Part I

Midsummer night, drinks all around. The night's cool breeze swirling perfectly with the warm buzz of family members catching up over jugs of sake. Mina was sitting on uncle Shunsui's knee, soaking up compliments from red-nosed and jovial adults about how pretty and well-behaved she was. It was the annual Kyoraku 'family' reunion, like every holiday combined, there was tons of food and presents exchanged and for one night of the year everything felt perfect and blissful.

The chipper buzz of conversation started to quiet and the members of the Court Guard Squad migrated onto the porch and front lawn of grandpa Yamamoto's house. Mina was busy sucking on her fingers, eyebrows furrowed, trying to understand the words being exchanged between her mother and her uncle when uncle Shunsui gave her shoulder a light squeeze, leaned forward and pointed past her at the sky. Clear above the woods, the softest glowing green paint strokes in the middle of the royal blue sky embellished with bright sparkles here and there, like sand sparkling in the rays of the sun.

Aurora borealis. She'd never seen a thing like it in her life before, it filled her little mind with such magic and wonderment, she slid off her uncle's lap and started wandering, never taking her eyes off of the alien streak in the sky, off the porch and into the yard until she was directly underneath it. The night was cloudless and clear, there was nothing between her and this phenomenon, this thing that hovered above her made her feel at once small but big enough to reach it if she really really tried. Maybe she was clever enough to coax it down. It was a special being, something that if she didn't get to speak to it now, it'd be a long time before she'd ever get the chance to again.

She raised her arm up and opened her little palm up to the glowing green fox watching her from the stars, and it shifted above her, reaching down with its starlit paw and touch her hand gingerly, giving her some of its own heavenly glow before fading into the night sky.

She lowered her hand and stared into her palm, which was glowing that celestial sea foam green. Nothing felt out of place and everything felt exactly as it should be. She lifted her head to find her entire family, frozen, bewildered at the glowing green child before them. That was the last thing she saw before passing out.

Stuffing clothes into a bag with shaking hands in the middle of the night, Mina was as anxious as she was furious. The decision was made for her that she'd be attending the Shin'ō Academy. There was no way she was going to take any part in training to become an officer for something as violent and corrupt as the Gotei 13. She knew about the ins and outs of the place thanks to her lineage and it looked like a fucking mess.

Her main argument for staying out of the Shin'ō Academy so far had been the Eleventh Division, more specifically the fear of attending school with the type of people who'd likely be ushered in to the Eleventh Division. She'd heard about it around her neighborhood which had recently joined in with a few other neighborhoods in calling for a major overhaul in the rules about regulating Gotei 13 officers after a few mischievous newbies from the Eleventh destroyed property and put lives of commoners at risk for taking care of a small hollow very, very haphazardly.

There was a slew of horror stories about innocent bystanders getting caught in a fight between a couple of belligerent Eleventh Division officers and ending up in the hospital for weeks, assaults on top of assaults, the periodic accidental deaths. It gave her chills, honestly, but being related to a captain would assure her some degree of protection, even if it offered even more opportunity for embarrassment. Still, she was having none of this shit show and that's the way it was gonna go.

She gingerly set the bag onto the bed, and took out from under her bed a scarlet kaiken, removed the blade and held it by the handle in her mouth while she scooped her hair up into a fist, took the blade from her mouth and started sawing as close as she could get to her scalp. She let longer pieces of freshly shortened hair frame her face and hacked away at the hair near the nape of her neck.

Looking into her mirror, she was satisfied with the person she'd made with her kaiken. With all of her hair she'd looked childlike and girlish, not something anybody took seriously in particular, even when baring witness to her wild temper. She'd never gotten anywhere on her own, never accomplished anything on her own, and didn't have any exceptional qualities. To anybody who knew her she was hot tempered and useless.

This was a new person. This was someone who was tough and did whatever the fuck they wanted no matter what anybody said. Not-to-be-messed-with was debatable. Her immaturity paired with the childish glower on her face screamed 'My only defense is profanity!'

She did however, thanks to her uncle Shunsui, know how to shunpo reasonably well. She took up her bag, opened her window slowly, and made for anywhere, as far as her legs could take her.

Author Note: Criticism welcome!