Fic: Sunlight and Song (2/11)
Title: Sunlight and Song
Author: Venefican
Pairing: Nanao/Shunsui
Summary: Nanao distracts herself from her problems, and realises that enemies weren't always enemies, and that Rangiku alone remembers that. Somewhere between fake-Karakura and Soul Society, they both got lost.
2
Life slowly returns to the Divisions, cleaner air and the ability to breathe it in. Nanao isn’t so removed from it all that she can’t feel the quiet tension leaking out from the Third, the Fifth, and the Ninth. It has been a long while since they had captains, and though none of those left behind have been thought traitors for months now some things truly are hard to unlearn. It has been a week since the decisive final battle and everyone is still walking on broken glass.
Kira wilts, Hinamori’s reiatsu bleeds hurt at anyone with a mind to listen to it and she hasn’t seen Rangiku in four days. Small wonder any messages from the Tenth are as well written as ever but terse to the point that she suspects Hitsugaya is combining sword work with paperwork and stabbing at the reports with a vindictiveness it took decades for her to master. He is a prodigy, after all.
The Eighth remains as it ever was. The Captain and Vice-Captain act as ever, and nobody notices the tension thrown over the pair like a shroud. The Vice-Captain is just a little too sharp in her rebuffs; the Captain’s smiles are just a fraction too slow.
But the Division doesn’t collapse, or implode, and the Vice-Captain does not suddenly decide to murder the Captain over unfinished reports so they are nobody’s concern, for the moment.
An unseated officer from the Tenth is leaving with her Division’s reports when it occurs to Nanao just how long it’s been since anyone has mentioned Rangiku to her.
‘Kagami-san? Is your Vice-Captain in the office?’
The girl hesitates, and winces a little ‘I’m sorry, Ise-fukutaichō. No one has seen her for a few days now. The Captain...’ She pauses again, apparently having an internal debate over how much to say. ‘He’s rather worried about her.’
Which meant he was gearing up to start tearing Seireitei apart stone by stone until he found her. The Court could do without the stress; the buildings could do without the property damage. Nanao sighs a little. She doesn’t want to do this. But she’s now probably the only person who can.
The door leading out onto the courtyard stands open, and a breeze breathes autumn into the quiet office. She knows Shunsui is on the roof, yet when she reaches for him her reiatsu skitters just over his, like he’s under glass. She can’t quite bring herself to make contact. Or he can’t bear for her to touch him. She wants to stay. She wants to leave and never come back.
She represses another sigh. ‘Hold on, Kagami-san. I’ll walk with you.’
*
‘Matsumoto? She hasn’t been with you?’
If she feels like exhaustion incarnate, Hitsugaya looks it. He seems to have gained a good decade in age from the paperwork, buckling under the strain of working for two even more than usual. His brush hovers an inch over the page as his eyes flick towards his zanpakutō, resting faithfully by his shoulder.
‘I doubt any harm has come to her, sir. I think she’s just...’ She considers for a moment, the best way to phrase it. ‘Lost.’
Hitsugaya leaves off his staring contest with his own blade and blinks at her before nodding slowly. ‘Guide her back then, Ise.’ He gestures at the office. ‘I can’t manage this alone.’
His meaning isn’t so vague it needs a codebook, though she’s surprised at how much he’s admitted to it. ‘Yes, sir.’
It’s only when she steps out of his office and into the courtyard that she realises she hasn’t got the faintest idea where to start.
The Eleventh, perhaps?
Once she has made it through the labyrinth of half-destroyed corridors and lines of people looking for a fight - they disperse quickly enough, once she runs a very deliberate finger over the bridge of her glasses - Madarame is easy enough to find, even with the immense cloud of Zaraki’s reiatsu drowning out everyone else. She pauses, waits for the sound of something breaking.
There.
She steps down the hall, pausing beside a head of perfectly arranged black hair. ‘Ayasegawa Yumichika-san.’
‘Ah, Ise-san.’ One quick, judgemental look. ‘You shouldn’t frown so; it’s not beautiful at all.’
She feels her eyebrows twitch and wills some calm back into her voice. ‘I’m not here for beauty tips. I’m looking for Rangiku.’
‘Oh.’ Ayasegawa rests his narrow chin on his palm, wincing a little. She thinks that it’s directed at the fight, but she’s seen him watch Madarame fall in battle without so much as blinking. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’
Why is everyone speaking over and at and through her like she doesn’t know anything about her own, closest friend?
‘I’ll have to be the judge of that.’ Her voice is a little too clipped, even for her. She never did like cryptic-isms. ‘I have orders, anyway. It’s not like I can refuse now, even if I wished to.’
‘Well, I haven’t seen her, anyway.’ Ayasegawa flicks his hair out of his face. ‘Try the Sixth. She likes to harass Renji when Kuchiki isn’t there. Or even when he is, actually.’
It takes all the dignity she has not to storm out. Timewasters.
Rangiku isn’t in the Sixth, or the Ninth. She even tries the Fifth in the off chance that she’s gone to see Hinamori.
She won’t be in the Third. But-
But.
She curses herself for an idiot, and flash steps towards Rukongai. If she’s quick, she can be back before sundown.
The First District flashes by. Then the Tenth. The Twentieth. She keeps running even after paving gives way to cobble gives way to dirt.
The Sixty-Fourth District rolls up around her and she finally skitters to a stop. So far from Seireitei, searching for someone is easy as breathing. No having to tune out the overwhelming presence of Zaraki and then every other Captain in Gotei 13.
She breathes out, and expands her senses.
Rangiku, Rangiku, where are - there.
A sudden weary sigh of wind disturbs enough dust to have her blinking behind her glasses. She takes them off, rubs her eyes, cleans the lenses and replaces them, but in those few seconds nothing has changed. It’s a moment caught in a frame, picturesque if you can ignore the decay and the dirt and the death. Rangiku is standing stock still at the peak of the hill, gazing down over Rukongai’s Sixty-Fifth District in the distance. She hasn’t looked, or turned, given no indication she knows Nanao is there.
She takes one hesitant step forwards. Then another. Breaths of air disturb Rangiku’s burnished golden-red hair but she stays put, staring down onto a little ramshackle hut as if someone had chained her there. Maybe someone had.
‘Nanao.’
She stumbles. There’s something blank in Rangiku’s voice. Something gone, like she had emptied out her mind and had swept out her soul by accident.
‘Rangiku.’ Cautiously, cautiously. ‘I was worried.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘You can’t ask that of me.’
Finally Rangiku turns. Her face is terribly, terrifyingly empty, eyes open but about as clear as fogged glass. ‘I don’t want anybody to worry over me.’
‘I’m sorry, Rangiku, but that isn’t for you to decide. I will worry, whether or not you ask of it of me.’
Rangiku’s jaw clenches. ‘I don’t need it.’
‘Whether you need it or not is immaterial. You have it, anyway.’ She shakes her head a little. ‘There is little we can do for you, now. So allow us to worry.’
‘Us? Shunsui too?’
‘Hitsugaya-taichō. He is...’ Tense. Angry. Ten seconds away from encasing the Division in a layer of ice six foot thick. ‘Anxious, for you.’
‘My cute little captain. Always so diligent.’ She sounds exhausted.
There’s a long silence, stretching out the space between them. There’s no smell of food, and warmth, not this far out. Just dirt and death and humans wasting away. It’s been years since she last spent any time in the inhabited parts of Rukongai, even longer still since she lived here. Her very early life here, before the Eighth and Yadomaru and Shunsui and safety, is an ugly memory best left alone.
‘I thought I’d be okay.’
‘Rangiku?’ Her eyes are at half-mast, beating slowly together. How long has it been since she last ate, or slept? How long since someone pulled her aside and asked how she was? Nanao has been a bit of a failure, recently.
‘I thought, that if he left nothing of himself behind I would be okay. I wouldn’t have to stand still and wait for him forever.’
‘But?’
‘I’ve just come back to the last place we were truly together, in the same spot. Why was I easier with him being a traitor than loyal and dead?’
‘You’re only human, Rangiku. Logic doesn’t usually factor into these kinds of things.’ As much as it pains her to admit it.
‘I guess.’ Rangiku breathes out a sigh, straightens her back, and turns fully to face Nanao. ‘He was terrible. Always going off without telling me.’
‘If he’d been planning this as long as he said he had, then he probably didn’t want to drag you down with him. He knew very well how you’d react.’
‘He always was scared of me when I yelled.’ She tossed her head, red glinting gold-bronze in the last light of the day. ‘Come on, Nanao. Before I get stuck at this spot.’
Nanao doesn’t look back at the tumbling-down little house behind her, abandoned for decades now, worn wood and a little impression of under-developed reiatsu. A red girl. A silver boy who smiled too often and never with his eyes. She doesn’t look. Neither does Rangiku.
She leaves Rangiku at the Tenth, lingers long enough to hear Rangiku’s affectionate squeal of ‘Taichō!’ and the sound of paper being knocked off a desk. Hitsugaya shouts, but even Nanao can hear there’s no heat in it.
She takes her work, steps back towards the Eighth. And doesn’t feel the slightest ounce of disappointment when her office is cold, and quiet, and empty. No disappointment.
She puts down her work, pulls up her chair, and drops her face down into her hands.
None at all.
Onwards to Chapter 3
Author: Venefican
Pairing: Nanao/Shunsui
Summary: Nanao distracts herself from her problems, and realises that enemies weren't always enemies, and that Rangiku alone remembers that. Somewhere between fake-Karakura and Soul Society, they both got lost.
2
Life slowly returns to the Divisions, cleaner air and the ability to breathe it in. Nanao isn’t so removed from it all that she can’t feel the quiet tension leaking out from the Third, the Fifth, and the Ninth. It has been a long while since they had captains, and though none of those left behind have been thought traitors for months now some things truly are hard to unlearn. It has been a week since the decisive final battle and everyone is still walking on broken glass.
Kira wilts, Hinamori’s reiatsu bleeds hurt at anyone with a mind to listen to it and she hasn’t seen Rangiku in four days. Small wonder any messages from the Tenth are as well written as ever but terse to the point that she suspects Hitsugaya is combining sword work with paperwork and stabbing at the reports with a vindictiveness it took decades for her to master. He is a prodigy, after all.
The Eighth remains as it ever was. The Captain and Vice-Captain act as ever, and nobody notices the tension thrown over the pair like a shroud. The Vice-Captain is just a little too sharp in her rebuffs; the Captain’s smiles are just a fraction too slow.
But the Division doesn’t collapse, or implode, and the Vice-Captain does not suddenly decide to murder the Captain over unfinished reports so they are nobody’s concern, for the moment.
An unseated officer from the Tenth is leaving with her Division’s reports when it occurs to Nanao just how long it’s been since anyone has mentioned Rangiku to her.
‘Kagami-san? Is your Vice-Captain in the office?’
The girl hesitates, and winces a little ‘I’m sorry, Ise-fukutaichō. No one has seen her for a few days now. The Captain...’ She pauses again, apparently having an internal debate over how much to say. ‘He’s rather worried about her.’
Which meant he was gearing up to start tearing Seireitei apart stone by stone until he found her. The Court could do without the stress; the buildings could do without the property damage. Nanao sighs a little. She doesn’t want to do this. But she’s now probably the only person who can.
The door leading out onto the courtyard stands open, and a breeze breathes autumn into the quiet office. She knows Shunsui is on the roof, yet when she reaches for him her reiatsu skitters just over his, like he’s under glass. She can’t quite bring herself to make contact. Or he can’t bear for her to touch him. She wants to stay. She wants to leave and never come back.
She represses another sigh. ‘Hold on, Kagami-san. I’ll walk with you.’
*
‘Matsumoto? She hasn’t been with you?’
If she feels like exhaustion incarnate, Hitsugaya looks it. He seems to have gained a good decade in age from the paperwork, buckling under the strain of working for two even more than usual. His brush hovers an inch over the page as his eyes flick towards his zanpakutō, resting faithfully by his shoulder.
‘I doubt any harm has come to her, sir. I think she’s just...’ She considers for a moment, the best way to phrase it. ‘Lost.’
Hitsugaya leaves off his staring contest with his own blade and blinks at her before nodding slowly. ‘Guide her back then, Ise.’ He gestures at the office. ‘I can’t manage this alone.’
His meaning isn’t so vague it needs a codebook, though she’s surprised at how much he’s admitted to it. ‘Yes, sir.’
It’s only when she steps out of his office and into the courtyard that she realises she hasn’t got the faintest idea where to start.
The Eleventh, perhaps?
Once she has made it through the labyrinth of half-destroyed corridors and lines of people looking for a fight - they disperse quickly enough, once she runs a very deliberate finger over the bridge of her glasses - Madarame is easy enough to find, even with the immense cloud of Zaraki’s reiatsu drowning out everyone else. She pauses, waits for the sound of something breaking.
There.
She steps down the hall, pausing beside a head of perfectly arranged black hair. ‘Ayasegawa Yumichika-san.’
‘Ah, Ise-san.’ One quick, judgemental look. ‘You shouldn’t frown so; it’s not beautiful at all.’
She feels her eyebrows twitch and wills some calm back into her voice. ‘I’m not here for beauty tips. I’m looking for Rangiku.’
‘Oh.’ Ayasegawa rests his narrow chin on his palm, wincing a little. She thinks that it’s directed at the fight, but she’s seen him watch Madarame fall in battle without so much as blinking. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’
Why is everyone speaking over and at and through her like she doesn’t know anything about her own, closest friend?
‘I’ll have to be the judge of that.’ Her voice is a little too clipped, even for her. She never did like cryptic-isms. ‘I have orders, anyway. It’s not like I can refuse now, even if I wished to.’
‘Well, I haven’t seen her, anyway.’ Ayasegawa flicks his hair out of his face. ‘Try the Sixth. She likes to harass Renji when Kuchiki isn’t there. Or even when he is, actually.’
It takes all the dignity she has not to storm out. Timewasters.
Rangiku isn’t in the Sixth, or the Ninth. She even tries the Fifth in the off chance that she’s gone to see Hinamori.
She won’t be in the Third. But-
But.
She curses herself for an idiot, and flash steps towards Rukongai. If she’s quick, she can be back before sundown.
The First District flashes by. Then the Tenth. The Twentieth. She keeps running even after paving gives way to cobble gives way to dirt.
The Sixty-Fourth District rolls up around her and she finally skitters to a stop. So far from Seireitei, searching for someone is easy as breathing. No having to tune out the overwhelming presence of Zaraki and then every other Captain in Gotei 13.
She breathes out, and expands her senses.
Rangiku, Rangiku, where are - there.
A sudden weary sigh of wind disturbs enough dust to have her blinking behind her glasses. She takes them off, rubs her eyes, cleans the lenses and replaces them, but in those few seconds nothing has changed. It’s a moment caught in a frame, picturesque if you can ignore the decay and the dirt and the death. Rangiku is standing stock still at the peak of the hill, gazing down over Rukongai’s Sixty-Fifth District in the distance. She hasn’t looked, or turned, given no indication she knows Nanao is there.
She takes one hesitant step forwards. Then another. Breaths of air disturb Rangiku’s burnished golden-red hair but she stays put, staring down onto a little ramshackle hut as if someone had chained her there. Maybe someone had.
‘Nanao.’
She stumbles. There’s something blank in Rangiku’s voice. Something gone, like she had emptied out her mind and had swept out her soul by accident.
‘Rangiku.’ Cautiously, cautiously. ‘I was worried.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘You can’t ask that of me.’
Finally Rangiku turns. Her face is terribly, terrifyingly empty, eyes open but about as clear as fogged glass. ‘I don’t want anybody to worry over me.’
‘I’m sorry, Rangiku, but that isn’t for you to decide. I will worry, whether or not you ask of it of me.’
Rangiku’s jaw clenches. ‘I don’t need it.’
‘Whether you need it or not is immaterial. You have it, anyway.’ She shakes her head a little. ‘There is little we can do for you, now. So allow us to worry.’
‘Us? Shunsui too?’
‘Hitsugaya-taichō. He is...’ Tense. Angry. Ten seconds away from encasing the Division in a layer of ice six foot thick. ‘Anxious, for you.’
‘My cute little captain. Always so diligent.’ She sounds exhausted.
There’s a long silence, stretching out the space between them. There’s no smell of food, and warmth, not this far out. Just dirt and death and humans wasting away. It’s been years since she last spent any time in the inhabited parts of Rukongai, even longer still since she lived here. Her very early life here, before the Eighth and Yadomaru and Shunsui and safety, is an ugly memory best left alone.
‘I thought I’d be okay.’
‘Rangiku?’ Her eyes are at half-mast, beating slowly together. How long has it been since she last ate, or slept? How long since someone pulled her aside and asked how she was? Nanao has been a bit of a failure, recently.
‘I thought, that if he left nothing of himself behind I would be okay. I wouldn’t have to stand still and wait for him forever.’
‘But?’
‘I’ve just come back to the last place we were truly together, in the same spot. Why was I easier with him being a traitor than loyal and dead?’
‘You’re only human, Rangiku. Logic doesn’t usually factor into these kinds of things.’ As much as it pains her to admit it.
‘I guess.’ Rangiku breathes out a sigh, straightens her back, and turns fully to face Nanao. ‘He was terrible. Always going off without telling me.’
‘If he’d been planning this as long as he said he had, then he probably didn’t want to drag you down with him. He knew very well how you’d react.’
‘He always was scared of me when I yelled.’ She tossed her head, red glinting gold-bronze in the last light of the day. ‘Come on, Nanao. Before I get stuck at this spot.’
Nanao doesn’t look back at the tumbling-down little house behind her, abandoned for decades now, worn wood and a little impression of under-developed reiatsu. A red girl. A silver boy who smiled too often and never with his eyes. She doesn’t look. Neither does Rangiku.
She leaves Rangiku at the Tenth, lingers long enough to hear Rangiku’s affectionate squeal of ‘Taichō!’ and the sound of paper being knocked off a desk. Hitsugaya shouts, but even Nanao can hear there’s no heat in it.
She takes her work, steps back towards the Eighth. And doesn’t feel the slightest ounce of disappointment when her office is cold, and quiet, and empty. No disappointment.
She puts down her work, pulls up her chair, and drops her face down into her hands.
None at all.
Onwards to Chapter 3