Chapter Text
Superheated winds swirled around Yamamoto Genryuusai Shigekuni as he stood staring down the two brilliant souls before him.
They stood their ground, their tall figures limned with flickering vermillion firelight of the inferno blazing around them, their robes stirring in the searing reiatsu winds.
Kyouraku Shunsui and Ukitake Jyuushirou.
Shunsui, the taller of the two, broad shouldered and strong, his apparent ease a mere façade, for beneath the wide rim of his sugegasa hat his pewter eyes were bleak and his lean aristocratic face desolate as he held Yamamoto’s stare.
And Ukitake Jyuushirou, slender, athletic and lithe, his serene grace unable to hide the anguish in his dark eyes and the fear and anger racking his fine noble face as he stared beseechingly at Yamamoto.
Millennia of thoughts and memories flashed across the fore of his mind.
He had lived too long through too many wars, losses, successes, failures and mistakes. Too much had been sacrificed by too many to allow the precious balance they had achieved be destroyed overnight by a handful of reckless ryoka youths. The rash ignorant children had neither inkling nor care for the impact of their actions. They knew nothing of the terrible cost many had paid to build a millennium of stability that had kept souls, Hollows and humans in finely tuned balance with one another. Cost paid by countless other lives and souls over the millennia. Costs which Shunsui and Jyuushirou themselves had paid hundreds of lifetimes over. With their own blood, their own sweat, their own tears.
Yamamoto would sooner incinerate himself than allow their laws and institutions that upheld this precarious balance be impugned or questioned in any way.
It was irrelevant that he had spent the last three hundred years fighting a secret war against a seeping internal erosion that threatened this delicate balance. To all citizens of Soul Society, the great frame of the leadership and governance must maintain a strong and impregnable front. Thus the rebellion must end and the ryoka put down as examples, along with any whom they had corrupted.
Even if he was blindsided by how the ryoka had corrupted the two whom he had always believed to be the most unassailable pillars of Soul Society.
Shunsui, always peaceable, always choosing revelry over work, and a bit of a rascal and reprobate hiding behind the excuse of being the second son and the younger disciple, yet born with an innate mutability which could turn him ruthless in a flash, devastatingly punishing in a breath, and a nature that harboured a hard mercilessness that could strike at a moment’s decision. He had been the extension of Yamamoto’s long implacable will and prowess imposing order unto war-torn lands and quelling millennia of violent insurgencies from short-sighted warlords whose petty, bloody civil wars ran Soul Society into ruins. He, who had been Yamamoto’s eyes and ears and instincts with his preternatural gift at taking inexplicable leaps of intuition into the midst of chaos only to always land onto the heart of the truth. He, who rebelled against the strictures of traditions even as just a mere boy, yet who became more like Yamamoto with each passing century. He was the one who never failed his missions, who always executed Yamamoto’s orders to his last exact intent, who Yamamoto firmly trusted to watch his back. He was the one destined to follow in Yamamoto’s footsteps, to lead after Yamamoto was gone. The one who was the auxiliary shield about Yamamoto’s most precious, secret centre, his dear elder son, Jyuushirou.
Gentle, kind, dutiful Jyuushirou. So frail in body, so tender in nature, yet born with a gifted mind and a terrible power beyond mortal ken that took everything Yamamoto had to raise and nurture. Tempered by a deep compassion and an unshakeable sense of honour from surviving the dire circumstances of his birth and early life, when Jyuushirou spoke, hearts instinctively listened and followed regardless of the mind. When he acted, souls rallied in unity regardless of all differences. Bound as a mere toddler to a tragic fate by desperate parents, then thrust too young into the yokes of adulthood, his chronic dance with death demanded all of Yamamoto’s obstinacy to pull him back into the shelter of light, his power and sensitivity consumed all of Yamamoto’s resources, skill and dexterity to foster and groom. Yet, Yamamoto was rewarded beyond his wildest dreams. Jyuushirou’s gifts transformed into reality everything Yamamoto intended, he read and knew Yamamoto’s mind without need for words, his loyalty and understanding of the balance and the ways of the soul amplified Yamamoto’s own to levels he never would have achieved otherwise. He was the only soul whose abilities Yamamoto could depend on to aid his clandestine fight against the ones seeking to wrest control of the Gotei. And in all of his ten thousand years of hard sacrifice to Soul Society, Jyuushirou was the only one who opened Yamamoto’s hardened heart to show him his own humanity.
That it was Jyuushirou who instigated this treason of the highest order…
With a soul-piercing stab Yamamoto never thought he could feel again, the reality before him became painfully clear.
A bleak choice faced him. If he made that choice, many would hate him for it, and he would hate himself for it, but these would be nothing compared to what he, personally, and all of Soul Society, would lose.
For millennia Shunsui and Jyuushirou were half the core leadership of the Gotei Thirteen and half the guiding light of their realm. As Yamamoto himself was the institution of Soul Society itself, Shunsui was the extension of his will and prowess, and Jyuushirou the realisation of his mind, his intent, and ultimately, his old petrified heart. If he lost one, he would lose the other. The loss would be unimaginable, the consequences unquantifiable, the only certainty was that none would escape its aftermath. The alternative however… what could even be the alternative?
He founded the Gotei Thirteen nearly ten thousand years ago at the height of its bloodiest era. He had only one vision: to return Soul Society to its rightful balance. He had gathered to him twelve of the most renowned and terrifying warriors and ruthlessly, violently, methodically, thrust the seeds of stability into the broken realm. It had taken him a full millennia to quell the worst conflicts. Even in that early dawn, he had known that the Gotei Thirteen would need to evolve into a new kind of leadership to lead and nurture the fragile stability they were wrangling at such a high cost. The new era would require a leadership that was powerful like its pioneers but in different ways. They could no longer solely be a feared fighting force. Their lust for battle would need to be balanced by an equal passion for compassion, their uncompromising adherence to rules tempered by understanding and humanity, their wont for removing obstacles with swift punitive violence complemented by masterful subtlety and subterfuge. To preserve the costly peace, they would need to keep in line the feudal clans, to become a force to be reckoned with upon the battlefields as well as in the courts and councils. And he had understood even then that he would need to seek beyond their group to find these talents.
Shunsui and Jyuushirou had been what he had needed, gifted to him by kami when he had needed them the most, even if he did not realise it at the time. He had nurtured them over centuries, and relied on them almost two thousand years. Soul Society would not be what it was today without them. Over the course of time, they had become the sons he never had.
That they now did what they had done with full knowledge of the high stakes at risk and the consequences…
Especially Jyuushirou. Gentle, understanding, dutiful Jyuushirou, who had ever only vexed Yamamoto with his complete lack of consideration for himself... did the last millennia now mean nothing to him? Did he not work selflessly and exclusively beside Yamamoto himself during the last three centuries to hunt down those who would weaken the Gotei?
And Shunsui, whose loyalty for his soul brother had turned to love, both which were painstakingly engineered by Yamamoto himself, had his regard for Jyuushirou overtaken his loyalty to Soul Society and the cause of the Gotei? Did their millennia of war and bloodshed now pale so much in comparison?
For Yamamoto, as the founder of the Gotei Thirteen and originator of laws of Soul Society, to show leniency and favouritism for a treason of this extent – he would cause an immeasurably worse outcome. Any sign of his leniency would send the message that double-standards and hypocrisy were allowed since the very founder who had ruthlessly wiped out these immoral values would flout his own principles for those he favoured. The authority of their laws would be questioned, the enforcement power of the Gotei would lose credibility and standing, and their enemies, who had furtively spent the last three centuries plotting to depose him and wrest control of their military power, would jump at the chance to weaken them by publicly instigating malcontents and fan the flames of sedition in the masses. If that happened, Soul Society would begin the treacherous slide back into the dark ages of chaos, bloodshed and mass suffering which once wrecked and ruined their realm, and reawaken the thirst for revenge of clans whose long stubborn memories of petty slights and feuds never faded. Civil wars would once again spark as easily as cinders on dry hay, and mass misery would return to beset souls who returned to Soul Society from the Living World, who would expect rest and paradise, only to be plunged into the hell Soul Society had once been.
Yamamoto would not be able to mete out the usual punishment. The stakes were too high.
These were his sons. They had been extensions of himself for thousands of years.
This was no choice any ordinary soul could make.
Yamamoto could not be an ordinary soul. He did not have the luxury of choice allowed to ordinary souls.
Intense regret welled in the hard fossilised place which was his heart. The cold ancient shell shuddered deep within its core threatening to break apart and flood his resolve to stay his course.
Had the golden age come to an end? After nightmare centuries of bloodshed and sacrifices? After two thousand years of dedication and care of the two souls who became as precious to him as his own flesh and blood?
How had they come to this point?