Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

On the day Ishida Soken died, Ryuuken got home early from work. It had been a hard day, he was tired, and for once he did not want to stay until dark filling out paperwork.

The house was empty and silent, decidedly devoid of its younger occupant, and he sighed. A sure sign that Uryuu had gone and done exactly what he told him not to do, which seemed to be a prerogative of young children in general and eight-year-olds in particular.

Ryuuken sat down at the kitchen table for a moment and thought, rubbing a hand against his forehead. In all likelihood, he takes Uryuu to train where he took me as a child. Now, if I could only remember where…

Finally, it came to him. The place at the river with the waterfall. Far off the beaten path from the park, it was secluded, and few ever came or went from there, especially not at that time of year when the oppressive heat drove would-be sightseers into their houses and hotel rooms. Ryuuken looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes after four. It would be nearly an hour long drive, but he could get there before dark.

.

As he drove, Ryuuken frowned at the strange shifting of the air. That too-familiar sense of foreboding swept over him, thick and suffocating. His heart began to beat too rapidly in his chest, and he recognized the feeling.

Ryuuken sighed, adjusted the rear view mirror, and drove at the speed limit.

.

The cicadas were striking a harsh, staccato performance when he got out of his car on the street by the park.

Ryuuken started up at a relaxed walk. There was no need to rush. His father and Uryuu certainly weren't going anywhere, if they were where he thought they were. A regular training session took several hours, and Uryuu had only been out from school for about three hours. They would probably be at it for another good half hour, if his calculations were correct.

There weren't any birds in the trees. That was the first time Ryuuken noticed something odd. He couldn't hear any bird song, couldn't see any birds. Normally, even without people with bags full of seed or popcorn, the path would be flocking full with pigeons, so much so that Ryuuken would have had to be careful not to step on them, small, velvet gray birds.

As he got closer, he began to search out for any sign of reiatsu. Almost immediately, Ryuuken picked up on Uryuu's reiatsu.

Ryuuken had always made it a priority to attune himself to the reiatsu of those he was close to. His father, while not close anymore, had at one point qualified as such and Ryuuken had accordingly made himself to Soken's reiatsu as well.

Ryuuken could sense Uryuu's reiatsu, close and strong, trembling and fluctuating, the way a small child's was supposed to in any situation. But that was the issue. He could only sense Uryuu's reiatsu. Soken's was nowhere to be found.

The old man just left him here? That was Ryuuken's first thought, a sharp anger and disdain bracing in his ribs. His lip curled back. Alone?

Then, a more reasonable line of thought took hold. Maybe Uryuu just decided to come here by himself. This place is much closer to the elementary school than home is, and he had no way to get home.

His thoughts didn't stop rattling until he came to the place where he sensed Uryuu's reiatsu.

That was when Ryuuken saw the mess.

For a moment, Ryuuken didn't know what to think. He stood stock-still, gaping down at the crumpled form on the ground. Then, thought returned.

He could barely recognize his father's corpse for all the blood.

.

Ryuuken could guess what had happened, and could tell without a doubt that Soken was dead, but leaned over him and checked for a pulse anyway. Nothing. His flesh was cold and stiff.

His first instinct was to check and make sure that there were still no Hollows in the area. Ryuuken swiftly cast his eyes around his surroundings, scanning everything. Nothing. Either Soken had managed to finish them off before dying, the Shinigami had cleaned things up, or whatever Hollows had been there had run off.

Something clicked in Ryuuken's mind. Uryuu. A cold dread came over him as he thought of what might have happened to him. Soken's dead; what sort of state is Uryuu in? Where is he?

"Uryuu?" Ryuuken shouted, trying desperately to get a fix on his son's reiatsu as his head spun round in every direction.

A small sniffle met his ears. Ryuuken's eyes shot to a tree nearby, as his breathing quickened and his throat began to burn and trickle. "Uryuu?" he called more softly, heart thumping. Oh, please… Oh please don't let him be hurt.

A pair of red-rimmed, bloodshot blue eyes, framed by thin, wire-rimmed spectacles, met Ryuuken's eyes as his eight-year-old son shakily stepped out from behind the tree, trembling with hiccupy sobs, tears pouring down his face.

"Father?" The sound of the word was nearly inaudible, broken up and chewed out like an old bone a Labrador had had for months.

The day Ishida Soken died marked the first and last time Uryuu ran to his father for any reason.

Uryuu went tearing to his father, his hands clinging to his pant legs as he buried his face and sobbed. Disjointed words floated up from the sobs and the pitiful wails, words that Ryuuken couldn't make out for all the tears that choked them.

For a moment, Ryuuken found himself furious with his father. He was furious that Soken had exposed his child to danger and pain, after all of the times he had demanded he stop, even when it had been so clear how much danger there was in everything…

Something else then hit Ryuuken, and the world went cold again. Uryuu's otherwise pristine white clothes were damp with many, crimson spots.

Ryuuken was sure his face was chalk white as he dropped to one knee. "Are you hurt?" he asked, voice low but urgent, putting a hand under his son's chin to examine his face, which was also red and sticky.

Uryuu shook his head. "N-no," he stuttered, before squeezing his eyes shut and breaking into another crying fit.

Ryuuken sighed, closing his eyes. So the bloodstains had come not from being hurt, but most likely from Uryuu running over to his grandfather's corpse some time in the afternoon. Thank goodness. God only knew how long he had been out there by himself.

Ryuuken picked his child up in his arms as he stood up. "Come on," he murmured to his sobbing wreck of a son, who had his face buried in his father's shoulder. "We're going home."

He would not be telling the police about this, nor would he attempt to report in Soken's death. There was no way on earth Ryuuken could possibly explain the scene before him. No one would understand.

When they got back to the car (and Ryuuken blessed the good luck that had happened to make the park utterly deserted that afternoon), Ryuuken got the blanket out of the trunk of the car and draped it over Uryuu in the back of the car, so the sticky crimson blotches on his clothes wouldn't be visible (They would both have to throw out the clothes they had been wearing that day).

Uryuu huddled under the blanket, still trembling, and Ryuuken adjusted the rear view mirror every five seconds to make sure he didn't seem any worse than before.

The drive home was the longest drive Ryuuken had ever made in his life.

.

The night was humid and muggy, heavy-bodied fireflies flying sluggishly to their doom against light bulbs; their fat little bodies cascaded to the ground in a spectacular death spiral.

Ryuuken stared pensively out at the street beyond his porch, taking a long draught out of the ice water in his glass as he sat in the long bench of the rocking chair.

His hand rested on Uryuu's head of shiny black hair; the boy had fallen into a fitful sleep, twitching and scrunching his face at odd intervals, huddled against his father's left side. Ryuuken should have put him to bed over an hour ago, but he would have been lying to himself if he tried to assert that he was comfortable leaving Uryuu alone for any amount of time.

He hated to admit it, but Ryuuken found himself relieved that it was his father who had died, and not his son. It was a ghoulish thing to even contemplate, but quite frankly, Uryuu was much more important than Soken had ever been and Ryuuken wasn't sure what he would have done had the positions of his father and his son been reversed. That thought scared him more than anything.

The thought of what he had almost lost that day made Ryuuken's eyes burn and his ribs ache even as his son whimpered in his sleep beside him and the night set even deeper.

Of course, it would take Ryuuken several years to realize that what he had almost lost paled in comparison to what he actually had lost.