6. Transformers and the Path of Least Resistance

"Ready?" he asks.

Benihime says she is ready, and through her, he can hear Shizukashi's "All clear," too.

It has taken Shizukashi several months to get enough control and anatomical knowledge to even think about transforming gigai. Even now, Shizukashi can only do small changes, but those will have to be enough to prevent complete disaster. At least, he hopes they will be enough. He doesn't want to imagine how much a zanpakutou can or cannot do without its wielder.

His goddess is fast asleep on her futon on the other side of the room. He has made sure that she will stay asleep for the next five hours, but that, in case of emergency, Shizukashi can wake her up.

Another goddess, this time an empty gigai, lies in front of him. This is the body he will slip into to set the path of transformation. Right next to the gigai, Benihime and Shizukashi lie side by side. The swords are touching each other to facilitate communication.

On the outside of the door, he has pinned a sign with 'Please do not disturb'. It is mainly aimed at Soi Fong, who is the only one to even think about coming near her captain's quarters at night. This had resulted in a few somewhat embarrassing moments for all three of them before, and Soi Fong is much more careful now.

Beneath the gigai, on the tatami mat, he has placed a small contraption with one of the soul separators. Both Benihime and Shizukashi can trigger the mechanism, resulting in him being forcefully expelled from the gigai. He hopes they won't need to, but he has to take care of all possibilities.

All in all, his preparations are as complete as they ever will be. Together with Benihime's and Shizukashi's help, he has identified and isolated every possible risk factor, and then worked to minimize them. At this point, further hesitation will only be counterproductive.

Taking a deep breath, he lifts the gigai's upper body by its armpits and enters it from behind.

Immediately, he becomes aware of how uncomfortable this artificial body is. He has been born as a man, he has grown up as a man, and he has been living as a man for more than a thousand years now. There is just no way that boobs and having to squat down to urinate will ever feel natural. Not to mention all those different proportions. He tries to blindly touch his nose and almost pokes his eye out.

Both Benihime and Shizukashi laugh at his cursing, and he sticks his tongue out at them. Hell, even that feels different from doing so in a male form.

He decides that moving as little as possible is the better part of valor, and instead, concentrates inwardly.

As soon as he tries to focus his reiatsu on the gigai, he rediscovers a problem that he hadn't thought of before. Just like with his regular body, his reiatsu encounters no resistance. How in the world is he supposed to do a transformation when he can't even feel where to start?

After several minutes of experimentation, he thinks he has felt a flicker of something. Several minutes later, he has identified that something as his breasts, of all things. From there on out, he feels along the places where he knows – from long hours of study – this body should continue, and gradually, the gigai takes shape in his mind's eye.

He thinks he should be glad to be so uncomfortable in the gigai, because with a closer match, he never would have found anything for his reiatsu to latch on. But why did it have to be his breasts?

Mentally shaking his head, he ignores Benihime's chortles. Then he initiates the transformation.

Almost immediately, a sense of vertigo threatens to overwhelm him. Benihime's presence steadies him, but he almost loses his grip on his reiatsu. Gritting his teeth, he ignores the distraction and continues. He has no margin for error.

Slowly and carefully, he moulds bones and muscles, reshapes organs and nerves, always taking exquisite care not to damage anything. The sense of vertigo becomes a constant, and he learns how to work through it. But the additional reiatsu freed by loss of mass almost throws him off again. Only Shizukashi's quick intervention prevents the situation from spiraling out of control.

He can't even take a deep breath to center himself again because, although stable for the moment, his body has changed enough to be almost painfully foreign. Instead, he calls on all of his iron discipline and forces his reiatsu on mutating and molding and impressing those changes on the body.

After a sheer endless amount of time, he finally feels the gigai settle in its cat form.

The gigai has been transformed from human to cat and back again enough times that the two end points of the transformation mark stable states that the gigai tries to assume on its own. He has already linked those two stable states by a path of least resistance, but impressing that path into the body can only be done from within.

So far, he has only managed the shift from human to cat, and he already feels exhausted. Not so much physically (the transformation takes comparably little energy), as mentally.

And, not to forget, the torture of being caught in a cat's body. If he had thought being a woman was uncomfortable, being a cat was incomparably worse. He has no clue how to work four limbs – pardon him, five limbs; the tail is the worst since there is no human equivalent – and his senses are practically on overload. It is unbearably bright in the room, he can practically count the grains of wood in the ceiling, and the cicadas' song outside almost bursts his eardrums.

In the overload of sensation, he almost doesn't hear Benihime's soothing voice. As soon as he finds it though, he latches onto it as a stable point in the midst of chaos. He knows that if he doesn't get out of this body soon, he will go insane.

This time, getting his reiatsu to grip his gigai is much easier, probably because he is even more foreign to this state than the human one.

He ignores the sense of vertigo completely and forces the inverse transformation as quickly as he can. Somewhere, far beyond his current focus, he can feel someone worry, but he ignores that, too.

More and more of his reiatsu is drained as it solidifies into mass. He eyes his dwindling resources, noting that it will be a close race. He forges on. Muscles grow, bones creak, and nerves protest. Everything is swallowed by his need to get back into human form, and to get out of this gigai. But he is nearing exhaustion, the transformation swallowing even more energy than he had thought.

Just when he thinks he cannot go on anymore, he finally feels the gigai snap into its human form. Benihime immediately triggers the separation mechanism, and he finds himself catapulted out of the fake body to land unceremoniously on the tatami.

For a very long time, he can only pant, trying to get himself under control again. His panic mellows out, and his heart slows down. He reaches for Benihime, and through her, Shizukashi, letting their concerned presences soothe him.

Finally, he manages to gather enough energy to reassure them of his health. Both seem incredibly relieved, even the normally quite stand-offish Shizukashi.

"How much did you have to help me," he asks after looking at the now empty gigai. It looks a little bit disheveled after his hasty exit, but otherwise unharmed. A quick probe with his exhausted reiatsu reveals it to be in perfect condition, with the transformation path nicely impressed into the body.

Benihime answers for Shizukashi, since he can't hear it at the moment. "We had to give you a little bit of help for both energy-mass and mass-energy conversions, but otherwise, we only provided a steady focus."

He nods absently, the information in complete agreement with his own observations.

He lays his hand on the gigai's forehead. A short burst of reiatsu activates the transformation, this time completely without his guidance. The gigai swallows the last of his reiatsu and morphs itself perfectly into the cat.

With a satisfied smile, he falls unconscious.

Now that his part of the story is almost over, he is a little bit sad. He has repeated the nightmare of cementing the transformation path two more times, once in soul society, once in the real world, to the point that it is near instantaneous. The entire marvel of scientific progress is flawless. The only thing left to do is handing it over to its intended recipient. This will be his last contribution.

"Come, come. You just have to see it," he encourages his reluctant goddess, pestering her until she agrees.

He has stored the gigai in a safe place in the world of the living, to make the surprise even greater. And, of course, to keep spies from interfering. He doesn't want anybody to find a body that can transform itself with merely a small burst of reiatsu, least of all Kurotsuchi.

His goddess reluctantly looks down at her paperwork, then back up at him, again. He can practically see how she shoves the paperwork into a big category labeled 'screw that'.

Secure in his victory, he smiles broadly and bows gallantly to her, waving her on with his fan. "After you, my dearest. We are going to the world gate."

She stalks by him, a little bit suspicious of his behavior, but doesn't protest. Shizukashi's contribution?

Following her, half a step behind, he admires her purple hair and her toned body, as they swing seductively from left to right and back again. It is almost like she is gliding on the air; feline grace honed to perfection.

When they halt, he almost bumps into her. Looking around, he sees that they have already arrived at the world gate. How quickly time passes when one enjoys himself...

"Well?" she asks impatiently.

He quickly concentrates on the matter at hand. "Oh, yes, yes. The coordinates."

Entering a series of numbers quicker than most can follow, he summons a hell butterfly and activates the gate. With an indecipherable expression on her face, she follows him into the blinding light.

On the other side, he has to blink a few times because it is raining steadily. Within a short few seconds, her hair is plastered to her forehead, and he supposes that he doesn't look much better.

"Sorry for the weather," he apologizes. "But I promise that there will be shelter, where we are going."

Her frown grows deeper. "Just what is important enough for you to drag me into the living world? Please don't tell me it's a new species of butterfly or moth again."

"You'll see, you'll see," he sings giddily, using his fan as a make-shift umbrella. Maybe he really should look into getting a hat like Kyouraku-san. "And, you have to admit, that Ishidashijimi butterfly was beautiful!"

Finally getting a glimpse of the hut – well, more like a shack – he has stored the gigai in, he accelerates his steps. "And, look. We're already here."

He invites her into the bare interior and offers to take her soaked haori. Shivering slightly, she shucks her straw sandals and hands him her coat. Only then does she see the body wedged into one corner of the hut.

While he divests himself of his own shoes and wet clothing, he observes her from the corner of his eye. Like a cat, she curiously investigates the body he has swathed in blankets. When the gigai doesn't move at all, she tugs on one corner of the blankets, revealing its face.

She inhales sharply in recognition, immediately descending on him in anger. "What the hell is this!?"

Her golden eyes flash with fury, and despite her wind-swept appearance – or because of it – she looks more radiant to him than ever. Spreading his hands in a gesture of appeasement, he smiles slightly. "Not what you're thinking, I'm sure. It's a special gigai I've made for you."

Involuntarily, she looks back to the gigai, and with a glare at him, she turns to study it more closely.

"Try it on," he encourages her, only barely able to hold in his glee at seeing her reactions to more than a century of intense study.

She takes her time, as if she is intentionally keeping him in suspension. Knowing her, she probably is. Finally, when he almost can't contain himself anymore, she enters the body.

For a few moments, everything is quiet. Then the body moves to free its arms from the blankets. She gets up slowly, careful to keep at least one of the blankets wrapped around her. Flexing her hand and arms a few times, she studies them in amazement. "This gigai feels so much better than the usual ones. I almost don't feel a difference to my spiritual body."

He nods with a slight grin. "Mhm."

She twists and turns her body, trying to see it from all angles without the help of a mirror. The blanket can't quite keep up with her moves, giving him hot glimpses of the perfect body beneath. His grin turns wider in anticipation.

Then, finally, Benihime warns him that Shizukashi is about to make its move.

He is courteous enough to forward the warning to her. "I think you should sit down for a moment."

Surprised, she looks at him. "Why?"

Before he can say anything else, he feels a flare of reiatsu from her, and with an astounded expression, she loses her balance. He catches her rapidly shrinking form with an alert shunpo. A few seconds later, he's holding a dazed black cat with yellow eyes in his arms.

Carefully, he sets her down.

At first, the tip of her tail twitches. Then a foot shudders as, one after another, claws are extended. A little bit unsteadily, the cat struggles to its feet, swaying slightly from side to side, just like The Cat does after being drugged.

"Vat de …" The strangely deep voice cuts of with an ungainly squeak, and the cat looks even more confused.

He breaks out laughing. He has never managed to get that cat gigai to work well enough to even think about talking, so he has never tested out its ability to form words. It is a work of irony that his goddess sounds like a man now.

"Ai'm a cat?" The cat twists its head around to get a better look at its body, still a little bit unsteadily. It turns back to him, pleadingly. "Keeske?"

"Yep. Do you like it?"

The cat seems unable to shake off its daze, even a little bit fearful. He takes pity on it.

"To change back, you just have to feed a bit of reiatsu to your zanpakutou. It knows how to activate the transformation," he quietly tells his confused goddess.

Almost instantly, the cat grows back into a naked woman. She's shivering. Seeing that she's beyond words, he gently places the tip of Benihime's cane on her forehead and pushes her out of the gigai.

Like a child, he dresses her in her wet haori and waraji. It is a testament to her shock that she just stands like a doll with its strings cut while he rewraps the gigai in the blankets. Quickly taking it back to the corner, he grabs his own haori, slips into his geta, and softly leads her outside.

"Come," he whispers to her. "We'll get back to soul society, and then, you can lay into me, okay?"

Her head nods up and down, but her eyes remain blank.

Sighing a little, he unsheathes Benihime and quickly opens the world gate. Guiding her by her elbow, he leads her through and back to her captain's quarters. A few shinigami stare at them on their way, but he shakes his head at them before they can say anything. He's lucky that they don't run across Soi Fong.

Closing the shouji behind her, he takes heart in seeing that the familiar surroundings revive her a little. Like in a dream, she peels the wet clothes off her body and moves to kneel next to a brassier filled with hot coals, the only source of heat in the room. He decides that she is stable enough to be left alone for a short period of time and goes to fetch some green tea.

With a tray in his hands he returns to find her in almost the same position. Her color though is far better, and she looks a lot livelier.

Slowly, she turns towards him, studying his still dripping form.

"You know," she says in an almost normal voice, "your sense of humor leaves a lot to be desired. Shizukashi has deigned to inform me of everything you have so conveniently 'forgotten' to tell me.

"But…" She fluidly rises to her feet and stalks towards him until the only thing keeping her from getting into his face is the tea tray. With a graceful hand, she picks up one of the mugs of tea and takes a dainty sip, golden eyes boring deeply into his. Mug still in hand, she stalks around him, trailing her fingertips over his arm and shoulder until she's standing right behind him. Her free hand wraps around his neck in a position where she can easily snap it with her strength. She whispers into his ear, "With a bit of practice, I think I could get to like it."

Only Benihime knows of the relief behind the shit-eating grin spreading across his features.

The End

A/N: I hope you enjoyed this story as much as I did writing it. Kisuke is just such a nice, whacked-out scientist that, despite his insanity, is still lovable (contrary to Kurotsuchi… Although Kurotsuchi's fight against Szayel was beyond cool!). And, again, many thanks to Guttersnipe, the wonderful beta for this story. Without her, this story would be far more clumsy, and she bravely weathered the storm of questions I had.