Characters: Hiyori, Shinji
Summary: Even if she doesn't say it, he knows when she's asking.
Pairings: Shinji x Hiyori
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for Turn Back the Pendulum, Fake Karakura Town and Deicide arcs
Timeline: post-Deicide arc
Author's Note: I know some of you will be pleased by this. Read, enjoy and review (Wishful thinking, I know).
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
It's the same old story: flashing what passes these days for a convincing fabricated ID card to be let in and telling the bartender, angry blotches of color already beginning to rise in her cheeks, that she has a medical condition and that's why she's "twenty-two" but looks to be about thirteen.
The arch comment about whether or not she needs to be drinking with her "condition" is not appreciated.
Damn it, if I could just get a few more inches on me, maybe people'd stop staring at me every time I ask for a vodka. Hiyori feels her lip curl slightly as she swishes her glass of straight vodka—no additive or false flavors for Sarugaki Hiyori, not by a long-shot—and she stares moodily into the clear, glassy depths.
There's a song playing in the background, so cheery that to Hiyori's ears it's sickeningly saccharine. They don't make this stuff strong enough. Especially not considering she can still hear the music.
"Yeah, I'll just have some sake, thanks." Hiyori lifts her chin from the surface of the countertop at the sound of that familiar voice, eyes squinting, head starting to pound just a little bit in the left temple, and she wonders where her irritation has gone.
Big white teeth flash at her out of a wide mouth, and a mocking voice, barely audible over the music blaring out—despite the fact that it was quiet a second ago—knots the air in Hiyori's throat. "Trying to kill yourself again, huh?"
Wait… Hiyori's found her irritation.
Hiyori snarls; the noise is half-hearted and ends up sounding more like a gurgling splutter, the sort of sound a drowning man would make before disappearing beneath the surface of the water. She takes another indelicate sip from her tall glass—some liquid courage is needed to put up with Shinji and not add property damage to the mix—before answering. "What's it to you, huh?"
Shinji doesn't answer. He stares straight ahead, and Hiyori thinks she can detect some tensing in his shoulders, as she turns a single brown eye, dull with vodka and brittle with tension, on him. "What's it to you, Shinji?"
For what seems an eternity, neither speak. Shinji, still noticeably tense and unnaturally still, gets his sake and starts downing it, and if Hiyori could think of another insult she'd spit it out in an instant, glad to have any tool to shatter the silence that's risen between them. Silence is not a state Hiyori can naturally or easily inhabit.
Hiyori watches Shinji's throat convulse as he gulps down sake, violin strings pulled too tight then expected to dance. Finally, he speaks, after putting an empty glass down on the bar and catching the bartender's eye in a significant way. "Ehh, I was in the neighborhood and I just wanted to see that ugly mug of yours again."
Under normal circumstances even in a public area such a catty remark would have gotten Shinji a sound whap over the head with Hiyori's shoe, but tonight, the heart's just not in it for either of them. Hiyori's too busy studying the acoustics of Shinji's voice—that disgusting construct of false, jarring levity in his tone—to drudge up the necessary adrenaline.
Aizen is as gone as he's going to get. Hiyori can't understand why the Central Forty-Six decided to spare him and leave him alive; any idiot can see that even in defeat Aizen's still dangerous. And, for a more personal take on the situation, Hiyori would not at all have minded being gifted with Aizen's gory, blood-dripping severed head. If that had been the case, after taking possession of it Hiyori would have pocketed the aforementioned head and marched to South America to see if there was anyone there who could still shrink a head properly; that would have been a nice little souvenir for her troubles.
The Vizard have gone their separate ways again. Hiyori knows it couldn't have lasted; they hadn't all been in the same place at the same time since Woodstock (And that was an accident; Hiyori's still not sure how they all ended up at Woodstock. Shinji and Mashiro were both high as a kite on anything and everything they could get their hands on, Rose was in raptures over the music and the rest of them were just trying not to breathe in the fumes too much). They grouped back together to size up Kurosaki Ichigo, and the idiot's gone and drained himself, so that's not a factor anymore. The threat of an Arrancar invasion has passed, and there's no reason for them to stay together anymore.
Hiyori still half-wishes they could though, even if she won't admit it.
"So what's up with you, huh? Aren't you usually chasing skirts by this time of night?" Hiyori asks acidly. In truth, Hiyori exaggerates and she knows it. Shinji's time is not entirely occupied with the attempted (and usually failed; no one's ever made the mistake of mistaking Hirako Shinji for Don Juan) wooing of some unsuspecting girl. Hiyori, as ever, wants to get a reaction out of Shinji. That desire is amplified tonight, though, by Shinji's uncharacteristic quiet, the way his eyes stare blankly at the wall opposite them and never look at her.
He winces at the incisively bitter note in her voice, Hiyori's second warning sign. The first maintains its way on through—Shinji doesn't even try to defend himself against Hiyori's accusation.
Refills are tipped off into both glasses—the bartender has gotten them mixed up, but Shinji is happy with Hiyori's vodka and Hiyori with Shinji's sake; at least what passes for happiness these days with them.
A thump in the music makes the surface of two alcohol seas quiver; Hiyori frowns at her sake and frowns at the music. Cheery, vicious in its clangs and crashes. A light-hearted song. A happy song. A song about dancing distributed to the lame.
When Shinji speaks, the words no longer seem to be proper or appropriate and it's almost as though he's answering the inquiry of a stranger. "Wasn't interested." Shinji licks dry lips. Hiyori watches hard as he shrugs. "I'm fine." As an afterthought, he adds. "And you?"
"Fine."
Both lie, both dissemble, both hide things from each other, as they always have done.
Hiyori feels… empty. Disconnected, pierced with apathy and lethargy, and wondering just what it was that made her care so much, if only briefly, for any of them when they got back together. Especially for Shinji.
Alone is how Hiyori has lived most of her life, pushing people away and watching them slip away and fall apart. Alone is the state she finds herself in even among the crowded recesses of a bar such as this one. It's never bothered Hiyori before, at least not at any level that's been touched by the sun. It does now.
Shinji is troubled too. Solitude does not pierce him in quite the same way or in the same places that it does Hiyori. Shinji finds being alone and being among others to be equally agreeable arrangements. Instead, what gives him grief and what robs him of sleep at night is something he wants desperately to hide, but Hiyori has already seen.
The feeling of a life not his own slipping from his hands like sand, the hourglass broken and spilling its contents is monstrous and cold as the grave. Black nausea rises in his throat as blood washes his hands; gritting and lodging in his throat is the worst of it.
Helplessness. The inability to turn back time, or even say a word.
Shinji looks at her oddly, his eyes piercing, and Hiyori feels her skin prickle. He gestures with long fingers towards her glass. "You want another?" Shinji asks, voice strangely hoarse.
-0-
Three rounds later, three cups full of bliss and misery later, and Hiyori is no longer bathed in the viscous dark amber glow of the bar. Now she is engulfed in night darkness and her face and hair are blanched blue and ashen. The winter is still thick on the city and though the snows are all gone a freezing rain has fallen; blackened buildings glitter with an icy sheen.
Of course, Hiyori doesn't appreciate any of this.
She is down on her hands and knees in a deserted alleyway, pants sodden, Shinji leaning over her as she retches violently. Hoarse panting fills the air between convulsions.
"Jesus, Hiyori." Shinji seems caught between pity and disgust, both emotions that make her want to reach up and claw his eyes out. "You still can't hold your liquor, can you?" he mutters, sticking his neck out to make sure no one's walking by on the slick snake of a street beyond.
Almost involuntarily, the youngest of the Vizard snarls and shoots a bloodshot glare up at him, trying her very best to unnerve him. It works; Shinji looks away. "Why the Hell," Hiyori gasps, "did you get me so drunk then? This always happens." She chokes. "You know that."
A harsh laugh, Shinji's trademark cackle and so reminiscent of the cawing of a crow, catches on the chill air. The eerie shriek of a car cutting a swath through a puddle wails past and is lost to the night. "If you knew you'd end up this, why didn't you stop?" he retorts.
Hiyori licks her lips, barely restraining a shudder as her tongue comes into contact with sickly bile. Her stomach turns again, and while throwing up extinguishes all conscious sentient thought after it she blinks her heavy eyes and starts to wrack her brain. Shinji's rubbing circles on her back now; though Hiyori would normally shun, quite violently, this sort of human contact, suddenly it's alright. Suddenly, she doesn't want to object to physical contact anymore.
"I wasn't really thinking about that at the time."
Shinji snorts. "Seriously, that's the best you can come up with? The old 'I wasn't thinking about that' excuse?" The mockery in his tone makes Hiyori think that Shinji needs to be re-taught what she does to people when they mock her.
This is what does it for her. Hiyori's temper, always ready to spark a flame, ignites. "It's none of your damn business how much I drink, Shinji!" she shrieks. "Now leave me alone!"
From the moment those words hit the air, sticking in the atmosphere like monstrous watching birds, Hiyori knows they were wrong. There's something piercingly cruel in those words, and if Hiyori has noticed them, Shinji has felt them make his skin bleed.
It's the silence Hiyori fears more than any shouting that might follow it. Shinji is silent, back completely stiffened like that of an agitated cat; his hand is gone from her back and Hiyori feels exposed to the elements, completely unprotected.
Then, like a loaded spring Shinji is on his feet, rolling his eyes to hide… to hide… to hide whatever it is he felt at Hiyori's shouts, she decides. An unfamiliar yet all too recognizable sensation starts to roil in her stomach, and it's not bile.
Guilt, Hiyori decides, is of the Devil.
"Whatever." Shinji's voice finds itself as flat as a flounder left to rot, abandoned, on some distant shore. "If you wanna be alone so bad, I'll just—"
His attempt to walk away is abruptly cut short by the small, wet hand clamping tightly around his ankle.
And when Shinji turns back around, eyebrows raised, Hiyori is staring up at him, eyes huge and dark in her face and mouth compressed tightly shut, unwilling to frame the words that pass all over the landscape of her mind.
Shinji doesn't say anything, plainly waiting for Hiyori to speak and explain herself, with that maddeningly superior air that if she were sober would send Hiyori into spirals of rage. They hold their staring match, each trying to hide the expressions hidden behind their eyes.
Finally, she manages something, voice hoarse and raw and half-ruined by vomiting. "For God's sake, Shinji…" She breaks off. "…I… didn't mean it like that."
"Okay." Shinji crouches down beside her, brow drawn up and face softening ever so slightly. Hiyori stops looking at him when she sees pity, familiar and ugly and even after everything unwanted, starting up on his skin; she can't bring herself to see pity, especially not from him. "What's wrong, Hiyori? What's really wrong?"
Feeling as though her skin has been stretched too tightly over her cheekbones and her wrists, Hiyori shakes her head, the words accumulating like a glob of syrup in her throat. "I… I just really don't want to be alone."
Now Hiyori can practically feel Shinji's pity radiating off of him. The emotion in her now is repugnance mixed with something else—acceptance, and gratefulness even. For once, she's glad to have another's pity. He sighs heavily, and puts a hand under the crook of her arm, helping Hiyori to her feet. "Come on. You don't need to be out here any longer than you already have. Where I'm crashing for now isn't all that far away."
Hiyori would have liked to point out that her current place of shelter isn't very far either, but oddly, that doesn't seem to matter as much. Instead, all she does is dig her fingers into Shinji's shirt, not so much as wincing when fingernails hit skin.
Shinji can't sound more tired as he mutters, "You don't have to be alone, you know. All you have to do is ask."
They both know that Hiyori wouldn't have been able to find the words.
And that Shinji doesn't need to hear them to know when Hiyori's asking.