Loved it!

Byakuya has his hands full with Ichigo and Yurouichi. lol It was deep, and the highlight was Ichigo becoming Squad 5's captain.

enjoyed this sooooo much... Byakuya is so real!

Poor Ichigo

Liked this a lot...

You did a great job with Byakuya's characterization. And I loved the background story, with Jushiro and Yoruichi together. Interesting combination. Keep up the good work. Cheers,

Pft who needs points when lovely rambling oneshots are so lovely and rambling?

Yoruichi marrying Jyuushiro made me go LOLWHUT O_O but I moved on. You're right, Bya-bo's characterization is ~god~ in this thing. I liked how he dealt with Ichigo. Very, very nice.

(Btw can I say how brave you are for making Rukia reject him? Like whoa.)

Are you not a fan of the IchiRuki love, then? :/

And now that I just read it again (yes. I re-read stories when I'm reviewing. ._. Its a vice!) I have to say there was a point, somewhere. Office therapy! Yeah. Yah!

(...I'm hysterical. Just a bit. -_-)

I liked it, is what I'm trying to say.

I actually really like this story... I'm not even a fan of Byakuya/Yoruichi but the way you portrayed his character was interesting enough that it kept me for the whole fic and left me wanting more. Very nice, thanks for the read. )

-Luvnikki

i really enjoyed the story. it almost made me cry when bya san was explaining to yoruichi what happened to hisana. and then ukitake about to die in the near furure. everyones dying and getting knocked back. it's so sad for the bleach cast. ;-;

keep up the good work

Another 'hm' fic. I've never really seen how an IchiRuki pairing would work to be honest, because while Ichigo may grow attracted to her, she will likely always see Kaien and feel the gap in their ages. Your representation of that, and Byakuya's understanding of Ichigo's feelings, was excellent.

I really like your Byakuya here, as he seems very real. Someone I would respect, in other words.

Good fic.

~Sal

Hm...

Byakuya's done excellently, his noble up-bringing and his calm, introverted character shining through every one of his thoughts and movements (and that tiny nightmare about Yoruichi's tendency to groom herself everywhere and finding blood kinky was marvellous). I like it very much how he is one of the very few stable pillars of Seireitei in the aftermath of Aizen.

Yoruichi's great, too. Looking for attention in an egoistical, cat-like way that disregards anybody else's needs without being deliberately malicious or uncaring. And somehow you managed to let her brokenness shine through without emphasizing it in an all-out angst-fest.

But, despite the excellent characterization, this one feels like the least... rounded, I guess, of all of your Bleach stories. I'm not completely sure why that is, as your writing is superb as always. But somehow, I couldn't quite get into the mood of the story.

I'm quite sure that a big part of that was my fault (I have a tendency to read a bit too quickly), but it took me about three quarters of the story to realize that Yoruichi was still in her cat-form, that Ukitake was Captain General, and that Yoruichi had a thing for Ukitake. When I finally got that, I went back to see how in the world that could have happened, and indeed, from the very beginning, you had mentioned those very same things. Why I didn't pick up on those? No clue.

My only excuse is that, as a long-time reader, I approach stories with quite a bit of a pre-conceived notion as to what history and characters are supposed to be like. I got it that Yoruichi was looking for the Captian-General, but I missed the fact that it's not Yamamoto but Ukitake. I merely saw the word Captain-General and didn't bother anymore reading the name behind it.

Perhaps you could give a warning in your first paragraph where you sketched the setting of post-Arrancar-War Seireitei, mention how it even cost Yamamoto's life (or whatever reason Ukitake's now boss) so that Captain-General Ukitake doesn't completely come out of nowhere.

Or perhaps you could just switch around the word order the first time you mention him: Ukitake-sama, the new Captain-General. Anything to make sure that the reader is forced to break the association of Captain-General - Yamamoto from the very beginning.

The second thing I stumbled over was Yoruichi being in her cat-form. I know it's not important for the story which form she's in, but suddenly reading a description of her licking her hind-legs is quite disconcerting when having an image of a more or less dressed woman in one's mind.

How I got that image? The way you introduced her. Well, I read 'Yoruichi', and the very first association that came to mind was 'woman'. The scratchy voice could be excused as her mock-flirting with 'Little Byakuya' and him refusing to acknowledge it as such, her 'feline glory' as the way she moves in her human form, and voila, I suddenly had a mental image of a playful, human Yoruichi who's teasing Byakuya by trying to flirt with him. And once I have a mental image, it's quite hard to get rid of it again (I need something of a hard mental wake-up call, like her licking her legs).

Perhaps you could have mentioned that it was a scratchy, _male_ voice (I think her cat-voice sounds male). Perhaps you could refer to her as a cat, or bluntly describe one of her features that definitely identifies her as a cat once in the first few paragraphs. The 'morphed features' is an excellent, delicate touch, like a painter painting the finest hues of shadows with the thinnest brush he could find. But for a brutish reader, it's also necessary to have a few bold strokes that give the basic outline so that the shading can be appreciated (and I think I just lost any sense of coherency there).

The thing about Yoruichi going after Ukitake instead of Urahara hit me when you described Byakuya's nightmarish mental image. I'm not sure whether you intended for a reader to pick up on a subtle attraction before that - wait a minute, he's her _husband_? Ok, now I wonder how I could have read the story at all, blind as I must have been to miss so many things. Once again, my only excuse is not expecting something like that from _Yoruichi_ out of all people. A bit of a warning there would have been nice... Are there even any married shinigami in the upper echelons of Gotei 13?

Well, I guess those are the main reasons why I didn't get as much into this story as your other ones. There were just too many surprises caused by my sloppy reading to get into the mood of the story. Is it just me, or is this story the easiest to read out of all your Bleach fanfics?

No, this isn't as much of a contradiction as it may sound. Something in your writing style of the other stories was far enough outside regular styles that you forced me to read slowly, savor your eloquent descriptions, and pay attention to every detail. Your other stories, they... well, from the very first paragraph on, they required a different mind-set to read. I don't know how to explain it properly. Their... flow was different. Not in a bad way at all (actually, I loved it), it just demanded that I read slowly. But this one was the most like regular fanfics, flowed the easiest, and thus allowed me to speed blindly ahead and completely overrun any details you might have laid in my way. Until I hit the proverbial brick-wall and had to go back and reread everything again slowly.

All in all, I'm not sure how valid this criticism is, since most of it was caused by my own inattention. I'm not sure whether there's even a need to fix anything - before you take anything I just said to heart, you might want to get a few more opinions on it.

The only thing I truly found strange was the sudden flash-back in the middle of the story. Personally, I think flash-backs are the roughest way to include necessary information of what happened in the past, and I tend to avoid them as much as possible. Especially compared to the rest of your very high-level writing style, this sudden interruption by a technique that I have primarily found in lower-level fanfics, seems strange. Even the way you inserted it completely clashed with the rest of your style - the only thing you didn't do was mark the flashback with 'begin flashback - end flashback' (or even worse: furashubakku no jutsu. I hate that.).

I know it's necessary to explain Ichigo's reason to be so down, but I don't think that warrants a flash-back. In my opinion, a full-blown flash-back gives the 'Ichigo-suffering'-aspect too much weight and distracts form the 'Byakuya-psychologist' theme of this story. It also suddenly takes all attention away from 'Yoruichi-patient', and this story is too short to be able to afford such a large break. If it were longer, the flash-back could be a nice breather before going deeper into Yoruichi's problems, but as it is, it makes the story quite disjointed.

But, all criticism aside (which can mostly be attributed to personal preferences and my own ineptitude at reading): This is a very well-written impression of a recovering soul society, including marvellous characterizations with just the right mixture to make them wonderfully human.

Sakiku

That was great. I really liked that side of Byakuya's personallity.

Now that is great fic...I'm so tracking this.

interesting story. sad about yoruichi and kisuke. wish i knew what happened to them. like them as a and jyuushiro? o_0 dont get that. lol. and poor ichigo. *sigh* man, this was kinda sad now that i think about it. but how true to life this is. sometimes things dont come out as expected, but we must get back up and continue. often it takes others to help us through but even then that may not b enough. lol. i'm being dramatic here. sorry. i guess it reminded me of past experiences i had to drag myself through and continue. i'm still alive :) despite the heartaches. i've learned from them and let them go. dont need them to hold me back :) so u can say tho ur story ended here, i hope the characters, and any readers, will press forward and not give up. be survivors ppl! lol there's always hope no matter how dire ur situation! lol ... i'm not joking. i'm just happy i have made it so far XD

It is indeed very good characterization. This piece is very well written and I thank you for not scrapping it. :)

-Vengeance