Title: High Windows
Summary: AU Twenty years after the death of his grandmother, Toushiro reemerges in the human world with no memories and a different name. But the Soul Society never forgets and now he is on trial for the murder of the century.
Rating: T
Notes: Disturbing imagery ahead.
The Court was a tomb.
Soul Society would die, just like Toushiro. They could go easily as thousands had in their sleep or they could choose to fight as the Shinigami fought.
Hyourinmaru yanked his wrist and the chain snapped to Kazeshini's pitched cry. He shrugged off Engetsu's attack. Electricity dissipated before it could reach his chest.
He had no blind spots; he saw what others saw. Even when bearers of Itegumo and Sode no Shirayuki closed their eyes in a fit of rebellion, he still felt the thrum of blood in their veins and knew he could coax them to flower.
Hyourinmaru spat water when a Shinigami drove a sword in his chest. The blade left no wounds when it was withdrawn. And when Toushiro, twisted and ruined, smashed their skulls together, the branches of his pale horns shattering on impact, he did not move.
.
A gigai breathed because it was designed to.
The gigai, boy-shaped and young, sniffled as he shoved more sticky rice in his mouth, absolutely oblivious as to where he was, to what he was.
Urahara squirmed and fidgeted in his seat, face hastily shoved behind a fan. It hadn't quite sunk in what he had done. What he had accomplished. Wonder of wonders—he brought a soul back to life. Little Toushiro was everything Hyourinmaru had asked for, down to the odd coloring of his eyes.
Did his heart beat? He wondered. The heart had been the only thing he could salvage from the boy's old body, the only thing that would take.
Toushiro asked for a second helping and Tessai was only happy to provide.
Urahara didn't know.
.
Masaki found the kid eating dirt and stomped on. She scattered his bullies with wild swings of her book bag and nearly knocked poor Ryuuken out.
The kid got up, dirty-faced and spitting mad. He slapped the pack of tissue out of her hands when she offered though he looked ashamed as it fell to the ground.
"I don't need your help." He gritted out, puffed up like an angry little cat. She couldn't stay mad at him or his funny coloring.
"Everyone needs help." She tutted. "Now hold still."
.
Toushiro fell. The sword fell with him.
There was no boundary between the earth and the sky. If he had been in his right mind, Toushiro would have asked if he was dreaming. If he had ever been real.
The zampakuto was him—his body. Hitsugaya Toushiro laid beside him as still as a corpse. Maybe because he was a corpse. His eyes were wide and fogged from the cold. His lips were trimmed blue, skin edged with frost.
Toushiro tried to ignore how his mouth watered or how much he'd have liked to tear into the boy's bruised stomach and eat him.
"What did you do?"
Hyourinmaru stood unmoving. They were still connected. He was dead and they were still connected. They saw through each other's eyes. Through Hyourinmaru, he had seen what the corpses saw, what Kaien saw, what Kuchiki saw, what everyone saw. And he saw himself. He saw Hyourinmaru who stood unmoving as though his nearness might break something incredibly fragile.
"I have done what you have asked me to do, no more. I kept you safe."
A bald man charged with a roar. Hyourinmaru tossed him sideways.
The spirit sighed. "Did I not keep you safe Toushiro?"
Twenty years ago, a boy died on the streets of Jurinan. Not to a hollow, not to illness but human ignorance. He died and his blood ran down the streets. An entire district was wiped out and for twenty years, his death festered like an infection.
Hyourinmaru had him. Hyourinmaru had all of them. Him, Kaien, Itegumo, Sode no Shirayuki and the others. He had watched from the blackness, the hole inside his chest. Hyourinmaru must have felt it when his heart gave away. The cancer inside of him had been hollowfication. The heart had begun to decay and tainted his soul. It had driven the spirit mad with fever.
Urahara lost his bet. Hitsugaya never opened his eyes. Not in the way Hyourinmaru wanted. Then what was he? If he was not Hitsugaya, what was he?
"You turned my body into a sword."
"It is mine."
It made sense. Asauchi were forged from souls. All asauchi were accounted for. So Hyourinmaru made his own. To be able to enter Soul Society freely on whim. To look for a boy who didn't survive.
"Then why bother with me at all? Why did you try to save me?"
"Twenty years is nothing." Hyourinmaru explained harshly. His tail swept backwards, knocking Kenpachi to the ground. Yoruichi became trapped in a pillar of ice. Isshin hurried forward to dig her out. "A century is nothing. A thousand years is nothing. But I am a spirit bound to my word."
"My name is Tuskabishi Toushiro. I've made no deals with you dragon. And if you got suckered into a bet with a kid, a scared, dying kid, that's your problem!"
"Do not lecture me!" Hyourinmaru boomed and Toushiro doubled over, sparks crawling on the inside of his skin.
The wind was picking up again, funneling into a dome that settled over them. He saw through Itegumo, when Rukia was knocked into the snowdrift. Hitsugaya Toushiro died like that. On the ground because he no longer had the strength to get up.
"Hainwa." He groaned.
Hyourinmaru calmly brushed it aside.
"Do you think you can stop me? It is futile."
Toushiro was young. He died young. Momo thought him lost. A victim in the snow.
He would not—he remembered his father's smile, Masaki's admonishments and Ryuuken's disdain. He hated pain, he didn't particularly like fighting and he sucked at it but he would not die lying down.
"You were not born but made—do you think you matter?"
"Let it go Hyourinmaru." Toushiro panted. "Hitsugaya Toushiro was a nobody. The difference isn't that he's alive or dead. The difference is this. I have people who are depending on me. People who remember me as a brother, or a friend, or a son. I can't let them down."
Hyourinmaru, unmoved, shook his head.
"I cannot be but myself."
Toushiro gave in.
"Maybe you're right."
Hyourinmaru's eyes widened. Before he could stop him, before anyone could stop him, Toushiro rolled over the slackness of his old body and gave into the hollow hunger.
The body barely bled. It was like practicing on cadavers, he told himself. His mask scraped against the ends of his ribs and it sounded like nails on chalkboards to his dissolving ears. Water gushed from his mouth and filled the inside of his mask.
"No!"
He lifted his head and turned the body over, succeeding only in tearing at it. His hands were not meant to grasp. The scars stood out almost glowing against the congealed blood. Hyourinmaru had stolen away the last fragment of his body to place back inside the original. Then maybe he wasn't Toushiro. He was not the one bound by a spirit's word.
Hyourinmaru was tall. He towered over him now. A dragon straight out of classic paintings. Winged and clawed with a mouth full of teeth. He had nearly swept others off the cliff when his human façade shattered, uncoiling his true shape on the Sokyoku hill.
Toushiro saw himself as the spirit saw him, curled up in the snow like a larva. And in that moment, he felt so small. He was a hollow. The material around his fingers oozed up his wrists and clung to undamaged flesh.
In Hyourinmaru's eyes, a small ball of light appeared.
Toushiro held a ball of cero in the grin of his mask and placed it inside his open chest.
.
Hitsugaya's body disintegrated. All bodies did. But this was not the destruction Hyourinmaru had wrought but a lighter feeling. Like a patch of snow left in the sun.
Ice sloughed off Hyourinmaru's frame. His legs shattered as his body smoothed back into its serpentine shape. The real shape, the shape he held before the hollow corrupted him.
The eyes winked out until the last one was of Hyourinmaru staring at him and of him staring back.
"It's okay." He grated out. His voice metallic. "Go."
Hyourinmaru roared once and the force of it beat inside the hole in his chest like it was trying to fill it back up. Make him whole again. And he swept past him. Disappeared as though he had never been.
.
"You fucking idiot!" Yoruichi pulled him up by the back of his robes, a feat since he was taller than her. His mask fragmented at her touch and what was left of his antlers turned to powder. He shivered when she poked inside the hole in his chest and when she got to his hands, her eyes were spitting fire.
"Toushiro you fu—fudging moron." Isshin hugged him hard from the back. "You're going to be fine. Ryuuken will fire your dumbass and maybe I'll let you stay with us to save your dad from embarrassment."
"I already quit." He gasped, squirming in his brother's grasp.
He saw Ichigo standing awkwardly a little ways away, his expression resentful, the downturn of his pout telling Toushiro just how angry Ichigo was. The boy's resolved crumbled like a cookie when Toushiro opened one arm and he tackled his uncle like a force of nature.
Someone cleared their throat.
In an instant, Isshin had Engetsu out again crackling merrily in the cold air. Yoruichi carefully pushed him aside.
"Captain-Commander, sir." Yoruichi said, addressing the man by a title she hadn't used in a long time. "Is this going to be a problem?"
Yamamoto squinted at her from under his bushy eyebrows. She could see the cogs in his head turn, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of angering Shihouins over their wayward head of the house.
"No." He decided. "The debt has been paid. You four are free to go."
"Wait," Isshin said, flustered. "Just like that?" His eyes went to Matsumoto and back, cowed by the fury in his former lieutenant's eyes.
"Come on you idiot." Yoruichi hissed.
Yamamoto nodded.
"Until we meet again, Captains Shiba and Shihouin."
"Wait, you two are captains?!" Ichigo's voice was shrill.
"Ex." Yoruichi explained tersely. "Time to go."
Isshin looked down at Toushiro once and agreed, "Good idea."
Toushiro drooped against Isshin's chest.
"I think he's passing out."
.
"Toushiro?"
