Rukia's eyes are going to fall out of her head. Or maybe her brain is. She is reading about civics, specifically the civics of the Seireitei.
The civics of Inuzuri are very simple. Everyone does what they want. If this presents a conflict, the party that is better at stabbing usually gets to do what they want and the other party does not (and sometimes also gets stabbed).
Rukia had assumed that the civics of the Seireitei would consist of a list of rules and an accompanying list of what happens to you if you break them.
Instead, the civics of the Seireitei are so complicated that she is fifteen pages into this book, and has yet to get to even a single rule. It is talking about spheres of authority. As far as Rukia can tell, spheres of authority are the people who get to do what they want. The book does not say whether or not they are any good at stabbing.
Renji is reading a different book, a book about souls and the resurrection cycle. They are supposed to switch when they are done. Renji is much further than fifteen pages into his book, but from the look on his face, he is also wishing for a convenient meteor to crash into the District 70 Consolidated Shinigami Recruitment Station.
Mr. Mochida bustles in. "Oh, dear!" he exclaims. "Look at these bright, smiling faces, absorbing the knowledge of the ages! And me, disturbing my diligent pupils!"
Renji manages a wan smile that looks more like a rictus. Rukia glares at Mr. Mochida with cold death in her eyes.
"It's rare for me to have long-term students," the old bastard prattles. "I have an obligation I must attend to today. I was wondering if perhaps I might prevail upon the two of you to accompany me. I could honestly use your assistance."
Renji slams his book shut. "Are we going Hollow-hunting?"
"Mmmm," Mr. Mochida hums. "It's more like a…an exercise in building community relations."
Rukia would muck out a pigsty if it would get her out of a single second of reading about spheres of authority. "We're in," she commits for both of them.
"Building community relations" apparently means playing street football.
Rukia has no idea why Mr. Mochida didn't just say so in the first place.
On the way over to the empty lot where the game is to be held, Mr. Mochida explains that in Shiotsuka, there is a deep rivalry between the street children and those of that elevated class, which is to say, the ones who have homes and adoptive parents. Such child emperors are vanishingly rare in Inuzuri, and Rukia and Renji side with the urchins immediately on principle. In any case, Mr. Mochida likes to attend the games, because his presence keeps the level of animosity at sneers and trash-talk, rather than descending into actual violence. It also gives him an opportunity to get to know the young people of the town, and establish himself as a benevolent presence. Many of them show up to the recruitment station at the pre-enrollment periods. Mr. Mochida suspects they are only there for the free meal, but he appreciates the opportunity to check their spiritual pressure, just in case.
Renji asks if adults are ever admitted to Shin'ou.
Mr. Mochida explains that it is rare to find any souls at all this far out with shinigami potential, and that they are nearly all very young. He hesitates before adding that the few adults with high spiritual pressure that do crop up in the outer rings are often more interested in establishing themselves as local bullies than devoting themselves to the service of Soul Society. If Mr. Mochida thinks this will come as a surprise to Rukia and Renji, then he has underestimated the understanding of humanity one can gain in a place like Inuzuri.
Speaking of things Mr. Mochida doesn't know much about, he sucks at football. Completely balls at it. Apparently the reason the children like him is because he plays as a one-man team, and gets absolutely clowned on.
Fortunately for him, Rukia and Renji are very, very good at football.
It's been a few years since they aged out of the Inuzuri streetball scene. Rukia doesn't feel rusty at all, though. In fact, her feet feel like they have wings, her body feels weightless. The other kids travel in slow motion, their moves clumsy and their feints obvious. Renji, on defense, is impenetrable. He is everywhere at once, grinning and barely breaking a sweat.
They have been staying with Mr. Mochida for sixteen days. Although she's been working her ass off, up until an hour ago, Rukia would have been hard-pressed to point to any actual progress that she has made. But in fact, all the breathing exercises, focusing on the flow of reiatsu through her body, the endless sword drills, all of it has changed her and Renji both, without them even noticing.
Rukia wonders if Mr. Mochida did this on purpose. If this is some sort of test, to see how well they are able to put what they've learned into practice. Or maybe…maybe he just felt like they needed to see their own improvement.
It's also entirely possible that this really is a recruitment tactic. The children, feral and domesticated alike, are completely bananas for this. Rukia and Renji are thrashing them mercilessly, and they can't get enough of it. They start jumping on Renji, hanging off his shoulders and ankles, while he laughs and tries to keep playing. A kid who isn't even as tall as Rukia tries to make eyes at her. Eventually, Rukia and Renji silently agree to stop passing to each other, and only pass to Mr. Mochida. He's extremely cheerful about all of this, but it's a guaranteed interception every time.
Afterwards, a few of the children run home to waiting parents, but many of them linger, bubbling over with curiosity. Are Rukia and Renji visiting shinigami? Have they come to work with Mr. Mochida? The fact that they are from parts south only brings a fresh barrage of questions. Somewhat defying belief, their impressions of the outer districts are somehow even worse than the reality.
Yes, there are houses in Inuzuri. There are streets, too, and Hollows do not wander them, eating citizens by the handful.
The good feelings in Rukia's chest slowly begin to curdle. The children clearly idolize them. It is envy that shines in their eyes, not pity. But they also think of Inuzuri as some primitive, horrible place. It is only eight districts away. Rukia has spent the last sixteen days thinking about how nice Shiotsuka is. She has not stopped to consider what other people think of her.
Inuzuri is only eight districts away.
What is another seventy, eh?
"Have you ever fought a Hollow, Mr. Mochida?" Renji asks that night over dinner.
"I have," Mr. Mochida acknowledges.
"Was it scary?" Rukia presses, hoping for details.
"Most of my encounters with Hollows have been here in Soul Society, where I was deployed as part of a combat unit. We had drilled extensively for this, and were led by seasoned officers. It is sometimes a case that a poor judgment is made and a unit is overwhelmed, but my experiences were always quite straightforward. A Hollow in Soul Society is usually the weakest and stupidest class of the beast, driven here by desperation." He takes a sip of his tea. "I did a month-long patrol in a Living World city once. That was a different story. That was quite scary." Details do not seem to be forthcoming.
"How come we don't get Hollows out here?" Renji asks. "You'd think it'd be good hunting grounds, since shinigami don't patrol this deep."
"You are thinking along the right lines," Mr. Mochida nods. "Hollows eat souls for their spiritual energy, though. The general distribution of spiritual energy in Soul Society is highly concentrated at the center and quite weak toward the edges. There is little sustenance for them out here. Most of the Hollow activity in Soul Society occurs between the District 20 ring and the mid-forties."
"How does that work?" Rukia frowns. "The distribution thing. I thought souls got randomly assigned to districts."
Mr. Mochida rubs his mustache. "That is…not exactly true. Do either of you remember receiving your district assignment?"
"No," Rukia and Renji reply in unison.
Mr. Mochida nods. "Few people do. In any case, the district assignment office is under the purview of the Kidou Corps. If you remembered it, you would probably only remember a civil servant shinigami casting a kidou on your arm and handing you a slip of paper."
They know about that kidou, even if they don't remember getting it. It's sort of like a magical tattoo. It's mostly invisible, although Renji says he can see them if the light is just right, and Rukia's itches sometimes. Shinigami can see them though, and the border guards have some way to read them. If it weren't for the brands, no one who was assigned to a high district would bother to stay, but the penalties for being caught outside of your assigned district without the proper paperwork are…unpleasant.
"What you don't see is the part where your assignment is made." Mr. Mochida purses his lips for a moment. "I don't know the exact details of how it works, but there is a calculation engine involved. It attempts to balance the load of souls across Soul Society."
"A what?" Renji asks, his mouth hanging half-open.
"Oh…" Mr. Mochida sighs. "I am not a technology person. It is like if a waterwheel ran an abacus, except that it uses kidou instead of water. They use many such things in the Seireitei. If you have the interest and aptitude for them, you can earn yourself a place in the Gotei's Department of Research and Development or the Kidou Corps' Institute for Applied High-Energy Thaumaturgy."
"I know about wheels!" Renji volunteers. "For a while, I worked at a place that took old carts and swapped their wheels around to make them look different and then sold them again."
Mr. Mochida looks blank for a moment. "The wheels were a metaphor. I don't think there are actual wheels involved. I am not positive, though."
Renji looks vaguely disappointed. Rukia wants to know more about the soul-sorting, though.
"Why do you need a whole fancy kidou engine to do that? If they're just sorting weaker souls out to the edges? Also, if that's the case, what're me and Renji doing out here?"
"Ah!" Mr. Mochida seems interested again. "Keeping everything balanced is more complicated than that, you see! Think of Soul Society as a plate, balanced on a needle at the center, and each soul is like a marble. Souls with little reiryoku are like smaller marbles, and stronger souls are larger. Many small souls may add up to the same as one large one."
"And souls out near the edge affect the balance more than ones at the center," Rukia surmises.
"Because of the lever-arm," Renji catches onto her train of thought.
Mr. Mochida looks surprised at this leap of logic, but Rukia and Renji are very experienced in the praxis of balancing two objects of notably different mass. "That's roughly correct," he agrees. "Souls leave Soul Society all the time, and their spiritual mass must be balanced by the new ones coming in. We cannot control the reiryoku of incoming souls, but we can decide where to put them. It is also the case that reiryoku isn't static, especially in the case of children. You two were likely not as strong as you are now when you were first sorted to Inuzuri. These recruitment stations are important, you see, not just because we need more shinigami, but because it is better for the balance of Soul Society to get you moved toward the center."
"It doesn't make sense, though," Renji rubs his chin. "Why should the strongest people be in the center? Wouldn't it be more stable to have everyone evenly distributed? Or maybe to have a ring of strong people around the edge as well as in the center?" He is thinking about wheels again, Rukia can tell. She does not miss the two months Renji worked at that stupid chopshop and talked about wheels incessantly.
"The problem with that," Mr. Mochida says, "is that strong souls can be overpowering to weaker ones."
Rukia's brows furrow. "We met a shinigami once, in Inuzuri. We both got real hungry, just from being around them."
Mr. Mochida nods eagerly. "Yes. Exactly. They should have been more careful."
"No one else seemed affected, though," Renji pointed out.
Mr. Mochida takes a long sip of his soup before he answers. "The hunger you felt was a defensive reaction. Your bodies were trying to react by raising your own reiatsu, but you had no energy stores to do so. Your neighbors lack those defenses, so they felt nothing. As long as you are properly fed, you should have no trouble living in a city full of people with strong spiritual pressure, especially as you strengthen your own spiritual muscles. But those others could not. Their souls would be shredded to bits within a few months."
Renji and Rukia are quiet. There are so many stories in Inuzuri about why people are sent there. Random assignment is the most common and widely accepted explanation. It is difficult to live in a place like that, though, without wondering if you all hadn't done something to deserve it. Or possibly, if everyone else had done something to deserve it, and some sort of mistake had been made in your case.
"Perhaps I should have asked earlier," Mr Mochida says mildly as he helps himself to more greens, "but is there anyone in Inuzuri that you are leaving behind? Anyone you will miss?"
Rukia's throat closes. She cannot answer.
"It's just me and Ru now," Renji says in a voice so cold she can barely recognize it.
Mr. Mochida, to his credit, reads the unspoken part. He reads the room, too, so he does not offer any sympathies or condolences. Instead, there is just deep sadness in his voice as he says, "Shinigami from the upper districts of Rukongai are able to return home for visits. It would not be impossible to return to Inuzuri, but…well, it is difficult to maintain ties, even to the middle districts."
Renji focuses intently on his food. "Good thing it's not a problem," he mumbles.
"Bedtime" is not a thing Rukia and Renji ever really thought about in Inuzuri. There was day and there was night and they spent their time doing the things that needed doing and sleeping was one of those things. Here at the District 70 Consolidated Shinigami Recruitment Station, though, the day is regimented into neat hours, with times for studying and times for training and times for eating.
Mr. Mochida turns in shortly after the sun goes down, which is to say, he goes off to his own rooms. Rukia is pretty sure he has an oil lamp, a thing unheard of in Inuzuri and still unspeakably luxurious here in Shiotsuka. She doesn't blame him for wanting a little time to himself in the evenings. She likes that, too, although she doesn't mind taking hers in the starlight.
Renji would probably go to bed with the sun, if he had his druthers, but he sits out on the engawa with her, because that's how he is. To be fair, they both work very hard all day. Rukia is tired, too, but she gets a little more of a second wind out of dinner than Renji seems to. She appreciates the gesture. Renji is unbearably cute when he's sleepy, all slumpy and squinty and he is more inclined to drop the mask of tough guy detachment that he normally wears like a second skin. At the moment, the latter is far more important than the former.
"Renji," she says, "if you'd never met me, do you think you would've left Inuzuri? To become a shinigami?"
He side-eyes her. "What do you mean? You're the one who suggested this."
"Earlier, is what I meant," she says slowly. "Years ago."
He makes a face at her like she's being ridiculous.
"When I first started hanging around with you, you used to show off a lot..."
Renji starts to grumble, but Rukia ignores him and plows on.
"...and the other boys used to say things like, 'oh, Renji, when you're a shinigami,' or 'oh, Renji, when you leave to become a shinigami'..."
"That was just kid stuff," Renji excuses, irritation turning quickly to embarrassment.
Rukia pulls her knees up to her chest. "I wanted them to like me. I didn't want them to think I was going to take you away. So I told them I'd rather stay in Inuzuri. That we would always be together. After that, they didn't talk about being shinigami so much."
"Cripes, Ru." Renji rubs the heel of his hand along his hairline. "Everyone loved you immediately. They would have thrown me to the wolves in a hot second if they thought it'd make you look at 'em." He snorts out a fond, rueful laugh.
"That's not true and it's also not the point," Rukia protests. He's never been able to see how important he was to all of them, that he was the center that held them together, before and after she joined the crew. "Would you have done this years ago? If I hadn't spoken for you?"
Renji sighs and looks up at the stars. "Maybe. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I certainly don't regret staying." He looks at her like she's suddenly become someone he doesn't know. "Do you?"
Rukia's shoulders slump. "I was just thinking about what Mr. Mochida said. About hurting those around us."
Renji's face instantly relaxes. He recognizes her after all. "You worry so much. He said we weren't powerful enough for that."
"Not…directly…" Rukia says, although she thinks about the way Mameji's health deteriorated over the years and wonders. "We got in so many fights, Renji. We caused so much trouble, you and me. If we hadn't dragged the others along with us-"
"What's your point?" Renji interrupts. "You think they would have been better off without us?"
"I don't know," Rukia murmurs. "Maybe."
She is thinking about Fujimaru, of course. She is thinking about sitting in the yard outside the squat in the weak winter sunshine and Fujimaru telling her to take Renji and leave, already. "I don't want to be the thing that keeps you here," he had said.
"Tough shit," she had replied, "you're our friend," and gave him a black eye.
A week later, he'd joined one of the big gangs and a month after that, he was dead.
Rukia doesn't know if Fujimaru had a similar conversation with Renji. They have not talked about Fujimaru since he died. It is like a big empty space between them, a vacuum where sound can't travel.
"Did you mean it?" Renji asks. It's just a question, not an accusation. "When you said you wanted to stay together in Inuzuri? You said you only said it because you wanted the other guys to like you. Was it a lie?"
"No! Of course not!" Rukia huffs. "You know how long I was on my own before I met you!" (He doesn't, actually. She isn't even sure herself.) "I'd never met anyone I liked in Inuzuri as much as I liked the four of you," she continues more softly.
"Then stop getting wound up on woulda-shoulda-maybes," Renji jerks his chin at her. "You wanted to stay and everyone wanted you to stay." He sighs, deeply. "Look. Ru. I don't think 'better off' has any meaning when it comes to Inuzuri. You're there, and it's shit, and then you die and get reincarnated, and you forget all of it anyway." He scratches his neck. "I liked knowin' 'em, though, and if we did bad by 'em, they're not the ones who have to remember it." He looks at her, then, in the way he wouldn't if it were daytime, if he weren't half-exhausted. "I don't know if I would have stayed or gone if it weren't for you, but I stayed 'cause you wanted to stay. I think that was the right decision. Especially now that I know we wouldn't have been able to go back, not really."
It is a good answer. Renji has considered her question, and given her his thoughts on the matter, truthful and well-considered, as usual. But Rukia feels let down and she's not entirely sure why.
You wanted him to tell you a bunch of warm, fuzzy bullshit, she scolds herself. Maybe she did. Maybe she wanted him to tell her that she had never done anything wrong and she should never feel bad, and maybe put his arm around her and pull her close.
But that's not how he is and that's not how she is. Rukia is a child of Inuzuri, of the air and the night. She has no mother or father. She does not need to be coddled or comforted.
She has only known Mr. Mochida for a few weeks, with his sympathies and his kindnesses, and it is making her a soft baby.
Fortunately, Renji is not a coddler. He does not say things just to make people feel better. She only needs to look to him to remember herself.
"I'm tired," she declares. "I want to go to bed."
He looks relieved. "Me, too. I'm not sure I can move my legs. You might have to carry me."
"You work too hard," she scolds. "You're going to injure yourself, and then where will we be?"
He shrugs sheepishly. She might as well scold the tides for going in and out.
"You need to stay on your side of the room tonight, you hear me?"
With a drawn out groan, he hauls himself to his feet. "I promise. I will definitely stay on my side of the room tonight."
Renji is such a shitty liar.