Disclaimer: I wouldn't be here if I did
A.C.: I miss Hitsugaya... he never really comes out in the manga anymore...
Warnings: possible spoilers, oocness, breach of grammar security rule number something, something, something, mature themes, implied rape, noncon and general BL-ness that you can ignore by skipping the italicized parts in the beginning.
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Altersuperego- thanks and no, that wasn't Hyourinmaru.
::Zanpakuto speech::
'Mental-memory-everything-else-speech'
"Normal speech"
Thank you GintaxAlvissForever, SilverWhiteDragon, phppsmss, Nire Sanam, andrewhot, Rasgara and izzy 283 for reviewing, hope you enjoy x3
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This... was not supposed to be happening. Or so he told himself as he watched the fog filter through the ice. He knew what it was of course; he had been thoroughly acquainted with it in life and in death. But he had no idea what it was doing here of all places and why the hell Hyourinmaru was not responding to his calls.
'Do it yourself shinigami, you have a perfectly good set of arms and legs.' He gritted his teeth putting a hand on the hilt of his zanpakuto. And as he did, he felt the blade come alive in his fingers once more --death and beyond would they ever part.
::Let them come,:: the echo of his zanpakuto whispered in his mind. ::I will protect you, let them come.::
'It's a promise.' He said out loud, unsheathing the only one in the world who understood what he had gone through.
The hollow reared its ugly head. It was dark, completely covered in patches of smoke and black. It blinked its cloudy eye and squinted through the barrier, swinging its claw left and right as it began to take on a more solid form in the realm --their realm. The ice began to evaporate, the hollow looking in obvious delight as the dome fell apart like a cracked egg. The man charged, his zanpakuto drawn out and extending as he roared out the incarnation to an initial release.
And while he knew that he was but a memory lost in the mind of another, he hoped that it would be enough to save Toushiro's soul from his fate.
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The last petal withered away into nothingness but the snow familiar bankai did not shatter as Shawlong had predicted. Hitsugaya raised his left hand and slowly wiped it across his cheeks, his nails lightly scraping the bloody gouges that had not been there just a moment before. Rubbing the dried flecks of blood between his index finger and the thumb, he let his blood-covered hand fall harmlessly back to his side. Briefly, Hitsugaya stared back at his companions, his eyes searching for where the flowers should have been had he not gone over the limit. But there were no ominous marks of his limitations still remaining in the air, Shawlong had been right but for the wrong reason. The petals did serve as a countdown, just not the one that the arrancar had imposed on the young captain.
Around him, everyone remained quiet. Even Hyourinmaru seemed to be straining against the sudden increase of power the destruction of the ice flowers had brought. Orihime shook nervously in her spot, wedged between the bodies of the tenth division lieutenant and of the tenth's captain. She wanted to go help them, even if the only thing she could possibly do was to create distraction in between healing the two shinigami officers. But for whatever reasons Hitsugaya's body stopped her from going to her wounded protectors. The blonde faux-body stood protectively in front of both, her eyes so empty and blank compared to when Matsumoto had inhabited it.
"They told us to protect you." Hitsugaya's voice was oddly husky and the human girl turned towards him in surprise. "Wait."
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Matsumoto Rangiku, the current lieutenant of the tenth division, laid against the cold concrete, her hand stretched towards the back of her captain's torn haori. Never in her life had she seen the jagged edges of what appeared to be bones protruding from the broken ice. The skeletal frames fluttered as if they were sighing. They slowly straightened, the ivory white now coated in ice. Serrated fragments birthed more and soon the proud wings were restored to their original state. She could still see the bones beneath them. Hitsugaya bowed his head, his face expressionless.
He looked back at Rangiku with his green eyes noting that her wounds, while terrible, weren't life threatening. Satisfied, he took a step forward. The arrancars took a step back. He put another foot in front of himself but it seemed as though he had taken a leap for he appeared a second later behind the two arrancars, Hyourinmaru clenched loosely in his hands and his liquid-ice tail trailing languidly behind him. Shawlong and Nakim looked shakily at the boy genius; Hitsugaya met their gazes evenly and snarled.
"Ryuusenka."
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As the icy cocoons of arrancar burst apart, Matsumoto scrambled to her knees biting back the pain of her mangled shoulder. But her captain was already looking away, his face hidden in the half-light half-shadows of the stars, his face pointed towards the sky. She looked up in the general direction of his glare, her vision growing hazy with pain and blood loss. Just when she thought she could hold her head up no longer, she saw it.
A third arrancar
A ragged breath got caught in her throat as she kneeled over and pounded her chest. With a start, Orihime was instantly by her side, her hands flying soothingly over the torn skin of her back and shoulders as the familiar healing trance took hold of her body. Matsumoto struggled, her clogged senses alerting her that the arrancar above them was no ordinary foe.
Before she could stop him, Hitsugaya jumped into the air.
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Across town Kurosaki Ichigo was fighting the sixth espada Grimmjow Jeagerjaques. He was alive and holding on but he had no delusions as to winning this particular battle. And with Rukia out of commission with a massive hole in her stomach, the situation was growing dire by the minute.
An explosion of power, distracted, Grimmjow stopped. Ichigo howled out 'getsuga tenshou' cutting the arrancar across the chest. The blue-eyed arrancar looked at substitute-shinigami in mild disgust as he blew him away with a cero blast. Stopping long enough to spit out "I'll deal with you later," the espada was off towards the horizon, following where ever the sudden surge of reiatsu had come from.
Ichigo collapsed to his knees in relief. He crawled over to where Rukia laid as she opened her eyes and offered him a shaky smile. Smiling back he pulled her limp body into his arms, his mind already plotting the fastest course to Orihime's home. His heart froze as he stood up with Rukia in his arms.
The direction the blue-haired arrancar headed was...
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He flew up and the first thing he noticed was the arrancar's green eyes –-a hollow, blood, a girl, a man, a secret, a death, a storm, a birth, a tragedy. Something in him screamed to hold him back; another knew that this was the right way --the only way. Hyourinmaru growled, protesting. But the sweet lure of promise drew him away from everything else and sheltered him in a bubble of silence that he thought he could never claim again.
"Ryuusenka!"
Hitsugaya flew past the arrancar with an upwards strike and a minute blizzard where Hyourinmaru had passed. The arrancar said nothing as he dodged in midair. Hitsugaya curled on to his back and buffeted his wings. As the prodigy re-righted himself, Grimmjow appeared, his excited face waning when he saw the shadowed eyes of his pale-faced comrade awaiting him only meters away.
'Killkillkillkill!'
"Grimmjow," greeted the green-eyed arrancar curtly. Hitsugaya attacked and arrancar briefly held Hyourinmaru's blade in his hands before elbowing the young captain to get him out of the way. When the white-haired shinigami refused to let go of his zanpakuto, the arrancar released the katana from his grip, letting teen fall.
"Ulquiorra," grunted Grimmjow irritably. The blue-eyed arrancar knew that he was in trouble. If Aizen's little lapdog had been sent personally to retrieve him, the sentence of a permanent caga negacion would be the least of his worries. Still, curious, the burlier arrancar observed the source of reiatsu he had been pursuing.
Grimmjow narrowed his eyes. The teen was remarkably powerful for his physical age but there was something wrong. The boy seemed incomplete in his eyes, not whole no... not real. He had felt the kind of reiatsu before but where? Perhaps it wasn't reiatsu at all but the killing intent that wrapped around the two espada. Grimmjow grinned; this was going to be fun. Maybe even better than the shinigami he left miles behind. His hand warm with the beginnings of a cero blast he was about to greet the captain with his personal 'hello' when Ulquiorra put a hand on his shoulders. Grimmjow growled deeply in his throat attempting to shake the other's grip off. If anything, the dark-haired arrancar's grip tightened, enough that the nails began to carve grooves into his shoulder and bite into the skin.
Hitsugaya struck, slamming his tail into Grimmjow's side as he brought Hyourinmaru down at the other arrancar's hollow mask. Ulquiorra jumped out of the way, his eyes widening imperceptibly as they bore into Hitsugaya's own.
'You are...'
"Lieutenant Matsumoto," the buxom blonde flipped her cell phone open, noticing the numbers crawling madly across the screen. "You've been cleared for…" immediately, she punched in Renji's numbers, too aware that the redhead was struggling against an enemy on the other side of the town.
Beside her, Hitsugaya's soulless body jerked up and stiffened upon the report. Slowly the preprogrammed modified soul groped his chest where an insignia of a flower had been carefully grafted on to the skin. A lily was revealed, stark black below his collarbone. Pressing a thumb on the stem of the flower the mod-soul called out,
"Lift the limit!!"
Hitsugaya jerked backwards. His mouth opened and closed multiple times but no words came out for he had none. His hand, originally intent on wrapping around the green-eyed arrancar's throat, withdrew to his chest, his neck, where the dark emblem of his division flower was --should have been. Bright lights were wavering in front of his eyes as if he had been struck hard across his head. And just a hairbreadth away from the dark haired arrancar's trailing hem, his bankai began to shatter.
He fell head first, what left of his wings flaring out under his body like the wings of an oversized bird of prey. Slowly the two arrancars retreated, a hideous gap leaving glimpses of a nightmarish desert in Hitsugaya's eyes. He sought to hold onto his depleted reiatsu, to maintain his wings and mobility as his tail melted away into the night's air. Grimmjow looked down at him, his face oddly calculating. The green-eyed arrancar –Ulquiorra, his mind whispered- tossed a dispassionate glance over his shoulder and pulled the wayward arrancar into the portal.
Hitsugaya blacked out.
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'Why is this happening?' the man demanded. The dragon yawned lazily as he took up the position that had become all too familiar of late. Briefly nuzzling the sleeping boy's snowy hair Hyourinmaru bore his teeth at the other shinigami.
::Why does anything happen?::
'That's not normal; whatever the old man and the creep did to him it's...'
::Reincarnation is tricky:: commented Hyourinmaru cryptically.
'So?'
::It does not matter if Toushiro remembers::
The dragon's talons curled in anger,
::It never did::
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Matsumoto caught her captain just before he plunged to the level of the sparse trees that lined the streets. Blood, overflowing even as she managed the fasted shunpo she could to get back to Orihime's side, spilt across her arms and splashed against her pink scarf. She thought to herself that she would demand a new scarf when her captain woke up --if he woke up at all. She shook her head as the healing bubble appeared over her captain's small body.
"Matsumoto-san, could you get his clothes off? They might get stuck in him if..." Matsumoto began to pull at the ruined haori. Orihime was watching in a horrified fascination as blood flooded the floor with the removal of the shinigami garb. Matsumoto had to agree. Her captain had not been bleeding as much when he had fought the three -four?- Arrancar.
'When he lifted the limit...' she realized slowly. Hitsugaya's body was staring intently down at his spiritual counterpart his face contorted in fear. Slowly she shifted the young captain to peel off the bloodied kimono. When the black cloth came apart at the seams and laid open beneath the young shinigami, the two women recoiled in dismay at what laid beneath.
Hitsugaya's stomach was black, an ugly black of a bruise trying to heal. Between the splatters of blue-black and violets were sick yellows the color of dried pus and greens reminiscent to a caterpillar the buxom blonde found one morning stuck to the heel of her zori. When Inoue Orihime's powers began to reach down to stimulate the affected area back to life, Hitsugaya protested weakly, his struggles getting more and more violent as the bruise-like colors capitulated to a tide of angry red. Both Matsumoto and Hitsugaya's body were holding him down as Hitsugaya let out a muffled screech. Fumbling, Matsumoto reached beneath her lieutenant's badge for a vial containing stagnant liquid.
'For when the pain gets too much.'
'Was this what you were talking about Nemu? What have you done to him?!'
What had they done to him?
She unscrewed the cap, realizing in despair that there was no way to measure the dosage needed to sedate her captain. "Doses be damned," she reflected when she saw Hitsugaya's fist narrowly miss his own face. She tilted the vial over to spill what seemed like over half the liquid over her palms when she discovered the tar-like liquid clinging stubbornly on to the vial. The viscous material slowly –too slow- dripped on to her hand, to her surprise, the droplets solidified into pills. When she collected three from the glass she immediately stuffed it down Hitsugaya's throat praying that it would work.
It wasn't fast acting but it had its effects. Matsumoto wasn't sure if it was because of the pills themselves or because by that time Orihime had finished mostly with the torso, leaving only frost-edged gashes to look after. Then Kurosaki Ichigo had arrived with an unconscious Rukia in his arms and Hitsugaya just had to be a gentleman and wake up right on cue to move along.
Rangiku glared at him the whole time she was bandaging him.
He had simply looked away.
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"Captain, you need to eat."
"The day I eat anything you give me is the day I go drinking with you."
"You drink the tea I give you."
"You usually make one of the lower officers to get it for you."
"Captain..." Hitsugaya opened his eyes crossly and found his lieutenant sitting on the other side of the couch. "You haven't eaten since you left seireitei. You don't even eat school lunch. Look I even got you something from the neat vending machines out there. You need to eat." Hitsugaya's glare softened as Matsumoto edged closer, a plastic bag hanging loosely from her elegant fingers. Hitsugaya turned his head away.
"I'm not hungry."
Matsumoto sighed gustily as she placed the plastic bag back on her lap.
"I know but you do need to eat something to keep up your strength. How are you going to grow up if you don't eat?"
At the mention of the word 'grow', Hitsugaya flinched. The blue-gray eyed blonde didn't miss it. Instead of pushing him about it, the blonde put the bag of food on the table and scooted closer to where Hitsugaya laid, playing with the bandage around his chest. The white-haired teen gave her a bored stare.
Rolling her eyes she pulled her captain closer to herself. Hitsugaya let out a half-hearted protest, wincing when her hand brushed his stomach. Her grip loosened as he let himself be cuddled to her chest. She patted his hair, much like one would do to an irritable cat.
"Then rest captain." Coaxed Matsumoto as she hugged Hitsugaya closer, "I promise I won't tell anyone about this." He could feel the cheeky grin radiating from her warm aura. But it was comfortable and he did make a promise to himself that he would get some sleep after fighting of the arrancar... as Hitsugaya finally began to drift Matsumoto asked, "You'll tell me later, right Captain?"
"Che, of course."