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[tozette]

A draft version of a Bleach fic idea!

I might never go anywhere further with this.

But as for this draft piece... I would tag it: Bleach fandom, Shinji & Ichimaru, Shinji POV, implied Ichigo time travel, TBTP era, Aizen haunting the text (as usual) but not actually present.

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Ichimaru called for help at three in the morning.

This came as one hell of a surprise to his captain. Ichimaru was Aizen Sōsuke's favourite, and the feeling seemed reciprocal. He clung to his lieutenant like a particularly smug tick.

But when he was in dire and unexpected trouble, it was Shinji's window to which the jigokuchō fluttered in the dark. Its soft dark wings shed reishi particles like fine powder and gently, lightly, it alighted upon his nose.

"Pfft??" Shinji shot up in his blankets, slapping at his face. Ouch? "Gfffle!"

With an air of reproach, the butterfly took flight again for one wingbeat, then two, avoiding his flailing. It landed at last upon his head as he blinked in the dimness and commenced delivering its message.

Shinji's insides went cold.

"Shit," he croaked, blinking his eyes into focus.

He staggered up from his bed in the dark while the butterfly was only halfway done, already sensing a hint of some awful spiritual power just over the horizon to the south. His shoes were by the door. Sakanade came to his hand without thinking. Beneath his sleep-stiff fingers, he could almost feel her vibrate with anticipation.

Outside, the night was cool and breezy and silent, except for the quiet murmuring of the skeleton night watch that Seireitei maintained even in peacetime. The butterfly disappeared. Shinji flash stepped to the walls and paused to sign out.

"Ah, Hirako-taichō... without your lieutenant?" The twelfth division shinigami on duty, a tall woman with a hooked nose and a thick dark braid, looked like she wanted to be doing anything except questioning him.

He smiled winsomely at the flustered young woman. "Ah, it's best to let Sōsuke-kun sleep. He's gotta take drill in three hours, anyway."

"Um... Excuse me, Hirako-taichō, protocol is..."

"The request for backup was kinda urgent," he interrupted.

"Um." The shinigami on duty blinked twice, stamped the paper for her records, and then bowed. "Have a safe journey, Hirako-taichō."

Shinji was over the wall and into Rukongai before she even straightened from her bow.

Now that he was awake, he could sense the shape of the problem, even at this distance. Ichimaru's squad was out in district 72, but it wasn't Ichimaru he could sense: it was a massive, dark spiritual pressure on the horizon, hot and throbbing like a wound in the fabric of the world.

What was it? An adjuchas? Several adjuchas? Surely not a vasto lorde. Surely.

Whatever it was, it did not bode well that Shinji could feel it all the way from district 1.

Sensing the nightmare reiatsu to the south, Shinji was no longer surprised that Ichimaru had sent for him and not Sōsuke: as technically gifted as Sōsuke was, just lately he was in the habit of strict compliance with Seireitei's rules. He would have followed protocol to the letter, checked the message against the mission register, logged it in triplicate, gathered a squad of his own, waited for approval from Shinji at first light... and looked very sweet and sad at his subordinates' funerals, of course.

Most of the time, Ichimaru cleaved to Sōsuke and treated Shinji with no more deference than he was strictly owed. But Shinji'd taken on such a young third seat because he was smart enough to make up for a certain lack of experience, and right now, he was clearly smart enough to know which of his superior officers was definitely going to come sprinting after him to fight whatever the hell that monstrous energy was.

So the jigokuchō had come to Shinji, begging for backup in the dark, and it was Shinji who took off at full speed towards that roiling mass of hollow energy.

He really hoped Ichimaru would be alive to tease about it. He couldn't sense him. Of course, it could just be interference.

An unhappy tension coiled up in Shinji's guts, and he ignored it in favour of stepping faster and faster.

It could just be interference from the adjuchas, sure.

Could also be that his young bratty third seat had gone and gotten eaten, though.

At this time of night even the drunks were abed. The landscape was dark, all its colours sucked away by the pale glow of the moon. The closest districts flew past as Shinji dashed through their narrow streets, their silence interrupted only by the snap-snap-snap of his waraji on packed earth. Drab awnings fluttered in the breeze of his momentum.

When he passed district 50, he finally caught the grim flicker of Ichimaru's reiatsu signature, bristling. At least that was still present and strong enough to sense, but having Ichimaru to compare against made it clear just how enormously powerful the hollow was.

Not an adjuchas. Or at least not just one. Dammit. What trouble had his third seat stumbled upon?

Shinji hit district 72 at a dead sprint, barely an hour after he'd received the message. He couldn't remember the last time he'd blitzed through so many flash steps in a row, but he slowed on approach because he was getting out of breath. Hiyori, he was sure, would laugh at him when she read the report: lazy, uncaring Hirako, hurtling across Rukongai at breakneck speeds in the dark because his precocious idiot of a third seat was about to get his precocious idiot self eaten.

On approach, the mess of corrupt signatures became more distinct, and it seemed there was not just one hollow — there were three, all of them had personal reiryoku signatures that didn't quantify well: all three of them seemed higher than Ichimaru's. At least one of them was higher than even Shinji's.

His third seat had at least had the good sense to have this fight in a forested area far from any village. No matter how impoverished or miserable they were out here, any man got angry when a shinigami collapsed his hovel.

Shinji slowed further, sliding between the trees quietly in hopes of understanding the situation before he entered it.

Unfortunately, he smelled it before he saw it: a familiar, rank, mineral reek that collected in the back of his throat and coated his nostrils. It was the smell of oxidising metal — red iron meeting the air.

He nearly trod in what remained of his twelfth seat in the darkness beneath the canopy. He picked out the curve of her pale cheek, a bare shoulder beneath a torn shihakushō, and a series of damp shapes and pale fragments on the moon-dappled mud that he blinked away from in short order.

...Shinji wasn't in the habit of excessive self flagellation. He knew he didn't need to try to name the anatomy strewn across the ground. It was bad enough to know it was there at all.

He picked his way around poor Michiko and ghosted through the trees, ever closer to the signatures.

This close up, those signatures loomed. The pressure was so crushing that even Shinji felt it like a band around his chest, something he had to actively shore up his reiryoku against. That his subordinates had had to fight through that kind of spiritual pressure was absurd. Nobody trained for such a thing.

He came to a clearing at last — or at least it was a clearing now, although the toppled trees and torn earth suggested that this was a recent change. As he hit the tree line, it was almost a relief to finally see the hollows and know that they were, in fact, vasto lordes. Clearly, Ichimaru had the kind of luck the gods bestowed upon those they wanted dead, yeah, but at least Shinji didn't have to face the possibility of an adjuchas — a monster with the capacity for evolution — with that kind of raw power.

There were two of the creatures, each masked but shockingly humanlike in its arrangement, with smooth armoured limbs and jagged teeth and wild tumbling hair in shades of red and black. They pulsed with a nightmarish power of a size a captain would envy.

The third, and most enormous, signature was harder to spot — just a flashing banner of streaming orange hair in the dimness, darting between the two vasto lordes in a cacophony of sword strikes.

They were, at this second, fighting among themselves, which gave Shinji the opportunity to get what he'd actually come for: his third seat, and whatever was left of his squad.

Shinji found Ichimaru immediately, for his barrier kidō — bakudō #39, Enkosen, applied with the same steady hand as all of Ichimaru's kidō — was suffused with a dull yellow glow that was impossible to miss. He was backed up against a lone tree in the wrecked clearing and his young face was paler than Shinji had ever seen it. There was mud smeared across his brow and he'd received a head wound that was bleeding like a faucet straight into one of his eyes. The other was wide open, watching the hollows fight. He knelt on the wet grass of the glade, breathing hard behind his barrier, which was protecting both himself and Yamaguchi Hisae, Shinji's nineteenth seat.

Shinji flash stepped again.

"Yo, Gin," he said, stepping up beside them.

Usually when he snuck up on him, Ichimaru twitched and then pretended he had known Shinji was there all along (adorable; like an adolescent cat pretending it meant to fall off the bed).

But right then, he just exhaled with an ugly grunt of relief and looked up at Shinji. His face was open and vulnerable and painfully young.

Jeez, kid. That face was enough to tug at anyone's heartstrings.

"Taichō," Ichimaru breathed. "You're here."

Beneath his bloody hand pressing down hard on her side, Hisae was breathing but unresponsive.

"Dunno what you were expecting," Shinji mused, tapping the unsheathed flat of Sakanade on his shoulder. She was vibrating in his hand, responding hungrily to the heavy pressure in the air. "What'd you think would happen when you called for help?"

Ichimaru didn't answer. Another glance at his face revealed an intentionally blank expression marked mostly by exhaustion.

Hmph. What was Sōsuke even doing with this kid, anyway? Something to look into.

The forest around them rang with the clash of metal on bone. A spark flared in the dark. Ichimaru tensed again, jaw clenched, mouth tight, and his shield went bright and solid just in time for a brutal rush of reiatsu to wash over them.

This time, even Shinji swayed on his feet. "What the hell is that?"

It occurred to Shinji that Hisae might not be unconscious because of her actual injury. Enough spiritual pressure, wielded without care, could knock a person out if they didn't have enough to brace themselves up against it.

The real reason for the shield became clearer in the next second: under the ripple of pressure, trees at the edge of the clearing tore free of the earth with a scream. Branches and leaves cracked under the weight and slammed to the ground. Several went streaming past, battering the glowing kidō disk on their way.

Another flash. The sickly red light of a cero caught the smiling edge of someone's sword. What the hell kind of vasto lorde carried a sword?

"Orange guy," Ichimaru said. "It feels like a hollow but he just looks like a guy. He said he thinks they were following him, and then they smelled our reiatsu or something. Caught up after we started running, said we'd drawn them out."

That put a weird spin on it. Shinji's little squad, attacked by two vasto lordes in the middle of nowhere in Rukongai, only for them to be intercepted by a third?

It seemed ...hilariously unlikely.

And yet, they were fighting.

"It's true you'd probably be a temptin' snack to a vasto lorde." Ichimaru might be dangerous as hell one day, but he wasn't quite there yet; any one of these guys would be pickin' him out of their teeth. Shinji's mouth tugged itself into a ferocious and toothy frown. "But hollows like this ain't exactly infighting in Rukongai every day. You got the barrier?"

"Aa." He didn't sound good, but the barrier was holding. For now.

"Right." Shinji leaned down and slapped a green-glowing hand onto Hisae's ribs, transferring as much reiryoku as he could afford to spare her. Kaidō was not his specialty, but he could help stabilise her so they could run her up to the Fourth. The first step was giving her enough spiritual energy that her body had the resources to stabilise at all.

Ichimaru was pretty clearly tapped out. Even the pale barrier of his enkosen was flickering.

He took another deep, weary breath. "Michiko —"

"Yeah. Saw her," Shinji interrupted. "Who else was out here with you?" Two unranked shinigami, if he remembered. Would they even have survived the crushing pressure of the hollows' reiatsu?

"Tondo and Hotaru," Ichimaru said dully. "Deceased."

"Shit." What a mess. Shinji blew out a deep breath, sending his sharp fringe fluttering. "I gotta admit, there was nothin' in our brief that suggested any possibility of you runnin' into three vasto lordes having a pissing contest out here. I'd never have sent you."

Hell, Shinji would have brought backup for himself.

"And ain't that a relief," said Ichimaru, not sounding very relieved.

"You get any idea where they came from?"

Ichimaru shook his head once, then cringed — probably under a wave of nausea, judging from his bleeding head. Blood really showed up on that silver hair. "Nothing. There were the two, and I thought they were going to kill all of us, and then the orange guy came out of nowhere — I didn't even sense him until he caught up. Dunno know what he wants — maybe he just doesn't like to share his dinner."

Shinji clicked his teeth. Hisae's cheeks had some colour, and her wound wasn't leaking. It'd do.

He withdrew his glowing hand and looked at Ichimaru instead.

Shinji lit one of his fingers up and passed it back and forth before Ichimaru's face. Beneath the blood, his pupils were different sizes. His eyes tracked the light, but slowly.

"These assholes are gonna be duking it out for a while, looks like... Drop the shield," he recommended. "You're done. We're leaving."

Ichimaru dropped it without protest, plunging them all into colourless moonlight again.

Shinji tossed Hisae's unconscious weight over his shoulders and stood, testing his balance. He was going to have to haul both of them out of here at speed. "Can you get onto your feet? I'm not gonna tell you to flash step, but..."

"I can flash step," Ichimaru said stubbornly. He rose, swaying.

"Oh, yeah. Sure you can," Shinji said, in a tone that indicated quite the opposite.

Ichimaru decided then to prove that he definitely could flash step with a bleeding head wound, which resulted in a) tripping straight over a tree trunk with a noisy crash, and b) vomiting with such force that Shinji got stomach acid on his socks.

"This is what I got out of bed for," muttered Shinji, scooping his gurgling third seat up.

Ichimaru was lighter than he expected for such a gangly man. It was that raw-boned, not-quite-grown body, he guessed.

"Gin-kun," he warned him, hooking his arm under his knees, "if you're gonna barf again, try to get it somewhere else."

Burdened with Ichimaru cradled to his chest and Hisae slung over his shoulders like an ugly scarf, Shinji commenced his own, very slow, flash step out of the forest. The added weight only seemed to make the towering spiritual pressure worse — either that, or, somehow, it was rising? It was hard to imagine it rising, but it was above the level Shinji could reasonably expect to sense. There was a point at which one's senses just said 'big!'

"Y'think," said Ichimaru, eyes closed and face tight with the effort not to vomit, "you think we really just ran into them by accident?"

A third seat, especially one as adept at combat as Ichimaru, would be more than a match for most hollows. Those ones, though? They likely wouldn't have noticed him, unless they got hungry.

And hollows weren't exactly known for their complex plans.

"Maybe." Shinji shuddered at the thought that such a thing was even possible, and his next flash step was rougher. "I'll have to think about that."

Whatever else could be said about all that, at least the hollows weren't following. 'Orange guy' had them thoroughly distracted.

Ichimaru groaned. He got as far as "I'm —" and then he clutched Shinji's shihakushō and coughed up a mouthful of gross bile on both of them. Even Hisae's hair didn't make it out safe.

"Thanks, Gin," said Shinji, pulling a face as the speed of his flash step chilled the vomit instantly. A single suspect yellow chunk made it inside his collar, a cold wet spot that slid slowly down his chest. "That's... real helpful."

Ichimaru panted, made a noise of pure misery, and scrunched his eyes closed.

Shinji sighed and tried very, very hard not to smell it.

"Hang on. You'll be in with Unohana-taichō in less than an hour," he promised.

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That's it! If I did go anywhere with it, I think I'd edit it a little and then maybe use it as a jumping off point for a fic in which Ichigo time travels and really hecks up the turn back the pendulum arc just by showing up — in which Shinji starts looking at Gin to look at Aizen, instead of trying to look at Aizen directly? I dunno...