Winter War: Karakura: Waiting
Title: Karakura: Waiting
Arc: Winter War - an AU co-write with liralen and sophiap
Characters: Tatsuki, Keigo, Mizuiro, Ishida Ryuuken
Rating/Warning: PG-13 for language, references to character death
Summary: There is a pressure on the world.
Notes: This is a rather dark AU co-plotted with liralen and sophiap. The war against Aizen's forces went very badly. Nothing is sacred and no one is safe.
Links
1. Nanao: Winter
2. Ukitake: Waking Up
3. Ikkaku: What Is, What Was
4. Kuukaku: Holding Ground
5. Nanao: Morning, Interrupted
6. Ukitake: Chance
7. Karin: Keeping Up Appearances
8. Yoruichi: Hunting
9. Momo: Trust No One
10. Soi Fong: En Garde
11. Gin: On Top
KARAKURA: WAITING
Tatsuki has been training for months with Soi Fong-taichou. She remembers to call the other woman Captain, because Soi Fong expects it, but she's not one of their soldiers and she hasn't joined their damn shinigami divisions and she isn't going to serve under any of them. She's fighting for herself and for Ichigo and for Orihime and for Karakura, and not for people that she'd never met before and who never cared about her until she was useful to them.
Liking's something different. She thinks that she'd like Soi Fong if Soi Fong was the sort of person to let herself be liked. She does like the cat-woman Shihouin Yoruichi, and Tessai's all right, and the kids are cute, but Urahara is so totally greasy and oily and generally untrustworthy that she's surprised Ichigo was stupid enough to trust the man.
She wears herself down every day with school and practice, and with each passing morning she hopes that today will be the day when Soi Fong and the others act. It's clear that they're planning something: they're just waiting for the right moment.
It's a different sort of hope from her first hope, when she used to run to the shop every day and expect to see Ichigo back from the other end of nowhere. He'd have Orihime with him, and Sado, and Ishida, because Ichigo never left anyone behind. Ever.
She had to get over that hope before Soi Fong would agree to teach her anything. She had to leave it to wither in the winter winds and the dirty ice and the dusty snow. The days had gone by and Ichigo wasn't coming home. Orihime was still where they'd taken her. The person who faked Ichigo at school and home (she'd had it explained to her but it made no sense -- how could souls be artificial? -- it must have come from somewhere) was a bad joke.
I will teach you whatever you are capable of learning, Soi Fong had told her.
She's let her extra karate practice lapse in favour of learning real fighting and real killing. She knows that her sensei thinks that she's brooding over Orihime, and she lets him think it: it saves her having to make excuses. When she does attend the weekly karate lesson, she has to force herself to remember the correct forms of kick and blow and kata. It's easy to see her fellow students in terms of weak points and failed protections, to count the ways to cripple them or kill them.
At the back of her mind, this troubles her. At the back of her mind, she wonders if she is going to be able to put this away once everything's over -- because it can't go on forever, can it? -- and how one stops looking at people this way.
Fuck it, Ichigo, she thinks, your dad's a doctor and you wanted to protect people, and I only practiced karate because I wanted to fight well, not because I wanted to take people apart, and, and . . .
There aren't any answers: not waking, not sleeping, and not in dreams. There is only the body's exercise and the mind's constant weariness. She knows enough to know that Karakura shouldn't feel this way. Like a hunting ground, and all of them the rabbits.
Kurosaki and his friends failed to bring Inoue Orihime out, Soi Fong had said. I am not training you so that you can go and be killed along with them. I am training you so that at some point you can keep yourself alive, and maybe others as well. You must know when to cut your losses. And with that she had turned away as though that answered any sort of question.
Kurosaki Ichigo beat me once, Tatsuki had said in response. Then he stopped fighting me. I don't stop fighting.
Soi Fong had nodded, once.
The worst of it is not having anyone that she can talk to. Keigo doesn't want to know: he's retreated from all of it, and he goes to school as normal and pretends that nothing's wrong. Mizuiro has gone to the other extreme: he didn't believe it, any of it, he claimed that it was a lie, and went out to find out whose lie it was, and now he squints at her from across the classroom when he thinks she's not looking, as though she's going to start growing something out of the back of her head.
Well, fuck them. She's doing what she can.
She knows they don't tell her everything. Not even Soi Fong, who's been known to occasionally "let something slip" when Tatsuki just can't focus. She doesn't know who the children at the shop are. She doesn't know who the strangers really are, the green-haired girl or the man with the problem with his leg or the one she's not supposed to know is down in the cellar, and whenever she tries to ask she gets headed off and told to go practice her kata. Shinigami who had an accident, and that's all she knows.
It's probably for her own good. Yeah. That's what Ichigo tried last time, and it worked so damn well that time too.
The shop door is in front of her, and she stares at it wearily for a long moment before she knocks. The little boy lets her in. He's twitching with eagerness, enough that she finds the energy to look around.
The kotatsu's broken. The only people there are the shopkeeper, fiddling with some precision instruments and a piece of jewellery, and the cat preening a paw. He looks up at her arrival, and gives her a troubled, uncertain smile. "Why, hello, Arisawa-san! What a pleasant surprise to see you here --"
"Where's Soi Fong-taichou?" she interrupts.
"Out of town," he says. "Very, very far out of town." And he picks up his fan and gives her a half-glance over the edge of it, one with enough meaning that she bites back her questions and nods in response.
"I'll take your training today, Arisawa-kun," the cat says. She shakes herself and is a woman, self-possessed and calm, but even she has a flicker of excitement around her eyes, and an extra tension in her pace. "We can't have you getting behind."
---
Asano Keigo keeps his head down these days, and wishes that other people had done the same. Everyone can feel the gaps in the classroom. Nobody says anything about it. Inoue's gone, Ishida's gone, Yasutora's gone, other people are gone, and Kurosaki -- damn it, Kurosaki isn't who he used to be. He's bright and cheerful most the time, and guarded when he thinks nobody's watching him. It's like he's been replaced with a plant person from the movie. There's none of the old temper, or the old flashes of ultra-cool, or even the old intelligence. He gets marks in the middle of the class and seems happy with that.
Keigo had always liked Kurosaki Ichigo, even if he was a bit weird. He isn't sure that he likes this new desperately smiling version any more.
The whole Kurosaki family seem to have withdrawn in on themselves. Kurosaki Isshin spends all his time at work or at home. The daughters never go out on their own any longer; either their father or their brother's always with them. It's like they're under siege.
If pushed (say, to the edge of a roof and held dangling there) Keigo would have to admit that yes, it is a siege, and yes, he's seen the creatures that prowl the area, and yes, he knows what's going on (as far as anyone can know) and no, he wants nothing to do with it. He and Arisawa and Mizuiro sneaked down and saw Kurosaki and Ishida and Yasutora go through that gateway.
You'd do better to go back home, the shopkeeper said, and hid his thin smile behind his fan. Things will be sorted out soon enough.
Keigo has worked out what happened. There was a battle. They lost. There was that weird day a few months back, when something went wrong with the clocks and everyone lost a few hours and they talked about getting the government or something in to investigate (like the X-Files, sort of) but in the end nobody did anything. And after that Kurosaki had gone pod person, and Yasutora and Ishida and Inoue never came back, and there were only monsters out in the streets.
He's grateful that his two guests did something to his sister's memory before they left. It means she doesn't ask any awkward questions.
Keigo knows that Arisawa's up to something. Well, that's fine for her, isn't it? She's the karate champion and everything. She probably doesn't have dreams of those things crawling in through the window and eating her alive. She doesn't have to be so afraid. She still thinks Inoue's alive. She doesn't have those moments when everything seems so absolutely pointless and when the future stretches out in shades of grey, when there's going to be nothing but failed examinations and an empty house and useless jobs and a wasted life and he might as well walk off the edge of the building because there's no point to any of it and --
Things were better six months ago. Really they were.
If there was a war, then Keigo is sure that they lost it.
Perhaps if I'd mattered, then it might be different, he thinks, and watches the slow looming clouds outside the window as the teacher drones on and on and on.
---
Mizuiro prowls the city. Not like a tiger or a lion: the thought makes him smile, that winsome little smile which always pleases women. Something smaller, but still something that has a nose for lies.
He doesn't blame Keigo, and most of all he doesn't blame Tatsuki. It's human nature to want an explanation, and to cling to any sort of an answer, however ridiculous it is.
Mizuiro is a philosophical atheist. He will not accept anything unless he's proven that it's true. He has seen things, but that proves nothing. He has been told things, but that proves nothing.
He has decided to accept, after months of watching, that there are hungry things which roam the city. That's definite.
He hasn't decided yet whether Tatsuki is on the right side, or whether she has made a terrible mistake.
. . . after all, Kurosaki Ichigo chose to trust those people, didn't he? And his friends did as well. And look what happened to them.
The best thing to do is to watch, then decide, and then act.
One of his female friends taught him how to use a gun, years ago. He hasn't forgotten.
---
Ishida Ryuuken looks out from his office window, and can see the whorls of reiatsu and spirit threads like dirty fingerprints all over town. He can feel them as well, feel the rising level of spiritual pressure and depression that the whole of Karakura must live with.
The results come into his hospital. Murders. Assaults. Accidents caused by carelessness caused by the sheer weight of taint throughout the town. And the attempted suicides. Oh yes, suicides. The constant pressure has its effect on everyone who can feel it, even if they don't know why or how life has gradually become unendurable and death seems so convenient an option.
These days he lives in a constant state of cold, controlled rage: rage at the creatures who took his son from him, rage at his son for being fool enough to go, and rage at the shinigami who have done nothing but compound the situation with every breath. So they wiped out the Quincy for failing to live up to their standards: where were they when they were needed?
He would like to believe that his son is still alive, but every ounce of logic in him argues against it. If he had been firmer, if he had kept the boy under restraints till the Kurosaki brat was safely away and he could talk some sense into him, if he had taught the boy better when he was younger . . .
Ishida Ryuuken no longer takes phone calls from the Kurosaki Clinic. He has nothing to say to that person, or to anyone connected with him.
What would have happened, he wonders idly, if that famous massacre centuries ago had gone the other way? If the Quincy had managed to put down the shinigami, and then dealt with all the Hollows, and swept the world clear so that the living could just live in peace . . .
He is aware that his fingers are tightening on the windowsill. He neatly uncurls them. A doctor must be careful of his hands.
In the end, this is what it comes down to: the last of the Quincy, alone in a wolf-winter under a grey sky, waiting for the end of the world and for the ghosts of the dead to consume the living. It should be a crime for a son to die before his father. He knows that his own father would have agreed.
He will care for the living as long as he can. He has no interest in the dead. Whatever they call themselves, Hollow or shinigami, they are all monsters and deceivers and murderers. Better that there should be nothing after death, and nobody should ever wake the departed from their sleep.
Best of all, perhaps, a mercy killing.
---
Arc: Winter War - an AU co-write with liralen and sophiap
Characters: Tatsuki, Keigo, Mizuiro, Ishida Ryuuken
Rating/Warning: PG-13 for language, references to character death
Summary: There is a pressure on the world.
Notes: This is a rather dark AU co-plotted with liralen and sophiap. The war against Aizen's forces went very badly. Nothing is sacred and no one is safe.
Links
1. Nanao: Winter
2. Ukitake: Waking Up
3. Ikkaku: What Is, What Was
4. Kuukaku: Holding Ground
5. Nanao: Morning, Interrupted
6. Ukitake: Chance
7. Karin: Keeping Up Appearances
8. Yoruichi: Hunting
9. Momo: Trust No One
10. Soi Fong: En Garde
11. Gin: On Top
KARAKURA: WAITING
Tatsuki has been training for months with Soi Fong-taichou. She remembers to call the other woman Captain, because Soi Fong expects it, but she's not one of their soldiers and she hasn't joined their damn shinigami divisions and she isn't going to serve under any of them. She's fighting for herself and for Ichigo and for Orihime and for Karakura, and not for people that she'd never met before and who never cared about her until she was useful to them.
Liking's something different. She thinks that she'd like Soi Fong if Soi Fong was the sort of person to let herself be liked. She does like the cat-woman Shihouin Yoruichi, and Tessai's all right, and the kids are cute, but Urahara is so totally greasy and oily and generally untrustworthy that she's surprised Ichigo was stupid enough to trust the man.
She wears herself down every day with school and practice, and with each passing morning she hopes that today will be the day when Soi Fong and the others act. It's clear that they're planning something: they're just waiting for the right moment.
It's a different sort of hope from her first hope, when she used to run to the shop every day and expect to see Ichigo back from the other end of nowhere. He'd have Orihime with him, and Sado, and Ishida, because Ichigo never left anyone behind. Ever.
She had to get over that hope before Soi Fong would agree to teach her anything. She had to leave it to wither in the winter winds and the dirty ice and the dusty snow. The days had gone by and Ichigo wasn't coming home. Orihime was still where they'd taken her. The person who faked Ichigo at school and home (she'd had it explained to her but it made no sense -- how could souls be artificial? -- it must have come from somewhere) was a bad joke.
I will teach you whatever you are capable of learning, Soi Fong had told her.
She's let her extra karate practice lapse in favour of learning real fighting and real killing. She knows that her sensei thinks that she's brooding over Orihime, and she lets him think it: it saves her having to make excuses. When she does attend the weekly karate lesson, she has to force herself to remember the correct forms of kick and blow and kata. It's easy to see her fellow students in terms of weak points and failed protections, to count the ways to cripple them or kill them.
At the back of her mind, this troubles her. At the back of her mind, she wonders if she is going to be able to put this away once everything's over -- because it can't go on forever, can it? -- and how one stops looking at people this way.
Fuck it, Ichigo, she thinks, your dad's a doctor and you wanted to protect people, and I only practiced karate because I wanted to fight well, not because I wanted to take people apart, and, and . . .
There aren't any answers: not waking, not sleeping, and not in dreams. There is only the body's exercise and the mind's constant weariness. She knows enough to know that Karakura shouldn't feel this way. Like a hunting ground, and all of them the rabbits.
Kurosaki and his friends failed to bring Inoue Orihime out, Soi Fong had said. I am not training you so that you can go and be killed along with them. I am training you so that at some point you can keep yourself alive, and maybe others as well. You must know when to cut your losses. And with that she had turned away as though that answered any sort of question.
Kurosaki Ichigo beat me once, Tatsuki had said in response. Then he stopped fighting me. I don't stop fighting.
Soi Fong had nodded, once.
The worst of it is not having anyone that she can talk to. Keigo doesn't want to know: he's retreated from all of it, and he goes to school as normal and pretends that nothing's wrong. Mizuiro has gone to the other extreme: he didn't believe it, any of it, he claimed that it was a lie, and went out to find out whose lie it was, and now he squints at her from across the classroom when he thinks she's not looking, as though she's going to start growing something out of the back of her head.
Well, fuck them. She's doing what she can.
She knows they don't tell her everything. Not even Soi Fong, who's been known to occasionally "let something slip" when Tatsuki just can't focus. She doesn't know who the children at the shop are. She doesn't know who the strangers really are, the green-haired girl or the man with the problem with his leg or the one she's not supposed to know is down in the cellar, and whenever she tries to ask she gets headed off and told to go practice her kata. Shinigami who had an accident, and that's all she knows.
It's probably for her own good. Yeah. That's what Ichigo tried last time, and it worked so damn well that time too.
The shop door is in front of her, and she stares at it wearily for a long moment before she knocks. The little boy lets her in. He's twitching with eagerness, enough that she finds the energy to look around.
The kotatsu's broken. The only people there are the shopkeeper, fiddling with some precision instruments and a piece of jewellery, and the cat preening a paw. He looks up at her arrival, and gives her a troubled, uncertain smile. "Why, hello, Arisawa-san! What a pleasant surprise to see you here --"
"Where's Soi Fong-taichou?" she interrupts.
"Out of town," he says. "Very, very far out of town." And he picks up his fan and gives her a half-glance over the edge of it, one with enough meaning that she bites back her questions and nods in response.
"I'll take your training today, Arisawa-kun," the cat says. She shakes herself and is a woman, self-possessed and calm, but even she has a flicker of excitement around her eyes, and an extra tension in her pace. "We can't have you getting behind."
---
Asano Keigo keeps his head down these days, and wishes that other people had done the same. Everyone can feel the gaps in the classroom. Nobody says anything about it. Inoue's gone, Ishida's gone, Yasutora's gone, other people are gone, and Kurosaki -- damn it, Kurosaki isn't who he used to be. He's bright and cheerful most the time, and guarded when he thinks nobody's watching him. It's like he's been replaced with a plant person from the movie. There's none of the old temper, or the old flashes of ultra-cool, or even the old intelligence. He gets marks in the middle of the class and seems happy with that.
Keigo had always liked Kurosaki Ichigo, even if he was a bit weird. He isn't sure that he likes this new desperately smiling version any more.
The whole Kurosaki family seem to have withdrawn in on themselves. Kurosaki Isshin spends all his time at work or at home. The daughters never go out on their own any longer; either their father or their brother's always with them. It's like they're under siege.
If pushed (say, to the edge of a roof and held dangling there) Keigo would have to admit that yes, it is a siege, and yes, he's seen the creatures that prowl the area, and yes, he knows what's going on (as far as anyone can know) and no, he wants nothing to do with it. He and Arisawa and Mizuiro sneaked down and saw Kurosaki and Ishida and Yasutora go through that gateway.
You'd do better to go back home, the shopkeeper said, and hid his thin smile behind his fan. Things will be sorted out soon enough.
Keigo has worked out what happened. There was a battle. They lost. There was that weird day a few months back, when something went wrong with the clocks and everyone lost a few hours and they talked about getting the government or something in to investigate (like the X-Files, sort of) but in the end nobody did anything. And after that Kurosaki had gone pod person, and Yasutora and Ishida and Inoue never came back, and there were only monsters out in the streets.
He's grateful that his two guests did something to his sister's memory before they left. It means she doesn't ask any awkward questions.
Keigo knows that Arisawa's up to something. Well, that's fine for her, isn't it? She's the karate champion and everything. She probably doesn't have dreams of those things crawling in through the window and eating her alive. She doesn't have to be so afraid. She still thinks Inoue's alive. She doesn't have those moments when everything seems so absolutely pointless and when the future stretches out in shades of grey, when there's going to be nothing but failed examinations and an empty house and useless jobs and a wasted life and he might as well walk off the edge of the building because there's no point to any of it and --
Things were better six months ago. Really they were.
If there was a war, then Keigo is sure that they lost it.
Perhaps if I'd mattered, then it might be different, he thinks, and watches the slow looming clouds outside the window as the teacher drones on and on and on.
---
Mizuiro prowls the city. Not like a tiger or a lion: the thought makes him smile, that winsome little smile which always pleases women. Something smaller, but still something that has a nose for lies.
He doesn't blame Keigo, and most of all he doesn't blame Tatsuki. It's human nature to want an explanation, and to cling to any sort of an answer, however ridiculous it is.
Mizuiro is a philosophical atheist. He will not accept anything unless he's proven that it's true. He has seen things, but that proves nothing. He has been told things, but that proves nothing.
He has decided to accept, after months of watching, that there are hungry things which roam the city. That's definite.
He hasn't decided yet whether Tatsuki is on the right side, or whether she has made a terrible mistake.
. . . after all, Kurosaki Ichigo chose to trust those people, didn't he? And his friends did as well. And look what happened to them.
The best thing to do is to watch, then decide, and then act.
One of his female friends taught him how to use a gun, years ago. He hasn't forgotten.
---
Ishida Ryuuken looks out from his office window, and can see the whorls of reiatsu and spirit threads like dirty fingerprints all over town. He can feel them as well, feel the rising level of spiritual pressure and depression that the whole of Karakura must live with.
The results come into his hospital. Murders. Assaults. Accidents caused by carelessness caused by the sheer weight of taint throughout the town. And the attempted suicides. Oh yes, suicides. The constant pressure has its effect on everyone who can feel it, even if they don't know why or how life has gradually become unendurable and death seems so convenient an option.
These days he lives in a constant state of cold, controlled rage: rage at the creatures who took his son from him, rage at his son for being fool enough to go, and rage at the shinigami who have done nothing but compound the situation with every breath. So they wiped out the Quincy for failing to live up to their standards: where were they when they were needed?
He would like to believe that his son is still alive, but every ounce of logic in him argues against it. If he had been firmer, if he had kept the boy under restraints till the Kurosaki brat was safely away and he could talk some sense into him, if he had taught the boy better when he was younger . . .
Ishida Ryuuken no longer takes phone calls from the Kurosaki Clinic. He has nothing to say to that person, or to anyone connected with him.
What would have happened, he wonders idly, if that famous massacre centuries ago had gone the other way? If the Quincy had managed to put down the shinigami, and then dealt with all the Hollows, and swept the world clear so that the living could just live in peace . . .
He is aware that his fingers are tightening on the windowsill. He neatly uncurls them. A doctor must be careful of his hands.
In the end, this is what it comes down to: the last of the Quincy, alone in a wolf-winter under a grey sky, waiting for the end of the world and for the ghosts of the dead to consume the living. It should be a crime for a son to die before his father. He knows that his own father would have agreed.
He will care for the living as long as he can. He has no interest in the dead. Whatever they call themselves, Hollow or shinigami, they are all monsters and deceivers and murderers. Better that there should be nothing after death, and nobody should ever wake the departed from their sleep.
Best of all, perhaps, a mercy killing.
---