White Silk, Red Steel
#01 - Snow
The last snow of the season
wrings a dry cough from Hisana, and he kisses her as if the gesture
could pull the chill from her lungs.
#02 - Child
Byakuya
had wanted a child, but the only thing Hisana could give him was a
miscarriage.
#03 - Brick
He heats smooth bricks for
their bed every night, but nothing warms her blood enough to blush it
back to her ashen skin.
#04 - Judgment
The final
decision concerning Rukia's sentence punches straight into his chest:
a kind but misplaced tracheotomy to compensate for his strangled
throat.
#05 - Powder
These days, most of the spirits
he cleanses died violently and linger vengefully: chained to the guns
that killed them, faded powder still ringing their bullet
wounds.
#06 - Grim
Grim-faced, distant, and silent,
Byakuya reassures none of the souls he reaps.
#07 - Trap
A
single encounter seals his fate, traps him between Hisana and Rukia:
leads him down a path to two sisters who will come to rule his locked
heart.
#08 - Star
The dog may seem to howl at the
moon's cold white back, but what he truly seeks is the star
beyond.
#09 - Possession
To possess that star, he
must first pass the sentinel moon.
#10 - Bandage
Hisana
cared for him once, in the third year of their marriage: changing the
bandages upon his wounds with coarsened, gentle hands.
#11
- Pearl
She never wore finery, and eschewed even the plainest
pearls: but he loved her even at her most unadorned, and did not
initially understand why the fact sometimes saddened her.
#12
- Glass
He handled no glassware as gently as he did the
delicate column of Hisana's throat.
#13 -
Classified
Byakuya receives his order to retrieve Kuchiki
Rukia in a sealed and tight-rolled scroll; when he opens the
classified document, Renji tries in vain to read it through the look
in his captain's impassive eyes.
#14 - Buttons
On
the rare occasions he uses a gigai, he wears white dress shirts with
the top two buttons undone.
#15 - Closet
When
closeted within his estate, untroubled by the demands of the external
world, he is capable of being completely absorbed for hours in such
little things as the strokes of calligraphy or the steeping of tea:
in the painted curve of his wife's throat, when he visits her
shrine.
#16 - Ash
Spirits leave no body when they
die, and so nothing is ever buried beneath those stone markers;
needing more, he burned her clothes and buried the ashes.
#17
- Definition
When Senbonzakura first manifests, he catches
only a fleeting and peripheral glimpse of her: lacking definition,
lacking detail, and lacking pity for his yearning gaze.
#18
- Staircase
As he pulls his hair up into the kenseikan, an
intricate part staircases into being: a crooked white lightning bolt,
reflected in wellwater hair.
#19 - Nail
Flaked bone
touches taut silk, and a slight press flicks a shivering note from
the koto's string: the sound coaxing a matching tremble from the
woman in his arms.
#20 - Prey
Those that preyed upon
Rukia always found themselves preyed upon in turn: seized and flayed
in an instant by a thousand vengeful blades.
#21 -
Backwards
The senka is a backwards iai cut: a stroke for the
back driven by a reverse grip.
#22 - Trouble
When he
was young, he never got into any trouble that could not somehow be
traced back to Yoruichi.
#23 - Little
Everything
about her is little: little hands, little body, little sighs beneath
the sheets when they move together, skin to skin.
#24 -
Collar
Byakuya can look at Rukia only long enough to see the
criminal's collar banding her throat-- to see her lips, parted and
sad around the syllables of his name-- before he must turn his face
aside.
#25 - Circle
Human souls here do not exalt so
much as they recycle: circling through a path of death and rebirth,
from which Kuchiki Byakuya has thus far stood apart.
#26 -
Hands
Rukia touches Byakuya for the first time when she
accepts his offered hand, and she is almost surprised to find him
warm and real: to feel a human beat of blood in his wrist.
#27
- Freedom
Staring down the black length of Tensa Zangetsu, he
follows its uncompromising lines to Ichigo's eyes; and in a single,
blade-breaking moment of distraction, he must tell himself he does
not envy the complete freedom of choice there.
#28 -
Last
When Rukia was admitted as a Kuchiki, the clan whispered
behind screens and fans that Byakuya's father would be the last great
Kuchiki head: for the clan would diminish beneath this insolent son's
rule.
#29 - Scab
Given enough time, even memories
scab over; he lives in fear of forgetting her voice.
#30 -
Crown
The kenseikan are not particularly heavy, but he wears
the white jade pieces as if they were a weighted crown.
#31
- Time
The modern world subdivides time into smaller and
smaller pieces, growing heavy with the anxious consciousness of every
lost second; but Kuchiki Byakuya still marks the passage of time by
the change of the seasons.
#32 - Rice
He neither
likes nor dislikes rice, consuming it almost perfunctorily-- until it
is topped with something spicy enough to strip the tongue from the
mouth.
#33 - Worn
The handkerchief is worn, frayed
about the edges, faded from sun and long service: but he carries it
close to his heart, for it was hers.
#34 - Paint
Byakuya
grinds his own ink for sumi-e, the circular motions loosening his
wrist for the strokes; when he finally picks up the brush, simple
flicks unfold bamboo that nods and bends across the paper.
#35
- Ache
Sometimes he aches to count all the ways Rukia
resembles Hisana-- to memorize all the ways she does not-- but he is
not ready, and so instead he turns his back.
#36 -
Cherry
Senbonzakura's thousand blades scissor through the
silence, moving so swiftly they split wind into the harmonic sound of
a finger tracing the edge of a wineglass.
#37 - Library
In
the library of the Kuchiki estate hangs a great scroll that records
the clan's genealogy: looking at it, Byakuya reflects on how strange
it is that the two most important names in his life are not inked
upon it.
#38 - Win
A single instant of doubt, of
reluctance, of hope-- that moment of indecision was enough to hollow
out the power of his blade, and he concedes victory to Ichigo with no
particular rancor.
#39 - Loss
He remains by her
bedside, head bowed, eyes blank, confused with loss: still holding
her hand, long after it stopped holding his.
#40 - Fold
A
mental exercise, for untroubled sleep: at night, he folds his hakama,
and pictures folding his doubts away into the silk.
#41 -
Music
Silk strings and snakeskin cannot match her plaintive
voice.
#42 - Bell
The seven flowers of autumn sway
in the gardens, washed by the rain and bent by the wind; he picks a
kikyou, and tastes winter in the air.
#43 - Sleep
The
Kuchiki lord and lady do not share the same bed: a time-honored
tradition he quietly defies.
#44 - Contact
Knelt
behind her to teach her the koto, he leans over her left shoulder, a
brush of lips warming the soft hollow hidden just beneath her
cheekbone: his hands on strings, his mouth on her skin.
#45
- Electricity
The twisting roar of lightning holes Ichigo's
shoulder, and for an instant Byakuya almost pities the boy for dying
so far from home.
#46 - Milk
After over a century of
absence from it, Yoruichi steps paw once more within the Kuchiki
estate; she wakes Byakuya with whiskers in his face-- an echo of old
games-- and with fraying tolerance he sends for a dish of milk.
#47
- Wild
A frenzied dedication to Rukia smolders plain in
Renji's wild eyes; seeing it, Byakuya rewards him by letting him die
with an intact face.
#48 - Expectation
Even without
the pressure from his disapproving clan-- who stand unanimous in
their protectiveness of the Kuchiki name's esteem-- Byakuya's
expectations of Rukia would still be exactingly high.
#49 -
Mechanism
She is the nightingale of the wild places, winging
in from his kingdom's very borders; her voice comes softly through
his window, and no mechanical songbird can break his thrall to
her.
#50 - Finale
Speared on Shinsou, tasting blood,
his only concern is whether his body was enough to keep the long
blade from her skin.