They huddle together under a tattered blanket, wrapped in hope and desperation. The white walls of Seireitei are perhaps an hour's walk from this park in the inner Rukongai; they would make that trek in the morning.

"Hey, Rangiku?"

"Hmm?"

"Y'know I'll always come back for ya, right?"

"Why? Are you leaving again?"

"Would I actually say it if I were?"

"I hate you, Gin."

Gin smiles and nudges at her teasingly. Rangiku pokes him back, right on the ticklish spot above his hip; she flutters her fingers until he starts squirming. It would have turned into an all-out tickle fight, but he maneuvers himself away from her hands and wraps his arms around her, hugging her into stillness. She senses the seriousness and quiets nervously.

"We need to split up once we hit the academy," he says.

"Why?"

Why indeed. He can't tell her that he's walking straight into the den of his enemy. He can't tell her they need to split up for her own safety. He can't tell her they have to minimize contact so that his enemy won't have her pinned as the first target to use against him.

"It'll be easier that way. The people there are good, not like here. Yer gonna make friends with some of the girls and sign up to be roommates with 'em."

"I can't room with you?"

"They don't let boys and girls stay together. We prob'ly won't have the same classes, either."

"So you are leaving again." She turns around to look at him. Sad. Accusatory. "How come you never stay?"

Gin shrugs. "I'll be around." To watch over you from afar. But you won't need me anymore. It's better if you stay away.

-oOo-

"So you're one of us now, huh." The sixth year boy reaches across the cafeteria table to ruffle Gin's hair. "Our little Hyapponzashi's all grown up!"

The boy sitting at Gin's side retorts, "He's one-upped all of us, man. They're putting him in the advanced class."

"Fuck! Is that true?"

Gin looks up from his lunch and smiles wickedly. "Yup. I'm a grower, not a shower. When I want it t'be, my sword-peen's a hundred times bigger'n yours."

The sixth year boys launch themselves at him in a vicious noogie attack, and Gin just laughs and lets them have their way. The first year students, whom he had never gotten along with besides Rangiku, look on in fear and envy from across the room. Rangiku is there with her new friends; Gin distantly notes that she is sitting next to a tiny girl, the one closest to her in age, Ise Nanao. He approves of this friendship.

Gin, in contrast to Rangiku's wholesome girlfriends, has gotten himself in with a bunch of misfit older boys from the lower classes. They help him plan pranks and teach him all sorts of inappropriate slang. They treat him like their genius younger brother, and they revel in the fact that, even if he barely comes up to their chest while standing on tiptoe, he can keep up with the best of the best. (It helps that hanging around Gin means they can see the jealousy on the faces of the "elite" students of the sixth year advanced class.)

Gin smooths his hair back into place as the lunch period ends. The morning of his first day as a sixth year had been spent familiarizing himself with his new schedule and getting a tour of his new classrooms and new dorms. This afternoon he would begin to attend classes.

"Watch your back, shorty. Those guys already hate you 'cuz you make them look bad." With one last pat on the back, his "brothers" split off to go to their separate classes, but Gin is headed to the room at the very end: the advanced class.

True enough, he is greeted with wary glances as he steps in front of the blackboard. Some even look at him with outright hostility.

"Everyone, please welcome Ichimaru Gin to our class. Ichimaru-kun has skipped quite a few grades, so this is still his first year at the academy and I'd like you all to do your best to make him feel welcome." Murata-sensei beams proudly at him, and that just increases the intensity of their hateful glares.

"It's a pleasure to meet ya," Gin says. "Please guide me in th' future."

As their instructor is looking over the seating charts, Gin takes the opportunity to scrutinize his classmates. His eyes roam over their faces, hands, postures. In mere seconds, he has managed to pick apart those who are genuinely hostile from the ones who are nervous or indifferent. A few are cautiously interested in befriending him if he turns out not to be as creepy as the rumors paint him out to be.

Unfortunately for them, the rumors don't do him justice - he's worse than they say. And he spies one student, just one, whose body language signals that there is more going on than what appears at the surface. Gin knows he will be ostracized by his classmates, but there is another loner already here. This one will be useful.

Murata-sensei is a nice man, and generally perceptive enough, but he's completely transparent. Gin thinks most people are too easy to figure out. There are plenty of empty seats, but Gin knows who he's going to be assigned to sit by even before the instructor decides. He guesses that Murata-sensei's thought processes probably go something like this:

Each year is different; each class has its own personality. This time around, the sixth year advanced class is unusually cutthroat, suspicious, and cruel. They are a tight-knit bunch not given to welcoming those they perceive as outsiders. As the rumor mill says, the worst of them also have been known to run these "intruders" out of their class. Why, last year this particular advanced group hazed a boy until he purposely flunked a test in order to sabotage his ranking and move back down to a lower class! And even then they continued to "put him in his place" and bullied him incessantly for ever daring to think he could rise to their level. Rumor had it that the poor boy left the academy in tears, shamed all the way back to the Rukongai slums. But now there are two students moved up from lower classes (or lower grades in Gin's case), and Murata-sensei has in mind that perhaps they will last longer if they have mutual support.

"Ah, perfect!" Murata-sensei pens his decision onto the seating chart. "Ichimaru-kun, please take the seat by Itou-kun. Itou-kun, raise your hand."

The girl in the back corner raises her hand, sparking a fit of muffled snickering from her peers. Itou-kun slouches in her seat and hides her face behind a veil of long, unkempt hair. "Okiku, Okiku!" they taunt her as Murata-sensei busies himself with the blackboard. "Go back to your Hollow friends!"

In their white uniforms, Gin concedes that she does indeed resemble the legendary ghost in the well. Nevertheless, he saunters down the rows to sit calmly beside her. "Can I see yer notes?"

And she whispers, "Which ones?"

"Oh, I dunno... Whatever ya think would be useful. What're we studyin' now, anyways?"

Murata-sensei begins his lecture.

Itou surreptitiously slips her personal notes in under the lecture notes from last class. Gin listens to their instructor with half an ear. He scrawls bits and pieces of information in his notebook, looking for all the world like the studious genius trying his best to catch up to his older classmates.

"I could expose ya, betray ya with these," he says to Itou, voice obscured by the scratching of pen on paper.

"You could..." She slumps further down in her seat, and her voice is small. It is small, but not nearly as broken as her hunched back would suggest. "But you gain nothing by taking me down. I'm the lowest ranked in this class; I'm a nobody."

"An' what's that got to do with me?"

"There are rumors about you. You like hunting the strong ones." She smiles, then, and though he can't see her eyes, he knows they are cold and vengeful. "I like seeing them fall."

-oOo-

They've joined the academy. They see each other after class sometimes. The distance is far too small for him even after he skips five grades and becomes her senior - a sixth year too busy to hang around with the first years. She reaches out for him, but each time she closes the distance, he increases it a hundredfold.

Her eyes bore into him from afar, filled with hurt as he walks off on a practice mission with a sixth year girl. She bites her lip when he comes back and chooses to go out with the older students rather than spend time with her. She still looks around for him on campus even after hearing the rumors about him and the sixth year girl having that kind of relationship.

Farther. He goes farther. He graduates in a single year. After that, there is no childhood friend for her to pester after class or visit in the boys' dorm.

It's five more years before they see each other again, and he has grown cold. He never lets her see his eyes anymore. His laughter is false; his face is false. He is a lieutenant now; the youngest ever in the history of the Gotei 13.

He is feared.

It takes him six years to do what takes others sixty, but through it all, she remembers what he used to be like; his kindness and his soft voice whispering to her when she couldn't sleep. She knows him well. (As well as anyone can.) She knows he is capable of love, and she thinks that they will always and forever be family even if they are no longer best friends.

He is loved, if only by her.


There was a new recruit moving in, an off-season transfer. These transfers were getting rarer, and now they had become, once again, a subject of curiosity. The members of the Third greeted him with distant politeness. Some, when they heard he was coming from the Fourth, laughed to themselves, whispering behind his back that they didn't need a weakling healer dragging them down. There existed a basic inequality between divisional duties that led to the varied, disjointed, and oftentimes vaguely hostile climate of the Gotei 13, and no divisions were immune.

The Third, especially since Captain Ichimaru had come to the helm, was widely noted for having a large stable of competent gentlemen, each with a half-hidden cruel streak. Captains tended to gather those of a similar or complementary nature around them, and Ichimaru was a natural attractant for pranksters and sarcastic snarkers. They flocked to him - the clowns, the surrealists, the skeptics. The outsiders looking in.

Once upon a time, Kira felt that he would have fit in. Now he did not.

Gin placed his slender hand on top of Kira's to still their nervous movements. "Stop yer fiddlin'," he whispered into Kira's ear. "Ya have just as much right to be here as anyone."

Kira nodded, feeling more relaxed, and his captain moved to sling an arm around his shoulders. He let himself be led to face the gathered division.