Chapter 9: Reunion

Ichigo wandered aimlessly through the streets of the city. It wasn't like he was really that much of an asset to the search party. Why the hell had they nagged him into doing this again? He sucked at sensing reiatsu, he didn't really know Hitsugaya-taicho, and they spent most of the time out searching for the captain, so his 'cultural expertise' wasn't really used. At all.

Well, that wasn't true. Apparently, shopping for dinner was something that the two vice captains needed a guide for. After he had seen Renji arguing with a vending machine, he'd understood why.

But, that didn't make the long boring hours of the search any more bearable. He couldn't even train during the day. He'd tried that, once. Just once.

There was a reason that Matsumoto-san was a vice captain.

Because his reiatsu-sensing skills were so poor, and after weeks of no results using that method, Ichigo had decided to forgo them altogether, and just search on foot, with his eyes and ears. And voice.

"TOSHIRO! OI! TOSHIRO!"

He wasn't in his body no one could hear him, but a few of the more spiritually-aware individuals in the rush of people on the sidewalk glanced towards the substitute. Not that he noticed. He didn't care about what these people thought, anyway. They couldn't see him, and even if they could, it wasn't like he was sticking around, so even if they could see him they wouldn't be able to make trouble for him.

There wasn't any response, not that he really expected any. There hadn't been any response at all during the whole search. Rangiku-san couldn't even feel her captain's reiatsu. A yell wasn't really going to do much if that were the case. It was still worth a try, though, even if nothing came of it.

Before his uselessness could depress him further, however, Ichigo sensed both Renji and Rangiku-san. They weren't far away, but the strange thing was that there was a third reiatsu with them. It wasn't Toshiro's, but it was slightly familiar.

"Hey King, he's back." The Hollow's voice in his head made Ichigo jump, and slapped him with the identity of the third reiatsu signature. It was that kid from the river. The one that his inner Hollow found so disturbingly delicious. It scared him, the Hollow's hunger for the kid's soul. It had never, ever shown any inclination toward feasting on human souls in all the time he'd known it. That was the only reason Ichigo hadn't done something... drastic before the Vizared had got to him. Despite all the Hollow's desire for control, it never showed any interest in human souls, but now it was ready to challenge him for control; all for the sake of one high schooler.

Even if the kid did have high reiatsu, it made no sense. Chad had high reiatsu, so did Orehime. Not to mention all the soul reapers he hung around. The Hollow wasn't interested in them at all, except in assessing their threat level, and that was only because before he had gone to the Vizared, Ichigo had thought about how each of his friends could take him out if he lost to the Hollow inside him. But that had been a passing interest. Ichigo was firmly in control, still, and his human friends weren't here. That other guy was.

The only guy who his inner Hollow seemed interested in. Not good. Especially with the other shinigami there. It was a crime to be a Vizared, he knew. The punishment was apparently banishment or something. So what would happen if he slipped and they put two and two together and come up with Vizared? Or if he lost control and started killing people? It did not look good. Not at all.

Ichigo was paralyzed as the two urges to run toward and away from the boy fought for domination. Unfortunately, that paralysis gave Matsumoto-san and the rest of the group the chance they needed to catch up. The busty vice captain grabbed Ichigo, with an enthusiastic cry of "Ichigo!" jerking the shinigami representative back to the real world, simultaneously killing the last chance said representative had of booking it.

"Er," Ichigo said as he deliberately didn't react to suddenly being grabbed while he was in the middle of having a sort of identity crisis. "Hey, Ran-san, Renji. I didn't know we were searching in a group again. What's with the kid?"

'The kid,' despite looking rather pale and ready to either puke or run for it, bristled at that comment. "Hey, I'm your age, not a kid!"

The customary frown fit easily on Ichigo's face as he looked at the human in front of him, ignoring the Hollow's suggestions to eat his soul. "Still doesn't explain what you're doing here."

"He can apparently see zanpakuto spirits," Renji explained, totally ignoring whoever-it-was. "Ran-san used him to try and find Hyorinmaru."

"Oh." Well, shit. That guy really could see the Hollow then, couldn't he? "... Did it work?"

"Yes and no." Matsumoto's voice was rather cheerful with an undertone of malice that would slice through steel like it was steam. "Watanuki-kun saw Hyorinmaru, but we couldn't get to him, and I couldn't sense Taicho's reiatsu."

Matsumoto Rangiku was a scary, scary lady when she wanted to be. In the Soul Society, even after all that crap with Aizen and the other two captains, she had been drunk and partying most of the time, from what Ichigo could tell. This super-focused Matsumoto made Ichigo very glad that he wasn't the reason for Toshiro's disappearance. He almost felt sorry for whoever had done it. Almost. That person/thing/force of nature was making him spend time with this terrifying version of Matsumoto, after all.

"Why couldn't you get to the zanpakuto?" he asked instead of begging for mercy. Strangely, the high school human (Ran-san had said his name, but Ichigo was never really good at names unless the name belonged to someone who was trying to kill him, someone who was going to be killed or someone who was going to help him prevent someone being killed. As of now, the weird Hollow-Bait Human didn't fit into any of these categories) blushed and looked anywhere but at the three shinigami.

"We went into the woods and got pretty far in," Renji started explaining, gesturing back the way they had come, "but the farther we went in, the harder it was for Watanuki-kun to breathe. We didn't know how bad it was until we got to this really cold clearing and the kid passed out."

Matsumoto threw an arm around the shamefaced Watanuki. "It wasn't a total loss!" She had seen how the bespectacled high school student had been trying to will himself into non-existence from sheer embarrassment, and had decided that she was going to demonstrate that he really had nothing to be worried about. "Before we dragged him away, I noticed that the clearing ahead was covered in frost!"

"Frost." Ichigo did not sound convinced. What did frost have to do with any of this again?

"Hyorinmaru is the strongest ice-type zanpakuto in the Soul Society! I have no doubt that that's the reason the weather has been so cold." Her captain worked very, very hard for control of his considerable powers, and had met with success. However, his powers had grown exponentially since leaving the Rukongai, and leaking reiatsu now could most definitely drag the temperature down like this. The fact that he had no control over his reiatsu was something to worry about. Especially loss of control on such a huge scale. Taicho had been missing for weeks, and the drain would be getting to him eventually.

Using too much reiatsu could kill, and there were any number of tragic stories about death from reiatsu overuse. And not just the students, though they were the most common. It happened with seasoned shinigami, sometimes through not paying attention, sometimes through using a kido too advanced, and sometimes intentionally, giving their lives up to save their comrades.

Matsumoto wasn't sure why her captain had lost control so spectacularly, or how it was being blocked so well that they couldn't truly sense it, but she was going to find out, and stop it before her captain ran out of reiatsu and time.

"Yeah," Renji chimed in. "Sometimes the weather changes suddenly in the Rukongai or the Soul Society, and most people know now that it's Hitsugaya-taicho training or something."

Watanuki was passed amazement or nervousness by now. Had he not been so tired, he would have been astonished that they were searching for a being who regularly controlled the weather. Maybe it was commonplace where they came from, however, in this world changing the weather was serious buisness. It needed power to do that, which meant that if Hitsugaya-taicho was someone with the power to control the weather like that, he was not to be messed with.

"Ah." Despite (apparent) newfound understanding, Ichigo still seemed very ill at-ease. Watanuki hoped that it was that the newest shinigami was as uncomfortable with the suggestions being whispered into his ears as Watanuki was. He knew, of course, that the spirits were after him, and that they wanted to eat him. Between Yuuko-san, and the spirits themselves, it was impossible to forget. It was one thing to see a freaky blob-thing after him, glooping along, but it was quite another to watch as a spirit stood behind a boy his age, whispering about how good he smelled, and how he really should be eaten. And it wasn't an improvement.

Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be a way out of this situation. He was stuck with the shinigami as long as this errand lasted, or at least until they got back to the shop. Once they got there it was probably going to be a moot point anyway, since the kekkai kept nasty spirits from entering. Hopefully, that spirit would qualify as a nasty spirit, thus, preventing the incredibly creepy spirit from following him into the shop. Of course, it would be much better if this newest addition to the group didn't follow, which was highly unlikely, considering his luck.

'Yeah. So now we're going back to that shop, and giving that witch a piece of my mind!" Matsumoto's sentence had started with a reasonable tone, however somewhere around the middle, vicious venom had crept in. By the end, the rest of the group was quite ready to break and run. They stood speechless, trying to figure out something to say that wouldn't tempt the touchy female in front of them to take her frustration out on them. Before they had to chance the roulette, Matsumoto grabbed Watanuki again, and started marching down the street. She called back behind her, "Well? Are you two going to stand there all night or what?"

Renji and Ichigo exchanged glances that mingled relief and exasperation before following her. Watanuki could be heard weakly protesting, "Um, Matsumoto-san, the shop is the other way!"

Vice Captain of the Tenth Division Matsumoto Rangiku was walking the fine line between turning that shop and everything in it into sawdust and finding the nearest bar to pickle her liver. It had been somewhere around three weeks since the Captain had gone missing, and now the best lead she'd gotten had turned out to be a dead end, almost literally. She didn't want to take it out on the kid- he genuinely wanted to help her; his actions were proof of that- but it was hard not to blame him for causing this latest search to fail. What she had to focus on was the fact that with this boy she had come the closest to finding the Captain she had ever come.

There was also the fact that that particular fact made the failure that much more devastating. The taste of success (or at the very least, real progress) was so close. Having it torn out of her grasp at the last second had been heart-wrenching. But, even then, she wasn't about to let this kid die. For one, if he had died, she would have had to find him all over again in order to do his zanpakuto-seeing trick, and even then, there was the chance that he wouldn't have it in the afterlife. Secondly, even if she had managed to find Taicho, the Captain would have been extremely disappointed in her. He wouldn't want to be found at the expense of anybody's life. Oh, and it would have been incredibly cruel, plus, Renji wouldn't have let her.

Matsumoto sighed. This search was wearing on her, on her nerves and on her mind. That last reason should have been first. In normal circumstances, it would have. In normal circumstances, her Captian would be in some reasonably known location, not another freakin' dimension!

It was a depressing line of thought, but she really couldn't stop thinking about her Captain's absence. The fatigue and nightmares probably weren't helping things, either. He'd been there, and then he'd not been there. Vanished, disappeared, all that cliched bullcrap. Matsumoto figured that it was her guilt that was the factor that pushed her over the edge of sane searching, and into the moronically unrealistic methods and hours of searching. Her loyalty pushed her to search until her feet bled, but that little voice in the back of her head that whispered, 'He might be dead, gone forever, and he never really got a chance to enjoy himself as a captain, all thanks to your lazy ways,' spurred her to keep going until someone intervened.

She couldn't tell the others about this. Renji sure as hell didn't steal his captain's free time, and neither did Ichigo. Ichigo didn't even have a captain!

All the times she had skipped out on doing her work, knowing her Captain would do it for her in order to set a 'good example for relaxation' crowded to the front of her mind. She knew that she really should keep up her energy, keep looking positive for the others, especially Watanuki-kun, but she was tired, and today's failure was still bitingly fresh in her mind.

Rangiku had denied herself a good wallow in self-pity since her captain had disappeared, so she decided that now was a good time to catch up. She continued to brood over every perceived mistake she had ever made in regards to her captain as the Hitsugaya-finding group meandered morosely through the streets back to Yuuko's shop.

Watanuki was probably the second most miserable member of the group. Not really a happy person in normal settings (since 'normal' for him involved spirits attempting to eat him, chasing optional) he was certainly more upset than usual at that moment. The guy they had run into on the street had indeed decided to join them, and so had the creepy white spirit. Mute spirits were one thing, but having the spirit actually saying things like 'Come on, let's eat him- he's tasty!' right behind him was straining the limits of what he could stand. Working in Yuuko-san's shop had upped his (already admittedly high) weirdness tolerance, but the muttering white guy was really pushing it.

Not being able to breathe freely wasn't helping either. He hadn't noticed it until the adrenaline rush from seeing the dangerous white spirit had worn off, but there was something around that was making it hard for him to breathe. The main suspect was the white spirit, since that seemed to be the only truly malevolent thing around. Whatever was causing it, breathing wasn't getting any easier as he walked with the three shinigami to the shop. It wasn't getting any harder, which was good, but having an easy supply of oxygen to one's brain was a great comfort in times when one's highly sharpened 'flight-or-fight' instinct is made even worse by the macabre whisperings right behind you.

As for the Inner Hollow, he was making life very difficult for his Outer Human. Shinigami. Whatever.

Basically, Ichigo was not happy about how things were. Here he was, with two highly-ranked vice-captains and a nervous looking kid who could apparently see (AND HEAR) his annoying Inner Hollow. The right words from the kid, and they'd know he was a Vizared. Which was Not A Good Thing in the Gotei 13, apparently, judging from the group of banished, disgruntled former-Shinigami he'd met. He wasn't exactly sure what would happen to him if they found out, but it probably wouldn't be good.

While he was pretty sure that these two wouldn't exactly rat him out to Captain-Captain, (he knew Renji wouldn't, even if it was against the rules. For Renji, rules were only followed if he wanted to follow them, as seen during Rukia's rescue. Rangiku he didn't know about so much, but she didn't seem to mind getting drunk in the middle of the day) however, Ichigo felt that this was something you didn't let other people really know about. And even if they didn't tell anyone, someone else might weasel the information out of them. Anyway, you could never be too careful. So, Kurosaki Ichigo was about as nervous as Kurosaki Ichigo could really be. He wanted to make the kid promise to not tell anyone about the Hollow.

What made him nervous was actually using tact to deal with this. The kid looked ready to bolt, shooting glances at the irksome Hollow every now and then. Ichigo knew that if he walked up to the kid and took care of this problem the way he dealt with most of his problems with his peers in high school, the guy (whatever his name was) was probably likely to get the hell out of dodge. Ichigo knew he was intimidating, with his scowl and his strange hair, and that was without the huge-ass sword strapped to his back. Ergo: tact.

Except, Ichigo wasn't all that good with tact. Which lead to the problem of 'how to talk to this person without scaring him'. And that was with 'tact'. Only, he wasn't good at 'tact'. Which lead to...

A really awkward cycle, and a Hollow that was now laughing its ass off. Ichigo vaguely wondered what the kid made of that.

Watanuki had never been so happy to be at the shop. While the fence had, sadly, not kept the super-creepy white spirit out, it had removed whatever-it-was that had been making it hard to breathe, which was very nice.

Matsumoto-san had been very gung-ho about the idea of finding Yuuko-san and 'shaking that deceptive -blank- until she tells me where Taicho is!' she had fortunately been talked out of that plan. However, all agreed that they did need to talk to Yuuko-san, so Watanuki had been sent to go find her.

"Yuuko-san?" he called, through the back of the shop. "Where are you?"

"She's not here."

Watanuki jumped at the sudden grumpy sound of Taicho's voice. "What the hell!" he gasped at the diminutive spirit. "Don't do that! And what do you mean, 'She's not here?' She can't leave, she has customers!"

The childlike spirit did not look the least bit remorseful. His slightly disgruntled look did not change as he elaborated on his previous sentence. "Well, I mean she's back in one of the storage rooms. She said she's checking on something. She'll be out soon, but we have to serve tea." His expression changed from mildly disgruntled to slightly petulant. Taicho did not like serving customers. He seemed to conciser it beneath him, somehow.

Watanuki sometimes wondered about this attitude; it gave an insight into whatever culture Taicho had come from (Watanuki didn't know much at all about spirits' culture, or if they even had one) but sometimes it was just frustrating to try and shove the little brat out there with a tea tray. Especially when he had to climb up onto the roof or into a tree where the white haired child had been hiding to do it.

Luck had decided to give Watanuki a break, even if it was a minuscule one, and Taicho was cooperating as much as he ever did. That meant that the spirit did everything he was supposed to, but his attitude made it seem like an uphill battle to just get the tray in his hands.

Watanuki headed out first, holding the tea tray, (Taicho wasn't allowed to carry hot drinks that were meant for persons other than himself, since things had a habit of losing heat at a rapid rate around the small spirit) and was heading back to see what had been taking Taicho so long- he should have been right behind the high school boy with the snacks. Before Watanuki could open the sliding door, however, it jumped across the threshold revealing Taicho, holding the snack tray.

Stepping aside, Watanuki glanced at the three shinigami, wondering if Taicho's presence would bother them at all. He wasn't sure how such human-like spirits reacted to each other. They didn't seem to be able to sense Taicho like they could sense the person they had been searching for. The newest member of the search party was glaring at his cup, (hopefully trying to ignore the malicious whispers that were being hissed into his ears) Renji-san was shooting a glance at Matsumoto-san who was sipping her tea wither her eyes closed. None of them seemed to even know that Taicho was in the room.

Until he set the tray of snacks down, that is.

There was a crash as Matsumoto's teacup slipped from her now-numb fingers. Tea pooled on the table, and gently dripped down onto her lap and the floor, but she gave no signs of noticing.

She had opened her eyes, ready to tell the boys the next stage of the plan, only to have that plan promptly implode as she spotted the figure in front of her.

"Taicho?" she whispered through lips that were about as numb as her fingers as she stared at her lost captain, who was looking at her in a vaguely worried way, as he picked up some of the bigger pieces of the broken tea cup.

Ichigo and Renji, who had glanced up at the sound of breaking china, also gaped at the person before them.

"Yes?" Hitsugaya-taicho said in a tone that would have been labeled 'weirded-out' if it had more energy. "Can I help you?"

"Taicho," Matsumoto gasped again. Before the spirit in question could respond, he was swept up into a bone crushing hug. "I found you! I found you!"

He struggled out of the hug, gasping for breath, staring wild-eyed at the lunatic who had grabbed him. "Wh-what?" he gasped, trying to regain the breath that had been squeezed from his lungs. "What are you talking about?"

Renji's cup clattered to the table as Rangiku's smile started flickering out like a dying light bulb. "What are you saying, Taicho?"

"And how do you know my name? Did I know you?"

Matsumoto knelt down to the short spirit's level. "You don't remember me? Or Ukitake-taicho? Or Hinamori-chan?" she asked, though she was almost afraid to.

Taicho shook his head. He was immediately engulfed in another hug, this one less rib-cracking, but something about the way this familiar-stranger wrapped her arms around him made the tough-as-nails kid want to cry. When he heard her whisper, "Captain, I am so sorry," he did.

A/N: Please don't hate me for taking so long, but a) there have been any number of reasons I couldn't post this chapter, including job-hunting, no internet access, and lazyness, b) We're getting to the good bits of the story. The end of this chapter, and the next chapter contain scenes that started this whole thing. Yes, I wrote an ENTIRE FIC just to have these scenes. Yes, I'm going to do it again. Why are you getting a straightjacket?
But, if you're not too mad at me, please leave a review, including PLEASE what you liked, and what you didn't. I would like to make these next chapters the best, and I need your help to do that! So, take some time, drop a review and get a better chapter sooner!