Three days after Aizen's escape
Kira was only slightly less drunk than Hisagi. They had spent the past couple of nights commiserating over their traitorous captains, but with Gin officially cleared, and Kira trying not to be too obvious about his own celebrating, Hisagi had gone from miserable to despairing. It just figured that the most evil bastard in the Gotei had been playing them all.
Hisagi perked up slightly as another lieutenant stepped into the crowded sakaya, looking around. It was Hinamori Momo, and it occurred to him that as her captain had tried to murder her she might actually be feeling even more depressed than he was.
He waved at her, and she smiled back.
"Your girlfriend's here," Hisagi said.
"Who?" Kira asked, already too drunk to realize he was being teased. He turned around just as Hinamori tugged another woman into the crowded entry. Her dark coloring and brilliant orange clothing made her instantly identifiable, even though neither lieutenant had ever spoken to her before, the legendary flash master, Shihoin Yoruichi.
Kira's eyes went wide. "Is that--"
Hisagi wasn't listening. He was watching Yoruichi working her way through the crowd, dragging Hinamori along. The woman had an exquisite figure. She wasn't like Rangiku, moving like she was trying to attract every male eye in the room, but she was almost aggressively feminine. Hisagi felt like she was challenging every man who dared to look at her, like she was silently demanding to know if they really thought they were man enough to handle her, and his honest answer was no, probably not--and Nanao was going to kill him just for looking.
"I've gotta--"
"Hello, boys!" Yoruichi said, slamming her hand down on Hisagi's shoulder as he started to rise. "No bowing and no calling me Shihoin-dono, got that? Now scoot in. Momo claims you know how to drink."
Hinamori smiled at her fellow lieutenants a little sheepishly. "Yoruichi-sama said she wanted to see where everybody got together these days. You don't mind, do you?"
"Of course not!" Kira said. He moved over quickly to make room for the women. "Please, join us."
Hinamori sat down in the space he'd made, but Yoruichi, with the evil instincts of a cat, seemed to realize Hisagi wanted to stay as far away from her as possible and dropped down onto the tatami right next to him. "How you doing, it's Shuhei-kun, yeah?"
"Yes, ma'am, Yoruichi-sama," he said, leaning back as she lunged across him to grab his bottle of sake.
She took an enormous chug and exclaimed, "Damn! That's good! A century is just too damn long to go without a decent drink--Kisuke's all for that World of the Living shit, but I swear it's got nothing on a proper bottle of Soul Society sake!"
She waved a waitress over before anyone could answer, demanding more sake. "And what else you guys want? Bring us whatever food you've got; it's all going on the Shihoin House tab! God bless being rich as fuck!"
Kira sighed for the fifth time since Hinamori and Yoruichi had left. It was beginning to get on Hisagi's nerves. He really thought if Kira was that crazy about Hinamori he should just tell her. It was easy to forget exactly how many years it had taken him to tell Nanao he was in love with her, and that was after multiple, albeit drunken, hookups.
Not that it really mattered anyway. Just when everything had started to be going really well and life seemed like in might actually be pretty awesome it all fell apart anyway. Fate clearly had it in for some people, and Hisagi was pretty sure that if he was one of those people Kira had to be another one. Their best bet was probably just to give up now.
"You sure I shouldn't have walked her home?" Kira asked again.
"Pretty sure Yoruichi can handle any bad guys," Hisagi answered.
"She seemed really drunk."
"So do you."
"But I--"
"What you think's going to happen to a lieutenant and an ex-captain in Seireitei on a two block walk?" Hisagi demanded.
"I don't know. I--"
At that moment an unranked member of the Third Division went flying across their table and through the rice paper wall into the street.
"What the—?" Hisagi began, but the rising shouts from across the sakeya quickly made the point of contention obvious. A large group of shinigami from the Third had been out celebrating the official announcement that their captain's life was no longer in danger and he would be returning to the division as soon as he recovered. They took the announcement as a vindication of their much maligned captain, but the surrounding shinigami, men of multiple different divisions, did not agree.
By the time the Third Division member went flying, his squad mates were all on their feet and yelling at or hitting other shinigami who were shouting back insults and accusations of their captain.
Hisagi couldn't quite suppress a smile when one man from the Eleventh called Gin 'a creepy, fox-faced coward who was only on their side 'cause it was the only place in the universe a freak like him was going to get laid'.
As the two lieutenants watched, even more drunken shinigami joined the fight. Someone from the Tenth hit the one from the Eleventh presumably because he saw the other man's statement as an insult to his own lieutenant, but most of the shinigami were going all out against the Third.
The front door opened, and Hisagi was not surprised to see Ikkaku standing there with a smile that was quickly spreading from ear to ear. This had to stop now or the Eleventh's Third Seat was going to put it to the most bloody end possible.
That was finally enough to get Hisagi to his feet. He staggered a little, and for a second his vision went gray, but it came back, so all good. "That's enough!" he shouted at the battling idiots. "Who the fuck do you morons think cares what the fuck you think anyway? Not one of you goddamn idiots count for anything. The captains are going to war. Do you understand that? We had captains fighting on the streets of Seireitei! When that happens all the fuck any of us can do is get out of the way and hope it's not the end of the fucking universe! You think it matters if we like the captains? If we think they're good people? All that matters is if they can win, and if they think they need Ichimaru Gin to make that happen then all I can say is thank god the fox-faced asshole is cooperating for the first time in his goddamn life." By the time Hisagi paused everyone else had shut up. The lieutenant of the Ninth had a reputation for being calm, rational, and more than usually understanding about the stupid messes people got into when drunk, seeing as he tended to lose a few IQ points himself when he drank. He was not the sort to berate an entire sakeya at the top of his lungs, even if they had thrown a man out into the street. "And," Hisagi added abruptly. "Before you go around insulting Captain Ichimaru Gin you might want to remember he could slaughter every last one of us before we could even flinch--and he petty revenge is his favorite hobby."
"True that," Ikkaku said, his grin reappearing, despite the fact that the fighting was clearly over. "I heard he got a guy from the Seventh transferred to Antarctica for fifty years after he made a pass at Rangiku. Poor bastard's still out there in the World of the Living freezing his ass off."
"That's almost as bad as the time he switched our division orders with the Ninth after our guys beat up a bunch of his. We spent three weeks working on Seireitei Communications before anyone noticed something was off," Yumichika said. "I thought my editorial was quite good, a critique of the fashion sense of various captains and lieutenants. It pointed out some very serious faux pas in desperate need of attention."
Their comments had done the trick and soon everyone's attention was diverted to the more humorous antics of Ichimaru Gin of the past century. Most people were now remembering why they actually enjoyed most of what Gin added to the Gotei since, as unranked division members, they never attracted enough of his attention to be the victims of his entertainment, and, at the same time, his own division was remembering why they actually hated the soulless bastard.
Ikkaku and Yumichika made their way over to the lieutenants' table. "You look like shit," Ikkaku said, frowning down at Hisagi, who had gone back to his drink now that everyone had calmed down.
"What would you know?" Hisagi mumbled, not bothering to look up.
"He's not wrong," Yumichika added, helpfully. Then he grinned. "Look like you've had the life sucked out of you."
Hisagi scowled but chose not to respond, not till he'd figured out how to beat the pretty-boy's shikai anyway.
Kira sighed. "I'm afraid Hisagi-san's had a bad week," he informed the other two as he moved over to make room. Hisagi clearly wasn't going to.
"You should go home," Ikkaku said. "You got a wife and kid waiting for you. What are you doing drinking yourself to death in a place like this? You have a life; go live it."
"I can't imagine Lieutenant Ise thinks much of you going out drinking every night without her," Yumichika added.
"She hates me," Hisagi groaned. "Kyoraku hates me. Ai-chan'd hate me too if she had a clue what was going on."
"Kyoraku's never hated anyone in his life, too lazy," Ikkaku declared. "But I doubt he's even annoyed at you. You did what you had to do, didn't you? Followed your captain's orders, not your fault your captain was on Aizen's side."
"I should have seen it. The hell's wrong with me that I could work with Captain Tosen every day for thirty years and think he was the greatest captain Soul Society had ever had, the most noble, the most honorable, a true hero of justice--fuck that! There really is no such thing."
"You can't give up on your ideal just because Tosen fell short," Kira protested. "You can still be everything you wanted to be; you can still be that hero. Justice is worth fighting for; truth and right are worth fighting for. You don't have to give up because you no longer have someone to follow. You can make your own path."
"You want to be a hero?" Yumichika demanded, barely holding back his laughter. "You two are adorable! You still think there's such a thing as justice? Sometimes I forget how young you lieutenants are, all wide-eyed innocence and idealism--remember that, Ikkaku?"
"Hell, no."
"Now you sound like Nanao," Hisagi said. "And if I'm going to have to hear how adorably naive I've been I might as well go home and let her tell me. At least she'll sleep with me if I pretend to listen."
"Yeah," Yumichika agreed. "You probably should. You're not bad looking, but I'm really not into tattoos."
Hisagi's eyes widened, and he hopped to his feet. "Yeah, better get home," he said quickly.
Yumichika smiled and waved after the retreating lieutenant. "That wasn't too hard," he said. Then he turned to Kira, still smiling, and said, "So Lieutenant, how are things going with you and Lieutenant Hinamori? You haven't given up, have you?"