Disclaimer: I wouldn't write canon-divergence fic if I'd written canon.

The Three-Body Problem

A Bleach Fanfic

Chapter Seven: March

It was easy to see why Sugitani was one of the best in their class at zanjutsu. He moved like he was born with a sword in his hands, and the more Yuzu thought about it, the more she noticed how it bled into the rest of his life, too. Karin walked confidently, Uryū with clear restraint, but Sugitani moved like he was stalking something, always halfway to his toes already, as if at any moment he might have to fight.

He was, in that respect, completely the opposite of her.

They sat across from each other on the mat, wooden swords over their laps, while Uryū and Karin practiced hakuda not far away. She'd initially been wary of this—the idea of spending yet more time trying to improve her worst skill in front of someone who was so good at it didn't sit too well with Yuzu.

But so far, they hadn't even sparred.

"You aren't used to fighting." It wasn't a question, but in saying it, he seemed to be inviting her to elaborate.

She shook her head. "I'd never even held a sword until I came here. I guess I still probably haven't, since it's a tantō." They all practiced with blades the same length as their sealed zanpakutō, which made sense. The forms for the different types weren't identical, but Renji knew them all, and taught the differences as part of his demonstrations.

Sugitani tapped his thumb on the side of his bokken. "I used to be afraid of them too," he said.

She didn't deny that fear was what she felt. How could she?

"Draw your zanpakutō." He stood, gesturing with his right hand for her to do the same.

She hesitated, but rose to her feet. "I can't use it," she protested, "it's against the rules." Well, that and she didn't feel anywhere near comfortable doing so. She could cut him, or more likely, herself.

"I won't ask you to. Just draw it."

Carefully, Yuzu laid a hand on her zanpakutō's hilt, wrapping her fingers around it and slowly sliding the short blade from its dark purple sheath. The soft rasp was a foreign sound to her, and equally uncanny was the way the field lights glinted off the edge of it. She held it slightly away from her body, grimacing.

"It feels uncomfortable, doesn't it? Too heavy for what it's made of. Like you're holding death in your hands."

Yuzu swallowed, nodding slowly.

"Wrong."

She looked up sharply, to see that Sugitani had crossed his arms over his chest. He met her eyes steadily, and it wasn't the first time he'd reminded her of some kind of predator species. Maybe a jackal? A wolf?

"You have always held death in your hands. Everyone does. Every time you light a kidō, every time you strike with your palms or your fists or your feet. There is no escaping it. You've had death in your hands since you were strong enough to grip a throat, or break a bone, or push someone over at the wrong angle. You hold it every time you wield a kitchen knife or a pen or a hairpin."

Yuzu's lips parted. "But…"

"But nothing," he replied. "You know a thousand ways to kill someone, some of them much more dangerous or efficient than that little blade. And how many people have you killed by accident so far?"

"N-none." But that wasn't the problem!

He shook his head, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "It is too late to think this is a power you should not have. You already have it. But if what you want is to be merciful, then you need to become so strong that you don't have to kill your opponents, because you can defeat them without deadly force. That is more difficult than killing. It will take much more training, much more practice, and much more skill. Skill that you are afraid to learn, because you feel death in your hands and think it is strange."

Yuzu thought she could see the sense in that, but she wasn't sure it solved her immediate problem.

Sugitani's shoulders relaxed. "You should carry her around for a while," he suggested, much less firmly. "The more like a part of you she feels, the easier it will be to wield her when the moment comes. She won't let you cut yourself."

"How did you know she's a she?"

He shrugged. "Most of the time, the sword spirit is whatever the wielder is."

Yuzu considered him for a moment, trying to relax the hand with her zanpakutō in it. "You seem to know an awful lot about zanjutsu, Sugitani-san. And zanpakutō."

His lip quirked. "And as I hear it, you know a lot about medicine. We all have our histories, Kurosaki-ōjo."

The form of address was starkly different from the one he'd used in the past, and she didn't understand the reason for it. It wasn't even actually accurate. "You… don't have to call me that."

"But I should."

Before she could ask him what that was supposed to mean, Karin shouted for her. Yuzu realized that it was probably about time to head to the dormitories. Turning back to Sugitani, she found that he was already leaving, and swallowed the question. He'd given her a lot to think about, really—maybe that was enough for now.

"How do you feel about what he said?"

They both sat under the engawa this time, the steady, gentle patter of the rain on the overhanging roof a constant backdrop to the conversation. Yuzu had no idea where the spirit had conjured the tea from, but oddly it felt exactly like drinking real tea. The smell and taste were the same, even the temperature and texture over her tongue.

Yuzu set her dainty little cup down with a clink onto the low table between them. "He's right in a sense. And I think I always knew what he was telling me, but… it's not just about the literal truth of things." It wasn't just that she could use a sword to hurt someone, though that was part of it.

"It's not something that could hurt somebody, like a kitchen knife or my hands. It's something that was made to hurt people. That's what it's for. The only thing. And I… I don't know if I can do that."

The spirit regarded her mutely for some time, slowly sipping at the tea in her cup. She wore the same kimono as before, but the flower arrangement in her hair was different today, composed of what looked like orange amaranths from the garden. It shouldn't have matched, but it somehow looked harmonious anyway.

"What do you want to do?"

Yuzu considered it. "What do you mean? About zanjutsu?"

The spirit shook her head, the flowers trembling slightly with the motion. "In life. What do you want to do? To become?"

A silence fell, broken only by the rain, and Yuzu watched the steam rise in languid coils from her teacup. Her fingers found the end of her braid, resting against her collarbone. She chewed her lip. "I want…"

She sighed through her nose, casting her eyes out over the garden. They were drawn to the desiccated tree in the center like iron to a lodestone. A familiar grief welled in her chest, pressing up against her throat until she wondered if it would choke her. "I want to protect them. The people I love. I want… I want to make it so they don't suffer anymore."

The spirit placed her own cup down as well, reaching for the teapot and pouring more in an elegant motion. "Everyone suffers, Yuzu. It is a part of life. That which does not suffer, does not grow, and that which does not grow, withers. There is no such thing as perfect stasis."

"Then I want to help them as much as I can."

"That is not a bad goal to have," the woman replied, blowing gently over the rim of her teacup. "But I asked you what you wished to become. Speaking relative to other people can only be half an answer, at best."

Relative to other people? Yes, Yuzu supposed that was fair enough. She was so used to thinking in those terms. "I'm… I'm not sure I know," she said at last. "It's not like I've ever had to be alone. Dad and Karin have always been there, even after what happened to mom and Ichigo. I'm not sure I want to know who I'd be without them."

"Of course not," the spirit said gently. "But surely you would agree that there is an obvious distinction between loving other people and allowing yourself to be defined by them. You are Isshin and Masaki's daughter and Karin and Ichigo's sister. That much I knew from the very moment you woke me. But what I need to know now is who Yuzu is, and who she desires to become. I cannot lend you my power without knowing how it will be used, do you understand?"

Yuzu lifted her legs to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and setting her chin in the indent between her knees. "I do. I just… don't have an answer yet."

"Well… think about it. That is my requirement. And when you think you have the answers to my questions, we will speak again."

"Kurosaki, Moribito." Fēng sounded almost bored when she read out the sparring assignments.

Karin, on the other hand, was itching to go. She felt like she'd made some serious breakthroughs in her training in the last couple of weeks. She just needed to remember all of it when she got on the mat.

Her tabi-clad toes curled slightly into the padded surface beneath her. On the other side, Moribito was rolling his shoulders, cracking his neck to either side with a series of dull clicks. Confidence practically oozed out of him, like some kind of slimy fungus. She couldn't stand it, or him.

It was more than the fact that he beat her every time. More even than the fact that she'd given him, and this, the status of 'obstacle' in her mind. It was the little things she noticed but couldn't call out because of their subtlety. The way he turned his nose up, just a bit, at herself and any of the students who weren't noble like he was. The way he scoffed in history class whenever anyone asked a question he knew the answer to already. Like everyone should have had the same education as him, even though plenty of them had never been given the chance. The fact that he'd walked out of Uryū's room and refused to even bunk in the same hallway as a Quincy.

She was also pretty pissed at the fact that someone had accommodated his stupid, bigoted request.

But most of all, she hated the way his superiority was a foregone conclusion to him. This person, who'd never known hunger or hardship or heartbreak, had the gall to believe that people in the outer Rukongai somehow deserved what they'd gotten.

It was a popular theory among the nobility: that the circumstances under which one entered Soul Society, and the place they were shuffled to, whether they were born as babies here or woke up in adult bodies, all somehow reflected the 'quality' of their souls. That the vaunted lifestyle of nobility was their get for being the pure people they were, and the people that woke up in Inuzuri or worse had been and were degenerates. Even, somehow, the children.

It had been really easy to make him an obstacle after she'd heard him and Fujita talking about that Reikōketsu crap.

Because if he was an obstacle, Karin got to tear him down.

She pulled in a deep breath, jerking her head to flick her increasingly-long ponytail behind her shoulder. Moribito was quite a bit taller than her, but it was his breadth more than anything that caused her problems.

No. No, she couldn't think like that. None of it would be any problem at all if she was doing hakuda right. In fact, his outright aggressiveness would work in her favor. Momentum. She had to do this in terms of momentum.

"Begin." Fēng's voice broke the hush.

Moribito stepped forward almost lazily, swinging a heavy fist for Karin's side. She'd seen this approach before. What she needed to do was—

Instinct, the result of long hours of practice, took over. Karin registered the oncoming blow, and sidestepped, grasping his wrist as it went by, stepping again and dropping the center of their gravity lower. Moribito's own momentum locked up his joints; and, in a smooth movement that actually took little strength at all, she flowed around him, putting so much pressure on his elbow that he had to drop to the ground or risk a break.

He hit the mat with a thud, not near as quick in regaining his feet as he should have been.

"What's the matter?" Karin asked, narrowing her eyes. "Not used to falling down?"

Moribito surged to his feet, launching a series of kicks and punches, recognizable from the 'hard styles' portion of their previous lessons. Where before Karin had answered with the same, she countered more softly now, using angles and pushes to move his hits out of alignment or quick steps to get around them.

When he overcompensated for one miss, leaving his left side open, she took the opportunity, jabbing the spot with a quick hit and getting away again. She couldn't let him grab hold of her and force it to a contest of strength. She'd lose.

Her defense wasn't perfect, and he sent her reeling with a thrust to the sternum. She recovered quickly, refusing to rise to the bait and respond with the same kinds of strike. Instead, she moved away, out of his range, circling slowly around. "Come on, Moribito. Get it together. I'm just some inferior soul from the Rukongai, right? Shouldn't a noble like you be able to take me down easy?"

Control of the match was hers, and Karin put a punctuation mark on it the next time he came in. His maneuvers, once as inevitable as the tide, weren't nearly so difficult to anticipate as they had been six months ago. Karin leaned to the side to avoid the heel of his right hand, ducking in under his guard. She went low, stepping around his arm and driving the side of her foot into the back of his knee.

It buckled. Karin followed up while the advantage was hers, grabbing his loose left hand and twisting, planting her knee in his back and bearing down while he was unbalanced. He toppled facefirst into the mat, and she pinned him in place.

She caught Uryū smiling at her, and she grinned right back.

That felt exactly as good as she thought it would.

Uryū stepped across the line into the shaded part of his inner world, peering about into the gloom. It seemed darker than he recalled it being; though there were no objects here to cast shadows, exactly. It was just a deeper grey overall.

Once he was far enough in, he glanced down. Sure enough, the entrance of an object—himself—had produced a shadow. The spirit had taken to doing this, though he couldn't say why. It had to exist somehow when he wasn't present, which meant it could move about independently.

It detached from him, forming into the puddle of darkness again before rising, mutating into the full, three-dimensional entity he took to be its true form. It blinked at him, but said nothing. That was normal; usually, he had to initiate any conversation. Even then, it could be a chore.

"Will you tell me your name?"

It shook its head mutely.

Uryū made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. "Why not?"

It bent slightly, adopting a hunched posture, its head drooping slightly. The smoky darkness around the bottom of it billowed little, slight undulations now where often it resembled roiling fog. "I do not know."

"You… don't know why you won't tell me, or you don't know your name?"

"Yes."

He dragged a hand down his face, frowning at the spirit. "You aren't very helpful."

If anything, it deflated further, shrinking by some inches. Uryū felt a twinge of guilt. If it was truly in ignorance of its name, it wasn't being obtuse on purpose. Perhaps it was already helping him as much as it could; he had no way to know. He shouldn't simply assume it was intentionally resisting him.

"What…" It straightened a bit, tilting back its head to look at him from its new height. "What am I?"

Uryū's frown deepened, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. "You are, I believe, the spirit of my zanpakutō."

It seemed to give this some consideration, tipping its head sideways, the substance at its feet—if it had feet—thickening into a swirl of quasi-fog. It blinked slowly, owlishly. "And what… are you?"

"I'm a—" Uryū stopped himself. That question was, he'd thought, one with an easy and obvious answer. But it pulled up more associations in him now than he'd thought it would. He was a Quincy, obviously. No one here would ever let him forget it, between the cold shoulders and the outright hostility. He didn't want to forget anyway.

But… being a Quincy didn't explain his presence here. Not really.

"I… don't have a complete answer for you," he admitted, pushing his glasses up his nose and shifting his weight. "I'm unsure that there is one."

"Then… what is she?" The spirit's eyes shifted until it was looking out beyond the bounds of its half of the world, at the unconscious Lucia.

Uryū pursed his lips. "That is Lucia. She is… the part of me that is a Quincy, I suppose."

"Am I part of you, too?"

He tilted his head at it. "Yes," he said quietly. "I believe that you are."

Yuzu's wooden practice blade clanged off Sugitani's, and he drove her back a step. Digging her heels in, she angled the tantō, slipping his bokken right off the and regaining the space she'd lost with a hard step in. This aggression was still foreign to her, but she didn't have to be too confrontational. She just needed to do what she'd done with hakuda: find the moves that worked best for her, and remember to switch tactics when necessary.

Sugitani was still a much better swordsman than her, however, and his blade was resting on her clavicle two moves later. Sweat dripped freely from her chin, and ran down her back, and she was pulling in deep breaths to compensate for her exertion, but her muscles burned in a way she was slowly learning to enjoy.

"Good," he said quietly, removing the bokken from her neck with care. "You're getting the hang of it."

"Only about half a year later than everyone else," she said, shaking her head. Her hair was damp, spiked into little clusters, and she stowed her practice blade. Tugging her hair band loose, she re-gathered everything into a tail before tying it off again. She really needed a bath.

"What everyone else is doing isn't important," he replied. "What matters is that every day, you are better than you were the day before." He raised a dark eyebrow at her. "You already know this."

She nodded slowly. "I… yes. I did. I do." That didn't make it easy to internalize.

But Sugitani seemed satisfied, taking a long swallow from his canteen and putting the cork back in with a rap from the side of his fist.

They'd decided to practice in the dojo that afternoon, mostly because they were focusing on kidō tonight, and Yuzu wanted to get more zanjutsu in beforehand. It was different from dragging mats out onto the field—it felt more official, somehow.

"Sugitani-san?"

"Yes, Kurosaki-ōjo?"

She let her previous question go in favor of a new one. "Will you tell me why you call me that?"

He turned fully to face her, lifting his shoulders and letting them drop again. Absently, he scratched under one of his sleeves, lifting it to expose patches of blue, gold, red and green ink in the process. She thought the image was of some kind of fish or sea reptile, but it was hard to say for sure from her angle.

"Because it is the truth."

"But—" her protest was cut off when the door to the dojo slid open.

"Well well. I'm hardly surprised. Still, Sugitani, I expected slightly better taste on your part." Fujita, dressed for practice, stepped into the room, followed by Moribito.

The expression on her face was one of extremely elegant disdain, and honestly, if there was an ōjo in the room, it was Fujita, not Yuzu.

"Fujita." Sugitani didn't seem to be nearly as wary as Yuzu was; his tone was, if anything, a bit chill. Like he usually was with anyone who wasn't Abe.

She sneered, an oddly-delicate expression for one containing so much malice. "A poor choice, to cast your lot with a Quincy and his…" She paused quite deliberately, eyeing Yuzu. "Housepets."

Beside her, Yuzu could almost feel him stiffen, but she didn't wait for anything else. For the first time in more years than she could really remember, Yuzu felt a hot emotion welling up under her skin, twisting her insides and burning like a little ember at the pit of her stomach.

"You leave him alone," she said softly, straightening her spine and tilting her chin up to meet Fujita's eyes. There was no way to even begin to explain how many ways Fujita's understanding of the situation was wrong, and honestly, Yuzu doubted it would matter if there were.

"Did I permit you to speak to me, mouse?"

Yuzu's jaw tightened. Fujita was glaring at her—but Moribito was frowning, something in his expression almost guilty. It hit her in a sudden burst of insight, like dawn breaking over the horizon. It was almost too absurd to be true, and yet watching the interplay of expressions and body language, taking in what she knew to be so from previous interactions with everyone, it was the only answer that fit.

"You're afraid." Her anger subsided as quickly as it had swelled, receding like low tide.

Fujita's head snapped towards her. "Don't be ridiculous. I don't fear you."

Yuzu shook her head. "No—you're afraid of what you think I represent."

Fujita scoffed, taking a threatening step forward—but Yuzu knew she would never actually attempt to strike her in anything but a practice match. She cared too much about her reputation, and about making it through Shin'ō. She'd been trying so hard since day one to distinguish herself from everyone else: in kidō, in the history classroom, in everything.

"Everything is irregular, now. You were brought up a certain way, to expect certain things. You knew since you were young that you would go here, that your birth and training would make you superior to everyone else. But you aren't, and the harder you try, the more you realize that there are other people who are just as good as you."

Fujita was extremely talented, that much was obvious. But she wasn't infallible, and Rukongai brats and middle-class mice and a Quincy bested her just as often as she bested them, if not more.

"But nothing's right, is it?" Yuzu spoke at a gentle volume, clasping her hands in front of her. "This war is looming over everyone, threatening the safety and the stability of everything you lean on. It's like that for me, too, but… it's worse for you. Because you know that Quincy are enemies, monsters, and they can't be shinigami. And other people, the little mice of the world, they can't be as good as you at anything. They certainly can't choose to associate with a monster instead of you. And so you've made it about an 'us' and a 'them,' and you can't understand why anyone would ever choose 'them' because they're part of the problem. You're afraid this is the first step towards a loss in that looming war, the first step in your whole world crashing down around you."

She paused, sighing softly. "I'm right, aren't I, Fujita-san?"

Sugitani's eyebrows were creeping towards his hairline. Moribito blinked at her slowly, several times, still frowning mutely.

Fujita spluttered most inelegantly, taking another half-step forward before abruptly turning on her heel, whirling out of the dojo and slamming the door behind her. Moribito had to open it again to get through, but closed it with more care.

Yuzu exhaled, slumping slightly. "That was…"

"Well done, I thought." Sugitani's eyes seemed to glitter with amusement.

She huffed a bit, shaking her head. "Nerve-wracking. I wasn't sure what I was going to say until I was saying it." Come to think of it, she wasn't even sure where the words had come from, but they made sense in retrospect, and she didn't think she was wrong. "Do you think she'll leave us alone?"

"Hm." He shrugged. "At least for a while. Sometimes a good tongue-lashing can do what no number of bruises will manage."

"It wasn't… oh, I didn't mean to lash, exactly, I just…"

He actually laughed at that. "Kurosaki-ōjo, you didn't do anything she didn't have coming to her. Who knows? Maybe she'll actually think about it."

The spirit stood in front of Yuzu, regal and upright. A single lotus flower was tucked into her hair this time.

Yuzu, from seiza on the ground, tipped her head up to meet the spirit's eyes.

"Do you have answers for me?"

Sucking in a deep breath and tightening her hold on her legs where she gripped them, Yuzu nodded.

"Then tell me: what do you want to do?"

"I want to grow."

The spirit's head tilted slightly to the side. "Into what? Who would you wish to be?"

She licked her lips. "Myself. I want to be myself."

Amusement touched the corner of the spirit's mouth, tilting it upward, and she clasped her hands together in front of her. "Are you not already yourself?"

"Only the way a seed is a flower. I want to be my whole self. My best self. And I want to know who that is." She couldn't see it yet—but she knew she wanted to.

"Are you certain? There are many ways you might nurture your talents. Would you not prefer to return to your father's clinic, where you are not in danger of harming others?" The question contained no hostility, but there was a slight edge to it, anyway.

"Harm comes in lots of forms," Yuzu said slowly. "And so does help. I want… I want to make this world better for the people who live in it. I won't deny that. And I want that because I care about those people. But caring about them, wanting the best for them, and protecting them… I don't have to stop my own growth to do that. I don't have to stagnate so that other people can flourish instead. I want both."

Even saying it sounded like a bit… much, in a way. Too selfish, or too arrogant, to assume that she was capable of such things. But it was the truth—it was what she wanted, even if it had been difficult to understand at first.

"You will suffer."

Yuzu nodded. "I know. But I'd suffer even more if I didn't reach for this. I have to know who I am. I have to know what I can do." She could not be like Fujita—someone who saw her foundation quaking around her and reacted by lashing out, closing off, trying to redraw the lines where they had been so she didn't have to move.

And there was no mistake—the foundation was shaking. No one who knew what was coming could believe otherwise. She could hide from it, or meet it with everything she had.

She'd been uncomfortable since day one here. "I came to Shin'ō because of Karin," she admitted. "I wanted to be there for her, and I always thought 'when this is over, I'll go home.' But… I don't want to go back. I want to stay, and to keep growing, for my own sake, as well as to protect others." She swallowed thickly, and forced herself not to look away from the spirit's eyes.

The woman smiled. "Then we will cultivate you together."

Yuzu's eyes snapped open, and she sat up sharply in her bed, breaths coming quick and shallow. Scrambling to throw her covers off, she swung her feet over the edge and set them down on the tatami flooring underneath.

Her eyes landed on her zanpakutō, and she lurched into a standing position, snatching it off the desk where she'd left it when she went to sleep. Could it really be…?

"Nn… Yuzu? What are you doing?"

Tearing her eyes from the blade, she met Karin's bleary stare with frenetic energy. Uryū was stirring, too, reaching for where his glasses lay on the floor underneath his cot.

"I think… I think I know her name," she said, disbelief drenching the words. But she made for the door anyway.

They scrambled to follow, and she heard Uryū trying to pull on his shoes, but Yuzu herself didn't bother, throwing open the door and sprinting down the hallway without closing it behind her. She launched herself down the stairs, out of the dormitory building, and towards the practice field. Her bare feet thudded over stone pavement, gravel, and then slick grass, but she didn't draw to a stop until she was in the middle of the outdoor practice area. Most of the lights had long since gone out, but she could see well enough by the natural illumination of the night sky.

She heard more footsteps approaching from behind, and turned over her shoulder. Karin's hair was a mess and Uryū's wore only one tabi, but they were there. She beamed, but it quickly fell away.

What if…?

"Well, what are you waiting for?" Karin crossed her arms, scowling. "If you're gonna drag us out of bed, you have to at least try."

Yuzu nodded. "Right."

Turning back around, she carefully drew her zanpakutō. It glinted in the dark like the spirit's obi, and suddenly it didn't seem so foreign to her anymore at all. This… this was part of her. And if she kept growing, kept working and striving, it would grow just like she would.

We will cultivate you together. My name is…

"Sakisomero, Hasuhime."

There was a burst of light from the tantō, accompanied by a gentle chiming sound, a pure, metallic ringing. The shape of it changed under her hands, smoothing out until Yuzu was clutching the middle of a metal pole, one that extended to the ground and then a good foot above her head. The light faded, and she gaped.

Her shikai appeared, basically, to be a shakujō. But instead of a wooden pole, it was made entirely from bright silvery metal, and the top part was continuous with it, rather than being a different material. It had four rings, two on either side of the division in the middle, and they produced more soft chiming when they clinked together. The center line of the circle at the top, usually supported with a vertical bar of some kind, instead held what looked like a partly-open lotus bud, made of the same silver. A spear point protruded from the end, which such staves normally did not have.

"It's beautiful," Uryū remarked quietly.

"I wonder if it has any abilities," Karin added.

Yuzu blinked. "I don't know."

"Do you smell that?" Uryū glanced up at the sky above them for some reason.

"Smell what?"

"It smells like rain. Maybe it's the zanpakutō?"

Yuzu sniffed the air. It did smell a little bit like the air before a rain shower, but she wasn't sure if it was in fact Hasuhime or just the weather. "Maybe we should go back inside?" Part of her really wanted to stay, to start trying to figure out what Hasuhime could do, but it was late, or early maybe, and realistically, they needed to sleep since they had class tomorrow.

She let go of the release, and with another glimmer, Hasuhime reverted to her sealed state. Yuzu slid her carefully back into her sheath, unable to keep the smile from her face.

"C'mere." Karin pulled her into a hug as soon as the dagger was safely stowed.

Yuzu laughed, hugging back, leaning slightly to the left when she felt Uryū's hand ruffling the hair atop her head.

"Congratulations, Yuzu."

Term Dictionary:

Reikōketsu(meidai) – 霊高潔(命題) – "Soul Purity (Thesis/Theory)." So, there doesn't seem to be a consistent, in-universe explanation for where a soul ends up when it dies. Some are basically just dumped in various locations as adults or kids, but others are born into noble families as babies. In either case, to avoid infinite population inflation, the soul has to correspond to someone who died in the living world. There are a lot of ways this could work, but outside of asking the Soul King directly, which no one can do, there's no real way to know how it does work. So there are, in this AU, several competing theories for why some people end up born into fantastically-wealthy noble houses and some end up abandoned babies in Inuzuri. One of these theories is the Reikōketsu theory, which basically states that there are varying degrees of "quality" between souls, and good quality souls end up in noble families while bad quality souls end up in the outer Rukongai. This has implications, of course. But some (definitely not all) nobles believe this and teach it to their kids, so… you can understand why the likes of Fujita and Moribito really don't think much of the other students.

This isn't completely made up by me—the idea of the quality of a soul is everywhere, from Plato to Buddhism to Christianity (if you interpret the need for redemption as being because sin makes a soul impure) and beyond. This is one way such a concept might look in a society composed entirely of the souls of the dead.

-ōjo – 王女 – Literally, "lord's daughter." An honorific of significant distinction. Not to be confused with ojō (お嬢), which means something like "(another person's) daughter." Idiomatically, both connote something like "young lady," but while the latter is common in anime and stuff to refer to any rich, posh girl, the former has a similar meaning to "princess" in the Japanese sense—the daughter of a man of noble station. The former is what Sugitani uses to address Yuzu, which puzzles her.

Hasuhime – 蓮姫 – "Lotus Princess," more or less. This is the name of Yuzu's zanpakutō, which is a modified shakujō staff with further properties and abilities as yet undetermined. Its release command is sakisomero (咲き初めろ), the imperative form of "to blossom."

Shakujō –錫杖 – "Tin staff." Anyone familiar with the anime or manga Inuyasha will recognize this as the stave the monk Miroku carries. It's an item usually used by Buddhist priests/monks. The rings jingle together to alert people and animals nearby of the monk's presence, as a way to make sure small creatures are not accidentally stepped on by the monk passing by. It can be wielded as a weapon, and is particularly suited for defense, with a good reach. Yuzu's has a little extra kick for offense as well, since it actually has a spear-point on top, which most of them do not feature.

So… Yuzu got shikai first. This might seem weird, but my reasoning goes something like this: shikai is about self-awareness, and more importantly, the acknowledgement and acceptance of one's weakness and vulnerability. The zanpakutō spirits are all taking their wielders through a process of self-examination, and prodding at them until they understand and admit their true motives, their flaws, and their vulnerabilities. This isn't an easy process for anyone, obviously, but Yuzu came into the story much more aware of herself, accepting of her flaws, and willing to acknowledge her weakness than anyone else. This is part of her personality. It makes sense, then, that when that kind of thing is what's called for, she'd be the first to get it right.

That's not all it is, of course—one has to be worthy of shikai in other ways, but I think by this point it's fairly clear that if it were only a matter of talent or raw power, all three of them would have qualified already.