Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach or any of the characters or settings, Tite Kubo does.
When Worst Comes to Worst
He knew it . . . they were out to get him. Turquoise eyes narrowed as Hitsugaya Toshiro, shinigami Captain of the Tenth Division, peered nervously around the corner, scanning the empty corridor carefully. As quietly as he could, the white haired captain moved towards to closest door, the one that led to his office, and paused, hand on the edge of the screen. If they're in there . . . he shook his head vigorously, Focus.
When the short shinigami had woken up that morning, everything had been normal. And, in his newly formed opinion, normal was absolutely perfect.
His Lieutenant, Matsumoto Rangiku, had been off somewhere, presumably drinking, so there was no one around to annoy him or distract him from his work. And he'd had a whole pile of papers to fill out. Still, if things had remained normal then he would have had them finished by now, it was quite late in the day after all, and he would've been sleeping.
But oh no, that couldn't have happened, it would've been far too wonderful. The first sign he'd received that the day might go awry was about an hour after he'd started on his paperwork . . .
'Short-snow-chan,' Kusajishi Yachiru, a short, pink haired shinigami who was also the Lieutenant of the Eleventh Division and a great fan of candies, wandered into his room.
Toshiro looked up at her briefly, noting the huge sticky lolly in her hand, and then went back to his paperwork, silently wishing that she'd just go away.
'Short-snow-chan,' sidling over to the desk, Yachiru repeated herself, staring hard at the captain, and then, when he didn't respond, 'SHORT-SNOW-CHAN!'
The white haired captain jerked in surprise, brush skidding across his half completed document, and the back of his head hitting his chair, 'What? And what's with the nickname?'
Yachiru giggled and bit her candy, continuing to stare at him silently. Toshiro found that, no matter how hard he tried, it was impossible to start on a fresh document with her just standing there.
Looking up at her, he said coldly, 'Please leave,'
'Short-snow-chan,' Yachiru tilted her head to one side, blinking slowly.
There was a tension filled pause and then . . .
WHACK!
Yachiru slammed the candy down onto his desk and then raced to the door using her surprising speed. Giggling, she disappeared with a, 'Short-snow-chan!'
Staring at the sticky lolly that was very well stuck to his desk, gluing various documents together with the wood, Toshiro was frozen.
It would have been a good half hour before he regained enough courage to move, and by then, he had another visitor . . .
'Shiro-chan,' another white haired captain appeared in Toshiro's doorway – Ukitake Jushiro of the Thirteenth Division.
'Ukitake?' Toshiro was understandably nervous after the last episode, and his voice was strained.
Jushiro didn't speak again, he just walked into the room and began setting out a tea ceremony in the middle of the room. As he was preparing the warm beverage in the traditional manner, Toshiro watched from his desk, wondering just what was going to happen next.
'Shiro-chan,' head snapping to the doorway, the young captain watched as his childhood friend, Hinamori Momo, entered the room.
'Hinamori? What are you doing?' Toshiro watched as she silently sat down on the other side of the tea set and then the pair of them drank the tea. After the cups were empty, they both stood and walked to the door, Ukitake bundling the whole set together untidily, and then paused.
'Shiro-chan,' as they walked off, Toshiro blinked in confusion before shaking his head and returning once again to his documents . . .
It was a rumbling sound that notified the white haired captain of the next lot of 'visitors' he was going to receive. Seconds after the sound began, every single lieutenant of the Gotei 13 entered his office. 'Entered' as in they spilled through the doorways, windows, a hole in the roof, a trapdoor in the floor, and stood before his desk.
'Captain Hitsugaya,' the collective tone was warm.
Toshiro realised that Matsumoto was absent just before the whole group began singing some song from the World of the Living which seemed to include quite a few strange words in the lyrics.
Feeling incredibly disturbed Toshiro stood up and walked out of his office, noticing with some worry that they all followed him in single file, still singing at the tops of their voices.
I need to find someone who's still sane, the short captain thought as he hurried away, walking until he found something else which made him pause in horror . . .
Every single captain seemed to be dancing in the middle of the Seireitei, from the kind-faced Unohana, to the usually maniacal Kenpachi, despite the lack of music.
As the singers gathered behind Toshiro, he stared in shock as Soifon twirled past doing classical ballet, followed by Kyoraku who was tap dancing, and then Komamura who was solo waltzing. Even as his eyes widened further, Kurotsuchi began doing some sort of modern, very human like dance in the centre of the group, and then Ukitake began line dancing. Further over, the Head Captain, Yamamoto, was dancing jazz, and that was almost enough to send anyone mad.
But the funniest – or most horrible – thing that Toshiro saw was Kuchiki Byakuya, THE stoic, calm and collected Kuchiki Byakuya, doing something called, if he remembered correctly, break dancing over to one side of the courtyard.
'What are you all doing?' he shouted, losing his sane image completely.
Everyone stopped and turned to face him, the Lieutenants behind him using shunpo to move beside their respective captains, 'Captain Hitsugaya,'
'Oh Captain!' Matsumoto suddenly appeared before the group, a wide smile on her face and a bottle of sake in her hand, 'Won't you join us? We're having a lot of fun,' she forced the last few words out threateningly through her grin.
Screaming his lungs out in pure panic, Toshiro turned around and began running for dear life as the hoard of shinigami followed him . . .
And so that's why he was hesitating outside his own office door and wondering whether or not it was worth risking his sanity and opening it.
However, when the thunder of many pairs of feet slamming into the ground drifted towards him, Toshiro wrenched open the door and jumped in, slamming it shut again behind him.
After a moment of experiencing his first real mental breakdown, Toshiro pulled himself together and began constructing kido barriers around his office. After twenty-nine layers, he decided that, because of the kido experts currently chasing him, he should make it a little harder for them to get in . . .
. . . One-hundred and one traps, seals, barriers, time-bombs, hidden weapons, more traps and protection layers later, Toshiro sighed in relief. Because of the inhuman speed he'd been moving with, the group pursuing him had only just reached the Tenth Division.
So Toshiro did what any self-respecting shinigami would do when worst comes to worst, and fell asleep on the couch.
'Captain! Captain!' Matsumoto's calls woke him some time later and Toshiro sat bolt upright, recalling everything in a flash.
Moving over to his door rather cautiously, he opened it a fraction and peeped out. After taking one glance at the scene in the corridor outside, he opened the screen fully and blinked.
Matsumoto was being pressed face-first into the ground by a rather unique kido and was wailing loudly. Yachiru was a few metres down the hall stuck in a hole that had somehow opened up beneath her feet, and Momo was caught in a net hanging from the ceiling. Ukitake and Kyoraku were making the most of the board games that had, not so long ago, knocked them out, and Soifon was trying to break out of an unusually powerful seal that was unlike any she'd encountered before.
Yamamoto was sharing tea with the Lieutenants and Captains who had managed to escape or break their bonds, and Unohana was healing another shinigami who had concussion and a broken arm after a bookcase 'fell' on him.
'Ah, Hitsugaya,' Kurotsuchi Mayuri, the Twelfth Division captain, walked over to him carefully so as to avoid unsprung traps, 'I've got a question for you,'
Toshiro was incredibly worried that he was about to say something disturbing like Matsumoto had, 'Yes?'
'What happened?' the other captain bared his golden coloured teeth in a fearsome grin.
'What happened?' Toshiro echoed dully, hardly believing his ears.
'Yes,' nodding knowledgeably, Mayuri continued, 'I invented a new drug and all the Captains and Lieutenants agreed to trial it for me,' he pointed one long-nailed finger at the young captain, 'Except you, because I didn't ask you,' withdrawing his hand, Mayuri smiled again, 'Since you're a child prodigy, I thought you would be able to assess the effects the most proficiently,'
'Well,' glancing at Byakuya, Toshiro couldn't help but smirk slightly, 'It's all quite interesting, really,'
As he began explaining, now much more relaxed and ready to tell everyone about all the things that they'd done, Toshiro couldn't help but think that, although Kurotsuchi's story was quite feasible and a drug probably had been involved, all of them really had been out to get him.
Author's Note:
This is really random . . . you can probably see for yourself . . . but anyway, just another little something that I decided to put up. I hope you enjoyed reading, and please don't think any less of me because you did . . .