Sequencefairy and mizulily suggested an Ichiruki Hades/Persephone au but reversed, and as always, I am weak, weak, weak. May or may not become multichaptered, depending purely on whether or not I have the time...

Of Pomegranate Seeds and Counting Spring

by hashtagartistlife

"They didn't tell me the God of Death was a four-foot girl."

"Four foot eight inches," the girl corrects automatically, before curling around her staff in a wisp of smoking darkness to lean over the golden youth. "They didn't tell me the precious daughter of the exuberant God of Harvest was an angry, surly boy."

"Daughters," the boy corrects, scowl deepening. "You're thinking of my twin sisters. I'm Goat-Chin's eldest son, but he doesn't like to mention it. Ruins his image as bountiful bringer of the grain, flanked by two pretty girls as the Goddesses of Spring and Rebirth."

The girl quirks an eyebrow at him. "You refer to the esteemed God of Harvest as Goat-Chin?"

"Listen, I'll refer to my idiot dad however I like, ok? Who are you, anyway? 'Goddess of Death', my ass. I'll believe you're the Goddess of Death when the public at large finally believe the Goddesses of Spring and Rebirth is actually just a God of Spring and Rebirth, and that he hides out in crappy abandoned fields because his dad doesn't want to admit he fucked up."

The girl listens to the boy rant with an amused look on her face, and when he stops to draw breath, she flicks her wrist and rends the ground asunder.

A ghastly chill emanates from the gaping maws of the earth, and the cries of the damned float on the wind between the two figures, regarding each other in silence.

"You… you…" the boy stutters, a shaky finger pointed at the girl in an accusatory manner. "You're not–"

"That was really rude of you," the girl says conversationally, her look of cool amusement firmly in place. "'Crappy abandoned fields'? I'll have you know, I put a lot of work into this garden."

The boy snaps his mouth shut, and snorts rather shakily. "Yeah? That's even more tragic, then. Everything here's withered and dead."

"Precisely. Why do you think I was given the title 'Goddess of Death'?"

She looks inordinately proud of the stupid, dead grey mess of a field with nothing green in sight, and the boy doesn't know whether to pity her or run as far away from this nutcase as possible. No wonder the entire pantheon was in such a shambles, if a girl like her was the current God– Goddess– of Death.

Not that he can be throwing stones here, since he was the secret God of Spring and Rebirth no-one was supposed to talk about, but still.

He sighs, and pushes his bright hair out of his face. "Look, have you ever even seen a living plant before?" he asks, and the girl shakes her head.

He thinks he might be imagining the wistful look in her eyes.

Well. That's…. incredibly tragic. Who the fuck hadn't seen a living plant before? Her staff was cypress, right? That must have come from a living thing before, right?

He sighs again and closes his eyes, reaching out to touch her cypress staff. The girl flinches a moment, before unravelling the tendrils of darkness she has wrapped around its base to grant him access. He focuses, reaching inside him for something he only vaguely remembers how to use. Yamamoto help him, he hasn't done this in so long. He almost thinks he's forgotten how, but of course, that's ridiculous; this was his birthright as the eldest child of the God of Harvest. Spring and Rebirth.

From the tips of his fingers, a greenness starts spreading. The dead grey of the cypress staff starts to melt into a cacophony of colours– reds, browns, greens. The boy concentrates further, pushing against the dark black emptiness of what he assumes to be death; then, in a flurry of movement, he's overrunning it, new shoots sprouting all along the staff from tip to base.

The girl lets out a cry of shock and untangles herself from the staff, almost flinging herself away from it as it starts flowering.

"Relax," he tells her, "they're just some flowers."

"Yes, but I–" the girl begins, before clamping her mouth shut. There's a faint wash of colour on her bone-white cheeks, and her hand twitches beside her, as though she's itching to reach out and take the staff back into her hands.

"You can touch them," he says, offering it to her, "they won't die."

"That's what you think," she retorts; ah, the boy realises. Yes. Goddess of Death. That was a thing.

"Try it anyway," he urges her; hesitantly, she reaches out and places a small hand on the very tip of the staff.

A wave of grey spreads out from her fingers and travels down, the newly-flowered stems withering into dust on the way. He doesn't relinquish his hold on the base, however, and halfway down, their powers collide; there's a brief struggle during which both of them scrabble for dominance, until they learn to strike a balance and their powers settle down into an uneasy counterpoint. The staff stands between them, half alive, half dead: a paradox not easily seen even in the world of the gods.

The boy removes his hand from the staff, and the grey quickly obliterates the remaining life, leeching the colour out until it returns to its original dullness.

The girl bites her lip, and slowly coils herself round the staff again.

"Would you like to actually touch a plant?" he asks her, and she looks up at him sharply.

"I wouldn't be able to, you saw how it was just then–"

"Ah, just shut up, ok? I have eyes, you know. I thought of something that might counteract that."

She looks as if she has an angry retort on the tip of her tongue, but manages to rein it in just in time; she only nods tightly, and then she's taken completely by surprise as the boy grabs her by the hands and pulls.

"What're you–" she says, incensed, and the wisps of dark smoke around her bottom half resolve themselves into legs and a grey skirt. Her knees hit the ground with a thud.

"Ah, so you do have legs," the boy says, smug, and she tries to pull her hands away but he only holds on tighter.

"Yes, sometimes, when I feel like it," she says waspishly. "Are you letting me go anytime soon?"

"I thought you wanted to know what it's like to touch a plant?"

She does. Despite herself, her curiosity gets the better of her; she allows him to pull her closer so that they're sitting knee-to-knee, her hands cradled in his larger ones. He picks a wisp of dead grass from the field, and places it in her hands.

"Concentrate," he whispers, and she frowns; that would achieve the exact opposite of what he was trying to do–

"Not like that," he growls, when the piece of grass shrivels up further, "Rein your power in. Concentrate on keeping it away from your hands. I'm gonna push my power into you. It's probably gonna feel a bit weird, but try anyway."

There are a million pert retorts teeming inside her; the most polite of them being 'fuck off, have YOU ever tried to draw your power away from one of your own limbs? That shit's hard'. But he's bending his obnoxiously bright head over their joined hands, expression endearingly serious, and she decides not to ruin his efforts. She closes her eyes and imagines drawing the darkness swirling within her away from her hands; ironically, despite her power being one of death, it feels like she's drawing her own life away. Her fingers and palms, empty of her power, are curiously numb.

Then, she feels it; the first tentative foray of his power pushing into her skin. It burns, is her first thought; the slice of his power into her palms is a flash fire, brilliant for a second but gone the next. She flinches in his hands, and the next brush of power is more subdued: the warm glow of the hearth on Olympus, rather than the hellfire of Mayuri's smithy. Slowly, she relaxes her tense shoulders; there is still an edge of heat to his powers, too hot for her to be entirely comfortable, but not so wild and unrestrained that she can't handle it.

And besides, the little wisp of grass is changing in her palms.

It happens gradually; the curl of dead grey straightens, palest green lightening the edges and spreading to become a rich viridian. The dried-up leaves fatten, becoming glossy, and tiny white flowers begin blooming up and down the stem, each displaying a starburst of golden nectar in its centre. The Goddess of Death looks on in awe, held spellbound by a single stem of the most insignificant forest weed in existence, cradling life in her hands.

Inevitably, as with all living things, the moment meets its end too soon; his warmth withdraws from her in trickles, as does the life in the plant. She watches as the white flowers close then fall, the leaves lose moisture and shrivel up, and the colour fades away. When he is done, and his hands release hers, she holds nothing more than another dead strip of grass: one of millions in this garden of hers.

They're silent for a long time after this. The girl thinks for a while about many things, but eventually decides (for the first time in her life) to fuck it all, and looks up at the boy nonchalantly.

"You know," she says, offhand, "it's a grievous offence to trespass on the gardens of the Goddess of Death."

"Oh?" says the boy, in a bored tone. But when their eyes meet, he smirks at her. She feels a matching smile curve up the corners of her own lips.

"Definitely," she confirms. "There are some gardens in the Underworld that could use some tending to. You have quite the green thumb there. I could use someone like you."

She holds out her hand. The offer hangs there a moment, poised in time and space; neither parties are quite aware of the kind of repercussions it will have.

Then the boy takes her hand, and fate is sealed. The hundreds of millions of parallel possibilities crash into each other and dissolve; their path is set.

(Perhaps their path has been set long before either of them came into the cosmic equation.)

"Why not," he grins, all hard bright eyes and teeth; "I was getting bored of staring at corn fields all day anyway."

His hand feels scorching in hers as she leads him to the chasm in the ground. "My name is Rukia."

He picks up her staff, and hands it back to her; flowers bloom in the split second before she takes it from him. "And I'm Ichigo."

She puts two fingers to her mouth and whistles; with a clap of thunder and black lightning, her chariot appears, pulled by two skeletal horses shrouded in the blue flames of Tartaros.

'Show-off,' she hears Ichigo mutter behind her, and pulls him by the wrists to their ride, laughing.

"Nice to meet you, Ichigo," she tells him, before taking up the reins and looking back at him. He is, she is pleased to note, looking rather apprehensive at the sight of her at the reins.

She smiles, blue fire in her eyes.

She hasn't felt this alive in centuries.

"Hold on tight," she says, and with an ear-splitting shriek that chills every drop of blood in Ichigo's body, the ground swallows them up, leaving not a single trace behind.