Chapter 2: The book.

Toushiro's former unimpressed expression twisted into a cold shock after seeing the reverse side of the letter. He dropped the letter onto the table and sat back deep into his chair in disbelief; someone who he had no recollection of had written him a letter as their dying wish. Toushiro became wracked with guilt at the thought of this… but why? for all he knew this could be a prank that someone, probably Matsumoto, set up.

"Is this some sort of joke, Matsumoto?" he snapped at his subordinate, he'd never known himself to forget anyone. He started to become angry at the thought that anyone would play such a joke on him to question his intelligence.

"No, sir, as I said before; Kira found them in the squad 3 barracks whilst clearing out. Would you like me to bring him here?" she said, utterly confused as to the anger rising in his voice.

"Yes, immediately." He growled " and when you do bring him here, bring along the squad 3 records of former and current members." She looked over at her captain, he was deadly serious. She had never seen him this angry before, he was normally quite calm and collected. "Yes, sir." She announced as she left the office and shot off towards the squad 3 barracks, she thought that this gesture of good will she had found escalated into far more ominous than she had expected.

Toushiro sat deep in thought trying to remember every close friend he had ever had. being a difficult child the only people close to him while growing up were momo and his granny. Matsumoto discovered his potential as a shinigami and his time at the Shino academy was so short, he couldn't recall making many friends there either. After the academy he joined squad 10-

This train of thought was getting him nowhere, he'd have to read the book to establish more clues and with the squad 3 barracks quite a distance away, Matsumoto wouldn't return any time soon. He reached for the leather bound book and placed it in front of him on the large cluttered desk, he looked up at his pile of paperwork, "if this is a joke, that'll be a nice punishment for her." the captain let out a small laugh at the thought of his lieutenants face when she was forced to sit and actually work for once.

He looked back down at the clasp on the book, when he had attempted to open the book before it hadn't worked, but there was no harm trying again. He pulled on the clasp and to his surprise; it snapped open with no effort what-so-ever.

He turned to the first page and it read:

Name: Hokutan Akira

Rank: former unseated shinigami of the 3rd division and -

An ink blot was covering the end of the sentence, Hitsugaya wondered if it was a mistake or supposed to be covered up... due to the age of the book and how delicate the pages were, there would be no way to tell now. He re-read the sentence, and noticed the word former again and wondered in what context he meant this. He continued on and hoped to find more clues.

The tale I am about to tell is one that started many years ago when I first came to Soul Society. When I arrived in here I started off my life in the western rukongai with my identical twin brother, Takeshi. We came to reside in the 3rd district, Hokutan, and adopted this as our family name as we had no recollection of anything other than our names from when we were alive. We resided there for a few years, trying our hardest to fit in with normal society as best we could, it was difficult for our neighbours to get our names right because we looked so alike.

Two things caught Toushiro's attention. For starters he had grown up in the 1st area of western rukongai and members of this area had a somewhat of a snobbish view of anyone from lower areas; there would be no way he would know this person from prior to his own training at the Shino Academy. Secondly, it had never been heard of Twins becoming shinigami. According to the 12th squad's captain and head of the shinigami research institute: in the human world, identical twins are normally derived from the same egg and it was theorised that because of this, a soul is split in half to form two identical looking humans. This split would cause the two souls to be incapable of generating any spiritual force, if they were able to by some means, it would be so insignificantly small that they would not be able to materialise a working zanpakuto between them.

He flicked through the next few pages quickly looking for some clue as to his identity, he saw parts of sentences such as "we would eat fish every day to fill the hunger-" and "we didn't make friends easily-" until he came across a word in the middle of a sentence that caught his eye, a word that will forever been acknowledged in soul society to be evil.

'Aizen-Taicho."