Disclaimer: All rights for Harry Potter and Bleach go to their respective owners.
The children were still standing huddled by the fire when he went down the stairs. He paused on the landing and leaned against the railing, bracing himself for what was about to come. Hyourinmaru rumbled comfortingly in his inner world.
"Everything will work out."
"I hope so." He took a deep breath and went down the last of the stairs.
There was a long moment of silence in which they simply looked at each other. Toshiro took the time to study them and try to gauge their emotions.
Ron was, as expected, angry and perhaps confrontational. He was standing just in front of his friends, and his taped wand was in his hand. He stared at Toshiro with angy eyes, almost taunting him to attack. Toshiro ignored him. With the mood he was in, he could happily kill all of them. They had caused everything that had happened.
Harry wasn't looking at him; instead he stared down at his bracelet. He ran his thumb over it, tracing its lines.
He couldn't get a good sense of Hermione's mood. She was standing next to Harry but she didn't look angry or anything like that. Just...disappointed.
Toshiro guessed that Ron had done his best to convince both of them that he was an evil person who wanted nothing more than to overrun the school with monsters and kill them all. Likely he'd shared some of his stories as 'proof', and had urged them to tell a teacher. Probably Dumbledore himself.
"Why didn't you tell us earlier?"
Harry was, unsurprisingly, the first to speak. Toshiro turned his gaze to the boy, who still wasn't looking up. "My people are very secretive," he answered, going over to sit on his windowsill. If his posture was not aggressive then they would be less likely to believe that he was going to suddenly go around chopping peoples' heads off. Which was a good possibility. He felt the strong urge to fight. Where were Hollows when you needed them? "We have standing orders not to reveal ourselves to you. Unfortunately, somethings things...leak, and people get the wrong idea of who we are." He gave Ron a pointed look. "The truth is convoluted and warped by time and repetition. Since you apparently have stories telling of us, likely a wizard of long ago saw one of us and told anyone else he could find."
"Then how do you explain the monsters?" Ron took a tense step forward. "And what did you do to Harry?"
"Do to him?" Toshiro echoed. "I didn't do anything to him; his power went out of control and I...oh."
"Oh? Oh what?" Ron snarled.
Toshiro was too occupied by his sudden realization to follow the train of thoughts that this was a side of Ron that he'd never seen before. "Earlier this year when you were injured by the Bludger during a Quidditch game," he said, nodding to Harry. "I would go down to the hospital wing and spend some time trying to heal you. I think that the presence of my power influenced yours and matured it faster than normal."
"Normal?" Harry asked. He put his hand over the reiatsu-constraining bracelet. "This was always going to happen?"
"No," Toshiro answered, picking out his next words carefully. "Your power and my power are similar but not the same. We call ours reiatsu, or 'Spiritual Pressure'. You simply label yours magic."
"And this is how you get people?" Ron took another step forward, wand noticeably rising. "You...change wizard's power into yours and steal it?"
The pent-up anger lodged in his stomach swelled and threatened to burst. Toshiro took a deep breath and did his best to contain his reiatsu. "No," he said through clenched teeth. "Our power is our own. We do not steal others' power."
"But you kill them. You said so! Your name means you kill people!"
"This boy has no regard for his safety," Hyourinmaru noted as a freezing wind swept through the common room. The fire sputtered under the sudden onslaught, fighting to regain purchase.
Toshiro took another deep breath, taking the edge of the windowsill in a grip so tight that his knuckles whitened. "My name means Soul Reaper," he growled, noticing and not caring that the children shivered. "I do not kill humans. I allow their souls to pass on."
"You are Death," Ron insisted. "You are responsible for the deaths of everyone on this planet!"
"No. We do not harm living humans."
"You do! You control the monsters and tell them to kill us! You told that snake to kill us!"
The tight knot of anger burst, sending Toshiro to his feet as the wind took on a biting edge and the temperature plunged. Long, purposeful strides took him across the room and inches in front of Ron before the boy could take another breath of the freezing air. "How dare you compare us to them! How dare you say we are anything like him! You do not know the first thing about us!"
He could Hyourinmaru urging restraint but could feel his anger. He knew his inner world was suffering the onslaught of his emotions - the clouds gathering and splitting the skies with booming thunder and jagged bolts of lightning, tearing apart and letting loose a wave of unrelenting water. The wind roared and whipped around, sending the snow gathered on the icy ground whirling and biting.
He was large in his fury, in his righteous anger. These children, these living children, were comparing him to the traitors! They were saying that he was no better than him, that he controlled the Hollows and ordered them to kill innocent people!
If only he was not in his gigai, he would tear through them with his zanpakuto, execute them for the most grave errors of insulting him and all of the Gotei 13. Their blood would soak the ground and fill the ditches and cracks in the stone. They would pay for killing Sigruna, who had done nothing to them, who had wanted nothing more than to live in peace. They would-
The ring of ice around his arm tightened and burned.
Toshiro blinked, and it was if a curtain of furious ice suddenly cracked and melted away. His breath came out in puffs of cloud in the air, and as he stumbled away back to his windowsill, he saw the ice on the ground, spreading from where he had been standing just moments before.
He had their attention now. They were staring at him with wide, terrified eyes. He closed his own to soothe his inner world and contain his escaping reiatsu, only opening them when he was sure that he would not attack the children and when he could feel the air warm back to an uncomfortably hot temperature. The children had bunched together again, all their wands out and pointing uncertainly at him.
A pang of sadness shot through him.
"My apologizes, that was..." He trailed off, the usual words of a superior atoning to a subordinate dead in his mouth. These were not subordinates. These were children whom he'd spent almost two years learning alongside. "I..."
He sat heavily on the windowsill, staring at the floor and the receding film of ice. Remorse spread through him, heating his limbs and making him knot his fingers in the fabric of his clothes. What could he say? What would they say? What would he say if the roles were reversed, if he were the one faced with a strange, foreign being threatening and able to kill them all - wanting to kill them all?
The room was suffocating. He wasn't able to breathe, and he knew he had to get out.
"I'm sorry," he said again, standing and unlatching the window. The warm air of approaching summer blew against his face. He took a step forward to stand on the very edge of the window. Then he paused.
"Her name was Sigruna. She was a basilisk. And she was my friend."
He jumped.
Hermione watched everything happen, watched and knew that Ron was saying all the wrong things. Toshiro was sitting on the windowsill looking like his anger was barely contained. There was a new ring of ice around his arm, glittering in the flickering light of the dying fireplace. Hermione shivered, wondering where this cold wind had come from.
She didn't think Toshiro was a bad person. He was dry, short tempered, and sarcastic, yes, but he was also polite. He was kind, even if she wasn't sure he saw that himself. He was smart, willing to help, and he was powerful.
He was also not human.
After dropping Ginny off at the hospital wing they had hurried back to the Tower and collapsed on the couch, utterly exhausted. But still Ron had found the energy to try to convince them that Toshiro was evil, that he was going to kill them all, and that all he wanted was to eat their souls. Until Harry had brought an abrupt stop to that conversation.
"I have the same power. Will I want to eat your souls?"
Toshiro had appeared moments later, looking completely spent. He had trudged up to the dorms and reappeared a few moments later dressed in their regular uniform instead of the strange pajamas he'd had on before. Then he had moved to the window and everything went downhill.
"You do! You control the monsters and tell them to kill us! You told that snake to kill us!"
What in that short bit had caused Toshiro to snap? She shivered, his words echoing around the common room even as he stared furiously up at Ron. His eyes were glowing white, and he was trembling with fury.
"How dare you compare us to them! How dare you say we are anything like him! You do not know the first thing about us!"
Him? Who was him?
Then Toshiro blinked, and it was like he was suddenly able to see again. He stumbled back to his windowsill and seemed to crumple down on it. "My apologizes, that was...I..." He didn't appear to be able to say anymore, so he stood and opened the window. "Her name was Sigruna. She was a basilisk. And she was my friend."
Hermione had enough time to wonder how a basilisk could be anyone's friend before he jumped. She sucked in a sharp breath, running to the window and extending her wand, prepared to stop his fall when she saw nothing falling or on the ground. He had simply disappeared. She turned around and shrugged helplessly to her friends, unable to say anything. They each went to the window to see for themselves - though she knew Ron wouldn't even try to help him.
"He's gone."