Winter's Sons

Summary: When a body turns up at the Eastern Wall, run through with a zanpakuto and a sword of ice, all evidence points to Hitsugaya Toshiro. But this is only the first in a string of killings. With Central Forty-Six having issued an order for his execution, Hitsugaya must work against time to clear his name and find a killer strong enough to take on a captain. The past is never dead…

V. OLD FACES

Matsumoto was woken from fitful slumber, in the middle of the night. "Who'ssat?" she slurred, groggily. She recognised Hisagi's grim face looming over her. Sone was at the side, and looked both worried and concerned.

"Matsumoto-fukutaicho," they both said, at the same time. Hisagi went on, "Hitsugaya-taicho has escaped. There is a warrant out for his arrest."

Reality crashed in on her. Matsumoto sat up, blinking away the last of the sleep-fog from her mind. "He did what?" she found herself saying.

"He broke out of his cell," Hisagi said. "We found ice caking the bars. He claimed his zanpakuto back, and left. I found two of my Division knocked out by kido, but it seems he avoided the other guards. The Gotei Thirteen has issued an immediate warrant for his arrest."

Matsumoto wondered if it was a bad time to break into her secret stash of sake, locked in the same cupboard where her Captain kept his stash from the care-packages his grandmother always sent him from Junrinan. Personally, she just found it funny that he took great pains to be discreet about going down in person to obtain his package from the post office.

Funny what things the mind could think about, when you really didn't want to deal with the problem at hand.

"I understand, Hisagi," she said. "He hasn't come by the Division."

"You will turn him in if he comes here?"

Turn him in. Already, it had begun. Her Captain was a fugitive, and somewhere along the line, he had become a criminal. And the investigation into the deaths of Narumi Arata and Kahei Ichiro hadn't even gone anywhere significant.

Her mouth quirked in the faint, ironic smile she'd somehow picked up from him. Or perhaps it was from Gin. "Of course," she said, "Whyever would you doubt that?"

He was a little more polite than to tell her what he knew about a Lieutenant's duties to the Gotei Thirteen conflicting with her loyalties to her Captain. He simply gave her a nod and said, "Then I'll see myself out," and left. In any case, Matsumoto was not inclined to escort him to the Division exit.

"I've taken the liberty of having him escorted out," Sone said quietly. "By Hitomi and Takezoe." Matsumoto frowned.

"Why?" she asked.

Sone said, simply, "Will you do it?"

Matsumoto heaved a long sigh. Sone, she thought, really deserved a better answer than the one she'd given Hisagi. So instead, she said, "A Lieutenant's duty, Sone, is to have faith in her Captain. Sometimes…it can be difficult."

He was too polite to mention that faith had blinded Hinamori. That was always the problem.

"I thought we should make sure Hisagi-fukutaicho has not left anything behind at our Division," Sone said. "It would be rather difficult to make any choice, if our Division's security is compromised. And in any case, the Seal is to be returned soon."

Matsumoto smacked her forehead lightly with her palm. "I'd forgotten…" she groaned. With the mess that had resulted from Captain Hitsugaya's imprisonment, the murders, and his subsequent escape, she'd all but forgotten that they were meant to handle the final set of transfer ceremonies for the King's Seal. Then they could forget about the blasted thing and juggle dealing with…she didn't even know what to do about this.

Her fingers found the scrap of cloth she'd kept in her shihakusho. Why had he escaped? Why now?

And what was he going to do?

"It's fine," Sone said, jolting her out of her thoughts. "I've gotten some of the other officers to settle the guard shifts, and the tasks for the ceremony. We'll draw up and plan and have it on your desk by this evening."

Guilt blossomed inside her; slacking off was one thing when her Captain was on the job. But she was the Acting-Captain now, she was the one supposed to keep the Division running and together, and she couldn't do that if she was off shirking her responsibilities and trying to…trying to what? To find the killer? To prove her Captain innocent?

How was she going to do that?

"No," Matsumoto said firmly. "Call a meeting of the Division's officers later this morning please, Sone. We'll work out the plans together."

The look of faint approval on Sone's face was worth it.

The Academy was mostly as he'd remembered it.

In truth, there was little else to go on. Hitsugaya avoided the sentries by vaulting the wall; an easy task for a Captain of the Gotei Thirteen, and in any case, they were mostly looking for students sneaking out, not intruders sneaking in. He landed harder than he had expected; a straight four-point landing and then stood up and strode off before they could find him.

He wondered if he should bother stealing a set of Academy uniforms. He was out of place here, in his dark shihakusho. If anyone had bothered to look. He had been very good at his stealth exercises, back in his days at the Academy.

As he walked across the grassy quad, he felt the memories flood back. He'd spent far less time here than most shinigami had. Even so, it seemed like another part of his life, one he'd long set aside. One he was coming back to now, and not entirely because he'd wanted to.

A few lights still burned in the shuttered paper-screened windows of the student dormitories, but it was mostly dark. Even as he looked at them, a few went out. He held his reiatsu tightly under control, but cast his senses wide so he could avoid the one or two glimmers that had to be students sneaking out despite the curfew.

He shook his head. He'd almost never done that, in his day. Now he sounded old. He'd snuck up to the roof, once or twice, to practise kido. And to watch the stars. He'd always liked heights, always had a good head for them. Up there, in the cool night, breathing in the clear air, he'd felt…peaceful. Undisturbed.

But never at home. Home was always where Granny was, even though the Academy had become a kind of home to him, as the months passed.

No point lingering. He moved on past the dormitory buildings and the training halls, ghosted along towards the courtyard and the place he was supposed to be at. The lone cherry blossom tree, gnarled and hopelessly dead stood before him. He knelt at the marker beneath. He'd managed to bring flowers, a white poppy that was somewhat worse for the wear for being inside his shihakusho. He laid it in front of the marker stone.

They hadn't put anything on it, besides Kahei's name, and his position as headmaster of the Academy, and the dates. No epitaph. That was it. He hunkered down in the silence, thinking. The wind sighed through the old, dead leaves of the cherry blossom tree. He'd always thought of asking Kahei why he'd kept the tree around, in sight of the window. He never had.

A light burned in the window of the nearby headmaster's quarters. Strange, Hitsugaya thought, but it wasn't, really. Of course Kahei would be replaced. He was the latest in a series of headmasters to run the Academy, since the Captain-Commander had first established it. There was nothing more to it.

"I'm sorry," he finally said, to Kahei. To the man who had mentored him, in a way, as much as any of his former teachers could have been said to have done so. "I'll find your killer. That I swear." He drew Hyorinmaru's blade, knowing what he was going to do. The skin split anew along on his palm, droplets of blood falling to the dry dirt before the newly-dug grave. He laid it out before on his palms, offered it. His voice threatened to catch in his throat; anger or regret, Hitsugaya didn't know. "Thank you for everything. And goodbye."

He parried the blow that came in without turning back to see. It had been aimed at his back, would have torn him from hip to shoulder had it landed. But Hitsugaya's reflexes stood him in excellent stead, despite having been off active combat duty for a while, and his block was textbook perfect. He felt the surge of sharply-focused reiatsu behind the strike. In the next instance, he twisted about, using his leverage to force his attacker back, and then riposted.

His slash didn't land; his attacker caught it. Steel rang off steel, and sparks flew in the exchange. He pulled back and delivered a series of arcing cuts. His opponent deflected them all effortlessly; a flick on the last parry bound their blades together for a moment, and then opened a shallow cut along Hitsugaya's cheekbone.

Hitsugaya twisted away best as he could and then moved into Paired Sunbirds, which was beaten aside by a Willow In Breeze. He dodged that entirely and fell to a knee and struck from below with a quick Kingfisher Spears Fish. The unorthodox direction of the form surprised his opponent slightly, and Dance of the Hummingbird left the point of his sword at his opponent's throat.

The reiatsu was familiar, but it was too dark to see by. With his free hand, Hitsugaya said, "Tsukero." The light blossomed in his empty hand, throwing his attacker's features into clear relief. "Imai?" he murmured, in surprise. Almost surprise. It had been years. He carefully removed Hyorinmaru from the man's throat.

Imai Takeshi permitted himself a smile, and a shrug. "I see you've gotten better with a sword since your time here," he said casually. He gestured to the still-burning lamp in the window of the headmaster's quarters. "Would you like to come in and talk?"

"Tea?" Imai asked, lifting a dark brown clay teapot from a brazier.

"Yes, please."

Imai poured, and Hitsugaya thanked him. Imai had always preferred his pottery to be plain, unmarked pieces. The beauty of each piece, Imai had once said, as Hitsugaya watched his teacher work in the small kiln during his free time, should be made apparent through the work of the craftman's hands, and the functionality of the piece. Not through adornment.

Hitsugaya had always thought that Imai's swordwork was almost exactly like his pottery.

"You came back to see Kahei? A sad affair, that," Imai said. Hitsugaya breathed the familiar scent of green tea, redolent with a few spices. Imai had discreetly added a daub of wild honey to the tea in both cups. It was one of his many peculiarities.

"Yes," Hitsugaya said. "I suppose you're headmaster now."

Imai nodded. "It was almost Genji. Then we would not be having this conversation." He laughed at the sour expression on Hitsugaya's face. Hitsugaya had never liked the man. Genji was one of the more narrow-minded of Hitsugaya's instructors, and a noble. In retrospect, Hitsugaya suspected that Genji had been Aizen's eyes in the Academy. But he'd had so little proof…

Best not to think about such things. Aizen was taken care of. It was over. He closed his eyes, and sipped at his tea. Imai's tea was an acquired taste, Hitsugaya supposed. He thought about the man who had come before Imai. Arai. They'd both been taught by him, at different points in time. Arai was poetry with a sword, or so many had said. He'd personally taken Hitsugaya under his wing, despite the young student having no real aptitude for the sword. He'd done a good deal in instilling a sense of discipline and a feel for swordwork in Hitsugaya.

And he'd died. It was another of those things that couldn't be so easily explained, and Hitsugaya ground his teeth together as he wondered, not for the first time, how many of those things could be laid solely on Aizen's doorstep. Little things, like the death of an interfering swordmaster who saw too much at the Academy. The removal of some of Soul Society's strongest Captains. Gathering promising young students to his side. Biding his time.

No wonder they'd been unprepared.

"Thinking?"

"Just remembering Arai," Hitsugaya said.

"He was a good teacher," Imai said. He'd replaced Arai when the man had died, but they'd felt the loss all the same. Maybe that was why he'd managed to work with Imai, as the younger teacher took up his instruction. They'd both felt the loss when Arai had died.

"Yes," Hitsugaya said. No matter. He could not do anything for the dead.

Not even justice? It was ironic, he thought, to be sitting at a low table with Imai, drinking honey-sweetened spiced tea and speaking of old times. Speaking of the dead, just as he'd planned to bring Kahei's killer to justice. They were shinigami. Their duty was to protect the dead, to help the spirits of the departed make the crossing to Soul Society safely. To safeguard the balance between the worlds.

And here he was, thinking there was nothing he could do for the dead. For Arai.

Sometimes, he knew why Tosen had gone completely batshit crazy. Imai Takeshi had been the youngest son of a wealthy noble family. None of them really knew what it was like outside the Seireitei's walls, and he'd come from Junrinan. Junrinan, where it was safe to leave your door unlatched at night.

Here be dragons. Wasn't that the saying?

There were places in Soul Society where the only defense was to learn to become the people who did the hurting. Where 'It's not fair!' was a child's response, until the only answer was to stop caring. Where the only answer was someone else's pain.

Where the only answer was to close your eyes, and hope you eventually became numb to it, because there was nothing else you could do. He was a Captain, and he was still doing that.

Hitsugaya scowled. That voice wasn't his.

He hadn't been the one with all the grand plans.

"How is Terada?" he asked, because he didn't want to think about Arai anymore. The silence stretched and yawned between them.

Imai smiled. "Still gently taking the first few years in hand for unarmed combat training. Then after a few years with me, they run back to him for hakuda." Hitsugaya snorted. Imai's harshness as a sword instructor was also legendary. As was Terada's seemingly infinite patience. And to add to that, the two instructors were very close friends. "But you didn't return to talk about your Academy days. You said you came back to see Kahei."

"Yes. And I came back because Kahei was murdered." In this very set of rooms, Hitsugaya thought. But of course the blood would have been scrubbed off by now. Loss happened, and so did replacement. It was the way of the Gotei Thirteen. Scarcely different at the Academy. He remembered how quickly emptied rooms were filled with new students, back when a few students had been killed during a training exercise that had gotten out of hand.

Imai didn't blink, though surely he had heard about how Kahei died. "I see," he murmured. He glanced down at his pottery cup, but didn't lift it to drink the tea. "Sword of ice through the heart, and his own zanpakuto. Taken by surprise, and then overpowered."

"You saw?" Hitsugaya asked.

"Yes." At Hitsugaya's surprise, Imai elaborated, "I was the person they fetched from the Academy to confirm his identity."

"How good a swordsman was Kahei?"

He'd never sparred Kahei. Kahei had taught him other things, though Imai was still thrashing him regularly when Hitsugaya sparred him, even at the time he was graduating. Imai frowned. "Better than your average swordsman," he said. "Hard to take Kahei by surprise, in any case. And it takes a good amount of power to be doing so."

Hitsugaya accepted that with a nod. "Would you say above ninth seat?"

Imai shrugged. "Why not?" His dark eyes glinted. "Any reason why you're asking?"

Hitsugaya knew Imai, as much as he'd fenced the man a thousand times. The measure of a man could be found in the way their zanpakuto spoke when they fought, and his single duel with Gin had brought him nothing but unease. In the same way, he felt sure about Imai. So he said, "Narumi Arata was discovered dead earlier today."

Imai rocked back on his haunches. He was clearly surprised, though he mostly hid it well. He said, "Narumi Arata. I haven't heard that name in a long time. He was a ninth seat?"

"With the Seventh."

"I remember him," Imai said, slowly. "Promising student, everyone said. He was never quite the same after the duel. More angry and resentful than focused. He was a good swordsman. It was a well-fought duel, for students."

Hitsugaya's mouth twitched in a half-smile. "I suppose," he accepted. "I don't know how Narumi died, except that I suspect the method is similar."

"Your reiatsu," Imai said, almost to himself. "I thought the reiatsu at the Eastern Wall had been familiar. But it had been too long…I wasn't sure."

"Need you ask?" Hitsugaya said, bluntly.

Imai met his eyes. He gave a lazy smile. "You think?"

"I think it's linked to the Academy. That's the other reason I came here," Hitsugaya said. "Call it intuition. I was thinking about the victimology. There are two separate aspects to the killings. First, the killer's trying to make sure the blame goes to me." Even as he said it, he had the strangest feeling there was something he was missing out on. But there was nothing he could do about it now, and he set that feeling aside to mull over another time. "But he hadn't killed just anyone, yet there is no obvious link between Kahei and Narumi."

"You're missing out the obvious: they're nobles."

"Too obvious," Hitsugaya said. "I don't think it's a crime of opportunity. It's a killing meant to send a message to the rest of Soul Society—it's too theatrical to be merely a murder. And if he'd wanted to send a message to the nobles, there are more accessible and more prominent targets than Kahei or Narumi."

"You are sure of that?"

"No. But it's the only answer that seems to make sense," Hitsugaya said, softly. He sipped at his tea. "The culprit is going to great lengths to make me seem guilty. And the less obvious link is that both victims played a role in my past, during my Academy days."

"A number of people have."

"Yes. And I don't think the killer's going to stop with Narumi. Kahei…was just the beginning."

"What does he want?" Imai asked. "If you're right, then this is personal."

"It is personal," Hitsugaya said. Quietly. "It was the moment he killed Kahei." The moment he'd set up Hitsugaya to take the fall, whoever he was.

"More personal than that. There would have to be link between the killer and your Academy days," Imai said, shaking his head.

"Yes. There aren't that many people."

"More than you know," Imai said, stretching with a sigh. "Kahei's files are well organised, but I've yet to appoint anyone to take Shirasu's old position."

"Shirasu's old position?" Hitsugaya asked, blinking. Shirasu had served as the headmaster's administrator since as long as anyone at the Academy could remember, weathering changes in the positions. He'd been the administrator for far longer than Kahei had been headmaster. It was like hearing that Sasakibe was no longer the Lieutenant of the First Division. The consensus was that Shirasu would die in his post, rather than leave the Academy.

"Oh, you didn't know," Imai grimaced. "Shirasu died, the same night as Kahei. Neither of them fought off Kahei's attacker."

Ice crept along his spine. Shirasu was a dusty old man, a little too preoccupied with rules, but as most of the instructors serving at the Academy, he'd been an seated officer and an instructor before being moved to the post of administrator. He knew his way about a blade, and for Shirasu and Kahei to have died…

"I'm sorry," he said aloud.

"I was thinking of appointing Masuno Osamu," Imai said. The head of history, and the instructor in charge of managing the Academy archives. Certainly, a shift to an administrative job would not present Masuno with any difficulty, though Hitsugaya had little impression of the man, including whether he could be trusted, or whether Masuno even had a successor lined up. He said none of those; as headmaster, Imai no doubt had plans.

And that meant the records would not be accessible to him. Hitsugaya said, "I need to look in those student records."

Imai sighed. "They're supposed to be confidential, you know."

"I know," Hitsugaya said. "And there's a killer on the loose. I don't intend to let him get to the next person on his list." He raised his eyebrows. "And you know that if he keeps to his pattern, the next person to die will be from the Academy."

"I can give you a day with the records," Imai said. "Nothing more."

"Thank you."

"I should've thought you'd remember more about the students you knew, back from your Academy days."

Hitsugaya gave an expansive shrug. "I was mostly too busy with the classes, and I hadn't stayed with a class for very long in all my time at the Academy," he said, in response to the almost-rebuke. "In any case, the students who never reached above ninth seat can be safely ruled out."

"Still a tall order," Imai said, smiling. "You do know the batch you graduated with, and the ones directly before and after it were considered the most promising intake the Academy had seen in years." He stood up, draining the last of his tea. Hitsugaya followed suit. "Come. I'll show you to where the records are kept. The faster you are done, the faster you can be gone from here."

Hitsugaya peered out the window at the lone cherry blossom tree. "I never understood why he kept that there," Imai remarked. "He never really said."

"He said he liked the view from his window," Hitsugaya said. "When he could look up from his work and see it. I suppose we won't ever know."

Hitsugaya leafed through cabinet after cabinet of records. The one fortunate thing was that Shirasu had been as obsessively thorough in his filing system as he was as an administrator. The candle that Imai had left with him was faint light by which to see, but he was grateful for it nonetheless. With a killer on the loose who was leaving traces of his reiatsu at every murder, Hitsugaya wanted to leave as little traces of his reiatsu as possible. So he kept from using the simple spell for light, though that would have made easier reading for him.

Still, this was not the first time he'd studied by candlelight, particularly at the Academy. Funny how all roads were pointing here at this juncture in time. Hitsugaya liked to believe in coincidence. He also wasn't allowed to do so.

He was still uncertain about how he wanted to play this. The killer, he knew, would almost certainly have some sort of link to the people in the records. He suspected he might even be in the records. On the other hand, Hitsugaya knew he would have better luck trying to find the next victim and beating the killer to the person.

Anticipate. Don't react.

None of the names rang a bell. He recognised a few as people he'd met in passing, perhaps had a conversation with. That was all. All except Narumi Arata. He wondered if he should have spoken more to Imai about Kahei. About? His mind wanted to know. He didn't know what the right questions to ask were.

Narumi Arata. Hitsugaya flipped through the files, feeling strangely as though he was violating the dead man's privacy, for all he hadn't cared for Narumi. There was the usual, notes from all his instructors about how the scion of the Narumi family was a credit to the eminent name, how he was progressing with extreme skill through his various classes and assessments. Not the examinations, of course. As the son of an extremely prominent noble family, Narumi Arata had been spared the indignity of something as base as examinations. He hadn't needed to sit the entrance examinations, and he wouldn't need to sit the graduation examinations.

That was another reason, Hitsugaya thought, tracing the calligraphed characters on the page of the report that described Narumi's successful purification of a dummy Hollow during a training exercise. The Academy was as strictly bound to Soul Society's political hierarchy as the rest. Children of high-ranking noble families like the Narumi were guaranteed a future as a shinigami. The occasional wealthy tradesman's child or the child from a more modestly-placed noble family were still treated as well, for they'd paid their way in.

At the very bottom were the candidates from Rukongai, who had to fight tooth and nail through entrance examinations, graduation examinations. Those without sponsors had no way of paying their tuition fees, and so in exchange for a waiver, they were bound to work for the Academy, normally as servants to the wealthier students. They'd served tables at the mess, done the chores and cleaning, and every task that came their way.

Hitsugaya had been lucky. He hadn't been one of them. He'd been sponsored by the Captain-Commander Yamamoto himself, and his entry to the Academy had been irregular, in the middle of the term. He'd been treated as well as any student hailing from a middle-ranked noble family, or even a wealthy tradesman family. He knew that had been the starting point of the resentment, the jealousy, the envy. Was this the hint he needed?

Narumi. Hitsugaya closed his eyes and remembered. That was how their first clash had come about. Narumi had always had nothing but contempt for Rukongai trash, as he'd called them. He'd taken pleasure in lording it over them, knowing they were expected to show a measure of deference to him. And he'd expected the same behaviour from Hitsugaya.

He hadn't gotten it. For whatever reason, he'd enjoyed picking on Hitsugaya whenever he could. He'd been humiliated, then outraged, particularly when he discovered the small boy eating his dinner in the mess wasn't on assistance from the Academy and therefore couldn't be ordered around.

Narumi would have made enemies, Hitsugaya thought. Their duel had drawn far too much attention, and in the following weeks, it hadn't just been the Rukongai students who were treating him as though he'd made the Captaincy while still at the Academy.

But many of them were from Rukongai.

Hitsugaya took a deep breath. He couldn't afford to make that assumption. A Rukongai student with a grudge against Narumi and himself?

He leafed on through the records. Page after page, and little spoke of any altercations Narumi had been involved in. Hitsugaya resisted the urge to curse. The Academy and its cursed noble politics. Of course. The only references he found were two notes, speaking of the two times they'd had a confrontation which had actually gone on record. The duel. Always the duel.

He wondered how he felt about that now. Just a boy, he thought. A mean-spirited, arrogant boy with the need to assert his authority over everyone else. A gifted boy, even. And he'd picked the wrong target. And now he was dead.

It didn't change the small worm of anger that wriggled in his heart when he thought about it. There was—had been—too much bad blood between them for the anger to disappear. But Narumi was dead now, and Hitsugaya set that emotion aside for more constructive purposes.

Wait.

Hitsugaya flipped the last page again, and then he realised what he'd almost barely noticed, as distracted as he'd been with the details of Narumi's life. He turned back the pages, going slowly through the file again. He frowned. He'd been too preoccupied with the who, the things that Narumi had done, to realise that the Academy's records were kept in a very specific way. Instructors submitted weekly reports of the students progress, and each page was numbered and dated and recorded in the file. He checked back against the contents page. Pages of the monthly reports were missing; not just pages, in fact, but chunks of a month's reports had gone missing.

Hitsugaya frowned. What?

The contents page reflected some of these changes, he now realised. Page numbers hastily changed and crossed out in dark, hurried inkbrush strokes. When this had been done, he couldn't have said.

No, Hitsugaya realised. Not missing.

Pages had been removed from Narumi's file.

The candle burned down to a stub, and Hitsugaya had lit another from a taper, and another, despite the sunlight filtering in through the bamboo slats of the blinds. He'd left the blinds down before the window. Students were wont to get up to all kinds of mischief, and Hitsugaya himself had seen and heard things he wasn't supposed to, during his time at the Academy.

He didn't know if word of his escape had spread this far, or if a student could even recognise him on sight without his Captain's haori, but decided there was no point in taking the risk. He had been too recent a student at the Academy for them to have forgotten about him.

There was no help for it. He would have gone through each and every file if he could, but Imai had only promised him a day uninterrupted. So Hitsugaya chose his targets carefully and hoped for the best. Now that he knew what he was looking for, or even a little of it, discrepancies popped up. It was a strange experience, flipping through the pages of his own file, learning what his instructors had really thought of him.

Quiet…dedicated…hard working…great potential…possible materialisation of zanpakuto…shikai within the first year…

He felt the faint pang as he flipped past the pages written in Kahei's neat hand, and Arai's slashing, bold handwriting. Now both of them were dead. And disquiet rapidly overcame nostalgic sadness. There were pages excised from his records as well. The chain he'd only dimly seen was real; binding him and Narumi in a shared past. Hitsugaya frowned and rubbed at his temples, wishing he had a good, warm cup of green tea over which to mull things. Wishing he could recall what that slender link was.

An elusive thought came to mind, but darted away again, like the silver glint of a fish in a pale green pond.

They were his records, Hitsugaya thought, annoyed with himself. There was no reason he shouldn't have been able to spot what was missing.

It wasn't possible, he thought, at the growing suspicion in his mind. But perhaps it was. He'd been overlooking it, unwilling to articulate it.

A further search through the remaining cabinets revealed, mostly by chance, what he had barely begun to pick up on. Hitsugaya's eyes widened; papers held limply in his hand. The candle flame sputtered, and he sharply restrained his reiatsu. He blinked.

Suddenly, he began to see the shape of the puzzle.

The figure walked through the corridors of the Tenth Division barracks, carefully avoiding the posted guards. He slipped past them as if they weren't there. The Tenth Division had doubled their guards, but had no reason to change the patterns of their patrols, and he knew them…he knew them as he knew the position of his left hand, even in a pitch-black room.

He kept a careful grip on his reiatsu, even though he felt no fear at being discovered. He was more than a match for any of the shinigami present. This, he thought, was mere caution. Lips peeled back from his teeth in a silent laugh; the Captain, he thought, would have found this funny. Pity he wasn't here.

It was only a matter of time. Hitsugaya was supposed to be the clever one, the tensai, the genius. When he first heard the message being relayed across the Seireitei through hell butterflies—easily waylaid, and shinigami were wont to blame it on the pitiful thing getting lost, rather than being intercepted—he couldn't help his amusement.

So Hitsugaya had escaped; broken out from his confinement, and they were all a-stir about that. He slid open the doorway of the Captain's quarters. They weren't empty. They hadn't yet come to aquire the abandoned feel of old rooms. He amused himself by glancing at cabinets where clothes were neatly folded away, a small shelf of books, the neatly-made futon, and the writing desk on which everything was carefully arranged.

No, it was more as if everything had been set aside, waiting for the moment Hitsugaya would step through the door again. It spoke to him for a moment, a strange reminder of home.

In a chest of drawers, he found a stack of neatly labelled letters, and parcels, still wrapped in their brown packaging and tied over with twine. He opened one of the parcels, and fished out, among other things, a packet of amanatto. He smirked, and popped a piece in his mouth, then left the rest as they were.

He'd never quite understood why Hitsugaya had a fondness for amanatto.

He went back to the closet, and searched for a moment before he found a pale, jade-green scarf, a few shades lighter than the richer shade of green in the sash Hitsugaya used. There was a story behind it, of course. There was a story behind most things. The man knew the story.

He bundled the folded scarf under his arm, and then left through the side-exit, into the small courtyard. There was a small garden there, he noticed, filled with all sorts of plants. As he paused for a moment, out of curiosity, he noticed the watermelon growing.

Of course, he thought.

He left the Division a while later, having circled the grounds once more. He paused for a moment in front of the building that contained the high-security vault of the Tenth Division. Then, and only then, he left.

"Matsumoto-san?" A small voice disturbed Matsumoto from her sleep. Matsumoto moaned, but clawed her way, bit by grudging bit, to awareness. She rubbed at her eyes, wondering if she should ask her visitor to come back at a better time, aware that she must look a sight in her sleep-deprived state right now.

"Yes?"

And then the figure came into view, and Matsumoto discarded those thoughts. She'd had uncharitable thoughts about Hinamori on occasion, particularly with how the young lieutenant had been behaving. Especially, she admitted, and that was the main reason she had been cross—whenever her Captain was involved.

"Have you heard the hell butterflies?"

Matsumoto said, "Yes."

They'd been dispatched across the Seireitei an hour or two ago, informing everyone that Captain Hitsugaya Toshiro was to be arrested to stand trial for the murder of Kahei Ichiro and Narumi Arata. Matsumoto's heart had sank at those words, and Sone had visibly blanched, before the other seated officers of the Tenth had banded together around their current commanding officer.

"He killed them," Hinamori whispered. Matsumoto saw the glint of tears on her cheeks—pale where the moonlight revealed them. Pinned Kahei to the Wall like Aizen. Matsumoto almost thought that Hinamori was going to say it. She didn't.

She didn't know who Hinamori was referring to, when she'd said, 'he'.

"Do you think he did it, Matsumoto-san…?"

Raw, pleading. Why not? Matsumoto thought. Hinamori had given her heart and her unreserved loyalty to Aizen on a platter. He'd taken her trust, abused it, and destroyed it. He'd damaged her, and took a perverse amount of pleasure in having her suffer during the Winter War. There was only so much that could be said for how many times a person could bounce back from betrayal, and all in all, she had not been sure about Hinamori for a long time.

Perhaps even now.

"I don't think he did it," she said calmly, ignoring her own doubts.

Gin and Hitsugaya, and sometimes she was certain Gin had cast a long shadow indeed, even at the end. She'd never been certain of him and sometimes she never knew if she was certain of her Captain.

Why he was doing what he did. Just as mysterious as the sliver of moon that balanced at the end of Hyorinmaru's chain, as the daffodil that symbolised their Division. Matsumoto yearned for certainty. Ached for it.

"They're going to execute him if they find him," Hinamori said. Her voice trembled. The hell butterflies had also been clear about that. Attempting to take in a non-cooperative Captain was difficult, if not suicidal for most shinigami, and Central Forty-Six was under no illusions about how best to proceed.

And the Gotei Thirteen had countersigned that order in the dispatches that followed. Matsumoto had read them with a heavy heart. Why were they doing this? Hadn't they learned from the last time Aizen had tried to frame members of the Gotei Thirteen and turn them on each other?

But if someone was playing Aizen's game here, what purpose was it for?

The King's Seal, she thought. It had to be.

"I know," she said again.

"If the order comes, what will you do?"

For a moment, it wasn't Hinamori talking to her. It was Hisagi, eyes wary with the knowledge that came from experience. Tosen had, after all, betrayed his trust. He knew all about the contradictions and conflicts that came with being a lieutenant.

Matsumoto hid. "I have other responsibilities," she said simply. "In the absence of a Captain, all responsibility for protecting the King's Seal rests with me, as the acting leader of the Tenth Division. Those supersede any orders Central Forty-Six or the Gotei Thirteen may see fit to issue at this time."

Much better than admitting: I don't know.

Hinamori looked very, very small. "Matsumoto-san…is there any way we can help Shiro-chan?"

Matsumoto exhaled; a long, tired breath. "Not yet," she said, with forced optimism. "But I'm sure he knows what he's doing." Or so she hoped. "He'll be fine, Hinamori. He's been through far worse than this."

In the morning, Matsumoto found the watermelon patch that her Captain had always carefully tended had been slicked over with ice. She stared at it, her hand almost finding Haineko's hilt, her heart in her mouth as she cast out around her.

No familiar reiatsu met her senses; the only familiar traces were vestigial, and even now fading. The strongest source of icy reiatsu bled from the patches of ice in front of her. She picked up a shard of ice and rubbed it between her fingers, thinking.

"Captain?" she asked aloud.

There was no response. She wasn't sure if she'd expected any.