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The morning had started ordinarily enough. Reports to review, a patrol schedule that needed adjusting because two of the unseated officers had a scheduling conflict neither of them had thought to mention until it was nearly a problem, and the particular quiet of a division that ran the way the sixth division always ran — precisely, without excess motion, everyone attending to their portion of the whole.
Bianca has been at this desk for the better part of twenty years. She knows its rhythms the way you know the rhythms of anything you’ve lived inside long enough. She knows which floorboards in the corridor announce visitors before they arrive, which hour of the afternoon the light through the screens turns gold, the particular sound of Captain Kuchiki’s footsteps versus anyone else’s, evenly paced and unmistakable once you’d learned to listen for it.
She learned to listen for it a very long time ago. She has never quite figured out what to do with the information once she has it.
Renji comes in fast enough that she looks up before he fully crosses the threshold. That alone tells her something; Renji didn’t move fast for ordinary things, not after a month of settling into the lieutenant’s seat and learning the particular pace the Sixth Division expected of everyone in it, captain included.
“What happened?” Bianca asks, rising from her desk.
“Rukia. She’s being arrested. Centra 46’s orders — the Captain and I are being sent to bring her back from the world of the living,” says Renji, expression tangled in a way that gives away the opposition of his personal and professional obligations.
The room goes very quiet, or perhaps it’s just that Bianca’s own hearing has narrowed to the single point where this new knowledge sits; everything else recedes to make room for it.
“Arrested for what?” She asks, bewildered.
“I don’t have the exact details of what happened,” Renji put a hand on his hip, the other against his forehead, “Something about transferring her powers to a human, which is a serious sin, Bianca. Central 46 doesn’t send captains to retrieve someone for something minor.”
She set down the report she’d been holding. Her hands are steady. She notes this with the detached part of her brain that noted things like that, the part that had learned, across twenty years of managing difficult information in a professional context, to keep the outward register calm even when the inside of her was doing something considerably less composed.
“When do you leave?”
“Within the hour. Captain’s finishing up with the First Division now.”
Within the hour. She thinks about Rukia: a friend of some forty years, the bench in the Thirteenth Division’s garden, the particular quality of a friend who has never once made her feel like less than she was, and that friend is somewhere in the world of the living, unaware yet that her brother and Renji are coming for her under Centra 46’s orders, which means this was not a small thing, which means—
“What’s going to happen to her? Once she’s back.” She asks, almost afraid to hear the answer.
Renji’s expression does something complicated.
“We are to arrest her,” he pauses, meeting her eye as if for dramatic effect, “or kill her.”
Silence follows as Bianca assesses the options, grip white-knuckled at the edge of her desk. Renji speaks again before she can, “I’m hoping it’s not as bad as it sounds. Captain Ukitake will have something to say about it — he won’t let them railroad her without a fight. And her brother—”
“Captain Kuchiki is—”
The office door opens.
Byakuya crosses the threshold in his particular, unhurried way that reorganized the surrounding room without effort, haori settled, expression composed in the usual manner that tells her nothing about whatever he was actually carrying underneath it. He is already dressed for departure, and the small, practical signs show this; he moves with slightly more purpose than his usual measured pace.
Bianca’s sentence stops somewhere in her throat.
It isn’t dramatic. It never was, from the outside, just a fraction of a second where her body registered his presence and did something automatic and old before her mind caught up and reasserted control. Twenty years of this reflex, and it has never once fully gone away, not even now, not even with something as significant as Rukia’s arrest occupying the majority of her actual attention.
He glances at her — brief, unreadable — before addressing Renji, “We leave in twenty minutes. Have the gate prepared.”
“Yes, Captain,” Renji straightens.
Byakuya’s gaze moves back to Bianca for a moment longer than strictly necessary — not unkind, not warm either, just a captain’s brief accounting of a seated officer’s state before he turns and leaves the room to see to whatever remained before departure.
The door closes behind him.
She is aware that she had been holding perfectly still for several seconds and lets out a breath she hadn’t fully registered holding.
Renji looks at her with the particular patience of a man who has been a lieutenant for exactly two months and has already, in that short span, witnessed this specific phenomenon enough times to have opinions about it.
“Twenty years and you still freeze up around him.” He notes.
“It’s not- I don’t freeze. I was thinking about Rukia.” She counters, gaze falling away from him.
“You were thinking about Rukia and also visibly stopped functioning for a second when he walked in.” Renji asserts.
She picks her report back up, sets it down, then picks it back up again with slightly more purpose this time, the way you do things when you need your hands occupied with something that isn’t your own thoughts.
“I begged Captain Ukitake not to transfer me here twenty years ago. I made a formal request and everything.”
“Did it work?” Renji raised an eyebrow.
“Obviously not. I’m sitting here twenty years later, still freezing, as you so kindly pointed out.” Bianca rolls her eyes.
Renji almost smiles at that, which she counts as a small victory given the circumstances. Then his expression sobers again, the reality of what he is about to do settling in: retrieving Rukia, under Central 46’s authority, for something serious enough to warrant a captain’s personal involvement.
“I should go. Gate needs preparing.” Murmurs Renji, turning to leave.
“Renji,” she calls, and he pauses at the door, “Bring her back safely. Whatever else happens.”
He nods, a small, serious gesture that carries more weight than words would have, and leaves.
Bianca sits alone in the office for a moment, the mission reports in front of her demanding attention she can’t quite give them anymore. Nearly forty years of friendship with Rukia sit somewhere in her chest, heavy, and underneath it — smaller, harder to look at directly — sits the particular fact of the last thirty seconds. The door opening, the half-second freeze, the reflex that outlasted twenty years of professional competence, twenty years of proving herself capable in every measurable way, and having never once fully released its grip.
She thinks about Ukitake. The office, twenty years ago, the chair that had been hers. Try to take up the space you’ve earned. She has tried. She has gotten better at managing it, exactly as former lieutenant Ginjiro had promised she would all those years ago on her first day, when the office door had opened for the first time and she’d stood there not moving, not knowing yet that this reflex was going to be a permanent fixture of her working life.
She wonders distantly whether Ukitake would be gentle with Rukia when this was over, or whether the situation was too serious even for his particular brand of patient advocacy to soften. She hopes it isn’t as serious as Renji’s face had suggested, or that the last name Kuchiki would spare her. Surely, Captain Kuchiki won’t just stand by and watch his sister die. Maybe she’ll get off spending some time in the Underground Prisons?
She has no way of knowing yet how fair this was actually going to go. For now, she just picks up her pen and tries to focus on the reports in front of her, and she finds she cannot.
She thinks instead about the day arrived here, twenty years ago. The chair in Ukitake’s office. Ginjiro Shirogane’s steady voice. The first time the door had opened, and she’d forgotten, for a moment, how to finish a sentence.
She doesn’t remember the street she grew up on, or her mother’s voice, or the room where she learned to read. More than one hundred and fifty years is long enough to lose almost everything. What she keeps isn’t a memory. It is a reflex.
The sound of boots on stone, unhurried, coming closer. That unhurriedness, the gait of someone who has never once needed to rush because the world simply waits for men like that. She doesn’t remember whose boots they were. She remembers, in the way a body remembers rather than a mind, that she used to hold her breath until the sound passed. She remembers that she was never the only one holding it.
There were two of them. That much survives at least, not as a memory exactly, more like a fact she’s always known with no need to have witnessed it. The way you know your own name. A brother, younger by minutes, though it had mattered enormously at the time. Some family logic about inheritance and standing that didn’t survive its own century. They had held their breath together, whatever the danger was. They had died together too, close enough in the moment that whatever carries souls across into the next existence had carried them side by side, and they had woken in the Rukongai within sight of each other, which was as close to mercy as either of their mortal lives had offered.
She died at twenty-three. She doesn’t remember that either. What carries out of that life and into this one isn’t grief, exactly — grief requires knowing what you lost. It is smaller and older than grief. A held breath. A stillness that arrived before thought, every time footsteps like that one crossed a room she was standing in.
She would spend the better part of nearly two centuries mistaking it for cowardice.
Her brother never quite understands why she flinches at things he’d already forgotten. He doesn’t carry the same reflex—he’d have called that luck if he thought about it, but he tries not to think about it, and mostly succeeds. It is one of the first ways their second lives diverge from their first: he outran what happened to them. She didn't. She simply learned to hold very still and call it composure.
summary: She's spent twenty years freezing every time her captain walks into a room. He's spent fifty years making sure no one sees what he actually feels. Neither of them planned on this. A third seat with a fear she doesn't fully understand and a captain who has decided composure is the same thing as healing — Kintsugi follows Bianca Nishikawa and Byakuya Kuchiki from the Soul Society arc through the fragile peace after, as two people who have both mistaken silence for strength slowly learn that the cracks don't need hiding to be worth keeping.
information: byakuya kuchiki x oc, rangiku matsumoto x oc (secondary), canon compliant, canon-typical violence & death, slow burn, sibling fluff, byakuya being byakuya, eventual fluff
Kintsugi | Byakuya x OC
She's spent twenty years freezing every time her captain walks into a room. He's spent fifty years making sure no one sees what he actually feels. Neither of them planned on this. A third seat with a fear she doesn't fully understand and a captain who has decided composure is the same thing as healing — Kintsugi follows Bianca Nishikawa and Byakuya Kuchiki from the Soul Society arc through the fragile peace after, as two people who have both mistaken silence for strength slowly learn that the cracks don't need hiding to be worth keeping.
the responsibility of a general is a heavy one-- jing yuan knows this all too well. time is a telling force, and the tales he has survived and told many a time in such intricacies and riddles serve as proof. the weight is hardly suffocating now, he'll tell you with a teasing smile, though you find yourself bearing the task of tending to him and his weariness all too frequently.
...like today, for the umpteenth time. it is not the worst thing to deal with, you suppose : sitting in the grass, hidden beneath the shade granted by the trees. it is warm outside, the birds sing their songs, and here you are, staring down at a certain nonchalant man who naps peacefully with his head on your lap.
"general, it is time to wake."
silence. you watch his breathing, slow and steady. a subtle curve of the lips, often undetected by everyone else except you.
"general. you are awake."
"hush," jing yuan says, eyes closed, that familiar smile growing despite his efforts, "i am resting."
you sigh. you think if you dared roll your eyes, they would simply roll to the ends of the planet, and surely they would not return. what a dramatic fool. two can play at this game, you suppose.
"oh, i am missing my dearest lover, my sweetest jing yuan." you say, exhaling with a small huff. "if only he would open his eyes for me so i could greet him with a loving kiss. if only--"
-- ah, there he is. he looks up at you, one brow slightly raised in amusement as you pinch his cheek.
"what a short nap that was, my general. i am glad to see you awake."
"-- jing yuan." comes the correction, fingers lacing with yours as he brings your hand to his lips, blessing your skin with the softest of affections. "you had no problem calling me by my name moments ago. now, how will you repay me since you have disturbed my rest?"
a pause, then a beat.
"...you are very tiresome, you know."
"yes, i know." a gentle hum. "you love me all the same."
you cannot help but laugh despite your annoyed facade. you shake your head, free hand cupping his cheek as you lean down, lips pressing against his in a quiet good morning.
"i'm afraid it's true." a kiss to his lips, then his nose. "i love you all the same."
i forget how long it takes me to post a completed chapter and add the links to where they need to be sometimes... i was going to post a new fic (aka the surprise i yapped about a couple days ago) but not sure i'll have enough time before bed... but let's see. it is coming tho... it is coming...
Being acutely aware that one’s skills are inferior is never a good thing on the first day of any job. Normally, a veteran's skills are superior to a recruit's. However, their group was hired more than recruited precisely because their skills are supposed to be exceptional even when compared with the elites of the Scout Regiment. The brigade is hardly aware that Esmé is a pretend part of this group. She knows the basics, but only to the extent a cadet would. She is operational, not exceptional. And operational is almost certainly below standards in the Survey Corps. So, she knows this training will be anything but kind to her.
Horse riding, however, is a completely different ballpark. Esmé is nothing if not a good rider. Getting acquainted with a horse and galloping about the fenced area of the training yard came far more easily than fastening all the straps of the maneuvering gear. They need to finish the job before they find themselves at the gates for a suicide mission beyond the walls. She briefly wonders if being eaten by a titan is so bad. It might not be if the process is painless, she assumes, if they don’t bite limbs off and just swallow you whole.
Much less forgiving is the maneuvering gear portion of the training. The anchor points she selected are off by margins that cost her momentum, her grip on the handles uncertain in a way that shows. The dummy titans go largely unaddressed because her attention is split between not falling and remembering the sequence of movements she’s drilled in controlled spaces, infiltrating corridors and building interiors where the layout was predictable. Open air is an unfamiliar language entirely. Though she manages, that is the ceiling.
Then there is Levi.
She catches him in her peripheral vision mid-swing, and the internal monologue goes quiet for a moment. It’s not because of anything she can name; it’s just because her brain, trained to catalog and assess, has nothing to file this under except exceptional, and that word didn’t quite cover it either. The gear moves with him rather than under him, as if it is part of his body rather than a tool he is directing. Perhaps that is what a bird in flight feels like about wings; Esmé had wondered about that once as a child.
Flagon’s critique of her form is thorough and not inaccurate: “You’re so focused on maneuvering, and your form is stiff as a log. There’s no time to think about which lever to pull when you’re in titan country.”
She receives it without expression.
“How did you learn?” He asks, somewhere between a genuine question and a challenge.
Her eyes cut to Levi before she decides to look at him.
The claim comes out clean—self-taught, same methods. Flagon accepts it with a look that suggests he finds the standard underwhelming and moves on. When they are dismissed, Levi’s expression tells her he heard every word.
She falls into step beside him, just close enough to be private. “You didn’t have to do that,” says Levi.
“If I had said anything else, it would have been suspicious.” She keeps her voice low but level, “We’re supposed to be self-taught. What else was I going to say?”
He doesn’t argue. She didn’t expect him to. She is right, and they both know it.
Flagon’s parting comment about not picking up Levi’s style of holding his blades backward follows them out of the training yard. She says she will not. He looks as if he is reconsidering her continued existence.
Later, the lights in most of the barracks were out. Esmé had mapped three possible routes to Erwin’s office during training, marking the windows, the patrol rotations, and the blind spots between them. She was not expecting to need any of them tonight.
Farlan leaves the mess hall early. She makes a mental note of it and comments offhandedly about his habit of turning in early, as if her long acquaintance with him mildly exasperates her in that slightly affectionate way friends tend to be.
She finds him in Erwin’s office with his hands in a drawer and the door unlocked behind him.
“What would you have done,” she says quietly, “if I were Erwin?”
He goes very still, then straightens. The look on his face is the particular expression of someone who has been caught by the one person they cannot dismiss.
“We could both get caught.” Says Farlan.
“Then we tell whoever finds us we got lost looking for somewhere…private.” She crosses to the desk, “Erwin might not buy it. Move over.”
They search efficiently and in silence. Every drawer, every shelf, every folder. Nothing.
She steps back, crosses her arms, and looks at the empty desk.
“It’s on him.” Esmé declares.
Farlan’s jaw tightens. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Then we’ll have to figure out a plan with the others.” She moves towards the door, movement quiet as a cat, “Leave the sneaking around to me next time, Church. You’re good at a lot of things. This isn’t one of them.”
She lets herself out before he can answer.
The gates open at dawn.
Esmé has never been outside the walls before. She’s been many places inside and with considerably more control over her exit and entry. The long-range formation spreads out around them as they ride, and the scale of open territory does something to her chest that she doesn’t have a name for. Her skills suit rooms and corridors, and the specific geometry of human spaces allows her to predict exits and learn people's movement patterns.
Titans do not move in patterns she can learn. She has read the reports. The reports have not prepared her for the reality of riding through grass that stretches on forever and creatures the size of buildings somewhere in the distance, with the singular characteristic of finding people to eat.
She keeps her expression neutral and her horse moving.
By nightfall, the sky has changed. She clocks it, and the immense relief that seemingly always comes to her with the cover of darkness, now only intensified by the knowledge that titans can’t function in the environment she thrives in.
The brigade stops at an abandoned castle with orders to make camp in the ruins as she dismounts. She’s uninjured, and that is enough.
previous chapter | next chapter (coming soon!)
Author's note: greetings everyone! apologies the update was later than usual. i had my parents over for a month for my convocation, so I was too busy to write, but they have safely returned home now and I should be back to my usual routine for a bit until I have to move out of student house, hehe.
so maybe... I'll have a little surprise for y'all tomorrow 👀 my parents are headed home after their month with me sooooo I'm hoping to cook a little something after this break I had hehe
you know when someone leaves the house and then you come back after seeing them off and there is all this empty space where their stuff used to be? yeah, low-key going through it right now, but i'll recover in a few...
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