Chapter Text
It's just another summer storm. Hot and juicy, like one of Hinamori's tomatoes. There hasn't been a storm like this since before the war, though. It's so warm. Summer summer! screeches someone not-a-child, though their delight is youthful.
Beyond the walls of Seireitei, there are still glaciers, melting. The fields are a shallow sea.
It has been 37 days. It has been a lifetime.
—
Day 3, or maybe 4. There are more that need burying than can bury.
On top of that, Hitsugaya has been dismissing people handful by handful, like sand from between fingers—to check for family, to account for survivors, or simply to be elsewhere. To be anywhere but the edge of this long, deep grave. Matsumoto watches an unseated shinigami's mouth twist into a sob, a frown, and then a thin, impassive line when he tells her to find a meal, and then not to return for twelve hours. Non-negotiable.
She's uninjured, she can dig; she should be digging. That's what the girl's thinking, Matsumoto knows.
Matsumoto also knows Hitsugaya would like the girl to stay that way.
The girl—Hinode Mayuko, that's her name—leaves furious (lost, scared), desperate not to cry in front of her captain. Her eyes catch Matsumoto's, and she tries not to cry in front of her, either. Still, this is kindness.
There's only so many faces you can lay to rest before it does something to you. There is only so long you can stand above a grave, looking in. How many faces or how long you have, or even what it does, Matsumoto couldn't say for sure. But she stands at the precipice and watches Hitsugaya stare downward and feels the shovel rub at the blisters on her palms as she strikes the ground, and she has an inkling.
There are two hundred unaccounted for in the 10th. This pit, this grave they're digging, will need to serve at least that many. Matsumoto stares down through the cavernous darkness and tries to think only in terms of geometry. She tries not to think about faces.
—
The shinigami's proximity to death was part of the Quincy's distaste for them. It was inelegant, dirty, and so unlike their Quincy whites. And a thousand years ago, perhaps that distaste hadn't been entirely unearned—bloodlust and body counts had made a shinigami what it was, in the beginning.
"If only they knew how much ceremony we stand around on now," Hitsugaya had commented, lip curling as he'd explained this to her, leaning into the expository and pulling history seemingly from nowhere, as is his tendency. He probably knows more about the history of Soul Society than half of those that lived it.
In the years since the beginning, they'd managed to adopt more of the Quincy's standoffishness than the Quincy or even they had realized. Human taste filtered through Soul Society as it always has and always will, whether it concerns the philosophical and bodily nature of death, or the latest tasty 7-11 snacks. Maybe shinigami think they take pride in and vaunt their own cultures of death—we're supposed to be the "gods" of it, after all, Hitsugaya notes—but they're not as in control as they think. Likely no one even realized it was happening, but: Death became dirty. That's why it's not an officer's job to bury the dead. To dig the graves by their own hands.
But they have a duty to these bodies. So Hitsugaya and Matsumoto dig.
Neither of them are well enough to actually recover the bodies, anyway. Kurotsuchi's ministrations are ongoing, and Matsumoto can honestly say she's never felt pain like this in her life—not in this chronic, from-inside way. It's like she can feel her bones split every time she plunges the shovel's nose into the ground, pulls up one more clod of dirt. They shatter into dust and sometimes they don't reform.
It's only inflammation, Kurotsuchi had tittered clinically, the last time they'd gone for treatment, but it had still taken him hours to spin her blood clean of Giselle's poison, and even then it had only been a stop-gap—a treatment of the symptom rather than the disease itself. He's still working on the cocktail that will purify them for good. In the meantime, the pills only leave Matsumoto exhausted.
Hitsugaya pulls his chain over his head and leans Hyourinmaru against the side of the pit, then sinks shakily to the ground. He's neither a skilled nor aggressive shoveler, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstances. But he'd never stop, had he anything left to give. He looks skyward for a moment, at the thick expanse of gray clouds above, before his eyelids droop and he stares at the ground they have yet to move.
Matsumoto wills her bones to reform from ash.
—
Kyouraku—Captain Commander Kyouraku now, Matsumoto reminds herself—pays them a house call, early on. It is unusual to meet with the Captain Commander anywhere but the 1st, but he'd wanted to come personally, to inform them both that Ukitake would have a funeral. Not for some time, of course, given that there was much to be done, but—
"You'd like the body frozen," says Hitsugaya.
What an assumption to make. Something curdles in Matsumoto, and the prospect wrenches her breath from her. Ukitake is supposed to be mangling bonsai and quelling everyone's fears. He is not supposed to be a body.
Suddenly and fiercely, she wants to wrap her captain in her arms—in a way he wouldn't appreciate and that might not actually help him. It might've helped her, though, because Kyouraku's reply is worse.
"There is no body."
"Then what are you requesting?"
Kyouraku shrugs. "I make house calls," he says, as he eyes Hitsugaya up and down. He stays with the darkened hollows beneath his eyes and the distraction of pain behind them. "An old habit, I suppose."
His words are an outline of a body no longer there.
After the battle above the fake Karakura, Matsumoto had wondered if everything she did felt like Gin. Could everyone around her feel him in her, feel her mourning? Watching and hearing Kyouraku, she knows that it did.
Ukitake is in everything.
But he is not all things.
Kyouraku still has a favor to ask. "And Byakuya suggested it might be better to come to you than expect you to come to me." (He calls him "Byakuya," the way only Ukitake had.)
"Did he," says Hitsugaya.
(The day the war had ended, Kuchiki had been the one to deposit Hitsugaya at her feet. He'd carried him under his arm like a rice sack (though Matsumoto is fairly certain Kuchiki has carried more bodies than rice). Medical attention is likely in order, Kuchiki had suggested to her, before walking away without administering or sending for anything at all. He had not even explained what had happened.
You, Kurotsuchi had snarled at her captain when she and Hitsugaya had shown up at 12th, each mostly under their own power. I perform miracles, and you spit in my face. What did you do?)
Kyouraku does not want a body frozen.
It will take days—maybe weeks—to collect, account for, and bury the dead. By latest report, the toll is in the thousands. Many of the living are critically wounded. They can't help; and some won't make it. Kyouraku does not want the bodies to rot too quickly. But full summer is coming, and with it rain and heat. Neither mix well with the dead.
"Are you able?" Kyouraku asks.
Matsumoto didn't realize this was possible until Hitsugaya fails to object.
To Matsumoto, tensou juurin for the span of a battle, a battlefield, seems like one thing, and a storm in the skies over all of Soul Society, for days or weeks, quite another. But all Hitsugaya says is that he doesn't personally understand the meteorology. The long-term impacts, the consequences on the broader scale, the crop cycles. He wouldn't be able to control for any of that.
He finishes, "I'm reluctant."
Kyouraku gives him a patronizing smile, and Hitsugaya seems as shocked by this as she. Kyouraku has never treated him like a child before.
"Hitsugaya-taichou," he says. "It's been a thousand years since this place has seen a war such as this. Soul Society has never laid eyes on one. Allow me to explain."
As far as crop cycles are concerned, all the fields are burned or burning. Nanao is already in the process of arranging for the importation of shelf goods from the human realm. They will all be on war rations for some time. What's more, the Wandenreich had leveled mountains, forests, entire ecosystems, and the battles that had raged had not just tumbled buildings, or shed only blood. Soul Society, to its dew points, its atmosphere, the nature of reishi itself, had been fundamentally altered.
They'll be paying for this war for an epoch. The damage is already done.
"I didn't ask if you were willing. I asked if you were able," Kyouraku finishes.
Really, he isn't asking anything. He is Captain Commander.
"Thank you for the education," says Hitsugaya. Then, with all due respect or perhaps none at all, his eyes narrow and he says, "But what do you actually know about weather?"
"Taichou," Matsumoto objects, soft warning.
"You play with shadows, yet you never found the army the Wandenreich had built inside them. And you still want to act like the consequences will limit themselves to what we understand?"
Kyouraku doesn't fight small wars. "We have two thousand bodies to bury," he replies.
—
It's winter again. It's June.
Hitsugaya picks up a shovel and tests the ground. It's harder to dig, but not completely frozen. As so ordered.
The cold makes Matsumoto's fingers ache and her joints keen. She digs until her fingers bleed and her wrists are so swollen she can't bend them.
The next morning, she wakes to incredible cold. It's not quite dawn. Outside, a layer of powder snow coats the ground, bright and luminous.
"Fuck." Hitsugaya, outside.
They lose a day of digging, waiting for the thaw.
—
Soul Society avoids both blizzards and heat waves. Beyond that, Hitsugaya hasn't made any promises.
All the birds have begun flying in circles.
"It's like they're all vultures now," Hisagi notes grimly. He's stopped by to say hello, on his way back to the 9th. He'd gone to pick up the pills for Kensei and had thought he could get Matsumoto hers as well, but Kurotsuchi had refused. Too many middle-men. He doesn't trust "you idiots."
Hisagi keeps looking at Matsumoto like he can't quite believe she's alive. His eyes are full of all of those he'd tried to find and couldn't.
"Not that I don't like vultures," he qualifies. "I mean, they're cleaners—they're really a lot like us, they could practically be our—like, on our crest, or—"
Matsumoto quirks her eyebrows and holds out her shovel. Automatically, he takes it and moves earth.
"You're so weird," she says. Everyone talks about how cool and severe Hisagi is but she's really not sure what she's missing here. Hisagi's just Hisagi.
"I didn't want to sound ungrateful," he says, without breaking the rhythm of his digging.
By current estimation, the only division with a higher casualty rate than 9th had been the 11th, and the 11th doesn't bury their dead. It's smelled like burning hair for days. For as many days, the 9th has been stacking bodies rolled in tatami, as tall as their remaining buildings. The bodies come and come. They're grateful for the frost.
Matsumoto twists a lock of hair round her fingers. It feels chalky with dried sweat. "Taichou said something about the birds, too. I don't think he'd disagree with you."
"Is he all right?"
"Why do you ask?"
Hisagi shrugs. "I just meant with the—" He stops digging momentarily to draw a swirling pattern with his finger, directed at the sky. "I don't really know how elemental zanpakutou work. I didn't realize it was possible to— When he told me where to find you, he just seemed—"
"You have your own dead to bury, Hisagi," says Hitsugaya, from behind her. Matsumoto shrieks.
Hisagi, sheepish, sets the shovel aside. "I wanted to return the favor."
For the shinigami Hitsugaya had sent to dig for 9th, he clarifies.
"It seemed like they'd find it easier to bury strangers," Hitsugaya acknowledges. Everyone does, probably, he adds, but he doesn't want Hisagi to miss something he'll regret. Even if it's not easy.
Hisagi nods.
Later that night, Matsumoto and Hitsugaya memorize the faces of the dead as they lower them into the ground. This will not be an unmarked grave, bodies tossed within like refuse. They will know exactly how each body rests.
"Put Ayaka-chan next to Odo," says Matsumoto. "She's his daughter-in-law."
"I hadn't realized they'd already married," says Hitsugaya. Ayaka's husband, Odo's son, is still unaccounted for. Maybe they should leave space, maybe they should hope they find him living. In any case, whatever the weather, the bodies won't keep indefinitely. They need to be buried.
"The wedding was going to be this summer."
"Oh," says Hitsugaya.
He rests Ayaka's head against cold earth, her skin green-white white against flat black. Her stomach is beginning to bloat. The sun has set and it's almost too dark to see his hands come away entangled in loose hair and sloughed skin.
"Almost" spares them nothing.
—
Nothing could have prepared Hitsugaya for this. That's what worries her. Not that anyone can really be prepared for a war toll of this scale—but in the 64th, Matsumoto had at least caught glimmers. She'd grown up deep enough into Rukongai that the village was hit by marauders from the wilder districts with some frequency. Massacres came weekly, and she'd hauled straw to her share of pyres, picked through the remains of torched buildings to locate the dead.
Rangiku-chan, this is a celebration, the village patriarch would tell her, of the flames. The dead return to the human world to begin new life.
The patriarch generally didn't acknowledge her, but sometimes the nostalgia of ceremony would seize him, and he'd act the part. She'd be dirt again in the morning.
Then why are they crying? she asked, while she had him. She pointed to the mourners.
There's no rest in the human world, someone else jeered. You wanna lay your head, you gotta die.
So, no different than the 64th. No one else had seemed to realize the trap.
Junrinan was different. That's what she'd grown up being told, in any case. In Junrinan, there were shoes, and schools, and only the unluckiest starved. The streets were still dirt and the nights were cold, but you could live a good life there. You didn't go thirsty because there was blood in the water.
Maybe Hitsugaya's distracted by the weather work. Maybe he's just tired. There are burials, there are the records of the dead, which grow longer, and longer, and longer. There are fingers that ache as they traffic between shovel and brush. There is anger, because it should never have been like this. There is nothing that could have prepared him, and it shows.
This isn't to say the 10th has never lost anyone before. In the last century, they've been somewhat infamous for losing captains—sometimes so quickly that Hitsugaya isn't even the least senior, in terms of years served. And as captain he's overseen his share of funerals.
But not like this.
Every day, Hitsugaya feels further away. He listens when she tells him about the 64th, but he doesn't hear her.
244 shinigami under his command are dead.
Two weeks ago they'd been forgetting reports and stealing from the mess hall and scrubbing hallways, forcing each other to the ground as they sparred and trying to imagine the day they might summon shikai. They'd been the ones putting souls to rest.
244 people under his care.
—
247.
—
He doesn't say anything about it. He doesn't really have to. 249 are dead, and thousands more beyond their rolls. 251.
253. (They died with each other's swords in hand, and not their own. There's a story there, and none to tell it. There is no pointing wondering.)
254.
This is more than they'd accounted for. They will have to widen the trench.
—
Ichigo has been barred from Soul Society indefinitely ever since the battle ended—a banishment that, according to Yumichika according to Ikkaku, Urahara is playfully taking quite seriously. Officially, the request was submitted by the head of the Kuchiki clan, co-signed by the Captain Commander, and made law by the Council of 46. But the order is Rukia's.
For all that Ichigo has seen and done and weathered, he is seventeen years old, and he is human.
The war was enough. Rukia will not allow him to suffer its afterlives. He is human.
He is only seventeen years old.