Toward Some Tender Light Chapter 1: Red House
No wall or spell can fortify the Kuchiki house against the rot, not even their son, finally home after five years.
“Dad,” Haku says. Neither father nor son bend toward the house, silent and alert as dogs. The wind wraps around them warmer still. “Why did I leave?” The brightness of the valley opens into a hole. He knows this hole; he laps at it with a child’s reverence. Its emptiness commands he can only feel around it the way a perimeter of bluffs courts the sea below. In blank lust he traverses its decaying edge, too focused on the path before him to make out the foam and the rocks. What you left was not a home but a crime. Crime of rot, unclean, what crime? Shinigami prefer to die than to age. What sin drove you from that house, that training yard where gods court death? When the wound was fresh, before the hole, you saw in the Kurosakis’ bathroom mirror your mother’s face. Why choose to live? Your father has wondered this all his god’s life. “I don’t know,” says Kenpachi.
