Fic: Sunlight and Song (6/11)
Title: Sunlight and Song
Author: Venefican
Pairing: Nanao/Shunsui
Rating: PG
Summary: Nightmares are powerful things in a place where dead souls walk and carry big swords. And Shunsui has more than a few, even more than Nanao knows about.
6
‘Nanao-chan, I will come back.’
Her jaw is tight, and the words hurt when she hisses them between her teeth. ‘How can you say that, and still look at me like I’m already dead?’
Nanao startles awake. Leaves scuttle over the floor outside, and a room away, separated only by the thinnest of rice paper partitions, Shunsui breathes quietly in his sleep. At least someone’s peaceful.
-look at me like I’m already dead?-
Had she really said that? Guilt roiled in her stomach, heavy as a boulder blocking the flow of a river. Of all the things to bring up, especially now with Yadomaru Lisa present and alive and changed beyond anyone’s reckoning. Refusing to return, not that Nanao could blame her, or any of them. Seireitei did not deal well with deviation, their treatment of Kurosaki showed that much.
Nanao pushed the sheets back and sat up on her futon, curling her feet under herself in the most dignified seiza she could manage with her hair and short sleeping yukata mussed from uneasy sleep. She had long since discovered that sleeping in the nude was asking for disaster. Either the Division decides to catch fire, or emergency orders come, or her pervert of a Captain decides to try his luck and burst into her room in the middle of the night. Brushing her hair out of her eyes, she winces at the tell-tale light starting to brighten the window. Dawn, wonderful. And that this time of year that would make it around 5 in the morning. Wonderful.
She lights a candle with a touch, and draws out her copy of The Pillow Book. Best to make use of the hours sleep isn’t going to take, and she doesn’t want to go back into that particular dream. Which she will - this dream that isn’t a dream, this sequence of events played over and over, clings to her as stubbornly as clothes soaked through. If she tries to fall back to sleep the dream will simply continue where it left off, insistent on making her live through it once more.
She’ll be sluggish later and exhausted by late afternoon, but she won’t sleep all the same. Just this once, she’ll sacrifice concentration to keep her sanity.
She’s in the middle of Shōnagon’s description of a good lover when the first pulse of reiatsu hits her. It knocks the breath from her, sends shivers prickling up her back and she’s still wondering what just happened when the next wave rolls over her with all the subtlety of Zaraki on a rampage.
Shunsui is dreaming.
Which means Shunsui is having a nightmare.
Which means she is going to have to quiet him before he accidentally suffocates one of the recruits with his reiatsu or he burns the Division down or something equally expensive and hard to explain.
Hell.
She rolls to her feet, grabs Utagawa and strides to the dividing partition between her room and his. Steeling her shoulders against another wave of escaping power, she slid it back and stepped into Shunsui’s room.
It was poorly lit, even with the sun rising - he had long ago invested in some blackout material, for days when the hangover would prove too powerful. Most days, it turned out, were ‘bad hangover days’. There’s just enough for her to see him - curled up in his sheets, still and quiet but his reiatsu shoves against her with every step she takes.
It’s not much like being suffocated by Yamamoto’s reiatsu. This presence, this pressure, is as familiar to her as her own and the broadness of Shunsui’s nature extends to everything - the brush of his reiatsu against hers is as normal as late nights and too-much paperwork. It’s a signal of how far out of it he must be that he doesn’t react at all to her presence - his spiritual pressure merely flowing around hers like a river swallows a stone. It surrounds her and leaves her own reiatsu a small stubborn dot at the centre of the storm. A stone refusing to be weathered.
She’s going to regret this in the morning. The least she can do is make sure he doesn’t.
She settles down next to his head, crossing her legs and wiggling a little to try and get as comfortable as possible. Settling in for the long haul. Straightening her spine, she breathes down her nose, flexes her hands, and starts twining Shunsui’s reiatsu around hers.
For all the training and poise needed to pull it off, it isn’t any more complicated than curling someone’s hair around your fingers. She picks out strands of his and twists her own around it, pressing her reiatsu against his like a giant, affectionate cat. Not nearly enough to subdue him, if it came to that, but pushing parts of herself so insistently against him dispels the dreams, gives him enough of the waking world to concentrate on that he can forget the shadows dogging his heels.
Her sword-spirit hums quietly in her mind, singing either to her or to Katen Kyokotsu in an approximation of human comfort. Or she just likes singing, which Nanao admits to herself is actually far more likely. Utagawa is all noise and movement and streams of unending thought going nowhere, the poster child for how zanpakutō do not necessarily have any relation to the nature of their wielders. Still, she will take the thrum of her sword’s voice in her bones over the slowly building migraine in her skull. Shunsui is not easy and his spirit resists any attempt she makes towards it, and she finds herself using every trick she knows to allow herself to wind closer, press tighter.
The role reversal would make her annoyed at any other time, might still make her uncomfortable when she has a spare moment to contemplate it and subsequently have a small mental breakdown. Only a small one though.
Now it is all she can do to let her back slump against the doorframe, the pressure easing dramatically as Shunsui finally stops dreaming. The headache remains, and Nanao covers her eyes to blot at the golden rays attempting to make themselves known through the window.
Just five minutes. Her eyelashes flicker, sending stark shadows over her cheekbones as she closes her eyes.
She doesn’t quite manage to open them again.
Onwards to Chapter 7
Author: Venefican
Pairing: Nanao/Shunsui
Rating: PG
Summary: Nightmares are powerful things in a place where dead souls walk and carry big swords. And Shunsui has more than a few, even more than Nanao knows about.
6
‘Nanao-chan, I will come back.’
Her jaw is tight, and the words hurt when she hisses them between her teeth. ‘How can you say that, and still look at me like I’m already dead?’
Nanao startles awake. Leaves scuttle over the floor outside, and a room away, separated only by the thinnest of rice paper partitions, Shunsui breathes quietly in his sleep. At least someone’s peaceful.
-look at me like I’m already dead?-
Had she really said that? Guilt roiled in her stomach, heavy as a boulder blocking the flow of a river. Of all the things to bring up, especially now with Yadomaru Lisa present and alive and changed beyond anyone’s reckoning. Refusing to return, not that Nanao could blame her, or any of them. Seireitei did not deal well with deviation, their treatment of Kurosaki showed that much.
Nanao pushed the sheets back and sat up on her futon, curling her feet under herself in the most dignified seiza she could manage with her hair and short sleeping yukata mussed from uneasy sleep. She had long since discovered that sleeping in the nude was asking for disaster. Either the Division decides to catch fire, or emergency orders come, or her pervert of a Captain decides to try his luck and burst into her room in the middle of the night. Brushing her hair out of her eyes, she winces at the tell-tale light starting to brighten the window. Dawn, wonderful. And that this time of year that would make it around 5 in the morning. Wonderful.
She lights a candle with a touch, and draws out her copy of The Pillow Book. Best to make use of the hours sleep isn’t going to take, and she doesn’t want to go back into that particular dream. Which she will - this dream that isn’t a dream, this sequence of events played over and over, clings to her as stubbornly as clothes soaked through. If she tries to fall back to sleep the dream will simply continue where it left off, insistent on making her live through it once more.
She’ll be sluggish later and exhausted by late afternoon, but she won’t sleep all the same. Just this once, she’ll sacrifice concentration to keep her sanity.
She’s in the middle of Shōnagon’s description of a good lover when the first pulse of reiatsu hits her. It knocks the breath from her, sends shivers prickling up her back and she’s still wondering what just happened when the next wave rolls over her with all the subtlety of Zaraki on a rampage.
Shunsui is dreaming.
Which means Shunsui is having a nightmare.
Which means she is going to have to quiet him before he accidentally suffocates one of the recruits with his reiatsu or he burns the Division down or something equally expensive and hard to explain.
Hell.
She rolls to her feet, grabs Utagawa and strides to the dividing partition between her room and his. Steeling her shoulders against another wave of escaping power, she slid it back and stepped into Shunsui’s room.
It was poorly lit, even with the sun rising - he had long ago invested in some blackout material, for days when the hangover would prove too powerful. Most days, it turned out, were ‘bad hangover days’. There’s just enough for her to see him - curled up in his sheets, still and quiet but his reiatsu shoves against her with every step she takes.
It’s not much like being suffocated by Yamamoto’s reiatsu. This presence, this pressure, is as familiar to her as her own and the broadness of Shunsui’s nature extends to everything - the brush of his reiatsu against hers is as normal as late nights and too-much paperwork. It’s a signal of how far out of it he must be that he doesn’t react at all to her presence - his spiritual pressure merely flowing around hers like a river swallows a stone. It surrounds her and leaves her own reiatsu a small stubborn dot at the centre of the storm. A stone refusing to be weathered.
She’s going to regret this in the morning. The least she can do is make sure he doesn’t.
She settles down next to his head, crossing her legs and wiggling a little to try and get as comfortable as possible. Settling in for the long haul. Straightening her spine, she breathes down her nose, flexes her hands, and starts twining Shunsui’s reiatsu around hers.
For all the training and poise needed to pull it off, it isn’t any more complicated than curling someone’s hair around your fingers. She picks out strands of his and twists her own around it, pressing her reiatsu against his like a giant, affectionate cat. Not nearly enough to subdue him, if it came to that, but pushing parts of herself so insistently against him dispels the dreams, gives him enough of the waking world to concentrate on that he can forget the shadows dogging his heels.
Her sword-spirit hums quietly in her mind, singing either to her or to Katen Kyokotsu in an approximation of human comfort. Or she just likes singing, which Nanao admits to herself is actually far more likely. Utagawa is all noise and movement and streams of unending thought going nowhere, the poster child for how zanpakutō do not necessarily have any relation to the nature of their wielders. Still, she will take the thrum of her sword’s voice in her bones over the slowly building migraine in her skull. Shunsui is not easy and his spirit resists any attempt she makes towards it, and she finds herself using every trick she knows to allow herself to wind closer, press tighter.
The role reversal would make her annoyed at any other time, might still make her uncomfortable when she has a spare moment to contemplate it and subsequently have a small mental breakdown. Only a small one though.
Now it is all she can do to let her back slump against the doorframe, the pressure easing dramatically as Shunsui finally stops dreaming. The headache remains, and Nanao covers her eyes to blot at the golden rays attempting to make themselves known through the window.
Just five minutes. Her eyelashes flicker, sending stark shadows over her cheekbones as she closes her eyes.
She doesn’t quite manage to open them again.
Onwards to Chapter 7