There is a flower that will never fade and its name is amaranth.



Byakuya Kuchiki: greatest physicist of the Academy, scion to the Kuchiki clan, and voted most likely to rocket into stardom if he would just take off his pants—wanted to travel to the past. He stared blearily at the post-it notes on his wall and how his permanent marker had gone off the edges in a manic swirl of numbers and indecipherable gibberish about wormholes. His butler was going to notice that.

He swiped the papers into his suitcase and taped a poster of a smiling Einstein on it. There. One could barely see the vandalism.

His alarm clock brayed from his bedroom, signaling the start of his classes soon.

Damn students. Always needing coddling to understand Einstein's theory of special relativity and string theory and quantum mechanics.

What was so hard to understand?

He drank his sixth cup of coffee, dragged on an immaculately clean shirt and cardigan, ignored the beeping house-phone, then went off to teach science.

Time was relative to each person's speed. That was to say, if Byakuya could reach the speed of light with his motorcycle and survive the attempt, he could very well go anywhere and anywhen in the damn multiverse. It was exhilarating just thinking of the numbers in that theoretical model. What if Byakuya could create that kind of wormhole?

He veered sharply to the right, narrowly avoiding the truck's tail end and ignoring the other homicidal drivers of the road.

If he could take a hypothetical bag of atoms, shake it until the atoms collided at possibly nearing the speed of light, thus pulverizing them into a plasma bubble as hot as the center of the sun, then wormholes were the perfect solution. Byakuya wondered if he could bully those scientists at the Large Hadron Collider into giving up their particle accelerator.

No, as he slid the motorcycle into his space in the private parking lot. The Kuchiki name might take a beating and Byakuya had been pushing the worth of that name too many times already. He nodded at the pale-faced guard near the booth.

There was more to the process of course.

As Byakuya entered his classroom, his students quickly fled to their seats, noisy traps shutting tight at his expression. They were always so frightened, his students. Byakuya wondered why for a moment before slamming his fists into his desk and telling them they were having a surprise test on what exactly black hole information paradox was and why Stephen Hawking lost that stupid bet. He grimly added that this would be twenty percent of their final grade.

Then he sat back and ordered his TA to get him another cup of coffee.

For another issue, after he smashed all these atoms into their electrons, quarks, protons, and other bits and bobs, he would need to cosmically/magically/numerically grab that bubble of intense temperatures and squeeze until it imploded under that amount of pressure to become a wormhole. The more gravity something has, the more it warped time and space around it.

He threw his chalk at the red-haired student snoring softly who yelped like a puppy. The kid had amazing eyebrows but was a bit dim. Byakuya glared at him until Red went back to his paper.

But it still wasn't safe to travel by wormhole. For one thing, he could stretch like spaghetti just going near the damn thing.

Hisana hated spaghetti.

Byakuya stared down at his spluttering TA whom he'd just dumped his decaffeinated cup on. To be fair, it wasn't that hot and he'd only pushed some of the liquid on her atrocious flowery blouse. He asked her very nicely to get him another cup and next time, to make sure it had goddamn caffeine in it.

He would need to make the wormhole bigger. With negative energy (as his propellant) with antigravity properties to keep it from collapsing on top of him. It would create a vacuum of empty space equaling zero energy but would still have virtual photons he would have to squeeze out. Then he could keep one end of the wormhole in his clean office and the other end to Inuzuri, hometown of Hisana.

After class ended and his students tearfully handed in their pathetic-looking papers, Byakuya rushed back to his office where he had posted a very neat system of numbers and theories on his walls. And ceiling. And windows and furniture. He tracked where he'd been yesterday and found the end of the line of numbers on the floor next to his desk. He bent down to work.

There were more problems. He couldn't exactly harness that kind of energy. No one had ever really seen a wormhole and negative energy wasn't really available and going at the speed of light would surely kill him.

Byakuya stared at his numbers and variables and his shaking hand.

He hadn't slept for four days.

He stood up, drank another cup of coffee, and went home.

Byakuya wanted to go to the past. Pick the flower that was Hisana and live again. Sunlight took 8 minutes to reach earth and so what light Byakuya was seeing was 8 minutes earlier. If only he could stretch it into 8 years and Hisana would be breathing and smiling and making bad-tasting potato stew.

He came home to his quiet apartment without a time-machine or a viable way of traveling to the past and drank another cup of coffee and stared at his poster of the smiling Einstein. The phone beeped again. Bored, at the end of his rope and his string of useless numbers, Byakuya just pressed play.

"This is Detective Yoruichi. We found your wife's little sister. I faxed you her picture."

It was Hisana's face, angrily looking out into the world. And yet not.

He then felt a twinge he hadn't felt in years.

There is a flower and it will never fade and its name was amaranth, the ghost of Hisana murmured from behind him. And sometimes, sometimes, an amaranth can grow and crack the very foundations of rock.



AN: From a prompt from a sister from Alaska. Beta-ed by that same sister. Morgan Freeman, this is all your fault, for teaching me SCIENCE. (It's been a year, I know and I've been sitting on updates, pretending they didn't exist.)