Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach.
There are minor manga spoilers in the following fic.
In the 11th Division, there is only one main rule, one rule that you have to follow, that each and every shinigami in the division agrees on. Win or die. He never would have guessed he wouldn't like the knowledge that one of his shinigami, one of his subordinates, had died with honor. That he wouldn't like the knowledge that he wouldn't be seeing them ever again.
"Bye bye Ken-chan…" Her eyes lost their glow. Her small hand stopped holding his, and slid to the ground, into the growing pool of blood.
The killing blow was coming. But then a small form flew over him and took the hit. A form he had reluctantly brought with him, thanks only to a cute pout on an already adorable face.
With a savage roar, Zaraki Kenpachi, Captain of the 11th Division, stood up and yelled ferociously as the creatures laughed at his weakness.
He hadn't thought Aizen's soldiers would be so strong. He hadn't known their Ban Kai was so powerful. He hadn't felt pain like this before. He hadn't believed it when she had leapt. He had never regretted anything before.
One even had the gall to start churning saliva in his mouth, with the obvious intention of spitting on her. Kenpachi felt so infuriated, he was in so much pain, that he ripped the eye patch that sucked at his power off and charged.
Red on pink, red on black. A lifeless form lying on the ground, dead for the second time. Never coming back. She would never ride on his shoulder again, never tell him obviously wrong directions, never again giggle happily when he went that way knowing full well it was the wrong way.
As the eye patch hit the ground, the corpse fell as well. Kenpachi looked back up at the other monsters and challenged them, declaring he would kill every last one of them when he was obviously not in the shape to do so.
The monsters had taunted him, and even began looking down on him. One tried to spit on her. That one was dead before the eye patch hit the ground. But that had been only been luck. He was going to lose. Reinforcements would arrive soon. There was no way he was going to die. But he would lose this battle.
Kenpachi leapt over one's enormous arm and moved to cut it off. His blade snapped in half at the hardness of the skin.
He should have been taunting them to charge at him. He should have been laughing. He should have, at the least, been smiling. But he couldn't. Because that lifeless form on the ground wasn't going to stand up, wasn't going to look at him ever again, wasn't going to smile at him ever again.
A punch hit him and he slid across the ground, leaving him right next to a small body. Kenpachi instinctively moved her, prodded her, hoping she would jump to life and hug him. He heard yells in the background, he recognized Kurosaki's as one of them. But it was too late…
Yachiru was gone. And she wasn't ever coming back.
End