Winter's Sons

Summary: When a body turns up at the Eastern Wall, run through with a zanpakuto and a sword of ice, all evidence points to Hitsugaya Toshiro. But this is only the first in a string of killings. With Central Forty-Six having issued an order for his execution, Hitsugaya must work against time to clear his name and find a killer strong enough to take on a captain. The past is never dead…

I. THE FIRST OF AUTUMN

Here it was, he thought. This was where it had begun.

He breathed, feeling the air move through his lungs. He stretched; muscle responded as he moved through the swordsman's stretches. He'd always been the better swordsman. But life, it seemed, was full of surprises.

It was a cool autumn night, and there was a hint of a bite to the air. He bent down and peered in the dry grass. His fingers closed, for a moment, around the hilt of a shattered sword. The hilt and perhaps seven centimetres of steel was all that was left. The wind and the rain had done their work well; the wrappings of the hilt were dull and smudged. He rubbed at a corner of it, and then his hands closed around the rusted metal blade and flexed. It came apart in his hands.

An old blade, he thought. A good blade. It had not been treated kindly. He felt anger at that. "I expected better for you, old friend," he said. The sound of his own voice surprised him. It had been a long time since he had heard himself speak.

He laid the blade to rest again, on the dirt. With a word, purple flames blazed to life in his other hand. He held it for a moment, and then set it against the discarded sword. The flames burned bright orange as they consumed the broken sword, leaving nothing behind as they roared and then vanished from existence.

He waited, a moment more. Perhaps out of sentiment. He was not often given to such urges, but he waited nonetheless, trying to discern some sign that the past still lived. Finally, he turned away.

The wind whispered softly through the dying grass as he left, pale with first frost in the light of the waning moon. It blew bright-umber and dried-brown leaves across the killing ground.

Autumn, Hitsugaya thought, was not his favourite season as a captain. Autumn marked the beginning of an unending series of reports; pertaining to affairs such as logistics, promotions, transfers between the squads, looking through new applicants aspiring to a place in the Tenth Division of the Gotei Thirteen.

At least he could trust Matsumoto to handle division readiness, as she always did. He'd write the report if she would take the whole mess of handling new recruits out of his hands and consider it a fair trade. He had nothing against training fish. Handling orientation was another thing altogether, and it was just as well that Matsumoto was better with people.

At least that made one of them. He snorted, and blew until the ink on the report he was writing had dried.

This autumn was the worst of the lot. It marked the changing of the guard; a length and utterly ceremonial process where the King's Seal was taken from its normal place of honour in the Central Forty-Six compound and shifted to the compound of the division that would now assume responsibility for guarding the Seal until the next quarter-century. After a week, which was exactly how long it took for the ceremonies to be complete, the Seal would be once more returned to the Central Forty-Six and kept under heavy guard.

And during this particular changing of the guard, responsibility for the Seal would shift to the Tenth Division, which made things an administrative nightmare. While it was no longer true that the Seal would be guarded strictly by members of the Tenth Division, patrol reports still had to be collated, officers reassigned, and schedules displaced. On top of the usual paperwork—autumn paperwork, Hitsugaya thought, in disgust—that he already had on his plate.

Twenty five years, and this would be Zaraki's mess to sort out, not his. Twenty five.

Balefully, Hitsugaya eyed the pile of applications submitted from this year's graduating students at the Academy. He wondered if he could sit on them all winter; tried to recall the deadline. Spring. He could take all winter then; nevermind the flood of anxious letters from the Academy when they wondered about the hold-up. They didn't have to handle the transfer ceremony.

"Ah, Taicho!" A loud groan disrupted his train of thought as the door to the administrative office flew open and a strawberry blond stumbled into the room and collapsed on top of the sofa. He'd stacked completed paperwork on that sofa once. Never again.

"Matsumoto," he said. "What is it?"

"Our new recruits this year are horrible!" Matsumoto moaned, and Hitsugaya got up to tramp across the office and shut the door before someone heard. It probably didn't help, he thought grumpily. The whole division would know of it soon enough. If there was anything that moved quickly in Soul Society, it was gossip. Shinigami were inveterate gossips, or so it seemed. And eavesdroppers.

"Close the door before you do that," he admonished her. For all the good it did. "You say that every year."

"This year, it's true," she replied, closing her eyes and stretching out. "Taicho, are you sure the Academy isn't lying when they send the application letters? I just had three recruits fail a basic drill manuever. Some kid managed to hit the recruits next to him with live steel. A whole row couldn't even manage a proper turn. The formation looks nothing like a parade formation and more like a sake spill. And two of the new recruits threw up at the sight of blood, when the accident happened. Fourth Division had to send a team down to evacuate the wounded, and they were laughing at us, Taicho. I swear," she said darkly, "The Tenth Division will be the laughingstock of Soul Society!"

Hitsugaya sighed, and rubbed at his temples. Not now, he almost pleaded. Not now. "For the ceremony?"

Matsumoto nodded. "I need sake," she moaned again. "A nice, long soak in a hot spring, and sake. Lots of sake."

"You'll have to settle for a cold shower," Hitsugaya said. He didn't tell her to watch her drinking. She knew better than to be thoroughly drunk in the lead-up to the changing of the guard. "Who's running the drills now?"

"The seated officers," Matsumoto said. "I split them into their squads and had the officer commanding each squad handle the drills." He accepted the faint rebuke in her voice; of course that was what she would do. What else was chain of command for?

"And the recruits?"

"Arbitrarily assigned to the most senior squads," Matsumoto replied. "And we owe Sone a bottle of good sake." Sone Zenko was the third seat, and as such, the officer who commanded the second most senior squad in the division. As the lieutenant and nominal second seat, Matsumoto's squad was the most senior, but Hitsugaya supposed that she'd foisted them off on Sone in her escape to the administrative office.

"We?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"We," Matsumoto agreed cheerfully. She propped herself up on her elbows. "I decided," she said, "that since you wouldn't have wanted to be running the recruits through basic drills, you wouldn't mind contributing to Sone's sake."

"And as a captain," Hitsugaya said, his voice dry, "I'm supposed to contribute to the cause of encouraging one of my officers to drink?"

"It's encouraging division welfare, Taicho, that's a good cause!" Knowing that the battle was already won before it had begun—Hitsugaya would have kept his word to Sone, even though it was given by proxy—Matsumoto changed the subject. "How many more days to the ceremony?"

"A week," Hitsugaya said. "We'll be lucky to get to the end of division reports and settle the ceremony logistics by then. I've put in a hell butterfly to the Captain-Commander asking for an extension."

"Ah, he'll grant it, Taicho!" Matsumoto said, waving her hand dismissively. "Shunsui always used to put in for an extension. It didn't matter if it was granted anyway; who goes through paperwork that quickly?"

That was something they were never going to agree on. Nevertheless, Hitsugaya said, "The Tenth Division has not and will not be submitting late paperwork while I am captain." It was a point of pride for him. It was paperwork, certainly, mostly boring and some of it didn't even seem important, but it was something he was supposed to handle and Hitsugaya would be damned before he shirked his responsibilities.

He recognised the amused smirk; Matsumoto's lips twitched. "As you wish, Captain," she said, managing to narrowly avoid sounding patronising.

He stared at the quartermaster's report that he was working on and then slowly put it aside. Since Matsumoto was here, they were better off worrying about the impending ceremonies. He could do the reports later, by himself. "Who are we posting to Central Forty-Six?"

"I was thinking Sone's squad," she said slowly. "And ours. Precedence given by seniority. Captain Soifon has already sent a dispatch informing us of the posting of her onmitsukido units along the planned route. There's never been a problem with transporting the Seal to headquarters, but there's no sense in taking risks."

The route. His memory had always been perfect, and Hitsugaya thought back a few moments before he saw the route in his head, clear and sharp. It was a ceremony, which meant that while the squads would begin at Central Forty-Six at the crack of dawn, they would inevitably march past all the division barracks in Soul Society, taking a long and winding route before reaching their own division headquarters.

"Keep the fish at HQ," he said. "Put them all together in a temporary squad, or divide them if you have to. Don't assign them to a squad yet."

"The sixth squad is under-strength," Matsumoto warned. She always kept track of those things.

He'd almost forgotten. "Put them together with the fish, then." The sixth squad was high enough on the seniority ladder that the men could probably drill the new recruits to the point of competency. Or, Hitsugaya thought cynically, an appearance of competency.

He knew more than enough about appearances.

"You want them to drill the fish?" Matsumoto made a face. "Taicho! Now you've got me using the word."

"I have bad habits," he deadpanned. As far as he remembered, he'd picked it up from hearing some of Madarame's rants at the new recruits everytime the Eleventh faced their new intake. He'd long ago given up yelling at them and simply resigned himself to finding another place to work.

Matsumoto was grinning as though she'd won the lottery. "You're in a very good mood today. It must be the paperwork. Or does Taicho keep some secrets from me, hmm?"

"We all have secrets," he said, quietly. More than anything, the tone of his voice destroyed the light-heartedness of the moment, and put off any further discussion. Matsumoto said nothing. There was nothing she could have said, in response to that.

The next week, Hitsugaya took Matsumoto with him to the Central Forty-Six compound. He'd been there on his own slightly over a week ago, and so the guards recognised him and waved him and Matsumoto through. He wavered between exasperation and relief; he'd had to pass a battery of tests meant to verify his identity on his previous visit. If there was anything good that had come out of the Aizen incident, it was that many of the gaping holes in Soul Society's security—places where they had become complacent, he thought—had now been tightened. Access to Central Forty-Six was even more stringently controlled than it had previously been.

In addition, the compound had been refurbished with additional security measures meant to detect and eliminate intruders. Still, Hitsugaya thought disapprovingly, it seemed that security wasn't all that much tighter if they were waving Matsumoto through simply because she was with him. But he was pressed for time as it was, and all in all, he didn't want to have to pass the identity verification tests once more. They would have to run that gauntlet on the day of the ceremony, but that was tomorrow's worry.

"I've never seen the King's Seal before," Matsumoto said quietly, as they walked past long hallway after long hallway. They turned left at the junction that led to the central chambers, but the corridors in the compound all looked the same. Ordinarily, he would have called her on that unprofessional lapse into small talk, but they'd both walked the same kind of passageways, seen the slaughter that Aizen had wrought in the Central Forty-Six chambers, and he didn't think the memories would ever go away.

So instead, Hitsugaya said, "I have." At her quizzical glance, he added, "I was here on business around a week ago."

"What about me?" Matsumoto pouted, and tried to give him her best attempt at appearing pitiful. Hitsugaya sighed.

"You were overseeing the new intake of fish," he said simply. "I did not want to pull you away from your duties. In any case, I'd come as a precaution, nothing more." A wry smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Apparently, I'm taking the transfer ceremony more seriously than my predecessors have."

"That's because it's a formality, Taicho. No one's ever stolen the King's Seal during the changing of the guard ceremony before. No one," Matsumoto added, "would be crazy enough to do it."

He closed his eyes for a moment. "Regardless," he said, firmly. It was the tone that ended all discussion. "If anyone wanted to obtain the King's Seal, penetrating Central Forty-Six would be suicide. They'd wait for the transfer ceremony and attack the procession to steal the Seal en-route. Or attack the division barracks where the Seal is temporarily held."

Of course. It was the only thing that made sense, and as unlikely as an attack was, it was still his duty to be paranoid, to foresee all possible complications. And then, at the end of the week, when the Seal was safely in the keeping of Central Forty-Six, he would breathe a sigh of relief.

"But Taicho," Matsumoto began. They were drawing near the end of the corridor. Hitsugaya held out a hand and Matsumoto instantly fell silent, schooling her features into that of the serious lieutenant. The doubled guard was standard at the entrance to the secure vault; the door itself was barred and wouldn't open to his touch until at the ceremony tomorrow.

Hisagi Shuuhei, lieutenant and acting Captain of the Ninth Division was there. Not even the guard, all shinigami from the Ninth Division, could open the vault; access would have been restricted to the former Captain of the Ninth, Tosen Kaname. Now, though, Hisagi had access and he laid his palm against the indent on the formidable barred door that loomed in front of them. "Captain Hitsugaya," he greeted. "Lieutenant Matsumoto."

"Hisagi," Hitsugaya said. Matsumoto's greeting came after his; still a hair less than strictly formal.

They'd sent word of their arrival, of course, as well as their purpose. Everything had been approved and settled in advance, at a speed which seemed to be increasingly rare in Soul Society these days. Hitsugaya felt the cold scrape of iron against his tongue, tasted black despair and sharp blades of whirling death as the palpable sense of Hisagi's reiatsu grew. Hisagi was only a Lieutenant, not a true Captain; still, the strength in his reiatsu was appreciable. The air around his hand shivered, burned an incandescent, killing green. That was the form Hisagi's reiatsu took then, Hitsugaya thought.

Behind him, there was, for a moment, a flicker of cinnamon and vanilla and a purr like warm sunlight, like warm cinders among the ashes of a fire. Matsumoto had surreptiously drawn on a little of her reiatsu to ward off the side-effects of being so close to the amount of power Hisagi was calling on. Barely detectable, but he was attuned to her reiatsu, and he could have told she was doing so from ten miles off. Hisagi himself was beginning to sweat, but bore down with stoic determination.

The vault doors slid open, retreated into the stone. Hisagi said, "I'll be glad to not have to do this again, after tomorrow."

"No kidding," Matsumoto murmured, fanning at herself. Hitsugaya shot her a look.

"Thank you, Hisagi," he said, as he headed on past the open doorway and into the vault. This vault had been built of sekkiseki; he'd have known the disconcerting feeling anywhere. Sekkiseki neutralised spiritual energy thrown at it, and was virtually impervious to physical attack. It registered to his senses as a smooth, black void…sheer emptiness. There was another passageway; it led onwards. Hisagi let them in, past the other two doors, and then he gave them a curt nod of farewell, striding back along the long corridor. The soft scrape of his sandals echoed in the hollow recesses of the passageway.

Sekkiseki drained spiritual energy over time, interfered with their ability to sense reiatsu. Hitsugaya was not inclined to linger for longer than he had to.

"Matsumoto. You had a question."

"Why all this security?" her loose gesture seemed to take in everything; the triple-doored vault, the doubled guards, and the security nightmare that was the Central Forty-Six compound. "The King's Seal is important, I know, but isn't this excessive?"

"There's never such a thing as too secure," Hitsugaya said. He relented and added, looking over at her, "You're right. The King's Seal is subject to high security because it is invested with the full authority of the Soul King."

"And the Seal represents Central Forty-Six's mandate in governing Soul Society from the Soul King himself, I know," Matsumoto said. "It functions as symbol of the Soul King's authority and his presence in the rulings Central Forty-Six makes."

"You do remember."

"Taicho, just because I don't do the paperwork doesn't mean I slack off on assignments," she said, a little more sharply than intended.

He was silent for a few moments. "That was out of line. I apologise. But the Seal is more than just a symbol. It is actually invested with the Soul King's power. Think about spiritual energy enough to tear a world apart, and a measure of that is infused within the King's Seal."

Matsumoto gasped. "Taicho, that's…"

"…restricted information," Hitsugaya said softly. "Captain level restriction. Am I understood?"

Matsumoto straightened up. "Yes, sir," she said. "No one will hear of it from me."

He accepted that with a nod, as the passageway opened out to a small chamber. This vault had been built to do nothing more than house and protect the King's Seal. While part of the passageway had sunlight filtering in through grating in the ceiling, the chamber itself was dark. "Tsukero," Hitsugaya said, and a pale light blossomed over his outstretched hand.

The King's Seal was set into a raised, rectangular block of stone, in an engraved hollow meant to contain it, lined with deep orange silk. Such a tiny thing, Hitsugaya thought, even though he'd seen it once before. He let Matsumoto take a look at it. The King's Seal was made of a dark, glossy material, and as Hitsugaya stepped closed to the pedestal, his light reflected off the polished surface, revealing a dusting of tiny, sparkling grains within.

Matsumoto sucked in a breath in appreciation. "Wow," she said. "That's some Seal, Taicho."

Hitsugaya picked it up, very carefully. He could feel the engravings on the surface of the Seal; he didn't know what it was made of, but it reminded him of obsidian. As he had that day, he felt it; a carefully-constructed matrix of power to his senses, mathematical and precise. Impenetrable. The last time he'd handled the Seal, it had cooled slightly to his touch, as if it had in some way reacted to his presence."Sense it," he said, handing the Seal over to Matsumoto.

Startled, she almost dropped it. "Matsumoto!" Hitsugaya exclaimed. For a moment, he hadn't dared breathe. Though he was not sure a fall could damage it, the last thing they needed was to explain a broken Seal. "Don't drop it."

"Sorry, Taicho," Matsumoto said, and she did genuinely sound sorry. By the kido light, he could make out the confusion on her face. "It…grew cold to the touch." Not this time, he thought. He frowned. She added, "It startled me."

The Seal had a specific set of powers, Hitsugaya knew. But he wasn't privy to even those: he wasn't a senior Captain, and his job wasn't to use the thing but to guard it. Whatever it did, that wasn't his concern now.

Aloud, he said, "Thoughts?"

Lips pursed, Matsumoto said, "It's closed-off. Strange for an artefact containing so much power." She shook her head slightly, and the focus returned. "I know how the Seal feels like now, Captain."

He took it back from her, and set it back in position. "Enough room in the passageway for two lines of men," he said quietly. "But not down here. I was thinking before the first door. One squad."

"Two would be better," Matsumoto said. "One squad on each side of the corridor. Honour guard positions."

He was shaking his head almost immediately. "No room to manoeuvre. Purely ceremonial."

"It is a ceremony. The compound itself will be secured. We've already put six squads to securing the perimeter. Captain Soifon's onmitsukido units will be bolstering them."

"Have them do a sweeping screen," Hitsugaya said. "Diagonals, across the route, ahead of the squads escorting the Seal. Captain Soifon mentioned she was deploying the onmitsukido along the route."

Matsumoto nodded. The squads had been briefed on the route, and sent on manoeuvres, with the effect that they were as familiar as they could be. This was nothing more than her Captain's thoroughness. The orders the squads had been given could shift to accommodate this adjustment to their assignments.

"Taicho, do you think something is up?"

He paused, mid-step. "Hmm?"

"You seem…on edge."

He hesitated, for a heartbeat. "No," he finally said. "It's nothing." His mouth quirked in that smirk, but it lacked his characteristic almost-arrogance. His heart wasn't in it, she could tell. He was distracted.

"Taicho."

"What I feel doesn't matter, Matsumoto," he said. The harsh edge was back to his voice. Weariness; was there something else? She couldn't place the emotion. "Let's go."

Later, just before she dozed off, Matsumoto realised: it had been impatience, even strain.

For the first time in years, Hitsugaya dreamed of a plain of ice, broad with crushed crystals of ice underfoot and featureless. The only thing that stretched on into the distance was the empty plain, and the distant horizon where icebound land met pale white sky and faint clouds.

Ice crunched as he moved. He barely felt the cold, even through his thin socks and straw sandals. Each step compacted the ice further. There seemed to be nothing here, he thought. In the same breath, he somehow knew that wasn't true. And then he looked up, and saw two moons overhead in the sunlit sky.

A blade of ice sprouted between his ribs; he gasped, blood spilling out of his lips as the blade twisted and he tried to turn around to catch a glimpse of his attacker but failed. He fell to his knees as the world went dark and he died.

Hitsugaya woke up. He took a deep breath, felt where the attacker in his dream had struck him from behind. There was nothing here, of course. It had only been a dream. He stood up and peered through the paper-screened window, sliding it back.

The sky had not yet begun to turn light, but nevertheless, he drew his zanpakuto and practised sword exercises in the courtyard outside until the sun rose.

A/N: A few clarifications about the setting. I'm ignoring everything that happened after the end of Fake KT, past Aizen's defeat, in other words. If you want a fic with plenty of Urahara and the Vizard, this isn't it. There's something else I'm ignoring as well, but I don't yet want to give it away, though maybe I have inadvertently. I'll see how this plays out.