He finds her in a pool of her parents' blood.

At first he almost doesn't see her there -- she is such a tiny thing, silent and still, all bright eyes and no tears on her cheeks even with the stink of death all around her -- but when he does, when he kneels down to get a better look at her and she comes to life, giggling and reaching for his sword delightedly, he knows he is already lost.

For decades he was more blade than man. He knows he's alive, that he exists, only because of the fear in the eyes of other men as he kills them. He is a monster or a demon or something worse. He thought he would never be anything else. But the look in her eyes at that moment, only soft and curious and nothing else -- it is enough to make him feel almost human again.

He doesn't know anything about children, and she is so small, so delicate that for ages he can hardly bear to pick her up, certain his hands will crush her accidentally. He really should have left her there, for someone better to find and rescue and care for. But her hair is soft and she smells of baby's breath and when she curls her too-small fingers around his thumb he can feel a strength in them that is humbling. He has to take her with him.

At night, she is small and warm, and during the day she fits neatly on his shoulders. Many of his waking hours are spent looking for food, because while she is not a fussy eater she is often hungry -- as he knew she would be; she is too strong in every other way not to feel that strange distant hunger in her soul -- and when he has time for fights, she likes to watch, and afterwards paints figures that he thinks are meant to be the two of them in the spilled blood while it's still steaming on the ground.

Sometimes he wonders if she will ever be afraid of anything, and then he promises she won't. He will take her strength and double it, triple it, until nothing in the world could ever possibly threaten her, and in the meantime he will keep her as safe as he possibly can.

When she cries -- which is not often -- he feels a sort of awful squeezing in his chest that no amount of deep breathing will ease. He has a list of things to do to get her to stop, and keeps it tucked in one pocket at all times in case he forgets in his panic.

The list reads as follows:

1.) Feed her. Find a town if you have to. Persuade residents to help.
2.) Pick her up if you were stupid enough to set her down somewhere.
3.) Don't try to burp her. She's too old for that and you might break something.
4.) Find a stream and make sure she doesn't need changing.

If none of that works, he has one last-ditch resort which is not on the list because he knows she can't possibly want his awful singing. But it always makes her laugh, and eventually the wails become sniffles, and soon she's only giggling and not crying at all.

By the time she learns to talk she has stopped crying almost completely, which is a relief, but her first word is not his name because he doesn't have one. He stays up for three nights, struggling to come up with just the right thing, only to find that Kenpachi is much too big for her small mouth. She manages Ken, and when she is older Ken-chan, and he warns her that he only puts up with that because there's no one else around to hear.

Later, when it is much too late to correct her anyway, he will find he has come to like the sound of it in her high soft voice. But right now he is very slightly disappointed, because the last part of his name is the important part, the perfect part. He tells her it means the strongest, an honorary title among the Shinigami, and of course it does, of course it is -- but as he writes it out for her in the sand, he is half hoping she will notice that the first character of her name and the last character of his are the same.

It is the closest thing to poetry he has ever written, their new names side by side. Where he leaves off, she begins. He is Kenpachi, and she is Yachiru.

She has no trouble with her name, simply takes it as if she knows it belongs to her, and in a way it does, in a way it has ever since she became as important to him as the last person to use it. He wonders if this is the normal way of giving names, or if someday she won't wish she had been named after the mother she never knew. He wonders if someday she won't wish for a lot of things.

Winter comes and they steal into one of the seventy-level districts late at night for shelter. He chooses a big house, with lots of food and space to spare, and they hide away in a small room above the main house. Hours later, he wakes to find her peeping through a crack between the floor boards at the family down below, and a child not much older than her who is opening small presents. His parents wish him a happy birthday.

"Ken-chan," she whispers; he hasn't told her to be quiet, hadn't expected to stay here so long, but she seems to know instinctively. "What's a birthday?"

The truth is that he doesn't quite remember, because he died young and his memories of the human world are like ashes and smoke without a fire. He tells her it's the day you were born, or close to it, and that (apparently) you get useless things in shining boxes to celebrate.

She is quiet for a long time, then: "Do you have one?"

Of course he doesn't know, and starts to tell her so, but then he pauses. No, he does have one. He was born the day he met her.

This only makes her giggle. "You were born very old," she says.

When she doesn't ask about her own birthday, only turns back to watch the boy open more presents, he confesses haltingly that he isn't quite sure when she was born. He is more surprised than he should be when she replies absently, "My birthday is Ken-chan's birthday." Then she adds, almost scolding: "Obviously."

It makes the part of him that is almost human ache.

When the weather warms and the frost melts on the ground, they leave the seventy-third behind. He found her in the very late fall, so he has months and months to think of something she might like for her birthday, but all the girls her age seem to play with dolls. Those are expensive, and he doesn't want to steal, not for her present. That would be cheating. So he agonizes and finally tries to make one for in shifts while she sleeps. It is carved from wood and does not have a painted face.

She accepts it but does not seem excited, and he realizes how foolish it was of him to think she would ever be anything like all the girls her age. He makes up for it by carving her a tiny sword, and she throws her arms around his leg and thanks him over and over again.

Two more birthdays have passed before they leave Rukongai behind forever. She is around five, and grows like crazy. She has a clean face and new clothes, bought for the last of those birthdays by scraping together what little money he was able to earn. (Fighting for the bored, taking from the dead, stealing from the thieves, and so on.) She at least looks like she could almost belong in the wealthy city of Seireitei.

He spends the last of his money on sweets from a shop finer than anything she has ever seen, and carries her through the outermost streets, and tells her that they can live here forever when he becomes a Shinigami. She tugs on his hair and makes him promise they'll be living together before she cheers.

When he explains that there are thirteen divisions he could join, and asks her to pick one, she tells him her favorite numbers are five, one, sixteen (which, he reminds her, is not an option), and eleven. He plans to work his way backward, but the eleventh captain goes and dies on him, so that's that.

He becomes a captain, and makes her his lieutenant. One person objects, babbling something about how the eleventh division already has a lieutenant, but the lieutenant himself doesn't seem all that eager to challenge the man who just killed his captain, so there is muttering and bitterness for a while and nothing more. Eventually the former lieutenant leaves to further his ambitions elsewhere, but really neither he nor she are very surprised to hear that he never becomes a captain.

"Some people are supposed to be captains," she says wisely. "And some aren't."

Curiously, he asks her if she thinks he's one of the ones who is. There are a lot of different ways to become a captain, after all, and more to it than just being the strongest or the one who's killed the most people.

Yachiru looks up from her finger-painting to smile at him, and in his mind's eye he sees that tiny thing again, so unafraid as she made shapes that looked like them from other people's blood. "Ken-chan was already a captain on his birthday." And she adds, almost scolding: "Obviously."