She passes him in the hallway, a slip of a girl, just out of bed, not likely to remain out long, and Kuchiki Byakuya wonder if he's really seeing ghosts. Rukia, for all that she looks like her sister, is different from her: he is learning to see her for herself, for one. He blinks, and the dark-haired, head-hanging woman resolves into the white-clad lieutenant of the recently upheaved Fifth Division. The one who stood up to him over the matter of Renji (who was right to stand up to him and his mistakes, if he lets himself remember truly).

And what response, then? The most basic, and simple, perhaps; a brief nod at the girl, startled out of herself by his regard, and he moves on.

The captains are all so damned iunderstanding/i of her and her 'situation'. They will be lenient, they will be kind, they will expect delays in the paperwork, seeing as she's...

Still recovering, they leave it as.

It makes her sick. The pity, the not-understanding. Rangiku knows, but at least Gin had the decency to apologize to her, before he went. Hinamori subsists on second-hand accounts, on the facts from the skew of a world that now hates the name Aizen Sousuke.

(She finds it harder to hate him, the warmth of his arms not yet superseded by the cold of his blade, or of the far-off stories of a would-be god ascending. She supposes she will grow to hate him too, but does not want to hold such a cold emotion against her heart. It has seen much so much cold already.)

They stand there in their row and carefully don't look at her, the poor little lieutenant, freshly out of bed. Hisagi, oh, Hisagi-senpai, he always looked like captain material. And Kira-kun, well, if he seems a dimmed replacement for his traitorous captain, at least he's something, right? But her? She feels out of place in this room full of captains. It feeds the seeds of doubt in her heart planted there by the enemy they want her to fight and she flees, bowing, followed only by their regard.

It terrifies her, even more than the thought of war, or who against.

He is learning to become a brother, and it is harder than he thought it might be. When he had honored his late, beloved wife's request, he had expected that it would go over with the miminum of fuss and then he could keep her out of sight, out of mind, not think about her except for her few reports (what did unseated officers have to report anyway?) and her presence.

Now, he was forcing himself to see her as a sister, and not as Hisana's burden placed upon him, or the onus of a family disappointed in him once more. Rukia, he finds, is vivid. Hisana was the transcience of cherry blossoms, fleeting and so beautiful for it. Her sister by blood, his by plight, Rukia is as brilliant and fierce as a blizzard. She leaves nothing unchanged in her wake. Not even him, his heart reopened to the cold wounds of pride, loneliness, love-all the things he swore he left behind. He wants to see her rise dancing, now, not be buried under the obligations and oppression of several thousand years of Kuchiki clan history, even as his heart is wounded through.

Pride becomes him, a Kuchiki. Pride in his sister, his division, his organization, all mixed. Even if they have some strange replacements for captains, in the meeting hall. Kira, Hisagi, Hinamori-all classmates with his lieutenant, all touched and twisted by Aizen or his own lieutenants, to what end he still does not know. Hisagi, the one from the Ninth, holds his division together so well you'd almost not know how many sleepless nights he spent, at a graveside or over articles to be done by first light. Kira is as quiet and humble as Gin was loud and borderline disrespectful. Byakuya can find nothing to reproach there, save that his emotions display too nakedly on his face, from time to time. He must learn more control, if he is to truly cover for his captain.

And then there is the girl purported to lead the fifth division. Byakuya, for all his cold insight into others, finds it difficult to get a read on her, even after close scrutiny at meetings, in the halls. She is quiet, deferential, almost unnoticieable. But Byakuya remembers the fiery woman who stood up to him over something important to her, though he a captain and she a mere lieutenant. He wonders if she's hiding something. If it's all an act to lure them into a false sense of security so Aizen can worm his way back into the Soul Society he desires to stand atop. He watches her with suscpicion in his eyes, hardly realizing he is not the only one.

Eventually, he realizes that she is no double agent, no turned traitor hiding behind false modesty and niceness. She is broken, and somewhere in his soul he aches for her, this lieutenant he should think nothing more of.

They all stare at her. Everyone, everywhere she goes. She even takes to not wearing her lieutenant badge, for a while, though it pains her. That way, perhaps fewer will realize who the girl with the pale skin and the bags under her eyes and the downward glancing eyes is. Perhaps fewer of them will stare.

It never works out, of course. Half of them have that sickening pity, and half of them ice-sharp suspicion. She knows why. She isn't stupid, contrary to popular belief. Aizen-taichou had fooled them all, she just bore the brunt of it. Somehow, the suspicion is easier to bear. She suspects it is because, unlike the pity, she does not deserve one damn bit of it.

She throws herself into her work. But the perfect lieutenant thing only reinforces some people's thinking, she knows-so sad, holding to the routines he left her, or, he made her so perfect, didn't he, I wonder when it will end-but she hasn't got anything else to hold to, even as she crumbles under their attention.

But while Aizen may have done his best to break her, she was always stronger than even he knew. Somewhere, under all that niceness and sweetness and goodness there is, and always was, a steel core that never went away. Yes, she bent herself and molded herself to desires (fire is like that), but no one expects the sweet, good girl to stand up to them. To snap back into her place of deifance and burning brightness when bent too far.

To her later horror, it's Kuchiki-taichou she snaps in front of, telling him off for the suspicion in his eyes, in everyone's eyes. "If you're that sure of it, turn me over to the Second or something," she spits, and it's a stupid and a desperate thing to say and she's half expecting him to grab her and haul her off to make good on it, or a thousand blades to pierce her on the spot, even as she runs off. Even as she doesn't know she's piercing his newly opened heart.

Hisana hadn't had an easy life. That much was to be expected of anyone who ended up in so high a numbered district and survived. She had been beautiful, temporal, and he had loved her so deeply, even up to her scars and tattered edges. It hadn't always been so easy to love her, when all he saw was a gutter rat wrapped in the shrouds of a beauty that, he thought, shouldn't belong to one so low. She had frowned at him, and demurred (not the usual coy come-ons of ladies one had better not get involved with, but true humilty, true shame. It was the truth he found beautiful). For a man used to getting everything he wanted, even if he had few wants, she was a breath of freshness, breezing into his heart without knowing that she was.

So when he hears words that echo hers ('if you are so sure of that, sir', the deference and defiance mixed), across too many (too few) years and too much distance, his heart seizes and he cannot put her out of his mind for the rest of the day. Blue eyes turn to brass and his heart is dizzy with confusion.

There are things he knows: he loved, and still loves, Hisana. He is a Kuchiki, proud, strong and unwavering. She is a merely lieutenant, tossed aside like a leaf in the wake of the greatest enemy Soul Society has known in a thousand years or more.

And yet.

How should her eyes keep him awake at night, that glint of steel in them, aimed not at him, but at her own traitorous heart (that too, he knows far too well). How should her words, meant to wound but not so deeply as this, pierce his heart and set it afire with something that is not... well, there are many things it is not, and he can name many. 'Appropriate' and 'worthy' top the list, but going down there's 'wise' and 'sensible' too.

How should one girl be so powerful in her own right? He does not believe she can be, so he watches, and waits for her to slip again.

She should not have said such a thing. To a captain, at that. Abarai-kun consoles her, tells her that Kuchiki-taichou, well, he looks pretty scary, and yeah he supposes he can kinda be sort of scary and, yeah, he's only from one of the most powerful families in all of Soul Society (at which point Renji loses his drift and goes off on some tangent and she rolls her eyes and puts on a smile she doesn't quite feel). Perhaps he should have hauled her off. To the Second, to the Twelth, to be interrogated and investigated, grilled, examined-who knew, maybe even tortured, since the stories of the Twelfth didn't stop there-picked apart piece by piece for the seed of sedition they were all so sure was hiding somewhere in her being.

Yet she couldn't quite bring herself to regret it. It had felt igood/i, really, speaking her truth out loud, challenging the pity and the distrust all at once. But didn't most people regard her like that, these days? That same mix? So why had she chosen to snap at him and not someone far less terrifying, less likely to cut her to ribbons and leave her to die?

She shakes her head at Kira's question and mulls it over more. Had there been something different, maybe? Perhaps he had looked at her with more misgivings, and she had simply reacted to that. Maybe there was just that much less pity in his gaze than in the others. that would fit him, certainly, but her reaction? No, maybe not.

Hinamori could not explain it to herself, nor to anyone around her. So she chalked it up as a moment of stupidity and bravado and moved on. Though, from that point forward, she watched his eyes for suspicion more than any others. This too she justified to herself: a captain's doubts might lead the others, and if they all began to doubt her, well. She might find herself in the Twelfth anyway.

Even though she does not realize it, it changes her. Hitsugaya looks at her with the same pity born from her kindness and loyalty to a man they all have trained her to be loyal to for so long, and she puts kindness away in its box. Her steel core, she keeps. She will not bow to their condolances or their conjectures. She would not see his doubts confirmed, nor his pity increased.

She is unsure of whose doubts she thinks when she ties on her badge and puts her hands to the hilt of her zanpakutou. Gray and ice-blue shatter like fragments, into a prism of colors, daring her to burn them all away in the fire that sings to her soul, even so broken and cold.

Hinamori falls defeated at last by the pity and the illusion of suspicion, lying in tatters in a city as fake as any they've built for themselves.

The Captain-commander seems to think the haori off their backs are the most dismaying result to emerge from Hueco Mundo. Byakuya knows better. His pride laid bare before an enemy, the inconsequentiality of it all, the strange enemies and stranger allies made, the unwitnessed denouement of the greatest fight Soul Society will ever see (oh gods and kings, they hope)-there are things more important than clothes, even ones so symbolic as that. But the Captain-commander's focus on the trivial as a meotnym for the larger picture, ah, yes, that he understands.

So perhaps it is fitting that, while his sister and his lieutenant are off with the boy that saved them all, he worries about things he should have no business thinking about. A few disinterested queries gain him the information-she fought bravely, she was with us to the last, and she yet lives, though it is a near thing still-he desires. Just enough to keep him awake. Just enough to notice Hisagi-fukutaichou and Kira-fukutaichou and wonder if they worry for her too.

Her steel is so different from the ephemeral blossom. Yet he knows these things are not always what they seem, and that sometimes a petal is much sharper than it first appears. And heat, after all, brings spring.

When there's nothing left to burn, the ground waits. In silence and in ashes, later, there will always come something new.

She walks the ways of Seireitei, and he no longer thinks he sees a ghost. Hinamori has come through the trials of fire and burned and paid oh so dearly for the burning. But she has survived, steel-refined. He speaks to her, in the hall, as she walks with her head held up (no longer weighted by doubts and slights and lies, but buoyed by her own, singular self that cannot be taken from her). Hinamori does not flinch away, but meets him, eye for eye. Eyes in which she no longer finds pity or uncertainty, but a long, slow regard, interesting, and curiously unbarred, for a man she'd heard was one of Soul Society's closest-guarded and most closed.

"Tea?" She asks, the curiosity naked in her voice, and he pauses.

A long silence as the mores of his ancestors war with the regard of his heart, for the hundreth time. "Yes. If you would... like."

Hinamori regards him herself for a long, slow moment, her own heart judging whether this is the moment to flee and burn her old thought-of-enemies behind her with the ground or begin something new. She chooses the latter. She has had enough of burning, for now, even in her fire-trued heart. "I would like that very much, Kuchiki-sama."

He bows, and she watches him go.