My apologies--this will be the last update for a week, because I'll be out of town. Sorry! Hope you've been enjoying it so far...

Zaraki Kenpachi would probably have been surprised to learn that he'd been the greatest gift to the women of Soul Society in the last thousand years, but then again, he likely wouldn't have cared.

In an organization where anybody could be tracked by sensing their aura, and where half the people around you could teleport with some degree of accuracy, casual relationships were fraught with a certain amount of difficulty.

There are times when any woman just doesn't want to have a conversation right this minute, or would prefer to gently dissuade someone by avoiding them rather than having a messy and dramatic confrontation (at best) or having to incinerate them (at worst.) The world of the dead has just as many earnest, well-meaning young men as the world of the living, and being a shinigami did not make it any easier to dissuade them without feeling like you were kicking a large sword-carrying puppy.

Unfortunately, reitsu and shunpo, in concert, made it difficult to just slip out the back way when you weren't in the mood. Two seconds of thought and a brief interdimensional twist, and there they were again. Sure, there were shielded areas, but you couldn't spend all your life there, and while there were ways to hide your aura, not everybody was particularly good at it.

Enter Zaraki Kenpachi.

It's not that he was chivalrous. He wasn't. He had all the chivalry of a dead flounder, and a vocabulary to match. In Zaraki's world, the strong took what they wanted and the weak had better carry a switchblade in their back pocket.

But he had power like nobody else in the world. Flash-step into his immediate area for five or ten seconds, and trying to find your individual aura was like trying to locate a candle flame in the heart of a firestorm. And once somebody lost track of you, it was a great deal more difficult to be found again, and the minute or two of trying to work it out was generally more than enough for you to get someplace safe and relatively private, like the women's locker room or one of the shielded rooms in the library, and then an awkward conversation was averted without anybody having to go to the infirmary.

Within a few years of his arrival, "to Zaraki someone" became a verb among the female shinigami—i.e. "It was a great date until he started talking about his mother. Then I had to Zaraki him."

Whether Zaraki ever noticed that a surprising amount of women were flicking in and out of the edges of his power radius was debatable. (Yachiru did know, but considered this just another example of her beloved Ken-chan's greatness, and hadn't ever bothered to mention it to him.) Fortunately, he slept like a rock and never bothered to shield his quarters, which was a good thing, because for a man with a nonexistent sex life, more women passed through his rooms on any given night than Captain Shunsui could have managed in the best week of his life.

Finding Zaraki at any point was generally about as difficult as locating the sun on a cloudless day. You just turned towards the inferno. Nanao flickered across the rooftops, sensing that Shunsui was gaining on her, and she was pretty sure he was done with the chasing bit and about to focus on the catching.

Really, would that be so bad? Men generally never even look at you twice, and this one's followed you across half the city, and set himself on fire.

No!

Well…maybe…gods, I have to think!

I'm just saying…

She darted a glance over her shoulder, and saw a flash of pink from the corner of her eye. Still back, but gaining—gods, very fast. He definitely had the superior range, taking one step to every three of hers.

Gods, he really is like a cat. Sleeping sixteen hours a day was just conserving energy for the hunt.

You know what cats do when they catch baby birds, don't you? purred that traitorous little voice.

Kill and eat them?

Uh…

Leave them on the pillows of their loved ones? She had a brief, searing mental image of a baffled Captain Ukitate discovering her limp body draped over his pillow.

Let's just forget we ever went down this particular metaphorical road, shall we? said her brain testily.

She wasn't even sure if this was going to work. It was the sort of thing you did to low-rankers, not captains. For all she knew, her captain really could pick a candle flame out of a firestorm, and if he did, she was going to get pounced on in front of a good chunk of the Eleventh Division, which promised to open up whole new worlds of humiliation. Matsumoto might be the biggest gossip in the thirteen divisions, but Yumichika came in a close second if you got a drop of alcohol in him. (Zaraki himself wouldn't care unless she tried to disembowel Shunsui on the spot, in which case he might muster a certain minimal interest while it lasted.)

Still, she had exhausted all her other options.

Nanao caught the edge of the Eleventh Captain's power—it was like walking into an oven, you couldn't miss it—and charged inward. She was feeling almost giddy—from the chase? From the fact that she was being chased, and half-wanted to get caught? Who could tell?—and practically danced across the last set of rooftops, before dropping off the highly visible roofline and into the streets.

What happened next was pure bad luck.

She arrived on the street just as Zaraki Kenpachi, in a spirit of positive reinforcement, flung one of the lower ranking members of the Eleventh through a load-bearing wall.

Nanao was well back from the fight—only an idiot would just turn up under Zaraki's nose, that was asking to be turned into human origami—but it was a large building, and it had taken quite a beating in the last few hours. She slumped against the wall, trying to catch her breath, and it seemed to buck against her shoulder. A long wooden groan echoed through the street.

Flakes of white fell around her.

Is it snowing? In spring?

She held out a hand, and realized almost immediately that it was plaster dust.

"Wha…?" She pulled back, and the entire third story caved in and came crashing down.

The sky rained bricks.

"Oh, shi—" Nanao began, turned to flash out of the way—and a chunk of masonry caught her behind the left ear and spun her immediately down into darkness.

"Ooh! Ooh!" Yachiru jumped up and down on Zaraki's shoulder. "Look, Ken-chan, look!"

"Huhn?" The enormous captain turned his head, in time to see a woman—was it the little lieutenant from Eighth? Or maybe the one from Twelfth? They all looked alike to him, and none of them were worth anything in a fight. Anyway, she'd just gotten nailed by falling brickwork, so she was going to be worth a lot less in the near future. "Oh. Huh."

She didn't go down right away, he'd give her that. She swayed on her feet as if trying to remember how to fall down, and then the second story went and the laws of gravity took over.

At the last possible instant, before a falling beam turned her into a damp splat, there was the telltale streak of someone flash-stepping. The woman, her rescuer, and a couple of bricks vanished.

"I think that was Nanao-chan!" said Yachiru happily. "Bye, Nanao-chan!" She waved.

Zaraki grunted. Nobody was killing anybody. Boring. He turned away, and looked for someone else to throw through a wall.

"Well, that didn't work."

Eight hours had passed, give or take. Shunsui, still wearing a haori showing signs of scorch marks, was sprawled out under his favorite cherry tree. Empty sake bottles littered the ground around him, leaving long shadows in the late afternoon light.

Ukitate was getting worried. Finding Shunsui had been harder than usual. His power was tamped down so tight that if the captain of Thirteenth hadn't known where his friend would be, he'd have assumed Shunsui was a rock or a tree or one of the first-year Academy students.

Actually, in the late evening light, he did look rather like a particularly morose pink rock.

The white-haired captain sat down on the grass next to him, clearing a patch among the sake bottles. Judging by the number of empties, Shunsui wasn't even tasting the stuff as he drank. Usually it took somebody dying to get him to that state.

"But it seemed to be going so well! You tried showing her how you feel?"

"Oh, yes." Shunsui shredded an innocent cherry blossom between his fingers. "I showed her exactly how I felt. In response, she flash-stepped across half the town—no thanks to you, might I add—and tried to hide behind Zaraki. Then a goddamn building fell on her."

Ukitate blinked. "Is she okay?"

"She's fine," said Shunsui sourly. "Minor injuries. Fourth says she'll be up and around in a day or two. Unohana insisted on a day of rest. Says she's overworked."

"And you haven't gone to see her?" asked Ukitate, appalled.

"Mmmmm. Not since she woke up, no…"

Ukitate waited.

"I haven't had the nerve," muttered Shunsui, yanking down his hat.

There was a long silence. Ukitate turned away, shoulders shaking. For a moment, Shunsui thought he was having a coughing fit, but realized quickly enough that the other captain was laughing.

"You…you…got Zaraki'd…"

"I don't want to talk about it." He had both hands on his hat now, a size large hermit crab trying to wedge itself into a size small shell.

"Well," said Ukitate, helping himself to some sake, "at least she probably knows how you feel now."

A wordless sound of pain emerged from under the hat.

"How much sake have you drunk, anyway?"

"Not nearly enough." One hand flapped around until it located a bottle with a few drops in the bottom. "Jyuushiro—what if she decides to transfer out?"

"I'll take her," said Ukitate instantly.

"You will do nothing of the sort!" Shunsui shot upright, then had to clutch at his head. "Oooh…"

"The hell I won't!" Ukitate was laughing again. "Sorry, my friend, but all's fair in love and lieutenants." He tapped a finger against the bottle. "Assuming I don't have to fight a bloody duel to get her, mind you, which is a pretty big assumption. Half the captains would give their left arms for someone that competent to handle the paperwork…I hear rumors that Soi Fong is even in the market. Covert Ops loves paperwork, they just don't want anybody to look at it."

"I'll fight all of them," said Captain Shunsui, the Thirteen Squads' most noted pacifist. "Simultaneously."

"No, you won't."

"I will give them a very stern look, then."

"Now that I believe." Ukitate slugged back more sake.

"I've screwed everything up," said Shunsui mournfully. "I thought—for a bit there, I really thought—"

"Well…" Ukitate reluctantly gave up the dream of someone to fill out his requisition forms. "When I saw her, she didn't exactly look like she was having a bad time. And she did say to stall you, not to stop you."

The hat lifted long enough to reveal one dark, wary eye. "Would you have?"

"Stopped you? If I thought you were hounding her, maybe. I doubt she'd have needed my help, though. She really isn't a baby bird, Kyōraku. If you think she was interested, you were probably right."

"Mmm." He settled the hat again. "That was before the building fell on her."

"Eh." Ukitate shrugged. "What's a building between friends? If I were you, I'd go tell her how you feel…and soon. The longer she wonders, the worse she's going to build it up in her own head."

"I am attempting to gather my courage," said Shunsui, with dignity. He stood up. He swayed on his feet, and it took several tries to adjust his hat, but he was definitely standing.

Ukitate scanned their immediate surroundings and sighed.

"If you haven't found it at the bottom of all these bottles, I think it's a lost cause…"