Others drunkenly spoke of the rush of battle, of the excitement, the high.

They waxed eloquent about the thrill they had, the joy they experienced and the sheer need that they now had to pit themselves against someone who would challenge them, push them to the next level and make battle fun.

But that had meant nothing to him.

He watched them, so many of them, be drawn like lost travelers to a mirage, throwing themselves headfirst into a quagmire from which they would and could never escape.

Even the quiet ones, oh especially the quiet ones, he would watch their eyes light up with a fury that was almost unearthly, watch them leap into combat, watch them laugh the laughter of possessed men and then catch them when they fell from the skies like shooting stars.

And he had wondered.

He had wondered in the beginning even before his hands grasped a sword for the first time. Wondered if he too would someday come to poison his own soul with this forbidden, incomprehensible pleasure.

That thought buried itself deep within his heart as he swung his way through the katas, focusing his spirits, honing his concentration, slowly but surely burying that small spark of joy that had surfaced the very first time he had unsheathed a sword.

He trained like no other.

Even as he outgrew his masters in both stature and strength, even as he polished his skills into a mirror so clear that it no longer revealed his soul, he pushed himself that one step further.

The brutes that found pleasure in battle did not understand it.

Battle was not fun. It was not joy. It was a comparison of two swordsmen, a competition with one prize and one penalty. There was nothing more to it.

Win.

But they won too. Sometimes. They with the eyes of madmen, the souls of addicts and swords so wild they were almost unpredictable. But what victory was a victory steeped in madness?

No. Each move should be calculated. Each step should be precise. Each swing should be strong and true.

She disagreed.

She who haughtily, naughtily, mischievously hid away in corners of his heart that he had never before found, who slowly wormed her way into the sealed rooms of the manor in his head; she who both held and withheld everything.

She had disagreed when she first met him.

How could she not?

Her very nature was chaos, a nature in such contrast with his own that it shook them both deeply. He saw, in the moment that he saw her, the monster that he had always known was there. Oh how he had tried to deny it, forget about it, not think at all about its existence.

He could feel the cracks slowly spreading, but these were cracks in his mind, cracks that he could fill and mend and hide away and pretend they never existed.

And he did.

He worked his way through the chaos, building an almost insurmountable wall of control around each moment of constantly crumbling resolve.

It was temptation.

Temptation in every single movement of his arm, of his eyes, of his mind as she swirled around their training garden, laughing at the little boy that was determinedly sealing away the inner monster which they both knew was right there.

But she was not he, and he was stronger than that.

There was no need for an inner monster. It would do nothing for him and he wanted nothing to do with it.

With practice came control and soon even she came to see that he had no need for such a monster. Almost monstrous was his strength, tightly controlled, keenly honed and oh so sharply wielded - none of his enemies came close without him letting them.

Emotions were his weak point, as ridiculous as that may have seemed. Rarely was he quick to anger, but when the fire was lit, oh how brilliantly it burnt. His senses dulled, his control wavered, doubt filled his mind and even as she screamed in frustration, he seemed not to hear her.

But even then, the monster never surfaced. There was never a need for it to.

Even as his control wavered, even as he began to loosen in resolve, the very way he fought was so deeply ingrained into him, that moments of training would slowly stream back into his mind and the strength he had as an officer of this caliber and the sheer stubbornness and unwillingness he had to lose bode him through the difficult times.

He had lost before, yes.

Such a bitter pill to swallow it was too, but even he had known that one battle would not have ended in death. That was no enemy but an opponent. An opponent of startling strength grounded in some deeply unsettling insanity.

And that was about as alright as a loss could have gotten - that had been a passing moment. He would have called it luck, but he believed not in luck, only in the inner strength of the fighter and their skill with their tools.

It had been unfair, certainly, but such insanity would only drag the boy deeper and deeper into a world from which he would never escape from. He almost pitied the boy, the one who had barged into this world and taken up the sword of his own accord.

I have seen things you do not know about, you foolish emotionally-governed boy. I have seen where that path leads. And you have also seen that strength.

The monster strained at his chains.

Still he kept it down, suppressed it, sealed it away with crushing victories amidst lapses that nonetheless proved that he did not need that thing. He did not need her voice in his ear tempting him to see just what he could do.

And then it came.

He had faltered. He had misjudged this opponent. Such a power made no sense, but he did not have the time to wallow in self-blame. That was one strike he should never have allowed to fall on him. And how strange everything had become afterwards.

Nothing worked.

It was true.

His shikai had been sealed. Once the man had stepped into that zone and called it by the name he had, Byakuya knew that everything he had ever done before was now useless.

Anger welled up inside. Seventeen months of self-discovery, of pushing the boundaries, of coming that much closer to power he had never before grasped - all that was now useless. He would have howled in rage, but that was not the person he was.

Focus. That man was in his memories but not in his head. There had to be something that he could do.

And there was something he could do.

After all, his control was unparalleled. This zone was nothing. The person that his enemy had trained with was not the same one that was fighting him. He could do this.

And a thousand stinging petals tore into his left arm.

More than pain, more than fear, he was furious. He knew that he should not be, but this was a slight that he could not back down from. This was a battle he could not and would not lose. And it was no longer even a just a battle.

He had to win.

No.

He desperately wanted to win, to crush this man into the ground, to drown out the sounds of his own inadequacy and desperation. It was no longer just a simple comparison or a heated competition.

Now it all ceased to matter.

It finally ceased to matter.

And as he opened his palm, releasing the blades of Senbonzakura which he had just moments before tore into his own flesh, blood thrumming in his veins and a heady sense of fierce, primal joy bursting in every muscle, he understood.

He understood.

AN: Inspired by recent developments in Bleach, most especially by his battle with Tsukishima. That last panel gave me shivers.