{Onarata History}
Kuchiki Rukia;
Affiliation; Vescovo
Rank; Higher Soldati
Relations; Kuchiki Byakuya // Caporegime for the 6th Division of the Vescovo family
Her Story;
Rukia has no idea who she is. She’s never known her parents, never known any potential siblings, and, if it weren’t for a note attached to her blanket, she would never have known her name either. All she knows is that she was dropped off on the steps of a rundown orphanage when she was barely a few months old, wrapped in a blanket and with only a note attached stating that her name was Rukia and couldn’t the caretaker please care for her and bring her up healthy and well and happy.
Healthy, Rukia had been, and even well, to a certain extent, but happiness was in the eye of the beholder. Happiness to the short, violet-eyed girl couldn’t be found in the closed and dirty rooms of the orphanage. Her spirit was too much to be contained in closed, limiting quarters and so she took to the streets with a gang of friends, including one who had come to be her best friend, and then some, Abarai Renji. Rukia and her friends snuck out of the orphanage each morning, frequenting the more dangerous corners of Reggio Calabria, but always stopping short of roaming the more wealthy neighborhoods. With their ragged clothes and malnourished looks, they knew they would be thrown to the police at once and that was something they liked to avoid if they could help it.
Their days would consist of petty thievery and the mischief that only children who were young and still maintained a measure of hope and innocence could cause. Rukia was agile, had a sharp tongue, and, as Renji quickly learned, could streetfight better than any of them. That combined with Renji’s strength and stamina made their gang rather formidable, to the authorities and even some of the thugs they met in shady alleyways. When they returned to the orphanage at night, they always felt a sense of pride in having evaded danger and death, thinking their very existence a tribute to how indestructible they all were, as children are wont to do.
That changed the summer before Rukia’s 12th birthday. That was the day, in the middle of June, when all five of them left the orphanage in the morning. And only three of them came back. That was the day Rukia, and Renji, learned the dangers of the darker side of Reggio Calabria. The men in dark suits, the thugs with dirt smeared across their foreheads, and the stray bullets that could come from either side.
It didn’t take long for both of them to realize that they were no longer children anymore and they couldn’t do as they pleased and still resurface unscathed. They bore their guilt and sorrow well, using it as fuel to learn more about the city they thought they knew so well and how to fight to survive in it.
Still, it seemed death would not leave the two alone as it came to claim their last friend in the form of disease. Then it was simply the two of them. Rukia and Renji, two orphans with nothing to their names and nobody but the other, raised in the streets with no skills to speak of save fighting.
What neither of them expected was the long, dark-haired man with the impeccably crisp and rather expensive looking suit who was waiting for Rukia at the orphanage the day of her 15th birthday. He introduced himself as Kuchiki Byakuya, the head of some organization neither of them could make sense of. Rukia could tell he was of the upper tier in society. If his clothes did not give him away, his cold, judging gaze and clipped tone spoke for him. What someone of such wealth and status would be doing in their rundown, lowly orphanage was not clear until his intentions were spoken.
He meant to adopt Rukia.
It made no sense to the girl. She had never seen the man, not even on her jaunts through the streets. There was no plausible reason he would want to adopt her, but the offer was clear, as the director of the orphanage told her. It was up to her to accept or not.
Despite the hardships of growing up on the streets, the difficulty of losing friends to the street gangs, and the eternal filth and squalor she lived in, she had her misgivings. Or, rather, she had one misgiving. And that was Renji. If he told her, just once, that he would like her to remain with him, she would tell this Kuchiki Byakuya no, wealth and status or not.
As it turned out, Renji was more excited for her opportunity than even she was. Hurt her though it did, she took his lead and accepted Kuchiki Byakuya’s offer.
It was something she would come to regret later.
With the acceptance, she left behind the squalor, the disease, the poverty, and Renji, to be introduced to a new world. A world of wealth and status, deceptive lies hidden behind cold masks with tight smiles, the very idea of warmth and friendship a forgotten dream of the past.
Rukia learned more about Reggio Calabria in those first few months of her adoption than she had in the past five years exploring the streets with her orphaned friends. She learned of the mafia, of the two warring families, of the antimafia commission, and of the true powers and power struggles in the city. She learned of wealth and greed and sin and how omnipresent they were and how naïve she must have been to not have realized they existed before.
Kuchiki Byakuya was a caporegime for the Vescovo family and Rukia was to follow in his steps. The Kuchiki family itself, it turned out, had been loyal and close to the Vescovos for over a century. Each generation of the Kuchikis had turned out a superior soldier, who would quickly work his or her way up to the captain-level, if not beyond. The Kuchikis held the don’s attention and the don knew their loyalty and sense of duty to the Vescovos were unshakeable. The two were tied together, each strengthening the other.
This was what Rukia, now Kuchiki Rukia, had been adopted into, for reasons still unexplained to her.
With the status and the place in the Kuchiki family came that same responsibility and it was a responsibility that Kuchiki Byakuya, with his cold grey eyes and complete lack of warmth, reminded her of when he chose to condescend to her at all. It was under his orders that she attended the Academy to train to become a proper soldier of the Vescovo army. It was under his orders that she remained after hours to better her shooting and bloody herself learning to fight as a Kuchiki should. It was under his orders that she was never allowed to leave this new world to return to her old one and to Renji.
In three years, she had never been allowed back. In three years, she had hardened and donned the cold, emotionless mask as every Kuchiki should.
Now, past her 18th birthday, she was utterly unrecognizable from the person she had been, instead crafting herself to be the type of person-the type of soldier that the Kuchikis would accept. And that the Vescovos would find irreplaceable in this escalating turf war.