A/N: Ahaha, I was supposed to be writing Seven Percent. I was not. So instead, enjoy this mini prequel-esque thing I wrote for Petrichor! I do recommend reading that too if you want a better explanation for the stormbringer/hunter concept, but that isn't necessary at all! (I think)

Starlight

Night would fall in Starlight Valley in a few hours. Hitsugaya leaned back in his chair and stretched his stiff shoulders, swearing when his second-favourite pen rolled off the table and bounced onto the floor. It had occurred to him to search for his favourite pen, but the problem wasn't that he didn't know where it was.

His lieutenant's desk was, as usual, an incorrigible mess. It was piled high with files, lunar schedules from at least a year ago, unlabelled star maps from an era before he became captain, and overdue paperwork. And somewhere in that avalanche of antiquity, was his favourite pen.

Hitsugaya sighed.

His own table was piled high with a backlog of paperwork – he still wasn't done with the damages report from the war – and none of his efforts to clear the stack seemed to be paying off. He retrieved his pen and let his gaze wander around the room.

Four enormous star maps – one for each season – hung from one wall like ancient tapestries; they had been there for as long as he remembered. Apparently there had once been some kind of accident in the office, and instead of repairing the wallpaper, the previous captain had simply bought enough star maps to hide the evidence – similar rumours surrounded the peculiar presence of a couch and thick carpet in the office of the Tenth Division.

Hitsugaya had never dared to look.

In the fading daylight, the clock chimed, signalling the end of the afternoon shift and the start of the night shift, and he wondered when Matsumoto was going to report for work.

There was a knock at the door. 'Unit Eight reporting for field duty,' a voice announced curtly – they were impeccably on time, Hitsugaya noted.

'Enter!' A different voice called out from the other end of his office. He could recognise his vice-captain's laguid lilt anywhere, and practically fell out of his chair.

He peered around his overladen desk to find Matsumoto reclining on the couch, her feet propped up on three plump cushions and a fashion magazine over her face.

Between splutters, Hitsugaya managed to find words to throw in her general direction. 'Matsumoto! How long have you been lying th- wait, I don't really want to know but get up! They'll never respect you again if they see you in this state.'

'Oh, Captain, you worry too much,' she laughed. 'If I commanded true respect, the state of my being wouldn't matter.'

The door now stood open, with ten men standing in the doorway and spilling out into the corridor, looking slightly stunned and at a loss to be caught in the meaningless bicker.

Hitsugaya cleared his throat. 'Good evening,' he greeted the men.

'Good evening, Captain Hitsugaya, Lieutenant Matsumoto!'

Hitsugaya could feel a headache building up at the back of his cranium, and Matsumoto continued to languish.

The unit leader handed him a piece of paper – their proposed schedule for the night. He liked that he could trust his soldiers to do their research and planning responsibly, and scanned the document.

Fair weather with the waxing gibbous moon nearing its perigee and minimal wind, it said. They planned to work in alternating three-hour shifts of five people each, from dusk to dawn, and projected a moderate harvest. Optimistic, given the moon, but Hitsugaya shrugged and returned the piece of paper to them.

'Take one boat; I want it in the water and ready to harvest half an hour before sunset. I will supervise the first shift in person, and Matsumoto will be on standby in the office. If you encounter any problems during the night, radio her.'

There was a groan from the couch, but the soldiers paid it no heed. 'Yes sir!'

Hitsugaya folded his arms impatiently. 'Matsumoto?'

'…Yes sir.'

.

.

Captains did not usually participate in their division's generic field duties, but Hitsugaya secretly thoroughly enjoyed harvesting starlight. He stood by the lakeside, watching as his subordinates carefully lowered the boat down the slipway into the water. The air was chilly and still, and the lake was a deep, dark oval, broken only by the splash of the boat hitting the water. The bank of gravel was constantly slick with moisture, yet the air was always fresh and never stale or dank. The surrounding granite mountains that separated Starlight Valley from its neighbouring valleys were low, but beyond the basin of the thirteen valleys was more mountains, more steep, treacherous walls of rock that closed in on them from all directions. Partway up one of the highest peaks was an immense plateau so flat it looked as if someone had sliced off the top of a mountain – the irregular rhythm of the mountain range was strangely comforting, oddly natural.

Starlight Valley was the furthest and hardest to access from the mountains, and was home to the only mining lake in all the Valleys. Even in the day, its surface was pitch black, and when the winds stilled, the water was almost like glass, almost always a hypnotic sight. When night fell, the still surface of the lake would reflect even the dimmest flickers of the stars, and the black lake would be alight with breathtaking wisps of starlight, ethereal as smoke and glimmering as diamonds.

It was the Tenth Division's job to harvest that starlight every night and supply fuel to the Valleys. The boat was now as close to the bank as possible without running aground, and the five men on first shift stood at attention along the bank, a little ways away from him.

'Ready for inspection, Sir.'

Hitsugaya nodded and waded into the lake, his thick army-issue boots keeping the water out. He hiked up one foot onto a wedge along the side of the boat, and with a practised motion, swung himself over the side and onto the deck.

First he checked the engine, then the wheel and the rudder control. By the wheel was a small table with a rumpled and weathered star map, and a large, heavy compass. He checked the compass against his own, and then against the setting sun. A small lantern on the floor had been lit, and a can of extra fuel sat by its side; at the stern was two large glass barrels for storing the harvested starlight. He ran a finger along the inner surface of each barrel, ensuring each was cleaned and dried, and that the thick glass was uncracked. Four harvesting nets, each one a finely woven net of silk thread stretched over a metal frame with an attached telescopic pole, lay on the port deck. Each was dry and free of grime and rust.

Satisfied, Hitsugaya leaned over the side of the boat. 'Sergeant,' he called from where he was.

The unit leader immediately turned to face him. 'Sir?'

'I hope at least one of you brought water, because I don't want anyone dehydrating in the middle of a lake.'

The man flushed, but saluted professionally. 'I apologise, Sir, I will inform the next shift.'

Hitsugaya nodded. 'Board, and commence preparations.' The last soldier to enter the boat, he noticed, did not have a gun on his belt. The single white stripe on the shoulder board of the man's black jacket meant he was a private, recently promoted from recruit. What an idiot, he could feel that headache slowly intensify. 'Private!'

Two men by the engine froze. Hitsugaya paused.

'…You there. Private Ogura.'

'Yes, Sir?' he asked hesitantly as he shuffled up to the front of the boat. The subordinate stood a full head taller than he was, and was clearly uncomfortable with having to look down to meet his commanding officer's stone-cold glare.

'Where, may I ask, is your weapon?'

'Right over here, Sir!' The private slapped the holster on his left hip, only to find it empty. He rapidly shifted over to slap the holster on his right hip. 'I mean, here, Si- Oh. Oh.'

'I want all my officers to be armed with at least one gun when on duty. Understood?'

By then all colour had drained from the poor man's face. 'Yes Sir.'

Hitsugaya sighed, and pulled the spare handgun from his belt, handing it over to the soldier. The butt of the gun was inscribed with three gold stars, the same symbol that adorned the shoulder boards of the captains. 'If you manage to misplace this one, Private, you'll be reporting for duty with the recruits in the morning.'

'Yes Sir.'

Hitsugaya turned to lean against the bow of the boat and waved a hand dismissively. 'Carry on.'

He closed his eyes and let the breeze wash over him as the team manoeuvred the boat under a patch of sky that was not obscured by clouds, where they stopped and waited for the last vestiges of sunlight to melt away into the horizon and plunge the valley into darkness, waited for the lake to come alive in the night. The coolness of night swept over them like a sudden gust of wind, chilly but not unpleasant, and Hitsugaya opened his eyes.

One by one, like candles being lit by an unseen force, shimmers of light bloomed on the lake, spreading as if a carpet of magic unfurled over the water. The brightness of the nearly full moon dampened the starlight on the lake, and though they glowed far dimmer than they would have on a new moon, an all too familiar rush of exhilaration swept his breath away.

The moment was quickly destroyed as Hitsugaya reminded himself that not only was he on duty, he was sort of actually in charge – a strange feeling of mixed inferiority and incompetency that visited him time and again.

He shook it off and watched absently as the starlight clung to the silk of the nets, trailing shimmers in the darkness as they raised the nets from the water into the boat, leaving the lake black, to be lit by the next stars that rose over the horizon. The three hours passed uneventfully, in which time they had combed half the lake. The far shore was alight in the distance, making the darkness around them appear deeper than it was.

The soldiers switched shifts, and Hitsugaya left for the office, where Matsumoto was, by some miracle, not on the couch.

His lieutenant was giving their inventory log and logistics budget a blank stare and was twirling a shiny black pen between her manicured fingers.

Hitsugaya decided he was entitled to the couch.

'Welcome back, Captain,' Matsumoto said dully. 'I thought you'd appreciate me getting some work done, but I really haven't.'

He couldn't quite bring himself to scowl at her. 'Nice pen,' he said instead. 'When are you putting it back in my drawer?'

Matsumoto stopped and smiled sheepishly. 'Eventually? Maybe? It's such a nice pen.'

Hitsugaya never thought it would be him on the couch with a cushion on his face, groaning at the office in general. 'I'm going to take a nap,' he announced from under the cushion.

Matsumoto gave the clock a glance before bursting out in laughter. 'At this hour, Captain, most people don't call it a nap.'

He grunted, and her expression softened for just a moment before she grinned wickedly. 'I suspect the reason your growth spurt has abandoned you is that you've never slept properly ever since they promoted you to a ranked officer.'

Hitsugaya sat up indignantly. 'You're spouting rubbish. I've only been captain for a year.'

'Recruit at age ten,' Matsumoto jabbed the pen in his direction. 'Sergeant and Unit Leader by age thirteen. I wrote all your promotion paperwork, with much suffering,' she informed him, before continuing. 'Climbed out of the infirmary's second floor window at age fourteen – I wrote the paperwork for that one too.'

'Your point is…?'

'If you ever hope to be taller than an average pre-pubescent girl, get to sleep. I heard boys keep growing until they turn eighteen, so that gives you about one and a half years? Chop chop, Captain, while I'm still offering to work while you sleep.'

It was a rare offer, Hitsugaya conceded, and decided to leave the insults about his height for another time.

.

.

Matsumoto's offer was, as it turned out, not only rare but also short-lived.

He was woken unceremoniously to Matsumoto panicking. At first he had thought it was morning, then realised that the lights were at full power and that it was still dark outside.

'Oh my god Captain wake up we need to leave there's a problem at the lake and I have no clue what's going on nobody's responding on the radio and it's just static and I don't know if it's broken or if they've lost it or what but something's happened oh my god I'm so sorry I know I told you to sleep but are you awake-'

Hitsugaya kneaded his temples as he sat up. 'Matsumoto,' he began as he tried to blink the sleep away from his eyes. The clock read one in the morning. 'Punctuation, please.'

This seemed to effectively snap her out of her frenzy. 'There's a problem at the lake, and communications are down.'

In a flash, he was up and alert. 'What kind of problem?'

'I don't know,' Matsumoto shook her head. 'Unit Eight sent a distress call and requested backup, and then we lost contact.'

Hitsugaya strode to the weapons shelf. 'There isn't supposed to be a storm tonight,' he muttered furiously at no one in particular as he hurriedly holstered two guns and loaded spare ammunition onto his belt. He checked all the clasps on the belt and clipped a communicator to his ear as he moved across the room to retrieve his jacket, and promptly swept out of the office, his heart pounding with adrenaline and his head clear and functioning as if he hadn't been asleep just five minutes ago.

Outside, the sky was layered with opaque grey clouds that swirled dangerously in a spiral over the lake, swept up with torrential rain that whirled in a large column, casting heavy rain over his valley and leaving destruction in its wake.

'Damn Stormbringers,' he swore under his breath, and broke into a run. 'Matsumoto, let's go.'

They threw themselves into the wind and rain for the first time since the war. It had been too long since he had last fought, too long since he ran for hours in the cold while soaked to the bone, too long since he had last felt the satisfaction of destroying a storm. It was times like this that made him sure he was born to be a stormhunter – born to fight.

He could feel the raw energy causing the storm – it was pure and rugged, lacking control but bursting with unrefined power, and laced with a strange edge of déjà vu. Whoever was controlling this storm was not very smart, he thought. The constant outpouring of power would eventually die out, and the storm would weaken and dissolve faster than most – it had already subsided from the Class A storm it had been when they had first left the office.

Hitsugaya let out a burst of his own energy, negating the winds around himself and Matsumoto, and without exchanging a word, the leaders of the Tenth Division poured on speed.

'Any word from the Twelfth?' he asked.

'Nope. Looks like we're on our own.'

The constant static in his ear was beginning to get on his nerves, so he impulsively flicked the switch on the communicator, and rolled his eyes when Matsumoto reminded him it was against protocol.

They were nearing the lake, where the centre of the storm and its stormbringer were, where the wind howled in their ears and the rain turned to hail. Hitsugaya was still negating the wind around them as they ran closer and closer to the centre along the spiral of the storm, but they came to a screeching halt when their path was blocked by the shore of the lake. The ache in his leg where he had torn a ligament in the war had grown exponentially since when he had first started running, and he found himself short of breath. He wasn't sure how far from the centre they were, or how much energy he needed to break through the walls of rain and hail that whipped around them.

He spotted the boat that had been taken out that night, shipwrecked and floating in pieces in the lake with glass jars of starlight tossed about in the choppy waters.

Whichever crazy stormbringer that had decided to break the peace treaty between stormbringers and stormhunters in the middle of the night with a rude trespassing was going to get his ass kicked, Hitsugaya decided. Then, he would run the Border Guard through for letting an intruder so far inland, and after that he was going to take the Twelfth apart for not alerting him to the presence of a Class A storm in his valley.

For now, he let the thrill of battle take over his senses, although he still could not rid himself of the sensation that he had encountered this same storm before. That's ridiculous, he told himself. He stopped running and closed his eyes and felt the winds around him. Carefully, he countered each undercurrent and gust with one of his own, and slowly expanded the area of his control, spinning a storm of extremely fine detail and control that would become the exact opposite of the storm they were fighting. He could feel Matsumoto boosting his efforts with her own, and briefly wondered if they had enough combined power to clear a path to the eye of the storm from where they were.

'Matsumoto,' he said lowly. 'When I tell you to, run.'

She nodded, and he carefully dredged up more power from his reserves. Without warning, he sent it explosively outwards, amazed to see a flash of calm weather only a short distance away – the eye of the storm, where they would confront the intruder. 'Go!'

They burst into the sudden calm at the centre of the storm, soaked and tired and confused.

At the core of the eye of the storm was someone he had definitely met before.

He was tall and gangly, sporting a head of unmistakeable orange hair.

He also lay unconscious in the core of the storm he was causing.

'Kurosaki? What the hell?'

The young man had been their trump card in the recent war against Aizen, and had lost his powers in the fight. The authorities had thought it best to send him back to his hometown in the hopes that they would never require his assistance again. Evidently they had not anticipated something like an unannounced invasion, and Hitsugaya had never fought an unconscious enemy before.

'How, exactly, do we stop this storm?' Matsumoto asked, voicing his own question as if she had read his mind.

'…I think we have to hit him, like how we fight most Stormbringers?' He wasn't quite sure. Most storms disintegrated easily once its Stormbringer was engaged in battle and distracted from the storm. He had no clue how to break the concentration – if any at all – of an opponent that wasn't quite there.

'Isn't attacking a hapless civilian a crime?'

Hitsugaya hesitated as he aimed a blast of energy at Kurosaki's prone form. 'If we go by the book, his presence here is a declaration of war, Matsumoto.' With one precise blow, he knocked the hero with enough force to send him rolling several times before coming to a stop, and thankfully, the storm vaporised without a trace, though the sight of his wrecked boat and the ghostly absence of the five men on duty was deeply concerning.

Hitsugaya sighed. 'We don't have enough in the budget to replace that boat, do we?'

Matsumoto pursed her lips and shook her head. 'What are we going to do with him, though?' she asked, pointing at Ichigo, who was beginning to stir.

'Call a Captain's meeting in my name, will you?'

Matsumoto turned in surprise. 'In the middle of the night? They're going to hate you, Captain.'

'I hate them plenty too, so I guess that makes everything mutual and easy,' he said, and strode quickly towards where Kurosaki had fallen.

The degree to which Hitsugaya loathed meetings and his associated dislike for at least half of his fellow captains was almost hilarious, though Matsumoto was never ever going to tell him that.

'Come on, we've got an intruder to arrest.'

Peace was good, but so mundane, she thought as she jogged after her captain, and couldn't stop the smile that spread across her face – this was going to be another glorious misadventure.

Fin.

A/N: I love the Tenth Division dynamic. It's so magical. Next, I'm going to get cracking on the epilogue for Seven Percent, and then a new fic! (If anyone's still interested in my stuff, yeah...)