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Listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of.
--
There’s no butterfly when she wakes, which means they need her.
Hinamori nestles her face into her pillow and skates her toes across the cold bottom of her futon where her body had not been. Then she’s up.
Hinamori lets her yukata fall to the futon and wraps her chest. She makes sure her shihakushou sits correctly on her shoulders and ties her hakama prim and flat. She folds her yukata; futon, into the closet. Her hair, wrapped in silk at the back of her head, is fine. She fixes her lieutenant’s badge so tightly against her arm she can feel her blood pulse against it. It will loosen as she moves.
Only then does she light a candle. The electrical is out; the 5th before Captain Aizen had been an early adopter of the technology, but this meant a lot of the circuitry was over a hundred years old and Captain Aizen was someone who, in his usual amiable delivery, did not mind a walk in the dark now and again.
Hinamori has a fresh pair of sandals for the trek to Junrinan later today, and a double-tiered box of wagashi wrapped in furoshiki from the Seireitei. Beside the box, a bowl of leftovers, towel draped over the mouth. She scrapes out the last of the rice, broth-bloated, and tastes char. The burdock and carrot are off, too, taste like the dream she’d been having, the dream she can no longer remember, but it will have to do. Captain Aizen had invited her to breakfast to see her off, if. But there was no butterfly, and there is no if. Her leave begins at the start of business this morning: Until then, she is needed.
--
Hinamori has been Vice-Captain of the 5th Division for four months, and she is not used to the idea that a belligerent soul will stop squawking just because she shows up. But this one reads the deference in her two officers as they turn toward her, and he understands that finally, they have fed him up the chain.
“Oh sure, now you stop.” Kouga, one of Hinamori’s eighteenth seats, gives the soul a light shove, betraying the late hour and the number of them they have spent on this soul. Kouga is usually kind.
“I respect the rank,” the soul grumbles.
This obviously bemuses Otsuka. That a soul—particularly one so recently alive—would give any thought to such things. How charming! But Hinamori feels a dark intensity in his words.
“Were you a soldier in life?” Hinamori asks.
“We’ve been over this with him already. He did pornos,” Kouga deadpans.
“Pink films,” says Otsuka, and agrees, “We’ve been over this with him. It’s a whole thing. Anyway, you won’t be doing that here. We’re supposed to take you to East 42. They don’t do films out there.”
“If it were that simple, we wouldn’t still be here. We think he might be one of those,” says Kouga.
“We know he’s one of those. You’re just not sure which one of one of those he is,” Otsuka clarifies. “If you recall, Hinamori-fukutaichou, I’d written about Kouga’s neurosis about all of this.”
“It’s a moral complication.” (Kouga.)
“Who are you to judge!” (Otsuka.)
“My name is Maeno Mitsuyasu, and I am the judge.” (Maeno Mitsuyasu.)
“Do you remember how you died?” Hinamori asks, holding up a silencing finger at the other two shinigami. They’ve been over this, she’s sure, but she wants to see his eyes when he answers.
“I am the judge,” the soul, Maeno, repeats. “I died a warrior, a redeemer. I died for the soul of my country.”
“It’s 1976 over there,” Otsuka points out. “The war is long over, just so we’re clear.”
“It does not mean my country does not need to be rescued,” Maeno hisses. The soul hisses. Hinamori reminds herself not to use a soul’s name, even in her mind. It only makes this harder. “Not when even our leaders—”
“Hinamori-fukutaichou—”
“—Not when even our GREATEST leaders callously betray us!”
Hinamori takes a deep breath. She says, “Konpaku-san. Let’s talk.”
For the next six hours, they talk. They talk about acting classes. They talk about literature. They talk about reincarnation. (“It’s unlikely to ever happen in the way that you describe,” Hinamori offers frankly, but the soul does not care.) They talk about airplanes. They talk about the honor of flying airplanes into the hearts of those that have betrayed you, your country, all that you’ve been fighting for.
The 5th has been in charge of ‘those’ kinds of souls since Captain Aizen’s promotion. The yamato damashii, it’s theorized, have a higher likelihood of spiritual potential, because their spirits have fused so entirely to duty, to nation, to that soul in the world that is bigger than one soul. Captain Aizen believes that it would be a kindness to keep track of them, and to shepherd them toward the Academy rather than condemn them to the grim death of starvation. Kouga, however, has been a member of the 5th for several hundred years. He’s been an eighteenth seat for almost as long. He doesn’t want to have to work with any yamato damashii, now or ever.
Hinamori only wants this soul to be at peace.
“Would you ever betray that?” The soul jabs his finger at her lieutenant’s badge.
“If it conflicted with my heart,” Hinamori says, honestly. Otsuka yawns. Kouga grunts hearty agreement.
“Then you shouldn’t be wearing it,” the soul spits.
“I wear it because it means I am in a position to make sure such a conflict never happens,” she says.
“Oh, little girl,” he snickers.
“You said you respect the rank,” Hinamori reminds him, and in the end, that does hold true. After six hours, the soul allows himself to be escorted to the train depot.
“Lucky you!” says Otsuka. “Most souls have to walk.”
“I will fly,” Maeno insists. The soul insists.
The soul.
--
Otsuka and Kouga probably go straight to bed, and think nothing from the moment their bodies hit their futons. Hinamori leaves them at the Division gates and heads back toward the vice-captain’s quarters. She slides the door shut behind her. She sees her new sandals by the door and the wagashi on the table, and she sinks to the ground and sobs.
She’s not sad. She doesn’t even think she’s upset. But she is full to bursting with memory, and feeling, and sitting for six hours with one soul, and she cannot bring that with her.
She is already late—by three hours at least--but she stays in her own arms, hugging her knees to her chest, until the sun rises past her eastern window. By the time she arrives at the West Gate, Hitsugaya isn’t waiting for her anymore.
She feels a pang, resolves to ask Jidanbou if he’d gone ahead, or left a message; but Hitsugaya is with Jidanbou, just on the other side of the gate. He even looks happy to see her.
“I’m sorry, I had to—”
“I figured,” says Hitsugaya.
If they run, they’ll still have time to reach their first waypoint by nightfall, even with the days so slight. At this time of year, the souls of Junrinan will be in the mountain forests, far from the mouth of the Seireitei. They’ll arrive tomorrow, and the day after, they will turn around. Hinamori only has a three-day leave.
So they run.
Hinamori feels Tobiume rise up as her heartrate jumps and her blood begins to pound. She always wants to fly these days. Tobiume’s wings stretch as wide as Hinamori is tall, and her talons were built to crush the stone-like bones of Hollow masks. Her shriveled head is meant to stay pure and clean, even in the belly of the beast. But it can be shattering to feel all of that inside of you.
As a new recruit, Hinamori had spent so long trying to coax Tobiume down from the cliffs of her inner world she could never have guessed that so much of mastering shikai could be learning not to shatter. Learning to say, not now. Stay hungry.
Hinamori runs.
Stay hungry.
--
There was one time, at this inn. She’d been on her way from the Academy. Yes, her fifth year—she’d been applying for a special session in the Fifth. She’d come home for a festival. And for—
Hinamori almost always stops at this inn on her way to Junrinan, but that particular time it had been filled with men, shinigami on deployment and boisterously proud of the fact. The innkeeper’s daughter had taken one look at her and shown her to a private room Hinamori had not booked. Now that she’s Vice-Captain, her privacy is automatic. Despite the many decades Hinamori’s trips to Junrinan have spanned, the innkeeper’s daughter either does not remember her or makes a professional point of appearing not to. But this is the first time she looks at Hinamori and sees the arm band before anything else.
“The officer’s quarters, miss?”
“And a guest,” Hinamori says of Hitsugaya. The innkeeper’s daughter, professionally, does not look at him.
“Was that inappropriate?” Hinamori asks, once the innkeeper has finished drawing water for their private bath.
(The innkeeper leaves the massive kettle sitting atop coals. My daughter will be back for your dishes, she says. Please leave them by the door. She says, Let us know what else might spark delight, Vice-Captain.)
Hitsugaya shrugs. “She probably thinks we’re lovers. You were unspecific.”
“I meant, did you find it inappropriate?” For her to exercise her rank like that, pull him in with her instead of letting him be his own. He’s an officer in the 10th.
Hitsugaya misunderstands her again. “We’ll probably sleep in the same futon at Granny’s, if that’s going to bother you.”
She is looking forward to that, actually. The vice-captain’s quarters are solitary and she is often lonely.
They sit, sink into the silence of the large and private room. They each take their turn in the bath. Hinamori stays caught between two minds. In one, it feels so natural to share space with Hitsugaya like this, to think nothing of it. Hitsugaya seems to think nothing of it. And why would he? In the span of time they’ve spent together, they’ve spent more like this than they have apart. But Hinamori wants to push—to know for sure all the ways that they are different, that their time spent has made them different. She doesn’t want to not be those people to each other, too.
“How are you adjusting to the 10th?” Hinamori asks, as though it has not been an entire decade since he joined it. Maybe it hasn’t.
Hinamori does not think she will ever fully adjust to the compressed time of shinigami life—its whirlwind of classes and then missions and the daily blur of Gotei duty. It was only yesterday, wasn’t it, when she had joined the 5th? She’s only seen Hitsugaya a handful of times since, and even though she knows it’s been the longest decade of her existence, it also feels like it’s been five days since their induction, because she’s seen Hitsugaya five times, and she still can’t imagine not seeing him daily. This of course means that at the same time she has been here for ten years, he has been here for five days.
Hitsugaya either understands the way her clock works or isn’t bothered by the disjuncture, because all he says is, “It’s a lot of work.”
Hitsugaya is no stranger to work, though the way he says it reminds her of a much younger version of himself. He’d always seemed surprised by the amount of work there was to do in fall in Junrinan, no matter how many years they shared in it. Early on, part of Hinamori had wondered if maybe he didn’t remember, if he was one of those souls who’d gotten caught in an eternal eddy, as sometimes happens. But then she’d catch that look in him, and yes, he remembers. Each and every, in that long waterfall of time.
This is not the look he’s giving her now. He hadn’t balked at her erasure of his decade because it does feel new to him, she realizes. Part of it, something recent, feels new. “You like them!” she beams.
Hitsugaya’s eyes widen.
“Shiba-taichou and Matsumoto-fukutaichou. You like them!”
“You don’t need to be that enthusiastic about it.”
Since they joined the Gotei, every time Hinamori has seen Hitsugaya, he has always looked like he’d just finished swallowing a little glass. Poor timing on her part, maybe, and poor life outlook on his—but it’s hard. She knows this. Talent is easy to envy, particularly since the Academy puts on such a show about early graduates, but Hinamori knows that Hitsugaya has had to learn everything the quick, hard, lonely way. Six years in the Academy instead of one, and he’d have made friends. She’s sure. He might even have enjoyed the work.
At least now he’s doing the work for his captain, his vice-captain, for the 10th, and that is different. It’s good.
“Do you get compared to Ichimaru?” Hitsugaya asks. "As the new vice-captain."
Hinamori laughs. “Maybe a little, this morning. Not favorably.”
Hitsugaya has long since flopped onto his futon, body splayed, but she hears him chuff.
Ichimaru had once mentioned Matsumoto to Hinamori. Ah yes, a dear friend, he’d said. As Hinamori’s self-assigned big sister—lady lieutenants! We’ll rule the world!—Matsumoto had mentioned no such friendship, and Hinamori wonders if this elision isn’t part of Hitsugaya’s ire. Matsumoto is his vice-captain, and he likes her. Ergo, Ichimaru non grata. Or maybe his ire is his own, a result of having been thrown around with Ichimaru whenever conversation tends toward prodigy. Whatever the reason, he has clearly never heard Kira speak of Ichimaru, has never heard what that kind of love can sound like.
Were Ichimaru still 5th Vice Captain, last night would have happened in one of three ways: Ichimaru would have settled the matter from the start, and Otsuka and Kouga wouldn’t have had to spend the whole night negotiating with a ghost; Ichimaru would have determined there was no matter, and left the ghost to his own devices; or, with one penetrating 4AM stare and a snake-like bit of poetry, Ichimaru would have settled the matter this morning, quick as poison. With Ichimaru, Otsuka and Kouga would not have had to stand with her, hours past their shift. They could have just gone home.
There was a soul, Hinamori says. You know the kind, she says—yamato damashii.
He’d been betrayed, she says. There’d been another, there’d been dealings in the dark. He’d died for vengeance. Konsou is supposed to heal feelings like this, but Hinamori finds it often doesn’t.
“You’re asleep,” she accuses.
“I’m not,” says Hitsugaya, but he has nothing to say about yamato damashii, or vengeance. So he says nothing.
“I forgot my wagashi,” says Hinamori, “It’s on my desk, but I forgot it.”
This time Hitsugaya is asleep. Hinamori turns out the light.
Then Hitsugaya says, “If Ichimaru is anything to go by, I think the only thing anyone really cares about is turnover. So don’t give them anything to worry about, and you’ll be fine.”
--
In the last hundred years, the 5th has had three vice-captains—Captain Aizen, Ichimaru, and herself—a turnover which is probably only slightly above average. No one had had to die for Hinamori’s promotion. When Ichimaru had been promoted out to the 3rd, his duties were routed across a constellation of seated officers, among them Hinamori. Together, they’d done the work, without the pay or prestige. Now that Hinamori’s been taking these duties back, it’s clear the 5th would rather have her than not. But Hitsugaya probably isn’t talking about Ichimaru anymore. In the last ten years, the only vice-captain to die on active duty was Shiba Kaien. It had been just after Hinamori’s enlistment; her immediate commander had been light on the details. She guesses Shiba Isshin had not done the same.
Don’t give them anything to worry about means don’t die.
He’d said it very casually, but there’s a hard limit to how casual something can sound when your voice has to wait until the lights are out. Until the conversation is already over. In the dark, in the end, like that, it sounds like don’t go where I can’t follow.
There is something about vice-captaincy that pushes you out of your exoskeleton. This language comes from having been promoted at the end of July, and watching as the cicadas felt this, too. Perhaps it is the intensity of the examination and study leading up to it, finally bearing fruit once the stress has lifted and true growth can begin. Perhaps it is the intensity of duty, of needing to be more and more and becoming more and more. But these days, Hinamori is molten. She is changing. She is growing.
For a shinigami, duty is a lifetime, not a moment.
For the sake of Soul Society, let that life be long.
--
As much as Junrinan still feels like home, it also feels forbidden. It’s out of time with the Seireitei; it now feels like the past. Like it is a place to revisit the past, even as all a shinigami will ever tell a soul is that there is no place to go but forward. Please walk toward death. Your life is over.
When they arrive, Grandma acts as though they’d never gone. She immediately and perfunctorily sends them out for burdock. Her bones ache, she says, and burdock is so stubborn. It needs strong young backs.
So they go.
“Will you tell her?” Hitsugaya asks.
It was the purpose of this trip, to tell her: Your Momo-chan is a Vice-Captain in the Gotei now.
It’s a rare thing, especially when so often all that awaits a child in Rukongai is death. But Hinamori isn’t sure what their grandmother knows, or doesn’t, of the Gotei. A shinigami is a shinigami, and perhaps it is enough for her to know they are alive and healthy. Shinigami aren’t well-celebrated in Junrinan, which the Academy claims is all the fault of the nefarious Shiba who live there. But Grandma has made her living giving names to those that need them—to the Hinamori and the Hitsugaya who need those names for their exams, for instance. She did not let them go so much as make it possible to have gone at all. It might please her, to know that Hinamori has done so well.
“I don’t know,” says Hinamori. “Did she seem—"
They cut quickly through the easy edges of the forest, past where others have already come and gone. Burdock flourishes in the disturbed soils of game paths and ecotone, but the two of them can seek disturbances where most in Junrinan would not dare tread. Where Menos walk, the fishhook curve of their boots turn the soils, uproot brambles, cut through the footprint of trees. It is as though they have a thousand feet, all shuffling through topsoil.
Junrinan has a thousand folktales, and most of them are about getting eaten in the woods. Shinigami can be eaten in the woods, too, though as far as Junrinan goes, as a Vice-Captain this is not a great concern of Hinamori’s.
Hitsugaya hasn’t brought caution with him, either, which is very different from every other time they’ve gone into these woods before. It’s not bravery, but confidence. He knows he has nothing to fear.
Hinamori is assiduously deaf to the Hitsugaya rumor mill, which began during Academy and has likely never stopped, though the cut of Divisions from one another serves as an effective damper and the nature of the Seireitei has always been to fly so many rumors that none will ever matter. Rumor is not the way she wants to know him. Still, she wonders what kind of power Hitsugaya would have to be holding inside him before he’d let himself be uncautious. Uncaution does not come easily to him. Or it hadn’t.
She wonders if she still has ways to know him.
The burdock, already flowered, towers above them. Double Hitsugaya’s height, nearly double hers. A hand of burrs skritches against the silk in her hair, but there is young burdock here, too. Hinamori remembers the burdock of her childhood being large enough to cower under, with leaves like blankets, fanning out over the ground in a green rosette. It is just as massive now.
“That one looks good,” she says, realizing the silence only after breaking it. Hitsugaya nods, and on either side of the plant, they drop to their haunches and begin to dig.
It’s traditional to dig by hand in Junrinan, without instrument, soil still cold from the season’s first frost but wholly unlike the hard clay in the rivers. This is the part that Grandma can no longer do, Hinamori thinks as her fingers flex through soil. By contrast, this is probably good for Hinamori, for any hand that grips a sword. This is the kind of open-palmed stretch the 4th always counsels and no one listens to, not even Hinamori.
“I think Kira-kun is planning to sit for the lieutenant’s exam soon,” Hinamori says, thinking of the 4th. “Ichimaru-taichou hasn’t officially started looking yet, but—”
“Makiya wants out,” finishes Hitsugaya. This is only one of the Seireitei’s toothless rumors, but apparently everyone’s heard it. Captain Ichimaru and the 3rd's longtime interim, Makiya Ryoei, are not a fit.
“An opportunity with the Kidou Corps,” Hinamori translates diplomatically.
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“The 4th hasn’t been good for Kira-kun. He’s interested in the study, but the culture—”
She doesn’t know why she’s telling Hitsugaya this. The guilt, perhaps. They’d come to the 5th together, she and Kira and Abarai, but Hinamori is the only one it worked for. Kira was miserable, so left; and now he’s miserable elsewhere, alone. And Abarai—Abarai is difficult to describe. After he’d transferred out to the 11th he’d ended up in jail so many times it had actually become a tax issue. Hinamori’s not sure how that’s even possible, and Abarai’s explanation hadn’t helped. It all seemed worrisome, except that it also seemed like an 11th thing, and the fact that Abarai had taken the time to sort it all out did not feel to Hinamori like mindless self-destruction, no matter what it looked like. (“It’s actually pretty interesting,” Abarai had said of the tax code. “There’s like seven forms you can fill out and actually make money! And it turns out Yumichika—he’s our Fifth Seat—he’s pretty cool about this stuff.”)
Still, with a record like his, no other division would ever touch him again; no one leaves the 11th. And Abarai had had a goal.
It all feels perilous. Like maybe they won’t make it—not all of them, not together. It makes Hinamori feel like her own fortunes have been purchased at cost. She’s made Vice-Captain under a leader she adores, and it’s been good for her. Tobiume is snatching at her mind, always, begging to soar. But if she’d spent less time— And more time—
“Now that I’m Vice-Captain, I have more control over my schedule. I could visit more,” she suggests. She doesn’t know whether she means Junrinan or the 10th.
Hitsugaya doesn’t think that’s how it works. And when Hinamori tries to invoke Matsumoto, the way Matsumoto is somehow able to butterfly over everything, he says, you’re not her. Which hurts, but not because it’s untrue or because Hinamori needs it to be false. Maybe it’s divorced from any kind of truth or need. It’s part of something else.
Hitsugaya rephrases. “Matsumoto can be deeply irresponsible. Matsumoto is often professionally irresponsible. That’s all I meant.”
It’s not all, even if it’s all he intended to give. Hinamori feels the insinuation of roughly ten years’ worth of thoughts Hitsugaya has had about the Gotei. Maybe he’s right and this is not the place for such thoughts, out here in the forest, black dirt under their nails and roots coming up. It would ruin the illusion of return—to Junrinan, to them. But Hitsugaya has no taste for the illusive. He doesn’t even like the puppet shows that tell the tales of Junrinan, bringing fantasy to life. He liked them even less than he liked the idea of being eaten in the woods, and the glee with which the puppeteers would warn of this. He hates the lie of it.
At last, the root is ready. Hinamori tugs, and it comes up whole. There’s good energy in it, so much so the root feels warm to the touch, the hum of concentrated reishi making itself known. After the first frost, all life sends energy to its roots, returns it to where it came from.
There’s something about the way Hitsugaya jumps when she gives it to him—not a lot, just a hiccup. About the way he holds it like a live thing, one hand under its head and the other gently brushing dirt from its tip. The way his hands are too small to reach all the way around its thickest point, the feel of his knuckles as their hands touched in the handoff. It makes her want to the hug the root between them, to feel his cheek against hers, and probably the struggle of his shoulders as he tries not to want to escape.
Hinamori claps the dirt from her hands. It’s already stolen all their moisture, and her skin feels tight.
“I miss this,” she says, even though she hadn’t meant to. Then she has to ask, “Do you?”
“I don’t live here anymore, either,” Hitsugaya says.
Hinamori does not know whether that means of course or stop.
--
“You’d have to take this,” Hitsugaya says of the burdock root. “It’s no good frozen.”
It might be better, she’d said, if. You know, before we—
Hinamori takes the burdock in one hand and draws her zanpakutou with the other. Hitsugaya had declined to spar, though this was probably for the best. In periods of flux like this, traditional swordsmanship is not always available. Toibume has little desire to be a sword today.
Tobiume needs to fly.
Hinamori calls out her release, which she has always felt was as much for everyone around you as it was for her and Tobiume. She watches Hitsugaya brace himself, and wonders a little too late if this will hurt him. Not hurt, exactly, but Hinamori knows well the febrile nausea that strong reiatsu can incur, the head-pounding bone-splitting weight of it. To date, her reiatsu has never had this effect on anyone, but such are growing pains. Maybe it would now. As their lieutenant, Ichimaru had subjected them to the feeling weekly. With any luck, he’d said, one day you’ll share this with your own fresh meat recruits.
Hitsugaya does not look nauseous, but when she looks for him, peering through the mirage-heat of her own reiatsu, his mind indeed looks full. He looks like someone who has had a lot of thoughts about the Gotei, and perhaps as many about her.
Hinamori realizes Hitsugaya has never seen her shikai. They are not traditionally shared, not across divisions. Not unless you’re Captain Aizen. Once, on his way to give an Academy demonstration, Captain Aizen counseled, Oh, share widely! It’s how the Gotei grows. But you should only share what can’t be used against you. Share what can’t be stopped.
Hinamori can feel Tobiume beat against her ribcage. She can feel talons at her wrist as Tobiume pushes off, even though Tobiume is no bird that anyone can see but Hinamori. Her feathers cut as they surge past Hinamori’s face. Tobiume’s flight path feels like she is rushing to the skies of Junrinan but also burrowing through Hinamori’s belly, toward some other world. It feels like both at once. She is fire in her throat and also the meat-taste of the dead. She is vertigo as Tobiume sweeps and darts but Hinamori’s own feet stay anchored to the ground, she is muscle asserting itself over wind and gravity.
Captain Aizen told her it won’t always feel like this, so she should enjoy it while it lasts. Bankai, he supposes, returns some of that flavor. But as they say about birds in hand, he chuckles. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Hinamori-kun.
Cherish this.
Hinamori is lost, for a moment, in her own reiatsu. She loses the certainty of her body in space, her body versus Tobiume’s, and this is why Tobiume had needed to fly—so she could come home exhausted, Hinamori certain of her borders, Hinamori no longer overflowing, spilling, feathers batting behind her eyes and the dead in her teeth.
After ten years or five days or perhaps negative time, slow eternity, Tobiume comes home, docile and bird-shaped and in only one plane, the one in Hinamori’s heart. But Hinamori does not, she realizes, step back into reality. She is inside Hitsugaya.
There’s no dragon to be seen—for all her avoidance of rumor, a dragon is hard to miss—nor even any ice. She brings the burdock closer to her body, but it’s not colder than it’s been all day, not more than the slow slide of the temperature as the sun goes down. And yet. Every molecule feels like Hitsugaya. Then it feels wet and heavy, like a storm is coming. Then dry, dead-of-winter cold, the kind where the snow squeaks under your feet. Tears fill her eyes as the pressure in her nose and cheeks swing wildly. They freeze in her lashes and then every part of her body feels wet.
Then it feels like a storm is coming, but no longer feels like anyone.
Hinamori is sorry to have missed the rest.
--
When they return, it is as Hinamori had—not feared, exactly, or worried. It is as Hinamori had felt, is all she is willing to say. Grandma is not expecting guests, least of all strangers. They are the strangers.
It’s been happening, when Hinamori comes to visit. Only sometimes, usually at night. But Grandma does not remember the burdock, and she does not remember them. Either of them.
Hitsugaya is turned partway to the door, a stranger with no business being here. Hinamori gets the impression he’s walked out like that before. But the fact he hasn’t left suggests there are times he’s also stayed.
She takes his hand. “She needs us,” Hinamori assures him.
Someone else—likely someone equally a stranger to her—had already lit her hearth, made sure she’d have coals throughout the night. They’d made her a little tea, though it smells like it has gone straight through her.
“Get water,” says Hinamori, and Hitsugaya is happy to be gone.
“Granny,” Hinamori says, “Let’s get you out of these wet clothes.”
Grandma does not have the strength in her to stand at first, though she is strong enough to say that she would like to. Okay, says Hinamori. Okay, we can do that. In the time that it takes Hitsugaya to return with a kettle of water, Grandma is standing, most of her weight slumped against Hinamori, who is on her knees, arm wrapped around the woman’s diminutive waist. She says she is tired of standing.
“Just a little—longer—” Hinamori hopes, as Hitsugaya fumbles with the tie of Grandma’s yukata and struggles equally with pulling it from her shoulders. It is as though he thinks she will tear if he does not do it carefully. Perhaps it seems that way, with her crepe-skin sagging on her, the billow of plumper, younger days. Hinamori’s knees find her still heavy enough.
In a manner not that different from the way Hitsugaya had held their burdock, Hinamori has him hold Grandma’s legs and back as she removes the soiled fundoshi. She wipes down the insides of her grandmother's thighs first, then her buttocks, her privates. She thinks of the centuries this flesh has spent here. Millenia, perhaps. Hinamori has spoken to many of the souls in Junrinan, and none have ever said they knew another soul as old as this one.
“I need to find someone with fresh cloth to spare,” says Hinamori.
Hitsugaya looks stricken. He doesn’t want her to go, and does nothing to hide nor tame this. He looks at her with everything short of actual words: Don’t go.
But he says, “Take your time.”
It will be easy. Hinamori still has friends here, and of course everyone knows Grandma. Of the children Hinamori had once played with, some are grown. Some are children yet—they are Hinamori’s measure of Hitsugaya no longer actually being one, because now these friends reach only to the bottom of her ribs. Hitsugaya is taller than that. Some, of course, are gone.
It was Grandma who told her that that would be the nature of things. Time works differently in every place and on every soul. She has seen it happen in a thousand thousand ways.
Momo-chan, she said, may you be a thousand thousand and one.
--
They will have to leave in the morning, so they need to wash the linens now.
“I can go,” says Hitsugaya.
No. They should talk.
“She’s asleep now,” says Hinamori. “We can go together.”
At this, the relief Hitsugaya feels is so intense he doesn’t care what the corollaries are. What they’ll have to talk about. He becomes her shadow. He wants to be close. Then Hitsugaya surprises her further by being the first to speak.
“I thought that if I left, then she’d get better,” he says. He tells her about his reiatsu, and the cold, and Matsumoto. All are stories Hinamori had not known before.
For several hours, it had been easy for Hinamori to forget about Soul Society entirely, and to think only of Junrinan. But of course, it turns out Soul Society is never far behind.
She says, “It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“It’s just time. It’s how time works,” she says, as though there is only one way that time can work.
“If it wasn’t me, and never was, then I could have stayed. And she would have someone.”
“You know that’s not true.”
They are masking their reiatsu now. It’s an advanced skill, and something no amount of genius could have given Hitsugaya on his own. It requires training. It requires ten years in the Gotei. Hinamori can feel that time even in the ways they do it. Hinamori’s mask is sleight of hand: Layers of kidou shunting and refracting as though she has a world of tiny mirrors at her disposal. She’d learned this from Captain Aizen, not from his instruction but from careful observation. It’s one of the skills she is proudest of. She can’t quite figure out how Hitsugaya does it, except that it is not that.
Her point is, it’s a skill hard-gotten and imperfect. It remains to be made perfect. The only reason it works so well now is that they’d let most of their energies go at the edge of the forest, into the sky and the air in the shape of a bird and a dragon.
It’s not good for souls to spend much time with power like that, even if they are young and hale. And Grandma is not. Besides, she has Junrinan. She is not alone, even without them.
Hitsugaya could not have stayed. The wind picks up, and it is proof enough of that. The storm they’d left behind at the edge of the woods is blowing in.
It’s just as well. This way, the water will come to them. The rain comes down torrents, thick August drops except that it’s November. They’re soaked instantly, but the washbucket fills to Hinamori’s knuckles in no time at all, and she works at the laundry with soap as water sluices down her arms.
Hitsugaya apologizes by way of explanation. Not for the stupid guilt, but for the weather. This is not his shikai. It is something that tends to also happen when he tries to use his shikai. If he can bite it off, give it a name, make it into its own technique to be conjured at will and not as inevitability, then that would be—better. And if he can’t—
The moment Hinamori removes the cloth twist from their bucket and begins to tip the water out into the gutter, wind tunnels through the alley behind the house and rips the bucket from her hands. It sails clear to the roof across the street, and spins like an errant wheel across the thatch until it finds the edge. It goes flying.
Perhaps it is her exhaustion, or the absurdity, but Hinamori’s laughter is immediate and uncontrollable. When she and Hitsugaya run after it and end up on hands and knees, knocked to the ground by the sheer force of the open gales, it does little to quell her laughter.
Reiatsu is the answer. Reiatsu to anchor and shunpo to catch up with the bucket. It’s an easy fix, except for how thoroughly soaked they are and how blinding the rain. Hinamori finds his hand and he squeezes tight and it feels a lot like before—not before before but today, at the edge of the forest, when Tobiume flew through her and all around her she felt Hitsugaya. There is absolutely nothing between them. When she breathes she feels like he is there with Tobiume, in her heart.
She could kiss him.
The storm cell is small, if violent. Once it passes, they find their way back home, laundry wrapped around Hinamori’s shoulders and bucket safely in Hitsugaya’s arms.
Hitsugaya stops outside the door.
“Hinamori,” he says. It still feels weird to hear him call her that. She was once Momo.
“Hitsugaya-kun,” she says, because he should. Even if they’re here, in Junrinan. Even if he hadn’t before. And especially if he’s going to ask what he does.
“What would you do for Soul Society?”
“I would do anything for Captain Aizen,” Hinamori answers immediately. “I’m his Vice-Captain.”
They wring out their shihakushou and their undergarments as best they can in the entryway, before stepping up towards the hearth and hanging all of their clothing above the coals. The coal glow is red and dark, warm enough to be welcome and to light the outline of the rise and fall of Grandma in the futon. Hinamori can see little but the white of the futon and of Hitsugaya’s hair, still damp but drying very quickly.
She thinks about kissing him—just a bit. Where his neck meets his shoulders, just below the whisk of his hair.
But mostly, she thinks about his question. She’d forgotten, or chosen not to look for his eyes as the words left her mouth. I’m his Vice-Captain.
She’d answered it. But Hinamori would not have spent six hours reasoning with Maeno Mitsuyasu if she thought that question were that simple.
In that moment, Maeno, the soul, had said, You are closer to the thing itself than you are to that which serves it. You cannot go back. I cannot go back.
He’d felt great pride in this. Great certainty.
--
In the morning, Hinamori opens her eyes to the sounds of the already-awake. It is Grandma, cheerful. She is shaving their burdock. She has her memory.
“Momo-chan, it’s kind of you to visit,” she says, as Hinamori grabs her now-dry garments from one of the hooks above the hearth.
“Of c—”
“Toushirou-chan misses you when you’re away,” she says. “Will you be graduating soon?”
And she says, “You look like you need more sleep.”
But Hitsugaya starts awake the second Hinamori tries to crawl back into the futon with him. He inhales sharply. Hinamori jerks away the arm she’d let drape over his shoulder.
“The house was on fire,” he says, as Hinamori watches the nightmare fade out of him. She could have said, I dreamed of a storm. But before she can offer comfort or assurance, he adds, “But obviously, it’s not.”
And that is that.
--
Maybe what Hinamori wants to ask is, Hitsugaya-kun, why do you want to know?
--
The imagination. That's our out. Our imagination teaches us our limits and then how to grow beyond those limits. The imagination says Listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice, I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril. The imagination is the noon voice that sees clearly and says yes, this is what I want for my life. It's there to sort out your nightmare, to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to reform the nightmare into dreams that become your bedrock. If we don't listen to that voice, it dies. It shrivels. It vanishes.
The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.
Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare