Stand Tall [Yachiru] [Bleach]
Title :: Stand Tall
Characters/Pairings :: Yachiru; implied Kenpachi/Yachiru and Yumichika/Ikkaku
Rating :: PG-13
Wordcount :: 888
Summary :: She hadn’t cried when they died. (Future!Yachiru fic; what would happen if she was the only one left?)
Notes :: …I hate myself for writing this. So, so, so much.
She hadn’t cried when they died.
Not for any of them - not for Pachinko-head (Ikkaku, she reminded herself now), or Fairy-san (Yumichika), or even her beloved Ken-chan. (Ken-chan, he would always be Ken-chan to her, never Kenpachi.)
She knew they had been happy, knew that was what they had wanted. She’d grown up with this knowledge, felt it in her bones as firmly as her love for them. She knew that tears were senseless, would have been unwanted, and so she refused to submit to them.
She hadn’t even allowed emotion to creep into the one simple sentence she spoke at the funeral ceremony: “I’m still trying to make you proud, Ken-chan.”
She liked to think that he would have been.
Years passed, centuries passed, and she grew into a woman - still on the small side, but decidedly adult, curves having formed in all the right places and age lending a dullness to once wild eyes.
When she noticed this, it had been nearly as bad as reliving the funeral all over again. She wanted to know if Ken-chan would still have carried her on his back, now that she was bigger. She wanted to know if Yumichika would have declared her beautiful. She wanted to see the look on Ikkaku’s face when he realised that she didn’t have jump quite so far anymore to chew on his head.
She wanted to know if she was the kind of woman he’d wanted her to grow up into.
(She wanted to know if he’d ever expected to see her grow up at all.)
She’d become the new captain of Division 11 shortly after the funeral. Quite a few had been against it, some adamantly so. (“You’re still so young.” “Don’t you want time to rest?” “Don’t you want time to…recover?”)
She’d told them to fuck off.
Ken-chan would never have permitted some pathetic weakling to lead his division. That position was not for someone who did not accept death, did not embrace it with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm. Someone who could not honour and carry on the legacy of Zaraki Kenpachi.
But she, she had suffered through his funeral without tears, and she considered this her rite of passage. If she had accepted that, she would be damned if anyone else accepted her place as captain.
(Besides, she had never embraced the idea of death as wholeheartedly as she did now.)
“It’s right, isn’t it, Ken-chan?” she had murmured idly once to the air, sitting atop her (his) desk and slowly swinging her legs. “If I could never have been yours, I can at least have what was.”
The other shinigami quickly learned to fear her nearly as much as they had the previous captain, and not simply for her strength. (Though that was reason enough; she was never satisfied no matter how much power she had, and trained constantly, wildly, almost frantically.)
“It’s not that she could probably kill you without so much as blinking,” one of them remarked, once. “It’s that looking at her, you feel like you’re seeing a damned ghost.”
She overheard, and she smiled; that was precisely the point. (And at the same time she detested them, for their reluctance to stare death in the face.)
Upon taking her new rank, the thought of acquiring a new captain’s robe had never even crossed her mind. She had kept Kenpachi’s and cut it down, and despite the alterations and her own growth it still hung terribly awkwardly on her frame, but she wore it with a pride no other garment could have lent her.
But when she’d looked in the mirror, she realised something was still missing.
She’d gone through her Division’s headquarters then, prowling through still-untouched quarters till she found what she sought - a discarded set of feathers that had been left behind. Humming to herself in satisfaction, she fixed them to the corner of her own eye and at the beginning of an eyebrow.
Beauty had never really mattered to her (she had nothing to measure it against, had never found anything lovely except the sky and floating pieces of clouds), but family did.
(But she could still hear his distressed voice in her head: No, no, no, Fukutaicho! Those clash with your hair! You must take them off! And the clarity of the sound was more than enough to make up for the imagined scolding.)
With that accomplished, she resumed her search through the room - even as a child, she had been observant enough to know that she should look for Ikkaku’s things in Yumichika’s quarters. (She regretted never telling Ken-chan about that, now, since she knew he had never bothered to notice it himself and she’d loved the way his nose would crinkle in disgust.) Finally finding a small vat of red paint, she opened it and jammed her finger inside, then smeared it at the corners of her eyes, being careful not to dislodge her feathers.
She didn’t care how badly it clashed. Pink hair or no, red was still her colour. Their colour, what they lived for and what they gladly died for.
It was her reminder that she should live the same, that she would one day die the same.
It was her way of saying that she would always be following after, just a step behind.
Characters/Pairings :: Yachiru; implied Kenpachi/Yachiru and Yumichika/Ikkaku
Rating :: PG-13
Wordcount :: 888
Summary :: She hadn’t cried when they died. (Future!Yachiru fic; what would happen if she was the only one left?)
Notes :: …I hate myself for writing this. So, so, so much.
She hadn’t cried when they died.
Not for any of them - not for Pachinko-head (Ikkaku, she reminded herself now), or Fairy-san (Yumichika), or even her beloved Ken-chan. (Ken-chan, he would always be Ken-chan to her, never Kenpachi.)
She knew they had been happy, knew that was what they had wanted. She’d grown up with this knowledge, felt it in her bones as firmly as her love for them. She knew that tears were senseless, would have been unwanted, and so she refused to submit to them.
She hadn’t even allowed emotion to creep into the one simple sentence she spoke at the funeral ceremony: “I’m still trying to make you proud, Ken-chan.”
She liked to think that he would have been.
Years passed, centuries passed, and she grew into a woman - still on the small side, but decidedly adult, curves having formed in all the right places and age lending a dullness to once wild eyes.
When she noticed this, it had been nearly as bad as reliving the funeral all over again. She wanted to know if Ken-chan would still have carried her on his back, now that she was bigger. She wanted to know if Yumichika would have declared her beautiful. She wanted to see the look on Ikkaku’s face when he realised that she didn’t have jump quite so far anymore to chew on his head.
She wanted to know if she was the kind of woman he’d wanted her to grow up into.
(She wanted to know if he’d ever expected to see her grow up at all.)
She’d become the new captain of Division 11 shortly after the funeral. Quite a few had been against it, some adamantly so. (“You’re still so young.” “Don’t you want time to rest?” “Don’t you want time to…recover?”)
She’d told them to fuck off.
Ken-chan would never have permitted some pathetic weakling to lead his division. That position was not for someone who did not accept death, did not embrace it with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm. Someone who could not honour and carry on the legacy of Zaraki Kenpachi.
But she, she had suffered through his funeral without tears, and she considered this her rite of passage. If she had accepted that, she would be damned if anyone else accepted her place as captain.
(Besides, she had never embraced the idea of death as wholeheartedly as she did now.)
“It’s right, isn’t it, Ken-chan?” she had murmured idly once to the air, sitting atop her (his) desk and slowly swinging her legs. “If I could never have been yours, I can at least have what was.”
The other shinigami quickly learned to fear her nearly as much as they had the previous captain, and not simply for her strength. (Though that was reason enough; she was never satisfied no matter how much power she had, and trained constantly, wildly, almost frantically.)
“It’s not that she could probably kill you without so much as blinking,” one of them remarked, once. “It’s that looking at her, you feel like you’re seeing a damned ghost.”
She overheard, and she smiled; that was precisely the point. (And at the same time she detested them, for their reluctance to stare death in the face.)
Upon taking her new rank, the thought of acquiring a new captain’s robe had never even crossed her mind. She had kept Kenpachi’s and cut it down, and despite the alterations and her own growth it still hung terribly awkwardly on her frame, but she wore it with a pride no other garment could have lent her.
But when she’d looked in the mirror, she realised something was still missing.
She’d gone through her Division’s headquarters then, prowling through still-untouched quarters till she found what she sought - a discarded set of feathers that had been left behind. Humming to herself in satisfaction, she fixed them to the corner of her own eye and at the beginning of an eyebrow.
Beauty had never really mattered to her (she had nothing to measure it against, had never found anything lovely except the sky and floating pieces of clouds), but family did.
(But she could still hear his distressed voice in her head: No, no, no, Fukutaicho! Those clash with your hair! You must take them off! And the clarity of the sound was more than enough to make up for the imagined scolding.)
With that accomplished, she resumed her search through the room - even as a child, she had been observant enough to know that she should look for Ikkaku’s things in Yumichika’s quarters. (She regretted never telling Ken-chan about that, now, since she knew he had never bothered to notice it himself and she’d loved the way his nose would crinkle in disgust.) Finally finding a small vat of red paint, she opened it and jammed her finger inside, then smeared it at the corners of her eyes, being careful not to dislodge her feathers.
She didn’t care how badly it clashed. Pink hair or no, red was still her colour. Their colour, what they lived for and what they gladly died for.
It was her reminder that she should live the same, that she would one day die the same.
It was her way of saying that she would always be following after, just a step behind.