Chapter Text
A lifetime had passed in the three days since they’d first been brought to the cave.
It was intended as an initiation of sorts – a first and final salvo before official graduation and then conscription. The naming, the calling, the threshing floor. A thousand and one poetic and prophetic, as well as profane, names surrounded it. But Sojiro had always just considered it the test.
Toshiro had only had his asauchi for a matter of months – which figured, given he’d condensed an entire six year tenure at the Shinō Academy into one. Sojiro had had his for almost a year and a half – since before Toshiro had even entered the academy – and as such still early, since he’d pared his own stint at the academy down into a still commendable four years.
They alone had been summoned to the cave, long ahead of the other sixth years. Aspiring early graduates still had to attempt the test of acquiring their zanpakuto’s name before even being offered up to sign. If they couldn’t pass, they would continue on with their studies until their powers had matured enough to connect to the other half of their spirit, both dodging the rest of the graduation fanfare with a safe margin of time so as not to be immediately noticeable, and thus also the loss of face by promising themselves to anyone before they were ready.
Worse, they could be left with the masses who never would pass the test, and were therefore doomed to die vaingloriously as a chit in a log buried beyond remembrance. Or, if totally forsaken of inspiration or heart, they could swamp out dormitories at the academy as the old man Yoshino did for seemingly endless waves of wayward students. Toshiro had always seen something else in the man’s reluctance, a wisdom in his choice of insouciance. But how he could be content with his irrelevance, Sojiro had never been able to understand.
Here they stood on the verge of eminence, raw might thrumming in their veins, bright futures stretching out ahead of them. How could anyone refuse that call, to greatness? To power?
He had been nearly ready to blast boulders out of excitement as they waited at the mouth of the catacombs for their proctor and personal zanjutsu mentor to arrive. It was a clear day, good weather to work on kidō that might be more tenuous in rain or wind. Surely he could get in a few quick casts to take the edge off.
Yet... Sugimoto never arrived late, he reminded himself, nor early – only if and when he precisely said or meant to.
So he had turned his mind to the conundrum that somehow Toshiro’s shō was still more powerful than his own byakurai, though he was leveling that power differential quickly through their practices together. But lobbing kidō around to pass the time until their test hardly reflected the staid meditation they would have to exhibit in order to reach their interior worlds, and commune with their other halves.
Toshiro seemed bored, as was his usual moue when his mind was a million miles away, but Sojiro knew him better. He too was excited, albeit in a way that was strangely tranquil compared to his usual biting focus. As if, like usual, he already knew the answer to the question being asked of him.
Sojiro hadn’t heard his zanpakuto’s voice before that day, but he’d always had a sense that his blade was being patient with him. That it was waiting for something. Sometimes he got a flicker of mirth when he made a mistake, or a thrum when doing certain drills in the field, but he hadn’t been able to divine their pattern. That day, it had been imperative that he not only have his first conversation with his zanpakuto, but to learn its name. To hear it call to him, and answer in kind.
Perhaps all it had been waiting for from him was an introduction. A knock at the door, a soulful hello, as it were.
Without that intrinsic relationship forged, his future would be put off for another year. And he’d also miserably lose the bet he’d made against Toshiro – and too many of his other friends to not be at least somewhat shaming – that he’d walk out of the academy with a zanpakuto’s name and a seated position in a division. They were steep odds, but that was what youthful ignorance was for. And he’d found that friendly bets between classmates helped them to motivate each other.
Toshiro was pretty much impervious to that kind of social badgering, which is why he had only stooped to bet against him getting a seated position, which was a fair cop, if also perfectly in line with his sense of humor.
It also meant, underhandedly, that Toshiro didn’t doubt his ability to forge a connection with his zanpakuto, and that thought was what had finally calmed him enough to be able to bow respectfully when their instructor arrived and ushered them into the most important moment of their lives to date.
How little he realized that feeling of importance would hold true, in the most ruthless of fashions.
The words were still echoing in his heart when they’d been pulled apart at the mouth of the cave after the incendiary results of their trial. He’d turned them over, time and again, wondering what he had missed, what they had done wrong. What they even could have done wrong.
What was going on, which none of their usually reliable elders weren’t able to tell them.
“Child, do you think you think you’re capable of mastering me?”
“I do! Obey me now, Hyorinmaru!”
Words inscribed in history, laid down in stone. And that was that.
Wasn’t it?
He thought back to his friend, who by then had been sequestered in another wing of whatever strange quarters they had been separately and forcefully escorted to. Had it been the Kidō Corps barracks? The Stealth Force stockade? Or was this just a staging platform that led to the Maggot’s Nest?
Toshiro had been stock still after the test, for the first time since they’d met his eyes truly wide like a child’s, unbelieving. As if seeing an act of parlor trick magic for the first time. He hadn’t shared in Sojiro’s excitement, but in the moment he thought – and hoped – that the other prodigy had merely been just as struck by the wonderful unlikelihood as he was. That this meant their friendship was written in the stars, predestined. Special.
When they were allowed to see one another again, one day ago, Toshiro’s guarded expression told him that his silence had not merely been in shock. And, unfortunately, as their meeting before Central 46 had later proven, he had been right to be cautious of their newfound blessing.
Then, he had been the one left awestruck in that damnable coliseum of aged, faceless voices, when Toshiro had promptly offered to resign Hyorinmaru to stave off the slavering hoard who had begun to bay for their blood. In all of their conditioning, and all of the successful training drills they’d done – even against real, albeit low-level hollows – Sojiro had never once lost his nerve. In spite of those very real successes, he had been left bloodless, standing there on straw stilts that threatened to crumble beneath him if he dared move too quickly, act too quickly, think too quickly.
Sojiro Kusaka, having heard the voice of his zanpakuto for the first time only two days prior, was unwilling to face living another day without it. Was struck immobile at the mere notion of being once again left alone in the universe, let alone to deal with the existential failure that would come with relinquishing what was rightfully his.
Toshiro Hitsugaya, who Sojiro knew had been hearing Hyorinmaru for years prior to coming to the academy, whose manifested powers were so in-tuned with the legendary ice dragon as to have nearly spelled his fate out in writing since the moment he was born again into the Soul Society, was prepared to sign himself over – all of his talent, his potential – to living out the long mundanity of the rest of his life with less than half of his soul.
So long as it meant sparing his friend’s life.
He had tossed and turned the night between their death sentence and their duel, like the words tumbling through his head. Warring against good conscience and the drive he’d had all of his life to protect the Soul Society, any sense of justice he might have had battering against the consuming emotions tied to not losing this now intrinsic part of himself, he always came to the same inexorable conclusion. And it only made him angrier. At their circumstances, at their fate, at his fate.
He was going to lose.
Thus, he decided, late in the morning when the clawing shadows of deathly infinity drew too close for comfort, he could not afford to.
The dawn came in slow increments, bright and cold, relentless in its challenge. But he was ready when the masked guards came to escort him to meet that fate.
They were returned to the cave he had been so eager to enter three days before and sealed in by some of the darkest spells known, yet left artfully out of the books available at the Academy. Neither of their not inconsiderable creativity or spiritual pressure stood a chance at breaking them, not this century or the next several dozen.
The duel was set, the expectation excruciatingly clear. Only one of them would be leaving the cavern.
He had taken great care to position himself well, his previous eager twitchiness from just a few days ago harnessed into knowing discipline. Had he been a few paces away from Toshiro, he would never have managed the strike. For all his own skills, he knew that in a fair fight he had neither the speed nor the power to match the younger prodigy’s ability for uncanny foresight and practical improvisation. But the adrenaline, the will to not only survive but emerge the victor, the rightful owner of Hyorinmaru, had raced up his spine like a riptide and steadied his hand like he’d needed it to.
This was his. Questions of honor could come later, in silent nights when he would no longer have his friend to turn to for startlingly deep insight.
The grip of his sword was warm against his palm, the bindings fitting perfectly against the callouses he’d earned in wielding it. For the first time since their test, he felt finally that they were one.
He no longer cared whether Toshiro could or would understand. All he needed was already there, in the palm of his hand.
That day, he chose his blade over his honor, and before the match was even done being declared he had turned on his friend – his inspiration, his mentor – and carved him nearly in two.
The hit pierced him through – what little of him there was, and he would recall for decades later truly how little he had been – just to the left of his navel. It was a clean flick of the wrist and the twisting of well-trained muscles, and the edge of his blade made quick work of organ and muscle and bone and spinal cord. Just wide of four inches, barely a touch, and the younger man’s deadened legs had him falling off of his blade. There had been no need to complete the full arc of the strike, and he watched, in awe of his own impassivity, as the youngest and most esteemed future graduate of the Shinō Academy folded onto the floor of that cursed cavern, never to rise or to re-emerge.
To his amazement, Toshiro was still conscious even as the pool of his own lifeblood widened beneath him. With a face twisted with agony, teeth visibly grinding to contain the primal scream every thing roared when its paltry life winked out of existence, he levered himself up onto an elbow, his other hand still resolutely gripping Hyorinmaru’s hilt. When those Caribbean eyes opened, there was no question in them. There was no wet betrayal, no plea for mercy. Those were past realities, cast aside.
Now, there was only hatred. And that damnable, fey understanding, flickering like a cornered wildfire in his eyes.
Hatred was an emotion Hitsugaya never allowed himself to show, and struggled ceaselessly to never let himself stoop to feeling. Sojiro’s choice, it seemed, had set loose the torrent the other man kept carefully dammed so as to shield others from its wroth. There was no longer any reason to stop himself from ruining them all.
Were it not for his small body, bleeding out in the dirt at the feet of the only person who had dared to call him a friend.
In his final moments, Hitsugaya had every right to hate him. But Sojiro couldn’t regret his choice, or lack thereof. He rolled his knuckles against the grip of his sword, looking between his blade and its mirror as it sat closed in a steady but tiny fist.
But much to his astonishment, the air around the sword in his hand seemed to shatter, and suddenly the tsuba had lost its diamond star shape, instead reflecting only the blank, unembossed oval of all unnamed asauchi. The blade still dripped its hard-earned gore, but did not speak to him. It did not call his name, did not bellow at him. It merely reflected back the choice that he alone had made, in increasing, echoing judgment.
“This can’t be,” he cried, half tempted to shake the wretched thing like a petulant child, hoping to dispel the illusion. “Hyorinmaru is mine! It belongs to me!”
“He is not an it,” Hitsugaya spat, and there was blood bubbling over his teeth as his lips pulled back in a draconian snarl. Even in death, he was a thing to be feared; a force of nature, cheated. “And he was never yours.”
True to his proclamation, ice had begun to crawl up over Hitsugaya’s useless legs. It was horrific, albeit beautiful. The frost overcoming his tiny frame came not in cumbersome planes or blocks, but in billowing filigree – a million tears wrought into individually unique snowflakes against his cooling skin as his heart began to lose out over the blood Sojiro had loosed from it.
Now-nameless zanpakuto or not, rage boiled to the surface of his own heart, fast and brilliant. He raised his blade against his friend for the second time that day, uncaring of the face or soul he would lose in carving down the already dying if only for the satisfaction of it. Of hacking the fight out of Hitsugaya’s defiant eyes, if he had to.
A wave of black bodily forced him back from the carcass slowly freezing against the rock, and still he resisted against the hands of the Stealth Force until he faced the backs of three haori.
He stared at those numbers – 1, 2, and 4 – wondering why they weren’t looking to him, the victor. Why they refused to face him, to help him, to guarantee him his just reward.
His rage turned impotent, and it took him a moment to realize over the burning in his face and the ringing in his ears that there were stern words being exchanged between the three captains. Words which cared so little for his presence that he might as well not even have been there, in spite of having been entrapped at the bloody crux of it all.
“It cannot be lost, it is too powerful a force to pass out of this world now,” the Captain Commander stated, and it became clear to Sojiro, suddenly and brutally, that what mattered most in this damnable charade had never him.
It had never been either of them, just two boys, pitted against one another in a fight to the death.
It was the sword that mattered, the power that mattered. They were just the vessels, deployed to ensure its retained usefulness – so the Gotei wouldn’t lose a valuable weapon.
“I’m afraid it’s too late.” The serene glide of the Squad 4 captain as she stepped through the pool of blood to hover a hand over the small body revealed that Toshiro had gone still in those precious moments while greater powers stood by. When the head healer’s searching kidō found no trace of life, her hand swept to the face slowly being overtaken by frost, closing glassy eyes framed by snowy lashes for the last time. “His soul is already draining away. Hyorinmaru will not return until another reincarnation cycle is completed.”
In confirmation of her words, the frosted corpse creaked once, twice, and then erupted into a cloud of diamond dust that swept out of sight on an impossible gale within the sealed room. But disappear it did, with a drum of dragon thunder, beholden to none of them within – or without – of the miserable scene.
The duel was over. The trial was not.
Like a strike of lightning the eyes of the Stealth Force commander turned on him, and rather than anger or shame, for the first time he began to feel himself burn with fear.
What had he done?
“What a waste.” It was spat on a whisper, and he felt filthy under the trail of her gaze as it carelessly dodged his face and settled on his now nameless, masterless zanpakuto.
There was another cold gaze searching him, and it wasn’t the Captain Commander’s. Captain Unohana regarded him nakedly but emptily, having stood and respectfully stepped back to allow the ice to fully encase the tiny body left of all their damnable meddling, before it had shattered into oblivion.
Finally, Yamamoto spoke. “Leave this one to the Academy. One early graduate failing the naming ceremony is reason enough.”
The unexplained disappearance of the other won’t be, however, he thought, his heart hammering against his tongue as his thoughts raced toward his inchoate future.
“Impossible. He’s a liability. If he cracks,” and Sojiro hated to agree with the leader of the Stealth Force just then, more than anything, but she was right – he would crack, he felt then at any second, “there’s no telling the damage he could cause.”
The Head Captain didn’t argue the point, and though those eyes, entrenched in lines of age, failed to open or look at him, he could feel their judgment on him all the same. Which meant he agreed, and that Sojiro’s life was rapidly – precipitously – becoming forfeit.
Today had been a different manner of test entirely, and he, the sole survivor, had been found sorely wanting.
“Give him to me.”
Normally, he would have wept with relief at Captain Unohana coming to his aid. For all he had seen of her up until that point, she was the paragon of the earth mother – a healing goddess, sound of mind, body, and emotion. A pillar of strength for the entire Seireitei, a bastion of sanity against even the hardest of times.
But when her voice bid for him, it was devoid of any such mundane kindnesses. And as he dared to look at her, he found no trace of emotion – or even humanity – in the cold indigo of her eyes. He only found a knowledge of death so profound that it exceeded it, stretching far beyond the boundaries of fear or instinct.
He could not kill her if given a thousand lifetimes, and if he dared to stretch a hair out of line, she would eradicate him. Perhaps not more quickly than Head Captain Yamamoto, but certainly more painfully, and with far, far greater pleasure. Such was the promise, and the threat in her eyes.
Yamamoto merely nodded, and with a wave of his wide-knuckled hand the strongest barriers able to be erected by scores of Kidō Corps fell like a shorn curtain.
The other two captains departed immediately, leaving him with his savior, and his executioner.
It’s only a matter of time, her gaze said, neither gleeful nor uncertain. To her, this was divine fact, to the point that it was merely a chore of waiting for him to fail again.
“You will report to me singularly, Sojiro Kusaka.” She unsheathed her sword, but seemed to have slaked her thirst for his fear, and was no longer interested. Instead, she touched the tip of her blade to the pool of blood left on the cavern floor, and he watched, horrified, as the metal seemed to swallow it in, leaving no trace of what once had been the life force of Toshiro Hitsugaya. “So long as you serve the Soul Society.”
The moment I stray, he thought, will be my last.
Sojiro knew, with sudden and brutal clarity, that Toshiro’s sparing things would be gone from their shared dormitory when he returned there. And that he, upon arrival, would be faced with an entirely new set of trials. Years of them, in the form of unanswerable questions, stretching out into whatever of his future remained.
For his return, and Toshiro’s failure to return, would be lost on no one. Perhaps if their roles had been reversed, Toshiro’s austerity would have passed without notice, or chalked up to grief at the loss of his friend to an undoubtedly vague “training accident,” or even a general failure to survive a premature zanpakuto trial.
But as he watched the Fourth Division captain disappear, and was then left with only his own panting breath bouncing back at him from the stalagmites and stalactites, he didn’t wonder at how he was ever going to survive her. It was a foregone conclusion.
Instead, he wondered at how he was going to survive the stares, the questioning looks, the whispers that would undoubtedly dog his heels from the moment he resurfaced at mess the following morning, potentially to the ending of his days.
Everyone graduating – many of whom Toshiro had bested, and some of whom could still best Sojiro – would not be fooled. Their instructors could not be fooled. His own friends, very likely, would not be fooled. No matter how clever the cover-up, Sojiro had never been a proficient liar. He had never even been good at cards, or betting, which is why most people trusted to place bets with him.
And he wasn’t like Toshiro – he had never mastered the art of walling himself up from the world behind a glacier, safe and numb from petty or even grievous harm.
As he staggered from the cave, sick, empty, and wanting for answers, he realized he’d never felt Hyorinmaru. He’d never felt the brush of ice, or what a sudden chill powerful enough to summon avalanches could entail.
What did a glacier smell like on high mountain air? How did different levels of chill bite at the skin? What did all the various kinds of snow sound like, underfoot?
He didn’t know.
He’d only heard a voice, and though the words rang clear, the more he tried to recall the voice, the more distorted the memory became. He knew the voice, even in those wilting ripples of memory, but he couldn’t place where between the loss in his mind and the maze that had just become his life.
There was a guard waiting for him at the entrance back into the world, there to make sure he didn’t bolt, or worse, run his mouth to any faithful adult whose ear he might bend. For although the Shinō Academy was supposed to stand separate, there was only so distanced an academy could remain when it was built to service the powerful.
The eyes of Central 46 rested heavily on his back, every painstaking step back to his dormitory that night. He wondered how many years it would take for him to no longer feel like they were waiting in every shadow.
The rest of the Academy was fast asleep under the naked moonlight, save for a few ambitious first and second years scuttling away from the library in wake of the threat of bodily harm from the head librarian, no doubt. Toshiro had dodged that routine, unlike the rest of them, by masking his spiritual pressure. Well, and literally falling asleep on top of bookcases where no one could see him. Let it never be said he hadn’t used his slight stature to his advantage, whenever an advantage could be found.
He shoved out the memory of that discovery, of a snowy head using a disproportionate tome on feudal economics as a pillow, the night before their final tactical examination with the rest of the sixth years, as far from his mind as he could possibly push it.
It wasn’t far enough.
When he reached his room – their room – he found it cleared of any trace of the once to-be graduate. Of his friend.
Of the first man he had ever killed.
He strode through the room as it seemed to tilt, padding over open space that had never been his. Though they had bemoaned the barracks, then their dorms, then their shared room, they had never bemoaned each other the space it took to think and to work.
Standing where Hitsugaya’s desk should have been, he could practically feel all the work the other prodigy had invested in him bleeding from his feet and through the floorboards.
Stumbling, he collapsed clumsily against the shelves now containing only a single bedroll before he went into a fit of dry heaves. He looked down at his hands, wondering when or where he’d had the foresight to sheath his sword before returning to the grounds. When his shaking hands pulled it out of its sheath, it was still caked with dried blood, unfit treatment for the first real bloodying of a blade.
He dropped it in a clatter to the floor. Perhaps this maltreatment deserved to remain. That blood, regardless of being wiped away, would remain on the blade and on Sojiro’s hands forever. And no one, not Central 46, the three captains who had been witness to his failure, nor the ghost of Toshiro Hitsugaya would ever let him forget it.
Later, as he laid staring at the ceiling, remembering the look in his friend’s dying eyes. The death that he himself had put there.
What struck him was that it hadn’t just been cold rage. It was the kind of rage that froze the planet. Permafrost or an ice age, waiting to be unleashed.
And though Sojiro knew little of Hyorinmaru aside from his fading voice and shape, he knew from legend that dragons could have interminable, deadly patience. And revenge, as the old saying went, was a dish best served cold.
His naked blade sat across the room where he had left it, and he winced realizing it now lay where Toshiro should have been sleeping.
Rolling over, he could only pray that if it was not the last he ever saw of Hitsugaya, Captain Unohana would be the one to take his life first.
For if nothing else, he knew full well that Hyorinmaru’s spirit would have more to do to him than even a goddess of death could imagine, should they ever meet again.