Hey, everyone. It's me again! Obviously a lot has changed since last time I wrote any fic and I'm still not sure whether I'm really back into it or not, but I finally decided to sit down and finish the Bleach manga ... and apparently I have actually not changed all that much because I immediately *had* to write this. Feels good to revisit my incredibly specific fandom niche again...

Canon: all manga-canon, but some liberties may have been taken with timeline and details.

Also posted on AO3.

Content warning for brief suicidal thoughts FYI.

Toushiro always kind of resented the fact that he has to wear his zanpakuto across his back instead of at his hip like most Shinigami do. He hated learning to balance its weight, to walk without stumbling over it – hated so obviously carrying a sword that was meant for an adult. When he first started carrying it at the Academy, he was dismayed by how heavy and burdensome it felt – and he'd wondered, then, how he could ever grow accustomed to it.

That was nothing, compared to how heavy his sword feels now.

As he walks through his squad's grounds to oversee the first of the basic repair work, it seems to him that the weight of it bows him over until it's an effort just to stand up straight. Drags him down, like the weight of something dead –

No. No, he's only lost, he's not – I would know. I'd have to know. I would have felt it happen.

In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, it was Rangiku who had taken charge. "How many are injured? We'll start doing triage here." Her voice had rung clear and confident over the post-battle commotion, snapping Toushiro out of a daze.

He'd realized he was running his thumb across his sword's hilt over and over, as though trying to soothe it. As though it wasn't just a weapon, an object, nothing but inanimate steel and silk. Sudden nausea had risen in him and for a second he had to fight a powerful urge to fling the blade away from him.

He'd noticed its weight for the first time then, as he'd slowly sheathed it and slung it back over his body. He'd told himself that it was just the aftereffects of fighting and of so much strong reiatsu in the air that made him stumble dizzily and almost lose his footing in the rubble. (Not the overpowering silence inside his head.)

Rangiku had reappeared at his side. "Hey, Captain. Are you injured?"

"I don't think so." The Head Captain's final (ever) attack had turned the air so dry and gritty that the words felt like they were being scraped against the inside of his throat.

"Maybe – you should get checked out by someone anyway, you know? What about …?"

He'd known Rangiku long enough that he could see it all written in her eyes – the question she was working herself up to ask, the confusion and fear she was trying to hide for the sake of their already-terrified men. The worry about what he, in turn, was trying to hide from her.

(But that isn't really fair; she's always genuinely cared about him, even before he was her Captain, when she didn't have to.)

"No. It's not necessary."

She'd looked at him very skeptically. "If you say so …"

On one hand, there was no point in pretending he wasn't badly shaken, not when he'd been screaming panicked orders at her just a few minutes ago. On the other hand, the idea of beginning to answer her honestly – that Hyourinmaru just vanished, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, that the whole world seemed full of the echo of Toushiro's own ragged voice, calling after him – made Toushiro want nothing more than to run far, far away. Anger, disappointment, mistrust, he could have dealt with any of those, but her concern felt like it might break him.

He's never really known what to do with things like that, even at the best of times. People show him their feelings and he doesn't understand how to absorb them.

(It's been like that for him, with pretty much everyone, for as long as he can remember. Hyourinmaru is the only person he's never wanted to run from.)

"I should start putting together some kind of damage report. I'm sure all the captains will want to compare information."

Around them, the panic of the invasion had started to subside into a somewhat more organized chaos. He and Rangiku hadn't spoken anymore except to confer with each other about what needed to be done next. He'd felt her eyes following him, but he had avoided her determinedly and forced his thoughts towards actually taking stock of the damage.

Since then, the whole Seiretei has barely slept.

And since then, Toushiro has carried the weight of his empty blade, his sword that no longer has a name (because what's the point of naming something that can't hear you call for it?), and wondered whether soon it will drag him to the ground.

At first, he periodically tries to stretch his mind as far as it will go across the bridge that has always connected him with his inner world – Answer me, please, anything at all – until a fierce headache blossoms between his eyes. Logically he is almost certain it won't do any good – if it didn't during the battle, it surely won't now – but he can't seem to stop himself from trying.

Once, he goes to his quarters while the rest of the squad is occupied with sword drills (as if they really think it will help them) and tries to push himself into full meditation. He's too distracted and exhausted to get very far with it. Instead, he just ends up sinking into a restless sleep.

The next thing he knows, he is standing on the icy ground of his inner world. Oh – I must've made it the rest of the way after all.

The first time he'd ended up here, it had seemed impossibly alien and frightening. By the time he joined the Gotei-13, it had become somewhere familiar, a place he'd come to willingly and explore. By the time he became Captain, it felt like home.

Now he walks hesitantly forward, in no particular direction. It's so dark he can barely see the ground in front of him. All around him there's a nebulous sense of something wrong, a kind of emptiness that's never been here before.

But I already knew everything wouldn't be alright here. I just have to keep searching.

The branches of the bare, spindly trees scattered across the landscape keep catching on his clothing, breaking his concentration.

Can he feel me looking for him?

He has to be here somewhere. Please….Please be here, Hyourinmaru.

Where are you, where are you, where are you –

He's running now, senselessly, stumbling over rocks and calls his zanpakuto's name into the silence, over and over again – screams, desperately willing his voice as far as it will go, into the sky, across all the heavens, until it all but gives out.

But the world is so wide and he is so very small and the syllables are only swallowed up by the blank, endless sky –

The moon in his inner world has always waxed and waned, shone in a clear sky or been obscured by storm clouds. It responds to Toushiro's mental and emotional state, as elements in many Shinigamis' soul worlds do.

This sky has no moon in it at all.

He wrenches himself back into his own body with a desperate mental effort and wakes up disoriented and unable to catch his breath. It feels like his lungs can't expand. The world refuses to come into focus. For a minute he thinks he might actually faint.

The details of the nightmare, or meditation, or whatever exactly it was, are already slipping away from him, but fear has twisted itself deep into his chest – the fear that if he'd stayed any longer he would have discovered proof of the possibility that has lurked in his mind ever since the invasion, unavoidable, but too awful to name. At least while the Quincy were still here, he'd been relatively sure that Hyourinmaru was still alive, because he'd seen the one he was fighting against use his stolen power. Now … what possible way does he have of knowing? (Just the fading conviction that the heart he shares gladly with his zanpakuto spirit would recognize beyond a doubt a world without Hyourinmaru in it.)

Any more sleep is out of the question after that, of course, so he makes his way to the squad archives to look for anything useful (again). He shouldn't be sleeping anyway, not when there's so much work to be done.

Toushiro thought he knew what loss felt like, but this isn't anything like what he felt when he left home, or when Captain Shiba disappeared, or even after the final battle with Aizen when he was sure Momo was going to die. This time, the pain doesn't even start right away, not really. It's certainly not as though it isn't there – more like it can't fit into the spaces in his mind that are meant to hold it. How can it? How can he ever possibly make himself understand this?

There is a wound, a rip right in the fabric of his soul, and the pain it has created is so vast and incomprehensible that he can barely grasp the form of it. It follows in step with him everywhere he goes, sprawls awkwardly over every one of his thoughts, but he can no more face it, name it, than he can stare into the sun.

As soon as they can, all the remaining Captains gather in Squad One to exchange information and try to come up with some – any – kind of plan of action. Everyone dances awkwardly around each other as they take their places, acting like strangers instead of people who have all met regularly for decades now. All of their centuries' worth of rituals and etiquette seem to have crumbled to nothing along with the Head Captain's body.

Soifon and Komamura scream at each other about nothing. For a second Toushiro wants to scream too, thinks it's the kind of thing he'd normally do, but the impulse dies long before it reaches his throat. It's already all he can do to stand straight and internalize any of what's going on around him. There is barely any energy left in him for anger, or guilt, or fear.

The rip in his soul just takes all of it, and swallows it up.

The Head Captain is dead. The Seiretei is probably going to be destroyed. I will probably die. Rangiku will probably die. All of us … He makes himself think of the horrified faces of his men, many of them ones he's known ever since he joined Squad Ten – and of his lieutenant, taking charge of them the way she always has when it matters. I still have to do right by them, for a little while longer anyway.

These thoughts work a little bit – at least enough to make him try to concentrate on the rest of the meeting.

No one mentions the stolen bankai except in the most general terms. No one asks if any of the three of them have been able to speak to their zanpakuto. Looking around, Toushiro thinks they really don't need to. In the past, he's sometimes wondered about what kind of relationships other Captains have with their sword spirits. Right now, though, he's glad he doesn't know. Looking at someone else and knowing the same thing he feels is mirrored in them – he doesn't think he could take it.

The normal schedule of division paperwork has virtually ground to a halt, but Toushiro still has to fill out reports on all the Squad Ten Shinigami who died in the invasion. It's a grim task, and he has already put it off as long as he can. It's not as though he's never had to do it before, but he doesn't think he's ever had to write up so many at once. He considers this as he gathers his papers and writing materials together in the last light of the evening, thinking back to the battle in fake Karakura Town, the invasion of the ryoka, all the various everyday investigations and Hollow hunts that he has overseen during his time as Captain. How many terrible things are recorded on the shelves of this office? How many times has he stayed here late into the night, working diligently in the hope that if his squad runs smoothly enough, he can avoid adding to that number?

If the Seiretei survives the coming battle, will he have to make a record of this, too? When the next Captain looks over these shelves of files, will one of them be the report of a stolen bankai and a zanpakuto spirit who must have spent his last days alone, somewhere far from home?

It was hard on both of them, Toushiro becoming Captain so soon before he'd ever expected to. Time he'd used to spend training or meditating quickly got eaten up by the endless cycle of administration and paperwork. (And when he finally did find time to visit his inner world, he found that during his absence Hyourinmaru had decorated all the bare trees with ice flowers in varying levels of detail. The subsequent discussion – "Is this what you do when I'm not here?" "Apparently so, yes." – ended with both of them using shikai on each other, but afterward things between them started to settle again and Toushiro felt calmer than he had in a long time.)

Since then, Toushiro has lost count of how many conversations they've had while he does his work, sometimes about whatever Toushiro is working on, sometimes about nothing in particular, Hyourinmaru's presence almost tangible somewhere over his shoulder.

The characters of the report he's been trying to write blur and swim in front of his eyes and it finally registers that he has started crying.

He wipes his eyes on his sleeve with irritation and tries to continue on with his work. But alone in the deserted administration building, surrounded by long shadows and records of death and destruction, the small amount of self-control he has managed to pull together unravels effortlessly. The terrible, incomprehensible wound inside of him has resolved into the simple, crushing knowledge that Hyourinmaru is not here to talk to and probably never will be again.

And so Toushiro bows his head and cries for himself and his lost sword spirit. He keeps almost silent, still distantly conscious of the possibility of restless squad members wandering the halls; only the jagged edge of his breathing gives him away. This is my fault, he thinks. I should have been more careful. I should have protected him.

After that, it seems like a very long time before he can think of anything else.

If you had asked before this if Toushiro was holding out hope that the Captains' stolen bankai could be returned, he probably would have said no, because he is an old hand at the art of pessimism. He might even, in the moment, have believed it.

He would, beyond a doubt, have been lying. He has worn himself out sustaining denial and willful ignorance for hope to hide behind. He has ripped himself apart trying to keep it alive.

And when the double-edged blade of grief and guilt begins to shear right through every denial, every blind conviction, every safeguard around the last, hard-won flicker of hope left in him – Toushiro just sobs as quietly as he can and lets it happen, because he cannot stand to hope anymore.

By the time he finally makes himself sit up and take a long, shaky breath, the evening shadows have all melted together and he has no more hope left in him. He stays in the office late into the night and finishes all the rest of the reports (because he doesn't know what else to do with himself) and does not sleep until almost dawn. He dreams of something terrible that he does not remember and wakes up curled uncomfortably in his chair with fresh tears caught on his eyelashes. He watches the sun rise through the windows and wonders if the Quincy will come today and feels nothing about it one way or another.

Ever since the invasion, the members of Squad Ten, like the rest of the Gotei 13, have been immersed in near-constant training. While some of the seated officers who have working shikai have been going off on their own or in small groups to try and hone their powers, the rank-and-file Shinigami stay behind in the squad compound to practice basic swordsmanship. Honestly, it's as much a distraction tactic as anything – something to keep their minds off the prospect of bloodthirsty Quincy descending on them at any minute. The air is almost always ringing with the dull crack of wooden blades against each other and the call-and-response of Shinigami answering barked orders from their instructor, a man called Nagakiso.

For his own part, Toushiro had sort of forgotten for a while that he, too, still has other combat skills besides his bankai. No, not forgotten – the idea of preparing to fight without Hyourinmaru had skirted too close to the barely-contained, despairing hurt swirling in the back of his mind, where even his sense of duty couldn't make him go. Now, though, a wave of fatalism appears to have dulled the edges just enough.

Unfortunately, it appears that in the years since he first mastered his shikai, Toushiro has all but forgotten how to use a sword by itself. Even when he runs through simple maneuvers, he constantly falls back into the habit of wide, sweeping movements intended to set him up to use long-range attacks that won't work anymore.

("Hyourinmaru, do I have to teach you how to use a sword?" he'd teased once not all that long ago, after Hyourinmaru first showed him his human form.

"I can use it exactly as well as I need to. You, on the other hand, have a lot of room for improvement with Ryusenka."

"It's because I'm too distracted by where that name came from. Did you make it up, or –"

"Please just shut up and attack me.")

Swordsmanship, kido, everything he's ever learned about the world of the Shinigami … he only ever learned any of it because he had Hyourinmaru. He'd been serious all those times back in Junrinan when he'd told Momo he had no intention of becoming a Shinigami like her; he didn't want to seem like he was chasing after her, like he couldn't make it on his own without her looking after him. Didn't want her to know how much it hurt when she left. Maybe he would've changed his mind on his own once he got older … but as it turned out, he never got to make that choice for himself.

If he wants to be of any use at all in a real battle now, he'll probably have to start all over, all the way from the basics.

He has always vastly preferred to practice his fighting skills alone, in private. The habit started at the Academy, where he'd easily made it into the advanced class because of his intelligence and high reiatsu, but then struggled to keep up physically with his older, bigger classmates. The same thing happened again when he became Captain with his bankai still brand-new and incomplete. He became positively secretive about his training after that, motivated by the belief that a squad that had just lost their old Captain should not see the new one struggle.

So, right now, Toushiro's first instinct is to go and work through this somewhere out-of-the-way outside the Seiretei, the way he has in the past – but of course that's much more difficult than usual. Captains can't just be running off into the Rukongai every day while the Seiretei is on high alert. The best Toushiro can do is try to find whichever corner of the Squad Ten compound is most deserted at the moment.

The place is much quieter and emptier than it usually is, with unseated Shinigami mostly sticking together in groups instead of moving around freely, but the lack of privacy still does no favors for Toushiro's concentration. It's not as easy for him as it used to be, getting into the rhythm of simple katas, finding an uncomplicated harmony between mind and body. (This never really came naturally to him, even when he was younger – but, like with everything else he had to learn to become a Shinigami, he forced himself to work until that no longer mattered.) Now his limbs all move sluggishly and disconnected from one another, their patterns missing steps, refusing to come together as Toushiro knows they should. Frustration inevitably starts burning dully behind his eyes, turning his movements sloppy and erratic and dragging his training into futile downward spirals he has to waste precious time pulling himself out of.

When Rangiku tracks him down he's using one of the officers' meeting rooms. Preoccupied, he hardly senses her approach before she's in the doorway saying, "I thought I heard someone in here. So this is where you've been hiding."
"I haven't been hiding."
"You've sure been hard to find lately." Her words come out lighthearted, no edge in her voice, but her eyes are flat and serious.

"I have to prepare for the next invasion, just like all of you," Toushiro answers, trying to sound reasonable and in control – while inside him the urge to scream, to fight, rises from wherever it's been lying dormant, sparking through his chest, his throat. He just, selfishly and pettily, hates everything about this –hates that he has to hide from his own division, sneaking covert training behind their backs, hates that he made his Lieutenant come looking for him like he's still the little kid from Rukongai who understood nothing and couldn't be left alone.

"You really think this is the way to do it? Here, by yourself?" One of Rangiku's hands waves vaguely over the small, empty room, the bare floor, the bokken lying forgotten by Toushiro's feet.

Inside his sleeves, Toushiro's fingers squeeze tight, nails pressing tiny half-moons into his palms. "I've already done everything – there's nothing else I can do for you! Don't ask me, I can't – just don't!"

"We've barely seen you! The squad's worried! They need you, they need you to show them –"

"Show them what?I am useless like this! Even if I had time to – to figure out how to fight on my own, it still wouldn't –" They're both shouting now, forgetting to care that the walls are thin and frightened ears are everywhere. Toushiro knows he is taking his frustration out on Rangiku unfairly, that this is exactly the kind of Captain he never wanted to turn into, who yells at his officers for no reason, but suddenly these words have become desperate to be spoken aloud. Like they were waiting for him to let his guard down that smallest bit. "My powers are gone, all of them! How much good can I possibly be to anyone anymore?"

Rangiku folds her arms across her body. "Uh, Captain? I wouldn't be so sure about that."

She sweeps her eyes pointedly around the room, and it takes Toushiro an embarrassingly long moment to figure out why. The room is suddenly much colder, cold enough to make their breath show white. The kind of cold that has followed Toushiro all his life, as familiar to him as his own heartbeat. And on the floor, a thin sheet of ice spreads outward from his feet, almost to the walls. It makes a faint crackling sound as it finishes expanding.

A long silence stretches as they both watch their breath condense in the chilly air, Toushiro's pulse loud in his ears. The cold-laced reiatsu is dead and sluggish compared to what he's used to and it sputters around him, already resisting his attempts to hold onto and manipulate it … but it's still unmistakably his.

All the anger drains out of him as quickly as it appeared. "I shouldn't have shouted at you."

Rangiku just shrugs. "Yeah, well. We've all been wound pretty tight."

"I thought it was all gone." The words come out distant and hollow. "I've tried to use my powers before this. Nothing worked."

"Sometimes things just … need time. You know. To regenerate."

She's looking at him the same way she did what already feels like a lifetime ago as they surveyed the damage from the Quincies' rampage, sad and knowing, and Toushiro doesn't understand how to deal with it any better than he did the first time, but he knows that whatever kind of lifeline she's offering him, he wants to take it.

So he straightens his back and nods and after a second, she continues, "I think we can work with this. Maybe … I can help you," and a familiar enthusiastic glint starts to show itself her eyes.

"Are you serious?"

"I am completely serious! Listen, I know it's not what you want, and I know it might not be enough, but I can do this for you."

Through the walls, Toushiro can hear the sound of Nagakiso haranguing his latest group of squad members. (Nagakiso used to bark at him like that too, back when he was a new recruit – "Hitsugaya! That sword isn't going to do you any good if you can't control where you swing it!")

They need you to show them – Show them what?

They deserve a Captain who will do whatever he can to get them to the other side of this, even if all he can do is stand with them at the end.

Something like resolve start to flicker deep inside his chest, cold and bleak to match the frost still sparkling on the wooden floor. He'd been so sure that those powers were lost to him for good.

What can I do for anyone anymore?

I will do what I have to. Like I've always done.

"Alright. Let's get started."

After all, when the next invasion comes, maybe he'll have a chance to get Hyourinmaru back. And if he can't … well … against the Quincy army, unable to use most of his powers? No-one is expecting this to be a fight without sacrifices. It won't have to matter to him for very long.

The weight of his sword and the grief it represents still threatens to overwhelm him, but until then, at least, he thinks he will be able to bear it.