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Fanfiction || Treading Icy Waters 19
Title: Treading Icy Waters
Fandom: Bleach
Main Character: Hitsugaya Toushirou
Rating: PG-13
Genre: General/Action/Suspense
Warnings: Occasional language, violence, gore.
Timeline: This story follows the manga's timeline. It begins directly before the Hueco Mundo arc and diverges from there.
Summary: The board has been laid out. The pieces have been set and moved. The pawns are scattered across the floor, and Ichimaru’s fingers are wrapped around a stark white bishop. “That’s another check, little taichou.” The game has only begun.
~*~
“In the faces of men and women I see God.”
-Walt Whitman
~*~
Chapter Nineteen
Nine Lives
~*~
Really, Hitsugaya should have expected this.
He had been the one who had been skeptical. Matsumoto had readily informed him of what had happened before. After all, zanpakutou spirits all had personalities that reflected their wielders. Often the spirits were even more extreme, even in all of their wisdom.
And so he really shouldn’t have been surprised when he walked in on Matsumoto Rangiku standing five meters away from Haineko, holding her hands over her ears and shouting nonsense words at the top of her lungs as her zanpakutou spirit shamelessly plowed through the many verses of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was.
All it had taken was a nudge and a wink from Urahara, and he was ready to turn right back around.
It had been over three hours since then, and it appeared that Matsumoto hadn’t gotten much farther ahead. He could still hear her shrill shouts from deep below every once in a while, attempting to get the ornery zanpakutou spirit to listen to her. And ornery she was.
Hitsugaya had been rather intrigued by Haineko’s appearance. The large, lithe white tiger was decorated in white and black stripes that contrasted sharply with each other. The spirit’s regal face was lined in a small mane of sorts, not as prominent as a lion’s but enough to emphasis its stark features. The stripes seemed to meld into themselves as they curved around the sharp, pink eyes and bristling whiskers, emphasizing the pure white muzzle that ended in a glorious, saber-esque jaw line. The wild cat’s paws were also entirely white and harbored claws a great deal larger than they should have. Its tail was in constant motion, not so much a tail as an ash storm in and of itself, never quite reaching an entirely solid state. Around its neck was a pink scarf that matched its eyes, a scarf that was very similar to Matsumoto’s own.
Haineko. Ash cat. It fit.
Riding on the coarse winds, clogging the lungs and killing the senses, a storm without water or sand, the afterthought and the locust mentality. The diminutive taichou sighed at the thought, resting his back against the familiar rise of Urahara Shoten’s roof. Damn it all, now he was getting sentimental. He wasn’t supposed to do that; not now. Not so close to the end…
Unwillingly, her voice from only hours ago came back to him.
“Taichou! What did I tell you?! See? She’s nothing but a lazy bum! Help me out, Taichou! If it’s you, you can just freeze her mouth shut!”
“You were the one who asked for this in the first place,” Hitsugaya had huffed dryly. He wasn’t going to help her with something like this. This she needed to do herself, and she knew it.
“Seventy-two bottles of beer on the wall! Seventy-two bottles of beer!”
“But, Taaaaaiiiichou!” the busty woman had continued to whine over the voice of her zanpakutou.
Hitsugaya knew full well that she wasn’t really expecting his help and that she knew all of this already. She had been the one to school him on zanpakutou spirits in the first place. This meant she intended to garner something completely different from this conversation, whatever that may be. “If you want to learn bankai, you’re going to have to synchronize with Haineko on your own. Otherwise, there’s no meaning to it,” he had continued to insist. He’d been about to open his mouth to say more when he stopped, realization dawning.
Oh. Of course. Well, that was extremely annoying.
“Take one down; pass it around! Seventy-one bottles of beer on the wall!”
“What did you say, Taichou?!” she’d called back, feigning ignorance.
The young shinigami could only huff, turning away. That stupid woman… Why he kept her as his fukutaichou was a mystery to him. She was like a parasite, slowly eating away at him, and yet if he tried to pull her out now after all this time, it would only cause more trouble. “I said,” he’d grumbled, his voice hardly audible above Haineko’s blissful singing, “I’m sorry for not telling you right away.”
“Don’t worry about it!” she had replied, a large, knowing smile surging across her lips. “Just remember! I’m not doing this to replace you, you lousy excuse for a taichou! I’m doing it so I can help you! Don’t ever forget!”
Oh, damn it all.
Another sigh, and the small boy shifted his position against the rise on the roof.
“If you want to learn bankai, you’re going to have to synchronize with Haineko on your own. Otherwise, there’s no meaning to it.”
She’d figured it out on her own. Ever since the damn ice cream. It hadn’t been that long ago, not really, but it felt like ages. He’d been done in by his own words. If he wanted people to understand, he was going to have to stop beating around the bush. He had to do things the right way … or else there’d be no meaning to it. He was as good as dead. Meaning was all he had left. He wouldn’t allow anyone to take that away from him, not even himself.
He fingered the ridiculous collar around his neck, courtesy of Urahara Kisuke. It was because of this device that he still had time before his symptoms began immobilizing him. Already, the incessant migraine was getting worse. That didn’t exactly help matters, but he refused to let it hinder them. He had time, and he needed to put it to good use.
So what was the next step?
The sound of the door opening answered his question quite nicely. He turned around to glare Kurosaki Ichigo in the eye before the teenaged redhead shut the door behind him. “Where’s Kuchiki?” he asked, his tone remaining indifferent despite the fact that Kurosaki must have known otherwise.
“Battling Renji,” was the simple reply.
“She can feel free to tell him everything,” the shinigami finally conceded. “There’s really no point to keeping it secret anymore.”
“Who all have you told?” Kurosaki got straight to the point.
Right. No more beating around the bush. This was the next step. It was the only choice he had left, if he didn’t want to… Hitsugaya snorted. “You and Kuchiki. Urahara knows, as does your father and the Quincy’s father. Matsumoto … knows enough.”
“You told her?” the redhead asked, clearly surprised at the mention of Matsumoto.
“…No,” Hitsugaya conceded. “With her, the details don’t matter. She just knows.”
“Oh.”
The substitute shinigami took the moment of silence to approach, leaning his back against the rise as well. He still remained a good meter out of reach, but Hitsugaya knew he was bound and determined not to leave the Tenth taichou alone until he got what he wanted. They were all idiots, the lot of them. Well, then. The next step would undoubtedly be to stop complaining about these idiots and start ridding himself of all them once and for all, and to do that, he would have to educate them properly. With a deep breath, he decided to get this over with. It wasn’t going to be easy.
But he supposed even he wasn’t above taking a leaf out of Matsumoto’s book every once in a while.
“I promise to remain civil if you do,” the white haired boy acquiesced grudgingly. So when the high school delinquent nodded his agreement, he could only ask, “What do you want?”
Kurosaki Ichigo scowled his reply. “I want you to stop sulking and start accepting my he-”
“Don’t say that word,” the shinigami cut him off before he could finish, his expression saying clearly that he simply didn’t want to hear it. “If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t mind, but you idiots…” He paused, taking in another deep breath. He had promised, after all. He could at least try not to insult them.
“I don’t get it, Toushirou.” Twitch. “You asked Getaboushi for help right off the bat. You even asked the vaizard for answers! But when I come offering, you act like I don’t exist. And even when I tried to get around it by helping out after the vaizard told you all of that stuff, you went and paid me back for it like it was a debt or something.”
“That’s the problem, Kurosaki,” Hitsugaya snorted, putting a great deal of emphasis on Ichigo’s surname. “You just don’t get it. You don’t understand that there’s a difference.”
“A difference between what?” the redhead huffed, obviously peeved at the fact that he had no idea what Hitsugaya was talking about.
“I don’t want your brand of help, Kurosaki. I am not being imprisoned against my will, guarded by an ill-informed and outright deceived military, nor have I been kidnapped and taken into hostile enemy territory. Do you understand?”
“What do Rukia and Orihime have to do with this?” the substitute shinigami persisted, his growing frustration evident on his glaring features. “This is completely different.”
“Yes, Kurosaki. I am not one of your damsels in distress; you are far from a knight in shining armor; and Aizen is not so easily defeated as a dragon. This is completely different. So tell me, why do you insist on treating it the same, your brain still lost in its fairy tale world where there’s always a happy ending?” he countered none-too-subtly. In his defense, he really wasn’t very good at this. The times when he’d had to explain himself and his ideals to someone else were few and far between. Usually, one look at his haori and the inevitable reply was, “Yes, sir.”
“I never said I was going to charge in on some stupid, white steed!” the teenager growled. “You’re in trouble, and if I’m not around to keep you from doing it, you just walk around aimlessly like the world’s already ended. It drives me crazy, okay? You can’t blame me for wanting to help. If I don’t save your ass, who will? You’re obviously not doing anything to help yourself!”
The only sign that this statement had any impact on the youthful shinigami was the painful pounding of his migraine steadily growing in magnitude. He slowly folded his arms across his chest, looking up into the night sky. It was nearly midnight; a couple of minutes and Wednesday would tick its way onto the clock. He vaguely recognized that he’d have to get up for school the next day.
“Help is a vague word; it can mean a great deal. To aid, to benefit, to contribute, to cooperate, to favor, to guide, to promote, to relieve … and to rescue,” he rattled off with ease, still glaring determinedly up at the stars. “You, Kurosaki, are intent on rescuing me. I don’t need that kind of help. That kind of help isn’t any help at all. Not to me. I don’t need people solving my problems for me. If I’m going to feel any guilt, it’s going to be over something I did on my own.”
When Kurosaki didn’t reply, he struck up a different tangent. “Originally, I’d intended for Matsumoto to continue her bankai training so that if anything happened, the Tenth Division would still have a leader to its name. But today she warned me that she had no desire to replace me. She warned me because she knew, Kurosaki. She knew better than I did.
“The world isn’t dying and neither am I. I know the odds are stacked against me; I know I might as well be dead already. I’m living on borrowed time as it is. But even though I know that I don’t stand a chance, even though I’ve known all along, I have never once given up. If I had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
His tone of voice implied an unspoken but very final because I wouldn’t be here. Kurosaki obviously didn’t like that implication, but he seemed to be catching on, none-the-less. Despite all of his impulsiveness, Hitsugaya could never call the boy stupid. “So if you’re not giving up, then what are you going to do?”
“First, I asked Urahara, and now I ask you,” came the slow, almost grudging reply as the young shinigami’s gaze slowly panned downward from the stars to meet with Kurosaki’s once more. This was it. The next step. “Kurosaki Ichigo. Please cooperate with me.”
“I promise to be civil if you do,” the cocky redhead smirked in reply.
And Hitsugaya almost cracked a smirk of his own. “I promise nothing.”
~*~
Wednesday passed by with little happenstance. Haineko had finally stood up and gotten down to business, though how Matsumoto had managed that, Hitsugaya didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t exactly ask Matsumoto. He just had to content himself with putting his faith in her, and, really, he didn’t find that to be hard at all. She’d told him she could do it. If there was one thing he’d learned about Matsumoto, it was that when she said she could do something, then there was no question that she could do it.
She often boasted of out-drinking Madarame and Abarai. She’d admitted that she had taught herself how to contort her body just enough to squeeze through the office window when she felt that he was in a particularly bad mood. She’d even confessed to knowing exactly what to say to each and every man in the Tenth Division to get exactly what she wanted from them.
But never once had she ever professed to be a diligent worker.
In Hitsugaya’s eyes, the odds were definitely in her favor.
~*~
“What’s everyone’s status?”
“Rukia’s at my place with Dad and the twins. Orihime and Tatsuki have been sticking together; Tatsuki’s spending the night at Orihime’s. Chad and Uryuu have been taking turns babysitting Mizuiro and Keigo; right now it’s Chad’s turn, so Uryuu should be out patrolling with Renji.”
Hitsugaya frowned as he and Kurosaki turned a corner on their way to Urahara Shoten. When Kurosaki had brought up the twins, he had been reminded of that loud-mouthed, little girl’s demands. Today was Thursday; she’d wanted to meet him today. For just a second, he considered it, but he quickly shoved the thought aside. If Kurosaki’s report was accurate, she was at home and therefore not waiting for him. He’d never agreed to the meeting anyway; that girl had been beyond aggravating. It was best to prioritize her safety over any mental turmoil at this point.
“Good. Shihouin has been keeping a close watch on Nell, Ururu, and Jinta, while Urahara’s been aiding Matsumoto. She won’t let them out of her sight.”
Kurosaki Ichigo stared blankly ahead for a few seconds before absently mumbling, “Actually, I don’t think anybody’s going to need to be watching Nell.”
“None-the-less, for now we should remain as spread out as possible while still holding decent forces in each area and remaining in each others sensory ranges. It’s unclear exactly how Aizen intends to make his presence known, but even if he isn’t taking this seriously, we’re going to have to tread as carefully and precisely as we’re able. He’s made it clear he knows our every move. We can’t surprise him.”
“But it sounds like power is still pretty heavy at Getaboushi’s. It’s like you’re counting upstairs and downstairs as completely different places.”
“That’s because they are,” Hitsugaya snorted, not willing to go into detail on the strange and often disturbing goings-on within Urahara’s complicated psyche. “Just think of the training area as a pocket dimension of sorts.”
“Dimension?” Kurosaki scowled down at his shorter companion, only to realize he wasn’t listening. “Hello? Earth to Toushirou?” He was just about to wave his hand in front of the little guy’s face before he suddenly felt it too. His brown eyes widened in tune with Hitsugaya’s before both boys broke into a run.
“Was that-!?”
“Matsumoto!” Hitsugaya growled back through the wind. “But her reiatsu was too erratic!”
“Does that mean something’s wrong?”
Hitsugaya only sped up his pace, reaching the building with two hasty shunpo steps. Kurosaki was only a second behind as the two jumped in through a window and bolted down to the training facility.
Several unexpected sights met them when they did so. The most noticeable was a large, gaping, barren nothingness in the center of the area with only a mannequin-like dummy lying limply in its deserted quarry. The second was Matsumoto Rangiku herself, zanpakutou drawn, standing unmoving just outside the perimeter of the wasted land. The third was Urahara Kisuke, grinning like a maniac as the brim of his bucket hat let free a steady stream of smoke.
One second, two seconds… Hitsugaya wasn’t sure how much time passed in the tense silence as he debated at lightning speeds about the probability of every possible cause and how each could have produced these results. Then the spell was broken by the voice he’d least expected to hear.
“Kokonotsu no Inochi… Haineko…”
And Matsumoto collapsed to the ground.
“Matsumoto!”
Hitsugaya was instantly by her side, checking her vitals. She was unharmed, thank heavens, and her only problem seemed to be overexertion. That, combined with those last words she’d whispered pointed to only one conclusion. “…She did it. She made the time limit,” he breathed, his shoulders visibly relaxing.
“‘Course, she did,” the redheaded teenager nodded his affirmation. “She’s your fukutaichou, right?”
“Right,” he snorted, hardly registering his own voice, let alone the relief obvious in every syllable. Just then, for just that moment, he’d really thought… No. He had known she could do it, and she had. That was the end of that.
~*~
“So that erratic pulsing … is normal for this procedure?”
Urahara Kisuke broke himself out of his amused stupor to give the young shinigami a quick once over. All seemed well, for now at least. Excellent.
“How should I know?” the be-hatted salesman hummed brightly, pinching the fabric of his hat to put out the persistent plume of smoke. “Shouldn’t you be asking if it’s normal for her?” Letting loose a genuine laugh, Urahara couldn’t help but grab his stomach to contain his mirth. This was better than a joke. “I haven’t seen anything like that in a while! It’s always the stubborn ones, isn’t it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kurosaki shot back accusingly. “What happened?”
“That, my ignorant, little friend, is a secret,” the blond smirked broadly, holding a finger to his lips and offering the substitute shinigami a sly wink.
And as Ichigo fumed, his attention wandered back to the happily sleeping woman and the boy beside her. Well, after all, even he had a conscience of a sort. And if, hypothetically, he’d happened to witness a shinigami and her zanpakutou spirit get into a cat fight with each other over who better deserved the praise of a certain runt of an ex-taichou, well, he’d be less inclined to gossip than if, say, hypothetically, he pushed Rukia into Ichigo’s arms in front of a mortified Abarai Renji.
That was actually a very, very good idea.
“Well, now that my job’s done here, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to plot evil deeds and mentally scar some adolescents,” he excused himself in all seriousness but not before he heard the soft voice of Hitsugaya Toushirou mutter to himself.
“I’ll stay then.”
“Awww. Toushirou and Rangiku sitting in a tree!” he chanted shamelessly, dodging anything and everything the diminutive taichou could find to throw at him, just barely escaping unscathed. Though certainly not without a great deal of effort.
So maybe he could gossip a little bit. Life just wasn’t fun any other way.
Especially with war just over the horizon and a deadly game peeking through the threatening twilight.
~*~
“Kokonotsu no Inochi…” Hitsugaya repeated under his breath once he’d calmed down. That stupid salesman always knew just how to annoy him at exactly a single level above his tolerance range, but now that he’d regained his cool demeanor, Matsumoto’s voice came back to him yet again.
Kurosaki chuckled, though the humor didn’t quite reach his face. “Nine lives, huh?” he trailed thoughtfully. “Sounds pretty lucky for you.”
“I don’t need luck. I need skill.”
“Sounds like plenty of that too.”
~*~
Thanks to celadonserpent for correcting Matsumoto's bankai name.
Kokonotsu no Inochi - Nine Lives
Fandom: Bleach
Main Character: Hitsugaya Toushirou
Rating: PG-13
Genre: General/Action/Suspense
Warnings: Occasional language, violence, gore.
Timeline: This story follows the manga's timeline. It begins directly before the Hueco Mundo arc and diverges from there.
Summary: The board has been laid out. The pieces have been set and moved. The pawns are scattered across the floor, and Ichimaru’s fingers are wrapped around a stark white bishop. “That’s another check, little taichou.” The game has only begun.
“In the faces of men and women I see God.”
-Walt Whitman
~*~
Chapter Nineteen
Nine Lives
~*~
Really, Hitsugaya should have expected this.
He had been the one who had been skeptical. Matsumoto had readily informed him of what had happened before. After all, zanpakutou spirits all had personalities that reflected their wielders. Often the spirits were even more extreme, even in all of their wisdom.
And so he really shouldn’t have been surprised when he walked in on Matsumoto Rangiku standing five meters away from Haineko, holding her hands over her ears and shouting nonsense words at the top of her lungs as her zanpakutou spirit shamelessly plowed through the many verses of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was.
All it had taken was a nudge and a wink from Urahara, and he was ready to turn right back around.
It had been over three hours since then, and it appeared that Matsumoto hadn’t gotten much farther ahead. He could still hear her shrill shouts from deep below every once in a while, attempting to get the ornery zanpakutou spirit to listen to her. And ornery she was.
Hitsugaya had been rather intrigued by Haineko’s appearance. The large, lithe white tiger was decorated in white and black stripes that contrasted sharply with each other. The spirit’s regal face was lined in a small mane of sorts, not as prominent as a lion’s but enough to emphasis its stark features. The stripes seemed to meld into themselves as they curved around the sharp, pink eyes and bristling whiskers, emphasizing the pure white muzzle that ended in a glorious, saber-esque jaw line. The wild cat’s paws were also entirely white and harbored claws a great deal larger than they should have. Its tail was in constant motion, not so much a tail as an ash storm in and of itself, never quite reaching an entirely solid state. Around its neck was a pink scarf that matched its eyes, a scarf that was very similar to Matsumoto’s own.
Haineko. Ash cat. It fit.
Riding on the coarse winds, clogging the lungs and killing the senses, a storm without water or sand, the afterthought and the locust mentality. The diminutive taichou sighed at the thought, resting his back against the familiar rise of Urahara Shoten’s roof. Damn it all, now he was getting sentimental. He wasn’t supposed to do that; not now. Not so close to the end…
Unwillingly, her voice from only hours ago came back to him.
“Taichou! What did I tell you?! See? She’s nothing but a lazy bum! Help me out, Taichou! If it’s you, you can just freeze her mouth shut!”
“You were the one who asked for this in the first place,” Hitsugaya had huffed dryly. He wasn’t going to help her with something like this. This she needed to do herself, and she knew it.
“Seventy-two bottles of beer on the wall! Seventy-two bottles of beer!”
“But, Taaaaaiiiichou!” the busty woman had continued to whine over the voice of her zanpakutou.
Hitsugaya knew full well that she wasn’t really expecting his help and that she knew all of this already. She had been the one to school him on zanpakutou spirits in the first place. This meant she intended to garner something completely different from this conversation, whatever that may be. “If you want to learn bankai, you’re going to have to synchronize with Haineko on your own. Otherwise, there’s no meaning to it,” he had continued to insist. He’d been about to open his mouth to say more when he stopped, realization dawning.
Oh. Of course. Well, that was extremely annoying.
“Take one down; pass it around! Seventy-one bottles of beer on the wall!”
“What did you say, Taichou?!” she’d called back, feigning ignorance.
The young shinigami could only huff, turning away. That stupid woman… Why he kept her as his fukutaichou was a mystery to him. She was like a parasite, slowly eating away at him, and yet if he tried to pull her out now after all this time, it would only cause more trouble. “I said,” he’d grumbled, his voice hardly audible above Haineko’s blissful singing, “I’m sorry for not telling you right away.”
“Don’t worry about it!” she had replied, a large, knowing smile surging across her lips. “Just remember! I’m not doing this to replace you, you lousy excuse for a taichou! I’m doing it so I can help you! Don’t ever forget!”
Oh, damn it all.
Another sigh, and the small boy shifted his position against the rise on the roof.
“If you want to learn bankai, you’re going to have to synchronize with Haineko on your own. Otherwise, there’s no meaning to it.”
She’d figured it out on her own. Ever since the damn ice cream. It hadn’t been that long ago, not really, but it felt like ages. He’d been done in by his own words. If he wanted people to understand, he was going to have to stop beating around the bush. He had to do things the right way … or else there’d be no meaning to it. He was as good as dead. Meaning was all he had left. He wouldn’t allow anyone to take that away from him, not even himself.
He fingered the ridiculous collar around his neck, courtesy of Urahara Kisuke. It was because of this device that he still had time before his symptoms began immobilizing him. Already, the incessant migraine was getting worse. That didn’t exactly help matters, but he refused to let it hinder them. He had time, and he needed to put it to good use.
So what was the next step?
The sound of the door opening answered his question quite nicely. He turned around to glare Kurosaki Ichigo in the eye before the teenaged redhead shut the door behind him. “Where’s Kuchiki?” he asked, his tone remaining indifferent despite the fact that Kurosaki must have known otherwise.
“Battling Renji,” was the simple reply.
“She can feel free to tell him everything,” the shinigami finally conceded. “There’s really no point to keeping it secret anymore.”
“Who all have you told?” Kurosaki got straight to the point.
Right. No more beating around the bush. This was the next step. It was the only choice he had left, if he didn’t want to… Hitsugaya snorted. “You and Kuchiki. Urahara knows, as does your father and the Quincy’s father. Matsumoto … knows enough.”
“You told her?” the redhead asked, clearly surprised at the mention of Matsumoto.
“…No,” Hitsugaya conceded. “With her, the details don’t matter. She just knows.”
“Oh.”
The substitute shinigami took the moment of silence to approach, leaning his back against the rise as well. He still remained a good meter out of reach, but Hitsugaya knew he was bound and determined not to leave the Tenth taichou alone until he got what he wanted. They were all idiots, the lot of them. Well, then. The next step would undoubtedly be to stop complaining about these idiots and start ridding himself of all them once and for all, and to do that, he would have to educate them properly. With a deep breath, he decided to get this over with. It wasn’t going to be easy.
But he supposed even he wasn’t above taking a leaf out of Matsumoto’s book every once in a while.
“I promise to remain civil if you do,” the white haired boy acquiesced grudgingly. So when the high school delinquent nodded his agreement, he could only ask, “What do you want?”
Kurosaki Ichigo scowled his reply. “I want you to stop sulking and start accepting my he-”
“Don’t say that word,” the shinigami cut him off before he could finish, his expression saying clearly that he simply didn’t want to hear it. “If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t mind, but you idiots…” He paused, taking in another deep breath. He had promised, after all. He could at least try not to insult them.
“I don’t get it, Toushirou.” Twitch. “You asked Getaboushi for help right off the bat. You even asked the vaizard for answers! But when I come offering, you act like I don’t exist. And even when I tried to get around it by helping out after the vaizard told you all of that stuff, you went and paid me back for it like it was a debt or something.”
“That’s the problem, Kurosaki,” Hitsugaya snorted, putting a great deal of emphasis on Ichigo’s surname. “You just don’t get it. You don’t understand that there’s a difference.”
“A difference between what?” the redhead huffed, obviously peeved at the fact that he had no idea what Hitsugaya was talking about.
“I don’t want your brand of help, Kurosaki. I am not being imprisoned against my will, guarded by an ill-informed and outright deceived military, nor have I been kidnapped and taken into hostile enemy territory. Do you understand?”
“What do Rukia and Orihime have to do with this?” the substitute shinigami persisted, his growing frustration evident on his glaring features. “This is completely different.”
“Yes, Kurosaki. I am not one of your damsels in distress; you are far from a knight in shining armor; and Aizen is not so easily defeated as a dragon. This is completely different. So tell me, why do you insist on treating it the same, your brain still lost in its fairy tale world where there’s always a happy ending?” he countered none-too-subtly. In his defense, he really wasn’t very good at this. The times when he’d had to explain himself and his ideals to someone else were few and far between. Usually, one look at his haori and the inevitable reply was, “Yes, sir.”
“I never said I was going to charge in on some stupid, white steed!” the teenager growled. “You’re in trouble, and if I’m not around to keep you from doing it, you just walk around aimlessly like the world’s already ended. It drives me crazy, okay? You can’t blame me for wanting to help. If I don’t save your ass, who will? You’re obviously not doing anything to help yourself!”
The only sign that this statement had any impact on the youthful shinigami was the painful pounding of his migraine steadily growing in magnitude. He slowly folded his arms across his chest, looking up into the night sky. It was nearly midnight; a couple of minutes and Wednesday would tick its way onto the clock. He vaguely recognized that he’d have to get up for school the next day.
“Help is a vague word; it can mean a great deal. To aid, to benefit, to contribute, to cooperate, to favor, to guide, to promote, to relieve … and to rescue,” he rattled off with ease, still glaring determinedly up at the stars. “You, Kurosaki, are intent on rescuing me. I don’t need that kind of help. That kind of help isn’t any help at all. Not to me. I don’t need people solving my problems for me. If I’m going to feel any guilt, it’s going to be over something I did on my own.”
When Kurosaki didn’t reply, he struck up a different tangent. “Originally, I’d intended for Matsumoto to continue her bankai training so that if anything happened, the Tenth Division would still have a leader to its name. But today she warned me that she had no desire to replace me. She warned me because she knew, Kurosaki. She knew better than I did.
“The world isn’t dying and neither am I. I know the odds are stacked against me; I know I might as well be dead already. I’m living on borrowed time as it is. But even though I know that I don’t stand a chance, even though I’ve known all along, I have never once given up. If I had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
His tone of voice implied an unspoken but very final because I wouldn’t be here. Kurosaki obviously didn’t like that implication, but he seemed to be catching on, none-the-less. Despite all of his impulsiveness, Hitsugaya could never call the boy stupid. “So if you’re not giving up, then what are you going to do?”
“First, I asked Urahara, and now I ask you,” came the slow, almost grudging reply as the young shinigami’s gaze slowly panned downward from the stars to meet with Kurosaki’s once more. This was it. The next step. “Kurosaki Ichigo. Please cooperate with me.”
“I promise to be civil if you do,” the cocky redhead smirked in reply.
And Hitsugaya almost cracked a smirk of his own. “I promise nothing.”
Wednesday passed by with little happenstance. Haineko had finally stood up and gotten down to business, though how Matsumoto had managed that, Hitsugaya didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t exactly ask Matsumoto. He just had to content himself with putting his faith in her, and, really, he didn’t find that to be hard at all. She’d told him she could do it. If there was one thing he’d learned about Matsumoto, it was that when she said she could do something, then there was no question that she could do it.
She often boasted of out-drinking Madarame and Abarai. She’d admitted that she had taught herself how to contort her body just enough to squeeze through the office window when she felt that he was in a particularly bad mood. She’d even confessed to knowing exactly what to say to each and every man in the Tenth Division to get exactly what she wanted from them.
But never once had she ever professed to be a diligent worker.
In Hitsugaya’s eyes, the odds were definitely in her favor.
“What’s everyone’s status?”
“Rukia’s at my place with Dad and the twins. Orihime and Tatsuki have been sticking together; Tatsuki’s spending the night at Orihime’s. Chad and Uryuu have been taking turns babysitting Mizuiro and Keigo; right now it’s Chad’s turn, so Uryuu should be out patrolling with Renji.”
Hitsugaya frowned as he and Kurosaki turned a corner on their way to Urahara Shoten. When Kurosaki had brought up the twins, he had been reminded of that loud-mouthed, little girl’s demands. Today was Thursday; she’d wanted to meet him today. For just a second, he considered it, but he quickly shoved the thought aside. If Kurosaki’s report was accurate, she was at home and therefore not waiting for him. He’d never agreed to the meeting anyway; that girl had been beyond aggravating. It was best to prioritize her safety over any mental turmoil at this point.
“Good. Shihouin has been keeping a close watch on Nell, Ururu, and Jinta, while Urahara’s been aiding Matsumoto. She won’t let them out of her sight.”
Kurosaki Ichigo stared blankly ahead for a few seconds before absently mumbling, “Actually, I don’t think anybody’s going to need to be watching Nell.”
“None-the-less, for now we should remain as spread out as possible while still holding decent forces in each area and remaining in each others sensory ranges. It’s unclear exactly how Aizen intends to make his presence known, but even if he isn’t taking this seriously, we’re going to have to tread as carefully and precisely as we’re able. He’s made it clear he knows our every move. We can’t surprise him.”
“But it sounds like power is still pretty heavy at Getaboushi’s. It’s like you’re counting upstairs and downstairs as completely different places.”
“That’s because they are,” Hitsugaya snorted, not willing to go into detail on the strange and often disturbing goings-on within Urahara’s complicated psyche. “Just think of the training area as a pocket dimension of sorts.”
“Dimension?” Kurosaki scowled down at his shorter companion, only to realize he wasn’t listening. “Hello? Earth to Toushirou?” He was just about to wave his hand in front of the little guy’s face before he suddenly felt it too. His brown eyes widened in tune with Hitsugaya’s before both boys broke into a run.
“Was that-!?”
“Matsumoto!” Hitsugaya growled back through the wind. “But her reiatsu was too erratic!”
“Does that mean something’s wrong?”
Hitsugaya only sped up his pace, reaching the building with two hasty shunpo steps. Kurosaki was only a second behind as the two jumped in through a window and bolted down to the training facility.
Several unexpected sights met them when they did so. The most noticeable was a large, gaping, barren nothingness in the center of the area with only a mannequin-like dummy lying limply in its deserted quarry. The second was Matsumoto Rangiku herself, zanpakutou drawn, standing unmoving just outside the perimeter of the wasted land. The third was Urahara Kisuke, grinning like a maniac as the brim of his bucket hat let free a steady stream of smoke.
One second, two seconds… Hitsugaya wasn’t sure how much time passed in the tense silence as he debated at lightning speeds about the probability of every possible cause and how each could have produced these results. Then the spell was broken by the voice he’d least expected to hear.
“Kokonotsu no Inochi… Haineko…”
And Matsumoto collapsed to the ground.
“Matsumoto!”
Hitsugaya was instantly by her side, checking her vitals. She was unharmed, thank heavens, and her only problem seemed to be overexertion. That, combined with those last words she’d whispered pointed to only one conclusion. “…She did it. She made the time limit,” he breathed, his shoulders visibly relaxing.
“‘Course, she did,” the redheaded teenager nodded his affirmation. “She’s your fukutaichou, right?”
“Right,” he snorted, hardly registering his own voice, let alone the relief obvious in every syllable. Just then, for just that moment, he’d really thought… No. He had known she could do it, and she had. That was the end of that.
“So that erratic pulsing … is normal for this procedure?”
Urahara Kisuke broke himself out of his amused stupor to give the young shinigami a quick once over. All seemed well, for now at least. Excellent.
“How should I know?” the be-hatted salesman hummed brightly, pinching the fabric of his hat to put out the persistent plume of smoke. “Shouldn’t you be asking if it’s normal for her?” Letting loose a genuine laugh, Urahara couldn’t help but grab his stomach to contain his mirth. This was better than a joke. “I haven’t seen anything like that in a while! It’s always the stubborn ones, isn’t it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kurosaki shot back accusingly. “What happened?”
“That, my ignorant, little friend, is a secret,” the blond smirked broadly, holding a finger to his lips and offering the substitute shinigami a sly wink.
And as Ichigo fumed, his attention wandered back to the happily sleeping woman and the boy beside her. Well, after all, even he had a conscience of a sort. And if, hypothetically, he’d happened to witness a shinigami and her zanpakutou spirit get into a cat fight with each other over who better deserved the praise of a certain runt of an ex-taichou, well, he’d be less inclined to gossip than if, say, hypothetically, he pushed Rukia into Ichigo’s arms in front of a mortified Abarai Renji.
That was actually a very, very good idea.
“Well, now that my job’s done here, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to plot evil deeds and mentally scar some adolescents,” he excused himself in all seriousness but not before he heard the soft voice of Hitsugaya Toushirou mutter to himself.
“I’ll stay then.”
“Awww. Toushirou and Rangiku sitting in a tree!” he chanted shamelessly, dodging anything and everything the diminutive taichou could find to throw at him, just barely escaping unscathed. Though certainly not without a great deal of effort.
So maybe he could gossip a little bit. Life just wasn’t fun any other way.
Especially with war just over the horizon and a deadly game peeking through the threatening twilight.
“Kokonotsu no Inochi…” Hitsugaya repeated under his breath once he’d calmed down. That stupid salesman always knew just how to annoy him at exactly a single level above his tolerance range, but now that he’d regained his cool demeanor, Matsumoto’s voice came back to him yet again.
Kurosaki chuckled, though the humor didn’t quite reach his face. “Nine lives, huh?” he trailed thoughtfully. “Sounds pretty lucky for you.”
“I don’t need luck. I need skill.”
“Sounds like plenty of that too.”
Thanks to celadonserpent for correcting Matsumoto's bankai name.
Kokonotsu no Inochi - Nine Lives