Fragments of a Shattered Home [Hana/Josh]

Joshua had yet to return, and Koga remained incapacitated for the time being. Though Hana placed her trust in Ms. Hatakeyama, confident that he was in capable hands—particularly now that she had finally gotten some rest. Hana's thoughts lingered on the events of the previous day. The more Hana's thoughts recalled the previous day, the more an undeniable sense of urgency compelled her to check on them. Hana had not seen her parents in over a year...

The area where her home once stood was... just fine. Hana was thankful that she had at least not cost her family their home--one good thing still stood. Most people in the area seemed mostly untouched. The buildings were still standing, shops were even in service here. They were among the luckiest in the Seireitei. Hana took a deep breath as she entered her home, noting the lack of guards they were normally there. It was oddly peaceful... eerily still. She heard... nothing.

"Dad?" she called out loudly into the house, shutting the door behind her as she made her way to his office. The silence induced another fit of anxiety that Hana tried to suppress, but then her eyes fell upon a hand on the floor, protruding from a partially opened door. "Mother!" Hana rushed forward, recognizing the hand all too well, and opened the door. The air began to freeze, literally, as Hana's reiatsu was briefly released and bits of ice formed throughout the house.

For a moment, Hana's body refused to move. She was paralyzed between the unbearable grief that struck her like a bolt of lightning and the disbelief. Bodies of people she knew, people she grew up with, her mother, and her father lay strewn across the room. Familiar faces were twisted in agony and horror, inciting a dangerous increase in Hana's heart rate. Tears brimmed but refused to fall, trapped behind the raw, disoriented shock. Hana’s trembling hands instinctively reached for something, anything, to anchor herself, but her foot slipped unexpectedly. She could not catch herself and crashed to the floor.

A sharp gasp escaped her as her eyes drifted down to the puddle of red, a mixture of blood from the bodies of friends and family coloring the hardwood below her. Her hands, her clothes, the ends of her hair were all stained with them. She was lying in them. Panic surged through her as she quickly withdrew, scrambling to her knees, and then her feet. Scared of touching anything, Hana took a step back, feeling her ankle bump into something. Looking down, her eyes met her mother's, two open, lifeless orbs staring up toward her.

An uncontrollable scream erupted from deep within her, raw and primal. It tore through the air, filling the room with a sound that was equal parts anguish and terror. Hana’s voice cracked under the weight of her horror, her cries echoing off the walls as she tried to wipe the blood away, her frantic movements only spreading it further across her body. The realization that it was not just blood—but the blood of people she loved—sent her spiraling into hysteria.

Hana's frantic actions caused her to lose her balance once more. She fell hard, her back hitting the sliding door and cracking it backwards. With her hands slick with blood, she crawled out of the room and away in a panic, leaving bloody handprints with each step. And in doing so, Hana took notice of something mid-panic... Everything else was pristine, untouched... Her heart began pounding again, as she glanced back toward the room that was once her father's office. It was like this was mocking her, taunting her with its contrast... 'Did he do this?'

For all the chaos and destruction, so much had managed to go untouched as well. It was so haphazardly spread that Joshua couldn’t help but chuckle; at least you couldn’t claim bias this time. In some places the worn down places of the Rukongai had gotten it bad, in others you’d find the noble manors on fire. Yet in other places, it seemed like people hadn’t had much more than a stiff breeze roll through. This district hadn’t been hit hard at all, and there were plenty of people still about who were willing to sell goods and talk services. There was a certain amount of haughtiness to deal with from some of the more uppity types, but by now Joshua was an old hand at dealing with those types. It seemed almost rude that some of them seemed to have walked out of this so clean, but that was luck for ya.

Maybe sometimes though, it was fate.

Something caught the edges of Joshua’s senses mid conversation, a spike of reiatsu; safe to say he’d been on watch for it.
“Continued another time,” he said to his blue-blooded companion, and he was simply gone before there could be objection. Shunpo carried him over the roofs of the district as he zero’d in on the reiatsu. First he had moved because there were still Hollow about, it sure wouldn’t have been the first fight he’d jumped in on today. Heck, it wouldn’t have been his fifth. But as he closed the reiatsu got clearer and he identified it. What the flying fuck was Hana doing out here!?

His blade was free of its sheath as he arrived at the manor; it was way too quiet. Or it had been, until that scream broke the stillness of the place. Joshua rushed forward, into the bitingly cold house as Hana came frantically crawling out of a hallway; there was entirely too much red. Joshua took a step, flying past Hana; he was not heartless to the panic in her face, he was seeking what was causing it. To kill it, but it wasn’t something that could be killed. There was no man in the hallway beyond her, no looming presence in the quiet eerie house.

Nothing, until he found the room.

He’d been about to pass it in his seeking, and stopped only long enough to get a sense of it; the bodies all still and cold, the wash of red, and the lack of a target. He turned, and was back to Hana’s side in another moment; in her panic, she may not have even know he was there the first time.
“Hana,” he said, calm and firm and steady as stone. He said it with as much compassion as he could. He didn’t reach out and touch her, not yet; no telling how she was going to react right now. He was alert, not because he expect her to lash out but because there might have been dangers still around he didn’t sense or know about.

“They’re dead.”

'They’re dead.’

“They’re dead.”

'It's your fault.’

“It's my fault.”

Hana's hysterics did not end when Joshua entered the building or dashed by her. She wasn't even aware of his presence until he said her name. She slowly turned her gaze to him, eyes wide, pupils dilated. After a few seconds, she finally seemed to recognize his presence and return to the world around her.

"Josh, I..." she looked down to her bloodstained hands and the red-soaked shihakusho she had been wearing since yesterday. "My Mom and Dad are..." she glanced briefly to the room and then to her hands again. "Everyone... They're all... What did I do? Wh-What did I do?" she asked, clearly blaming herself.

With a slow and deliberate motion, Joshua reached out and pulled at Hana to pull her into a one-armed embrace. He didn’t care about the blood; he’d been covered in worse, even if you discounted the last two days. With how bad the room had been, the rest of this place should have been a mess but it wasn’t; it stood out a strange, maybe even deliberate. This whole scene felt...wrong. Hana started to speak, laying the blame at her feet for what had transpired here.
“What do you mean Hana?” he asked. Given her reaction, he was pretty sure she was explicitly not the one who did this; she didn’t even have her blade on her. He made a note to yell about that, but this wasn’t the time for that.

Hana looked down at her blood-soaked hands, feeling some of the wet dry at the edges and make her hands stick. She closed her hands into fists, hiding as much of the red as she could and then raised her horrified gaze back to Josh.

“They’re dead… My Mom and Dad are dead… It’s my fault… I should have arrested him, but I barely beat him… He was holding back. I couldn’t kill him, even if I wanted to. He got away and brought a war to the Soul Society... I should have killed him... I should kill him." Hana's eyes widened, pupils dilated. A switch just flipped in her head. There was a murderous intent there, not something anyone would have ever expected from her. "He has to die."

Joshua schooled his expression, keeping it a careful neutral as Hana spoke. She was speaking straight bullshit, the same bullshit Tarifuck has been spewing when he’d shown up to the last fight. He’d gotten in her head alright, and it didn’t take any great leaps of logic to know who Hana believed was responsible for what they’d found.

Heck, he gave good odds Hana was on the money about this.

Joshua saw the shift in her perspective, that all too familiar look creep into Hana’s eye; he’d hoped it would be some time before he’d had to see that happen again to someone. There was so much wrong about what Hana was saying, but it wouldn’t do any good to bring it up yet. There was one thing though that she was perfectly right about.
“Yeah. He does. He will,” Joshua said in agreement, his tone a calm and quiet mix of sadness, agreement, and remorse.

Hana was stuck staring at nothing for a long time. When she finally broke her trance, she struggled to stand up. Returning to the room, a lifeless look in her eyes, Hana grabbed her mother’s hands and lifted her from the floor as much as she could. She got her mother's corpse over her shoulder and began walking her out to the backyard, where a crypt stood at the far back end of the property.

If at any point Hana saw Josh trying to help, she would go into a minor panic and whine, "No! I can do it! I can do it!" until he stopped and let her.

Hana slowly dragged the bodies of her parents and the eight servants that had been stuffed into the small room to die back to the crypt. Covered in their blood by the end, with the sun close to setting, Hana finally got the final body into the crypt and gave each of them a spot that had technically been for her family.

Hana did not expect Joshua to stay that entire time. When she was finished, she likely didn't think he would even bet there. If he was, it was a surprise...

When Hana did not see him in the yard, she went back inside and found Josh laying on the floor. She could tell he wasn’t sleeping, so she walked over and stood above him, staring through him, but toward him. “I…” she spoke, her voice raspy and strained. When he looked up, Hana was covered head to toe in their blood, it soaked through her clothes in some places and coated her skin. The worst part was a lot of it was drying and cracking in spots.

"I need to find the deed... It's all mine now, I guess," Hana said quietly, just able to be heard. "Where would you keep something like that?"

Joshua opened his eyes when she started to speak, looking up at her. He didn’t hurry her as she worked her way through her emotions and thoughts, he had the time to wait. When she had finally put together what she needed to ask, he nodded and stood up.
“Most people keep those kinds of documents in places they can keep safe. Ya know if yer dad had a safe somewhere?” he asked as gently as he could; he would have preferred to have touched on that subject as little as possible, but there wasn’t much for it. When he got a negative answer he nodded.
“Then I guess we gotta go lookin’. First stop, bedroom,” he said, and half-led half-followed Hana as they made their way along.

Once they arrived Joshua started looking around, looking in the closet and behind various pieces of art. It wasn’t until he looked around under the bed that he hit paydirt.
“Over here,” he called, and shoved the bed away from the wall. He looked at the safe for a few moments.
“You know how to open it?”