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Dark Matter

A Bleach Fanfic

Chaos Theory AU

Chapter Four: Looking for Answers


I sing the will to love:
the will that carves the will to live,
the will that saps the will to hurt,
the will that kills the will to die;
the will that made and keeps you warm,
the will that points your eyes ahead,
the will that makes you give, not get,
a give and get that tell us what you are:
how much a god, how much a human.
I call on you to live the will to love.

-Alfred Kreymborg


"Come on in, Ishida-kun. Close the door, please."

Uryū reached back, sliding the wood panel shut behind him, but his eyes did not leave the Sōtaichō. Kyōraku had just excused Ise-san, which apparently meant that it was his turn to hear whatever news the visit was designed to convey.

It has to be something important, or he'd have used a jigokuchō instead of appearing personally. But the fact that he'd come here instead of summoning them to the First suggested it was also at least somewhat personal in nature. Then again, Kyōraku was always making things a bit more personal in nature. He was capable of adopting a businesslike attitude, Uryū was sure. He just chose not to.

"Sōtaichō." His rather unconventional method of interrupting the evening's work was hardly unexpected, but it did make the rote formalities a little more difficult to observe. Uryū didn't actually hate the rote formalities, somewhat to his own surprise. Perhaps it was something about the structure of them. The stability.

Kyōraku allowed them, too, in a sense. Poked fun at them, sometimes insisted they weren't necessary, but never actually did anything to prevent their use. Such as now, when he dipped his chin with a wry expression and did not gesture for Uryū to sit. For his own part, though, he tipped his chair back onto the hind legs and laced his fingers together over his abdomen. "So how's the hero of the hour?" The words were light, and maybe a couple of years ago, they would have seemed more mocking than anything.

There was something less than completely genuine about them, but Uryū knew that wasn't directed at him. He still frowned at the captain. "Which hour was that? I must have missed it."

Kyōraku's smile was lopsided. "For the best, I think." He paused. "But you must have noticed that people are looking at you differently now."

It was hard to miss. It wasn't as though Uryū had suddenly gone from that Quincy to some kind of—well, hero was really the word at issue, poorly as it tasted. But there was a difference. Some degree of it in the Eighth, where he'd gone from one of the officers to one of the people who'd fought Aizen. That was starting to simmer down, thankfully, as he went back to paperwork and patrol with the rest of them.

Elsewhere, though—Uryū felt like he walked around with a permanent itch between his shoulderblades. The burning feeling of being watched.

"I think I'd prefer the way it was," he said flatly.

Kyōraku laughed at that, a chuckle with a faint dark edge to it. "Too late," he replied, one thick brow arching as if in mild chiding. "Perhaps you should have thought about that before you distinguished yourself." It was a joke. It had to be—the suggestion that he ought to consider his reputation before doing what was absolutely necessary was too absurd to be taken seriously.

The thought must have showed on his face. Kyōraku tempered his mirth, a faint smile the only remainder. "You'll get used to it. You can get used to a lot—it's one of your strengths."

Uryū furrowed his brows, mouth flattening into a near-straight line. "If you say so."

Kyōraku hummed, letting the chair fall just enough that its front legs brushed the tatami before rocking it back again. "Regardless of how you think of it, though, your service was meritorious. That's the word that kept showing up in the reports, by the way. Some of them were a little different—there's a few distinguisheds and commendables, and then also some saved my lifes—but the point is you've won yourself more than a little support. That kind of thing usually comes with all sorts of formal nonsense: awards, official commendation, so on."

There was a thud as the chair hit ground more decisively. "You're welcome to those things if you want them. I'd enjoy annoying the Central 46 by giving you all of it in the most showy, official way possible, and I usually hate official things."

Frankly, half of that sounded like a nightmare.

"But," Kyōraku continued, "I think I'll just note them all in your personnel file and promote you instead. If you don't mind."


"This is a pleasant surprise." Ise-san blinked at the tray Uryū set down, halfway on the edge of his desk and halfway on the edge of hers. Steam still curled from the sticky rice, though passage from the mess to the office building had dislodged the formerly-neat arrangement of the utensils a bit.

"I thought it unlikely that we'd be finished in time to make normal dinner hours," he replied, settling back down at his chair. The two rectangular desks placed against one another made almost a square table of sorts, at which they sat across from each other. It was clearly a working arrangement, given the large stacks of paper in the intervening space.

Evidence of the work spilled over, too: the whiteboard-on-wheels that Ise kept in the office was currently occupied by a neat grid, lines drawn on with the aid of a ruler. Names, places, and times were filled in with tiny, precise handwriting.

She hummed, standing so she could reach forward and take the bowls with her meal in them, alongside a spoon and some chopsticks. "That was thoughtful of you, Ishida-san. Thank you."

"Not at all, fukutaichō."

That gave her a moment's pause—a slight still in her motion before she finished the process of resettling into her chair. Her posture was noticeably better than most anyone's, his own included.

"I think that's a title that will belong to you as well, quite soon." The certitude in her tone could only mean Kyōraku had told her about it.

Uryū dipped his chin in bare acknowledgement. He still wasn't entirely sure how that was going to go, but he was confident that everything he'd learned from Ise-san was enough to qualify him for the more straightforward parts of the job, at least. Still…

"It's difficult to imagine the division without you or Kyōraku-taichō," he admitted. Even the time since the war had felt transitional. Liminal in a way that meant it didn't really count. As though they were in holding pattern and waiting for things to return to normal. Only normal at the Eighth was so inextricably linked to the captain sleeping on the roof or teasing the officers and Ise-san diligently keeping everything running with an organizational aptitude that was frankly boggling. It was just the sort of steady humming undertone that kept everything else pinned down.

As far as Uryū knew, none of the other divisions approached that kind of strange mix of almost ruthless efficiency in management and lightness of atmosphere. The routine never quite became automatic, because the captain was always finding a way to do the unexpected. But anyone could count on Ise-san to see to it that even those interruptions didn't do any harm. It had sort of bothered Uryū at first, the flexibility required to maneuver around Kyōraku's occasional random demand that the entire division take the day off and have a picnic outdoors or something like that. At least until he realized that the demands weren't random at all, but timed so as to interrupt the tension and stress that inevitably built up around a job like this.

He could perhaps at least approximate some portion of Ise-san's style of leadership, but that intuitiveness of the captain's was quite possibly unique to him and also likely irreplaceable because of it. And for now at least, the division would have no captain at all, which meant no one to make up for the lack. No one but him.

Grimacing, he returned to his work. The form he pulled from the top of their shared stack gave him a moment's pause.

"The Rukongai patrol routes are changing?" to his knowledge, the last time they'd been adjusted was after Aizen defected, to lighten the burden on the divisions without taichō. But this looked to be the opposite. Both of the Eighth's experienced leaders were leaving, and the patrols were being increased.

Ise pushed her glasses up her nose, inspecting the form upside down. "It's not just ours," she replied. "Every division is getting increased patrol duties. Kyōraku-sōtaichō wants us to be able to reach further areas in the Rukongai."

Uryū frowned down at the form. "Is this really the time for that, though?" Not that he disapproved. Just…

"I think," she replied slowly, "that now is the time to help our members feel like they are accomplishing things. To make everyone feel useful."

And the best way to make them feel that was to make it true. "That's… straightforward, for him," Uryū said, after a moment.

"Well, it won't necessarily seem that way to others." Ise shrugged. "In any case, each division has only as many distinct patrols as they do officers capable of leading one, so the assignments shouldn't be too troublesome. Just make sure to rotate the night duties."

He rolled his eyes. "Right. Don't want to interfere too much with anyone's evening habits."

"Indeed." Ise, a trace of wryness in the tilt of her mouth, looked back down at her paperwork. Her crisp, efficient brush-strokes resumed, and Uryū followed suit.

After sketching out a rough patrol rotation, Uryū paused before affixing his name to the bottom of the document. "Ise-san… does it ever seem to you as though there aren't enough shinigami for all the things we do?"

She paused in the act of lifting a small bite of food from her bowl. "In what sense?"

Uryū straightened in his seat, feeling a twinge where he'd gone stiff just beneath his shoulderblades. "I mean… konsō, patrol, keeping the Seireitei running, dealing with Hollows—it's just interesting that we can never quite keep up with it. There aren't enough of us, but at the same time, the number of souls with reiryoku remains steady."

Ise pursed her lips. "I would contend that the problem has been exacerbated in the time you've been here, but your understanding of the situation is… not inaccurate. Why?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. There's just something wrong about it. If the goal is balance, then I'd expect our numbers to be equal to the task of preserving it." Maybe that wasn't a necessity, or he was looking at it the wrong way, but it was made stark by looking at numbers and shifts and districts this way. There just weren't enough shinigami.

"Was it less pronounced when you joined?"

She hummed, finishing her bite before responding. Poking a bit at the contents of her bowl, Ise lifted her shoulders. "I wish I could describe it with greater accuracy, but I was quite young when I first joined the Eighth. Well below regulation age, you understand. My memories are not the clearest until after what I would consider a major upheaval."

It had to be the banishment of the Visored she was talking about. The first major play in Aizen's strategy. "Can I ask how that came about?"

She arched both eyebrows. "My joining the Gotei 13?"

He nodded once.

"It's not really the most interesting story," she informed him, her tone caught between its usual crispness and something more—ruminative? "Certainly nothing so noteworthy as yours."

Uryū huffed. "Thankfully, that's not the threshold of interesting."

Another tiny smile; Ise shifted in her seat and met his eyes. "The admission age for Shin'ō had no minimum or maximum back then," she said. "And, well—I didn't really have anywhere else to go. My mother had died, and I was in the care of distant relatives who felt as little connection to me as I did to them. I don't remember exactly how the idea came about to send me there, but I certainly didn't complain." Her eyes fell; she resumed poking at her rice.

"I completed the full six years without being able to so much as imprint on an asauchi."

Uryū blinked. "Imprint? As in—"

"The test they now administer to hopefuls, yes. Were that the test back then, I'd not have been admitted at all. Each of the blades I touched or carried around, for however long a time, remained completely blank. I had reiatsu, certainly; it just doesn't… leave an impression on asauchi."

He'd never heard of something like that. He knew Ise didn't carry a zanpakutō, but he'd always figured that she, like Yoruichi, chose not to. He could even think of reasons why someone might make that choice, though he couldn't imagine making it himself. Not anymore.

"Anyway—that made me rather unsuited for the sort of top rankings in my class that would ensure I could choose my own division. And so I was assigned to the Eighth, and here I've been ever since."

Uryū was quiet for a moment. Ise was not a very expressive person, but even the tiny clues in her behavior and tone of voice now were painting a picture of how she felt about all this. He cleared his throat, speaking in a way he hoped conveyed his confidence.

"I'd say it's foolish, then, that the asauchi imprinting is a vital part of the entrance requirements. If it had been back then, the Seireitei would lack someone important."

Ise blinked at him, eyes wide before she remembered herself and her face smoothed out. "I—thank you, Ishida-san. It is not—thank you."

"No need, Ise-fukutaichō. It's been an honor to learn from you."


Spring stole slowly over the Seireitei this year. The winter had been long, and colder than usual.

But something about that made the first time Uryū and Rukia took lunch outside this season particularly pleasant. The temperature still wasn't quite optimal; he had a feeling she was regretting her recent decision to switch to a short-sleeved shihakushō, even if the gloves helped a little. It didn't escape him that they looked an awful lot like the ones Kuchiki-taichō wore.

The river was flowing slowly, chunks of ice from farther upstream occasionally passing by, but they were small and fewer than even a week ago. The trees were just barely showing buds now, little pinpricks of pale green dotting the branches.

Uryū hadn't bothered to sort the food into two discrete sets—Rukia's piracy of food, disguised as trading, was a predictable habit. It made more sense just to pack items by type and let her have at whatever she wanted. They made comfortable small-talk for a while, most of it revolving around their division activities and the rumors of upcoming personnel changes. It wasn't long ago that Renji announced his promotion and asked Karin to be his lieutenant, but that wouldn't be the only shakeup before things were done.

Kyōraku-taichō had an unenviable task in front of him, to be sure.

"Something on your mind? You've been kind of distracted." Rukia lifted an eyebrow in his general direction, then popped a spear of cucumber into her mouth. The prompt for him to take over the talking portion of the conversation was clear enough.

There was no point denying it. Or delaying it, for that matter. Reaching between the layers of his shihakushō, Uryu removed the badge that had previously belonged to Ise-fukutaichō, the character for the Eighth sitting solidly over the silhouette of a bird of paradise.

"Remember when this was the other way around?"

Rukia's eyes rounded with her surprise; setting aside her food, she leaned forward and picked up the badge, running her bare fingertips over the engraved surface. She tapped the outside curve of the number with a short nail and smiled. The expression was just a tilt to one side of her mouth, accompanied by a small furrow between her brows.

"Yeah, I do. Maybe not quite the same, though."

That was fair. When she held out the badge, he took it back, replacing it in the folds of his uniform. "…it's a little similar," he admitted.

She blinked at him. "Worried about how you're going to do?" Unsurprisingly, she hit the problem on the nose.

Uryū exhaled in a controlled gust. "Somewhat, yes. It's not—" he struggled for the words to explain. He didn't fear he'd be inadequate to the daily tasks, or worry about his capabilities as a battlefield leader. He'd done enough paperwork and led enough patrols to understand that with work, the needed experience would come. But something else still gnawed at him, something he'd put aside in the face of necessity.

"When Aizen was still a threat…" His eyes narrowed. "Something about this was easier. No—simpler."

Rukia tilted her head. Her silence was patient; working more slowly through her food, she shifted her eyes frequently back to his.

"It made sense. What I was doing here." That wasn't quite right, either, but he knew of no better way to put it.

With a soft sound in the back of her throat, Rukia set her utensils down again and leaned back a bit, bracing her weight on her hands. "You're not sure if it's home?" Her words were slow, delicate; despite her posture, there was a fine tension in her frame. What to make of that wasn't clear.

Uryū shook his head decisively. "No. It is. I just—" A grimace overtook his features. The uneasiness was elusive, perhaps because he didn't know its source. Not as precisely as he ought to.

Rukia seemed to relax then, despite the lack of clarification. "I think maybe we just need to give it some time. I haven't exactly felt quite right either lately; I think it's just because everything's changing so much so fast. If you think about it, we spent years preparing for the war, and no time at all preparing for any of this." She shrugged. "I dunno that we could have prepared for this."

She had a point, and Uryū felt himself ease. Not completely, but enough that he didn't feel quite so itchy underneath his own skin. "Maybe," he conceded quietly. "In any case… I plan to accept. I thought I should tell you first." It made a certain sort of sense, to his own way of thinking. It might have been Urahara and Yoruichi that set him down the path that had led him here, but Rukia was in some way the prime mover of it. The catalyst.

Well, and also his best friend, he supposed. That had to count for something.

When she smiled this time, it was full, reaching up to her eyes and transforming the contours of her face into something softer. "I'm glad to hear it."


"Go ahead and set that down there, Ishida-kun." Urahara waved his fan in a vague direction, giving nothing more specific than that.

Uryū figured that meant he really didn't care, as he was unerringly precise when he wanted to be and generally irritatingly-lax otherwise. Hefting the crate with a soft grunt, he shifted a few feet to the right and set it down against the wall. It, like everything Urahara seemed to own, was more awkward to carry than outright heavy, though perhaps that was a fact of reiatsu more than actual kilograms. By this point, his memory of what heavy had felt like was starting to blur a little, though sometimes he was still vaguely surprised by his own strength.

Kurosaki-san set another down next to it, straightening and giving Uryū an easy half-smile. "I think that's about all of them, actually." Raising his voice a little, he turned to speak over his shoulder. "Anything else you need, Kisuke?"

"No, that's all right. We can put it all away later." Urahara slid the door to the outside of the new building closed, snapping his fan shut and tucking it away into his sleeve.

"What the hell, Urahara? You could have told us that ten minutes ago." Karin, half-inside a large box, pulled herself out and upright with a scowl.

Renji plucked a piece of packing tape out of her hair carefully, letting it flutter back down into the box. "How'd you manage to get a new construction in the Fifth District, anyhow?" It was a relatively difficult thing to do; land in the lower-numbered districts was strictly controlled. Anyone trying to move closer to the Seireitei either had to wait for an existing structure to be made available or lean heavily on a name much more weighty than Urahara's.

"I have my methods," the shopkeeper replied vaguely. An intentional nonanswer if Uryū had ever heard one. And he did. Frequently. Usually from Urahara.

"Tea's ready," Yuzu called from the next room.

Uryū and Renji exchanged a look, and both sort of shrugged. It wasn't worth pressing about, probably.

Following Karin into the back room, Uryū discovered that most of the others had already settled. Kurosaki-san, the twins, Renji, Rukia, and Ukitake-taichō had all appeared to help Urahara and Yoruichi move, along with Tessai and the kids, of course—but they had a separate building on the same plot. Probably so that there would be more space between them and whatever experiments Urahara wanted to run. Yoruichi was returning to the Gotei 13—the Fifth, Uryū had heard.

He had faith in her ability to turn Aizen's former division around.

Settling next to Rukia, Uryū accepted the teacup she handed him with a murmured word of thanks, relaxing back into the cushion. The conversation hummed on around him, and for the most part, he was content to observe it.

It was odd, to see all the faces here and remember himself as he had been before he knew them. Disturbing, almost, to think of what he'd have thought of them, had he known them then. For a moment, he had a curious sense of double-vision, like what used to be briefly superimposed over the present, and it left him frowning down into his cup, trying to banish the feeling.

"Doesn't do any good," Urahara said beside him, leaning back so his shoulderblades pressed into the wall behind them. It afforded the words a certain privacy, let them slide under the general chatter.

Uryu's brows knit. "What doesn't?"

"Dwelling. You're dwelling. Don't."

"That's funny, coming from you." It wasn't something he knew for sure, but he strongly suspected his implication was true.

Urahara didn't deny it, at least. "You're not me. It's better that way." He cast him a sidelong glance, one that held a beat too long. Then: "You did good, Uryū."

He shifted his eyes back away, the last words almost swallowed by the ambient noise. "If you have to remember what it used to be like, remember that, too."


Soooo… it's been a while. Hi again, folks. As tends to happen when I take a super-long hiatus, I'm just here to remind you that I don't leave projects unfinished, and while I have a whole lot of things competing for my attention, including a dissertation, I'm still here. Figured this chapter had been sitting half-finished in my Chaos Theory folder for long enough.

Anyhow, thanks as always for the support. I dunno when the next story will be along, but hopefully sooner than I took finishing this one!