"On and on, the rain will fall, like tears from the star,

On and on, the rain will sing, how fragile we are."

Sting: 'Fragile'

It was raining in Soul Society when he arrived. It was a cold, heavy rain that shrieked as it fell from the sky, dancing down in sheets of glimmering daggers as the world spun beneath it. Ichigo's heart raced at a dizzying discord, his mind in a rolling tumult over what he had experienced.

He admitted to himself that had it been any other person under the sun, he probably would not have cared. There would have been no sense of disturbance in his heart, no worry in his mind save for the sleep he had lost. But as his haste clenched at his throat, clamored at his heart, he knew why he was pushed into such a frantic frenzy.

Because it wasn't just any other person. It wasn't just a landscape that was the weaving of his imagination that he had seen rise into flame. It was Toshiro Hitsugaya who was falling victim to this, whatever atrocity it was. It was the inner world of the wielder of the strongest ice-type zanpakuto he had seen burning in the shadows of the night.

It was he, who amongst the whole of the Soul Society had come closest to uncovering Aizen's deception. It was he, who for reasons buried for scores of painful years, carried the weight of the dead, and the burden of secrecy on shoulders too small for such trials. It was he, who out of all the people he had ever seen, held a tragic beauty unlike any he had ever known, a beauty that cried out in pain beneath the stars as cold as his heart to end that which had not yet begun in favor of saving himself the sorrow of living alone as a genius and a prince.

He had parted ways with Rukia upon entering the Soul Society, his speed far beyond hers in his haste to uncover the truth. He did not know if she had left his side to search for some other means, or if she was merely trailing behind him. It sorrowed him to feel no pain in leaving her, to feel no worry for her safety. But such was the unraveled state of his mind that he could not bring himself to look back, lest he miss that which he was searching for ahead of him.

And as he came vaulting over the roofs of the outer limits of the Squad 10 barracks, he couldn't help but feel his heart race all the faster. All previous thoughts forgotten, he stretched his blunted senses as far as they would go, struggling to feel the icy reiatsu that the small captain was so avidly associated with. He had never been a savant at such things, and he cursed his own lacking abilities as he landed down before the front doors of the captain's office.

He did not bother to knock as he thrust the doors open, the poor portal opening with a loud crack as the wood unceremoniously collided with its frame. With a brash yell, he cried aloud into the office, "Toshiro!"

"What do you want, Ichigo?" a cold voice asked from the opposite side of the room, and, much to his surprise, Toshiro was sitting, as he always did, behind his desk, his snowy head bowed as he focused on a sheet of paper beneath his hands. He did not both to look up at him, in spite of his dramatic entry.

"You…" Ichigo said in surprise, his jaw suddenly lax and his mind blank of words. "You're okay!"

"I don't see any reason why I wouldn't be," the captain replied, though a bit shadily, setting aside the sheet of paper and retrieving another from the dwindling stack sitting on the corner of his desk. Ichigo just stood in awe, his shihakusho dripping wet and a slow chill crawling over his skin as the lukewarm air of the office settled around his soaked skin.

Despite the fact that there was not a hair out of place on the head of the young captain, Ichigo couldn't help but narrow his eyes. Usually the small captain wasn't altogether fond of intrusions, especially from him. And, to his growing surprise, the small captain had made no mention of the incorrect usage of his name, or even seemed to have registered it. Nor had he even resorted to the growling use of his last name to show any sign of irritation.

Stepping further inside, Ichigo looked at the younger man closely. He knew that Toshiro must have been aware of him watching him, and yet he still made no move to contradict or even acknowledge it. There was something off about him, and Ichigo needed to find out what.

"If you insist on staying here to stare at me, Ichigo, would you at least have the decency to close the door behind you?" the young man chided, startling the brightly-haired teen and making him frown. The brown eyes darted to the door, which he had indeed left open. A strong breeze began to kick up, slanting the rain as it fell, the cold weather slowly encroaching on the room.

Doing as requested in an attempt to give himself time to figure out what his observations could tell him, Ichigo clasped the door and slid it shut, realizing with a sharp breath what had seemed different.

If nothing else was a dead giveaway, there was the fact that Toshiro's voice did not sound the same. It was still very much his own, but there was a deep, rumbling, underlying echo to it that settled uneasily with the substitute soul reaper.

Clenching his hands into fists, he turned back to face the small captain, a steely glare settling on the young man's still concentrated form. "Toshiro," he said in a dark tone, "what is going on?"

"I'm afraid that I don't follow you," came his answer, though there was a split-second pause that wracked the tension in his mind to an all time high. The voice was definitely different.

Striding forward in the first degrees of anger, Ichigo reached across the wooden desk and grasped at the captain's narrow wrist, jerking it so hard that the brush it had been holding fell with a hollow clatter onto the paper he had been signing. They sat in silence for a moment, realization thundering through Ichigo as fact after chilling fact settled in his mind.

The very skin of the wielder of the strongest ice zanpakuto in the Soul Society was warm to the touch. Not even lukewarm, but radiating a generous amount of heat. This idea rocked the fear in his mind with an almighty strike, as he knew from experience, having carried the boy in his arms before when the world was cold and the blood on his shihakusho fresh and having been chilled to the bone by even having held him despite the layers of clothing that had separated their bare skin. To have that skin, frozen alabaster in every respect, be warm to his touch, was more disturbing than he ever could have described.

And as his grasp lingered, he also realized that the icy captain was trembling. It was a faint tremor, hardly enough to impair his writing, but just enough shake the pale bones in his body to an unsteady rhythm. To have the small captain be trembling, from any cause whatsoever was means enough to be worried.

Before Ichigo could comment further, the small icy captain snatched his wrist away, daring for the first time to look up at him with a set of murderous eyes.

Eyes that could no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, be related to their once tranquil and striking teal. Instead, they were a deep bleeding red, glaring up at him with a wary uneasiness. And yet, despite their color, they held no malicious or even evil intent. If anything, they seemed distantly familiar, yet just as out of place as everything else about the situation was.

"Where's Toshiro?" Ichigo asked with a slightly wavering voice, trying to hide the panic that was beginning to fray at the edges of his sanity.

The red eyes grew sorrowful, and the voice that had been speaking before lost all traces of its Toshiro-based origin. "I don't know," it answered, and at long last Ichigo remembered the source of the voice's familiarity. It came from the same resonance so long ago that had forever given him the image of Toshiro's inner world.

It was none other than Hyorinmaru's voice speaking to him across the darkness in the room. It was a deep, echoing timbre that despite its power held a weariness and exhaustion that made Ichigo feel inundated with confusion.

He felt his mouth open and close a few times, his tongue dry and his jaw stiff. But no matter how many times he floundered for words, he just couldn't bring himself to think of anything to say. It was like trying to get water out of a desert grave, or dry sand out of an ocean's worth of tears.

He was very thankful when Hyorinmaru spoke, though it was a nervous, uneasy kind of thanks. "I know not when he was taken, but when I went in search of his spirit and found it gone," the dragon closed his eyes, his lips thinning into a crumbling look very unlike the person he was inhabiting., " I now take his soul's place in this body." The small captain's face turned down, the red eyes looking almost curiously at the small pale hands sitting in his lap as they opened once more.

"It is so heavy."

Ichigo couldn't understand what the zanpakuto meant by that, but he imagined that living as an ethereal force was a plane of existence far lighter than even the body of a Soul Reaper. "Hyorinmaru," he said slowly, his throat still dry and the name still unfamiliar on his tongue, "there's something wrong with Toshiro's inner world." They looked at each other for a long moment before the substitute could even bring himself to finish his sentence.

"I saw it burning."

The snowy head sank, and the red eyes of the ice zanpakuto looked up at him with a weary, fevered fear. "I know," the dragon answered, and Ichigo blinked in surprise. "It is usually the place of the zanpakuto to protect the inner world when not engaged in battle. But when I went in search of Hitsugaya's soul presence, I somehow took its place in his body." The young man's head shook from side to side, and Ichigo could see the pale blush of fever upon the back of the neck of the cherubic captain. It seemed that destructive flame was working from the inside out. "Now, it seems, something else has taken residence in my world, and is keeping me away."

Before Ichigo had the chance to even think of another question, the face of the captain grew pale, and in a shuddering motion he slumped forward in his chair, clasping at his forehead as his breath drew in, quick and ragged. Ichigo rushed forward, his heart thundering as he grasped the shoulders of the small captain, feeling them tremble violently beneath his hands.

"Toshiro!" he cried, catching himself only afterwards as he remembered that even if it was Toshiro's body, his heart was elsewhere. He shook the shoulders in his hands gently, trying to mask his own spreading tremble. "Hyorinmaru," he corrected, and the withering gaze of the dragon looked up at him through glassy eyes.

And where before the eyes were a steady and unwavering ruby, there were now intruding splinters of ashen, dying gray stabbing through them. If the eyes were the windows to the soul, then there was no surer a death sentence than that. Whatever was going on, whoever had done this, it was slowly killing both Hyorinmaru and Toshiro's body.

"We have to get you to Captain Unohana!" he said, pulling the captain to his feet and realizing with a start how light he was. Hadn't Hyorinmaru commented on how heavy the body was to him? Perhaps it was the dementia of the fever throwing his senses into tumult, but there was no time to let that impede their haste. But the will of the body in his hands to move was lost, as the face contorted in pain, Toshiro's small hands clenching the sleeves of his shihakusho in a crushing grip.

Even when suffering unimaginable amounts of pain he held strength unrelentingly frightening.

"Can you move?" he asked lamely, almost slapping himself for asking such a stupid question of someone so obviously in suffering. But to his surprise he received a reply, the struggling shake of Toshiro's head told him that the zanpakuto struggling beneath his skin could make no such journey, even with assistance.

Taking no time in hooking his arm under the legs of the captain, Ichigo rushed out of the office, clasping the young body to his chest as he leapt from rooftop to rooftop, trying to discern through the darkness and the rain his way to the 4th Division barracks.

In the darkness, it seemed, his sense of direction was destroyed with his nerves. It felt like the flames from his dream were licking at the back of his neck, threatening to consume him and ravage all that he couldn't protect in the aftermath. The entire situation was a nightmare that he doubted even Kurotsuchi could think up. Each landing brought him that much closer to a source of hope, and yet the further he went, the more he worried.

He worried for himself, and what this strange situation's effects would do to him. He was worried for Hyorinmaru, and if he could survive this attempt at his destruction. But most avidly, he worried for Toshiro, and what ill fate had befallen his soul.

Gracious, I almost forgot about the author's note. Shame on me, I suppose. To answer your questions, yes this is a IchixHitsu fic (if, after reading this chapter, you weren't entirely convinced). The polls for the pairing in fic 2 are still taking votes, so please let me know what you think. This fic is obviously not debatable, as I'm already two chapters into it. I realize that this chapter may not be entirely as awesome as the first, but I'm still getting used to writing for Bleach characters. It's a new eneavor for me, so please be patient. Here are the pairings again, and how many votes each has gotten thus far:

Shuuhei-Byakuya: 1

Shuuhei-Renji: 0

Shuuhei-Kensei: 1

Shuuhei-Ikkaku: 0

Thanks everyone, and see you soon!

8-90's love,

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