorative T-shirts and keyrings to entertain her, and it was even less likely that the Cathedral served popcorn.
Music, Byakuya wanted to tell his sister, was hardly a merchandising opportunity. At least, not this sort of music. Commemorative key rings and little action figures of classical pianists would seem rather out of place at a concert. Besides, few of the concert-goers would be less interested in that kind of paraphernalia than the music and the quality of performance. Brahms and Mozart would hardly be fit for the sorts of things that Rent and Metallica (or whatever it was she listened to, probably more Rent than Metallica) had in common.
He didn't think that quiet piano music was the kind she liked quite as much as he did. She might tolerate it, even appreciate certain pieces, but it definitely wasn't her music of choice. She preferred her musicals, broadway type shows with movement and plots and costume changes. There might be people (or maybe even cats) moving and singing about lost loves and memories, and masked disfigured personages in cloaks pounding on organs. Brahms wasn't exactly conducive to such rigamarole. As such, the gesture was not lost on him.
"I do like Brahms," he told her, sounding pleased and a little touched that she'd done something like this for him. "And I do love his Intermezzos, particularly this one." He smiled then, a small rare smile that curved the edges of his lips. "Thank you, Rukia."
While she might not have commented on Byakuya's impression that she liked watching masked men pounding their organs, had he spoken his thoughts aloud, she would have told him that Rent was in fact based on an opera by Puccini and still managed to have drag queens, strippers and a huge line in accessories. They even made 'No Day But Today' Rent condoms, something she was almost certain nobody could say about Brahms.
Of course this may have been a slightly risque topic of conversation for a crowded bus trip on their way back from visiting Hisana's grave. Most likely it would have made Byakuya fix her with a very different look from the one she was in receipt of currently, which would have been a shame. He seemed a lot warmer when he smiled.
She returned the look, just as pleased, before turning her face back to the steamed up glass of the bus window, rubbing a small transparent peephole into the cloudy vista. "Don't thank me before we've got there, you can't take it back if it's awful. Here, this is our stop." and she let go of his sleeve, allowing him to stand up this time.
As if he'd take it back. The pianist could have been a hack instead of a conservatory-trained virtuoso, and Byakuya would still have appreciated the sentiment behind the two slightly worn tickets in Rukia's hands. It was the thought that counted, after all, and sometimes, it was nice to know that you were in somebody else's thoughts.
Not quite true. Through the driving rain (began as a pitter patter and now matted her hair to her cheeks, made a fountain of the bridge of her nose) she could not see him, but this was where he would be. Rain or snow, until dark. She made a point of showing up just as the sky turned to twilight, didn't want to intrude but somehow knew that if she left him there he might just stand all night.
She had her own respects to pay, her own carefully clasped bundle of sodden yellow flowers. Wijnruit - it's name meant regret, and Hisana had once speculated that Rukia was named for it's common pronunciation - Rue. Mother-named, any real meanings were the secret of a different grave, but Rukia had never minded being a creature of remorse. She liked to think it was a catalyst for change. It confirmed her belief that she was nothing to be clung to.
Finding the graveside more by luck than memory, Rukia bent to lay her bundle before turning her face up to the rain and her brother. "It will be dark soon. Are you out of secrets yet, or should I wait a little more?"
He'd fallen silent on hearing Rukia's footsteps coming up on him. It couldn't be anybody else but her in this cold, wet weather. He continued contemplating the name carved into the marble silently a few minutes past her question. When he finally spoke, his voice was husky, a little hoarse from the almost constant litany he had kept up for the past few hours. "I am finished here."
Finished. Done. At an end. It sounded complete, and Byakuya supposed that it was. A life had been completed and then brought to rest in this sodden ground. His was still half-finished, and he supposed that meant that the earth wasn't meant to swallow him up just yet. He ran his hands through the slickly wet locks of hair that had been soaked from the last couple hours of on-and-off rain. He was partially soaked through, socks, dry at first, were now soggy, and it was starting to get chillier.
He took a step back from Hisana's grave, his signal that he was ready to leave. He might return on another day, when it wasn't raining. He tilted his head up at the weeping sky through the arching branches of the cherry tree. Yes, he would return when the cherry blossoms turned its crown a soft pink and rained delicately down on the headstone beneath the tree. Decision made, he looked around to Rukia. "We can go now."
With a nod of acknowledgement and a hand raised to say just a moment, Rukia took his place in front of the grave, crouching down to meet the lettering at eye level. She said nothing aloud (sentimental, and if the dead had ears they could hear the unspoken) but addressed a memory nontheless.
'I don't think he ever spoke to you this much when you were alive. He should have, you might have understood him a little more, but he speaks even less now. Is it strange to say that I miss you? You tried too hard with me and I was always uncomfortable, never sure what you wanted. Maybe I just miss the way he looked at you, and that's all. Do you hear him? I might as well ask if you can feel the cold in your bones when the snow heaps up at the graveside. No, I hope you've found somewhere warmer than that.'
She straightened up, turned to look him over with an unusually fond tilt to her smile. He hadn't even tried to shelter. "Look at you. We're both going to be puddles on the bus."
"Should have brought an umbrella." There was no indication who Byakuya meant by that statement. Perhaps he meant that they both ought to have brought one. He accompanied Rukia down the path towards the exit, silent (appropriately enough) as the grave.
There was little else for him to say. Everything important enough to speak of, he had already poured out to a person not of this world. It had become a little ritual, his little ritual. In a way, it was freeing for him, having Hisana there to hear him tell her his sorrows and pains, worries and guilts. He knew, of course, that she wasn't there there, but she had died as his wife, and in a way, that meant that she was still his to care for. It meant that she couldn't, no, wouldn't leave him. It was a kind of morbid permanence, this security in death. In some obscure way, Hisana's passing had allowed him to open up to her in ways he might never have, had she continued living.
For Byakuya, who said little and confided even less, this outlet was both draining and a relief at the same time. He'd not cried at her funeral, nor during the reception afterwards. He'd waited patiently for a week before returning to the new grave and speaking to her. He'd not realised, that first time, how much he'd had to tell her until dawn had turned to dusk at the end of it all. He'd cried then, and not again. This annual rite provided more emotional solace to him than perhaps he even realised.
He'd looked back once, before they started down the last hill, the shadow of tombstone and tree stark against the quickly darkening sky, and then turned to look resolutely forward. The bus stop wasn't that far from the cemetary entrance, and the bus arrived with shocking punctuality. He ushered Rukia up and paid the fare for them both before settling into the seat next to hers for the trip back. It was only then that he finally spoke.
"How was your day?"
Rukia wasn't certain why she hadn't taken an umbrella. It had been raining before she left the apartment and she certainly considered the idea - however incongruous a baby blue umbrella replete with two upright rabbit ears and painted cartoon eyes might have looked traipsing through a graveyard, it would at least have kept her dry. Hadn't seemed quite right, though. Rain was appropriate for this kind of anniversary, she had always maintained than people shouldn't die on sunny days, and trying to keep dry would have felt like hiding.
Besides, she was certain he would have stood out there in the apex of a thunderstorm if it came to it, at the very least he would be as wet as she was. Something to share.
He shooed her onto the bus like a child (and she always felt younger with him, strange since the childhood she'd had was spent trying to be older), squashing her up against the window as he took the seat beside hers, sodden winter coats taking up more space than their two bodies. How was her day? She allowed him the mundanity of the question, his mind trying to pull itself out of the past. And she couldn't very well ask about his.
"Classes finished before lunch time so I went home to look over my lines. I think I have both musicals down, songs make everything so much easier to remember, but some of Thomasina's theory is giving me trouble. Anyway I assumed that I would have ample time to get ready before meeting you, but of course Renji decided to stage a medical emergency five minutes before I left. Did I tell you he'd burnt his hand the other day? It seems like it was worse than he'd admitted to, and his idea of a plan of action was to sit there and let the wound fester. Honestly I'm amazed he hasn't developed gangrene long before now..."
Distraction was one technique Rukia could easily claim to be a master of. Particularly when it could be achieved through talking.
It was a skill that Byakuya was grateful for, especially at a time like this when he dearly needed the distraction to drag his mind out of the past and into the present. Rukia's brook-like burbling provided him the perfect excuse to stay quiet and let his mind absorb the emotional intensity of the day, settle and come to rest. Meanwhile, all he need to was nod and make wordless assents at the appropriate times.
He shifted a little, trying to give her more room and not crush her between him, his sodden coat and hers. It really was going to be a wet ride back. He wouldn't have brought an umbrella with him, no matter if it had been thunder and lightning outside, anyway. It just didn't seem right to do that somehow. He'd have braved the elements to see Hisana, come rain or snow. Rukia knew that, he thought, looking down at her, seated next to him, continuing on with her chatter.
She was going on about classes and her plays and musicals and Renji and gangrene... Wait. "Gangrene?" He raised a brow then. She really did have the darnedest friends. That loud mouthed Kurosaki with the bright hair, Abarai with the even brighter hair and the tattoos. She'd met them at the public high school she'd been so insistent on going to. He'd slowly gotten used to them, of course, though they could be irritating at times. Sometimes, he didn't know what she saw in them, but he supposed that if she thought them good friends, there had to be a solid reason.
"Gangrene. It's what happens when you leave an injury to rot, Bee." she explained, as though the question had been scientific in it's nature and not merely bemused. "He just won't take care of himself, although I don't know quite what part of the male ego forbids one from seeking medical attention. Really I think he just burst the blister that formed over the burn, but he should have had it seen to properly in the first place, I'm sure he wouldn't have even cleaned it if I hadn't insisted."
What would her friends do without her? Probably have vital appendages dropping off all over the place, that was what. At least in Renji's case. Rukia glanced up sideways at her brother, and offered a smile, tugging at his arm when he stood up as the bus approached their connecting stop.
"Not yet. If it's all right with you I was wondering if we could stop off in town before going back to the apartment?" It was dark by now, too late for any shops to be open, but she had other motives for wanting to Byakuya to come with her. Knowing this anniversary was approaching, she had made plans for them to do something other than go back to a silent apartment where he could stare at blank walls all night.
Byakuya had opened his mouth to inform her that he did know what gangrene was, but she was off and running, and so he shut it again, listening to her ramble on about male egos and burns. When she tugged at his arm, asking to go to town, he sat back down, wondering what she wanted to do there. Few shops were open, some galleries might be, if it were their late night, and the restaurants for sure. He frowned a little in mild disapproval."Did you need to get something?"
If she did, he really didn't know what it was that she'd wait until this late in the day to get. Well, it wasn't as if he had anything better to do, anyway. He had a small mountain of papers to grade for the class he was TA-ing, and another stack of readings to do. Uncharacteristically, he had purposely put off doing the grading, if only to take his mind off tonight. Anything, however, was better than wading through a hundred sheets of undecipherable chicken scratch masquerading as algebra. He could always do it when they returned later that night, the papers were unlikely to run off and disappear, unlike the slip of a girl next to him.
"Hmm, not get, really." Rukia wrinkled her nose in deep thought for a moment before shaking her head and dismissing the idea. "No, I don't think they sell souvenirs at classical concerts, which really is a wasted merchandising opportunity. I can get you a programme, though. And one of those little hideously overpriced tubs of ice cream."
Unbuttoning her coat, she dug around in one of the mercifully still-dry inner pockets for a moment before producing two slightly battered looking tickets. It was hardly a night at the opera, but the Cathedral in the city was staging a season of classical music and tonight the piece being presented was Brahms' Intermezzo Opus 76. Rukia vaguely remembered it being part of Byakuya's old collection. The pianist was somebody from Europe she had never heard of, but the reviews seemed to be good, and she had dashed in to pick up the tickets on her way back from college.
"Here. I hope it isn't a bad choice. You like Brahms, don't you?" Music was perhaps the healthiest way of losing oneself that Rukia could think of, and while she would offer to work through her range of showtunes for her brother's benefit, the idea was that he might prefer this instead. She didn't mind sitting through it - though there would probably be a lack of Brahms commemorative T-shirts and keyrings to entertain her, and it was even less likely that the Cathedral served popcorn.
Music, Byakuya wanted to tell his sister, was hardly a merchandising opportunity. At least, not this sort of music. Commemorative key rings and little action figures of classical pianists would seem rather out of place at a concert. Besides, few of the concert-goers would be less interested in that kind of paraphernalia than the music and the quality of performance. Brahms and Mozart would hardly be fit for the sorts of things that Rent and Metallica (or whatever it was she listened to, probably more Rent than Metallica) had in common.
He didn't think that quiet piano music was the kind she liked quite as much as he did. She might tolerate it, even appreciate certain pieces, but it definitely wasn't her music of choice. She preferred her musicals, broadway type shows with movement and plots and costume changes. There might be people (or maybe even cats) moving and singing about lost loves and memories, and masked disfigured personages in cloaks pounding on organs. Brahms wasn't exactly conducive to such rigamarole. As such, the gesture was not lost on him.
"I do like Brahms," he told her, sounding pleased and a little touched that she'd done something like this for him. "And I do love his Intermezzos, particularly this one." He smiled then, a small rare smile that curved the edges of his lips. "Thank you, Rukia."
While she might not have commented on Byakuya's impression that she liked watching masked men pounding their organs, had he spoken his thoughts aloud, she would have told him that Rent was in fact based on an opera by Puccini and still managed to have drag queens, strippers and a huge line in accessories. They even made 'No Day But Today' Rent condoms, something she was almost certain nobody could say about Brahms.
Of course this may have been a slightly risque topic of conversation for a crowded bus trip on their way back from visiting Hisana's grave. Most likely it would have made Byakuya fix her with a very different look from the one she was in receipt of currently, which would have been a shame. He seemed a lot warmer when he smiled.
She returned the look, just as pleased, before turning her face back to the steamed up glass of the bus window, rubbing a small transparent peephole into the cloudy vista. "Don't thank me before we've got there, you can't take it back if it's awful. Here, this is our stop." and she let go of his sleeve, allowing him to stand up this time.
As if he'd take it back. The pianist could have been a hack instead of a conservatory-trained virtuoso, and Byakuya would still have appreciated the sentiment behind the two slightly worn tickets in Rukia's hands. It was the thought that counted, after all, and sometimes, it was nice to know that you were in somebody else's thoughts.