Chapter Text
The Gotei 13 may portray itself how it wishes, a stern and unbending titan against the night, but Starrk knows its core. If the Gotei were to take the shape of an animal, as many hollows do, it would be a prey animal. A great and terrible deer, or a towering draft horse. Armed with vicious hooves and all the available food and fear to use them first and ask questions later.
The Gotei is an anxious animal full of anxious animals. Animals that still remember cold, desperate days on the streets, or when being able to mold reiatsu was cause to be hunted and captured for a Clan. And prey animals– well-fed creatures who don’t have to kill to acquire their meal, for whom injury does not spell starvation– are exactly the type of animals that have never needed to pick their battles.
Did Yamamoto Genryūsai Shigekuni not bring rebellion against five noble clans all at once? Did he not win?
Prey animals faced with threats they cannot understand and power they cannot trust will fight back past the point of reason. Rabbits will break their own spines trying to escape the hold of helping hands, and a wild boar will gore its opponent even if they have to further impale themselves on a spear. Horses bite off fingers and crush skulls.
There is no reasoning which can reach an animal caught off guard by fear, especially the warmblooded creatures known as people. No other thing is so good at lying to itself and not dying from the ensuing dissonance between reality and belief, or how else would Aizen have tricked the Gotei and been defeated by them?
Starrk, if he were to walk into Yamamoto’s office and tell the truth, would be eviscerated.
There are other captains Starrk could confide in– Shunsui, even as a stranger, would believe him. Hirako-san too would heed his words. He is, after all, the one who has been carefully picking and choosing his battles to the point that his own Division is the epicenter of a concealed cold war.
But setting himself up as an outside agent and moving captains behind the scenes will look exactly like treachery to paranoid eyes. Starrk is not acquainted with Yamamoto, but anyone could guess the end result would be tragedy on an unmarked scale.
Instead, Starrk has entered the Shin'ō Academy, his next few years sacrificed for credibility.
Frankly, he could kill Aizen today. A single shot no one would expect, for who would have the audacity to assassinate a captain in their own city?
He could walk into Las Noches’ halls and slaughter the Espada.
Starrk could start the Winter War early, decimate the Soldat, drag Yhwach into Hueco Mundo and watch him adjust to the novelty of being the one on the defensive. He could obliterate plans and spring traps a thousand years in the making.
But that would only ensure the Gotei 13 sleeps on, unaware and brittle. It would gain no strength, no unity, no realization of the corruption beneath their feet. The exact same loopholes and blind spots which enabled Aizen and Yhwach would remain in place, and it would be only a matter of time before another traitor came to take ruthless advantage of them, one cleverer than self-obsessed, miraculously lucky Aizen.
The facts remain. He could kill Aizen today. He could carve a permanent scar into the bedrock of Wandenreich, detonate his soul in Yhwach’s orbit like a superheated star, spreading violence like stardust. He could die in a blaze of glory, and rest easy, knowing he ensured Soul Society knew the oncoming war was here at their door.
But then what would the Shinigami learn?
Overachiever, Shunsui would call him, with that dear, bitter set to his mouth.
Starrk could break himself against Yhwach’s walls today. But Ise-san was right. Even dead, even knowing he would remember nothing in the next life– Starrk wouldn’t be able to bear looking Shunsui in the eye ever again, even if they met again in new bodies that never knew each other.
The Gotei 13 is a teetering, nervous draft horse doing the work of three different governments with none of the support, choking on Central 46’s leash. It is harsh, and unbending, and deeply, deeply afraid. It was founded by rebellion, its entire existence the result of an impossible coup, and its fear comes from knowing exactly what they have to lose.
Starrk is not looking forward to the state of Soul Society if the Gotei falls.
When morning comes, he drags himself from the siren song of Las Noches, to sit in the hushed, awkward classroom, all to enact the changes he can make instead of the rushed events that will only break the worlds further.
–
Shin'ō Academy’s schedule is not for the uncommitted.
The full day is ten and a half hours. Starting at eight in the morning and ending at six-thirty in the afternoon, Starrk suspects it was put in place to curtail the predictable consequences of teaching irresponsible young people how to blow things up with their minds, as students will be either too exhausted or too focused to cause trouble. It is, for now, unclear whether it actually works.
The school year is split into three semesters, each lasting fifteen weeks, culminating in ten and a half months total. Each semester is followed by a two week break before moving to the next semester, with the last week of free days allotted for important festivals or absolute emergencies. The first semester of a full school year always starts in spring. It is….November? Yes, November, the start of the third semester, which will last until early February.
There are two day weekends, a surprise and a recent policy change, prompted by some Captain from one of the Noble Clans agitating for it as a student. Starrk cannot have them, due to his late arrival in the year. Instead, Starrk has been assigned remedial classes on these coveted weekend days, to “catch him up.”
Starrk should be upset about this, he thinks, in an abstract way where his mind is held on by a single thread to his body. Before the war– when sleep was not easy, but possible– he would have been.
Six years of learning, ten and half hours each day. The things Shunsui inspires him to do.
Even on the normal weekdays, instead of each of his classes being allotted an equal amount of time per day, seven last an hour, with his eighth class lasting two hours. This special eighth class changes each day, allowing each subject to have additional time throughout the weeks.
Today, it is Bureaucracy that has this two hour block. Tomorrow, it will be Kido.
Starrk doesn’t think he can be excited even if he wanted to be. But he is curious how Kido will differ from Ceros and his wolves. It’s all reiatsu manipulation in the end. Fiddly and sometimes ridiculous, but beautiful too.
Like Shunsui. Like dawn.
It keeps catching Starrk off guard. How bright everything is. How present, how tangible.
Shin'ō Academy is achingly, horribly real, and it makes Starrk ill to see it and know this was the first place out of all of Seireitei that Yhwach singled out for destruction. Someone cared about this place. Someone, multiple someones, poured countless decades and research into each small policy and pockmark which forms the whole.
He doesn’t recognize anyone from the war in his classes. It’s not the confirmation it should be.
Starrk’s memories are fallible, fragile things, blurs of blood, aching quiet, and a bone deep sort of hurt that steals everything, interrupted with a few sweet moments preserved like hastily pressed flowers. At some early point, when that young Quincy was still playing traitor, he had stopped recognizing faces, only knowing allies had died from feeling the visceral, stuttering stop of their reiatsu like his own heartbeat, his eyes unable to focus on the bodies. The problem is compounded by the youth of the students here, their spirits so soft and undeveloped, their asauchi empty.
Some of the people he had fought beside were regarded as young, felt young to his senses, and could very well be listening to these same lessons and sharing the space Starrk now belongs to. But there is no real way to know.
It’s starting to hurt, knowing the faces of his classmates. Recognition is an arrow to the spine, the stinging sensation of his eye focusing, no longer skipping over details, the world turned sharp and narrow. Were the dapples of shadow on trees always so distinct?
Gaggles of blue and red robed students pace in the open courtyards, laughing and arguing, their cheeks and ears pink and rosy with cold. An older student drags a younger student towards them by their mussed coat only to fix its wrinkles. A few circles of people sit on the hard, frozen dirt and lean toward each other while clutching tea glasses, mingled hot breath and steam rising above their heads like curled ribbons, warm in all the ways that matter. Laughter shatters and fractures across chilling gusts of wind, reflecting sound like particles of ice can catch and direct the brightest light.
Twelve years ago, centuries ago, Starrk wanted nothing more than the ability to be in proximity to a person without his reiatsu crushing them. Not even to be able to get close, or talk, or touch. No, his greatest and simplest desire was to be near people, to see their faces and hear their words. He wanted to be near people in the same way a flower might turn their face to the sun.
Anything further and the fantasy broke.
Everything he wanted all those years ago when he was trembling and cold is in front of him, waiting for him to cross the threshold. He should be, by all accounts, pleased. Here, he is Coyote Starrk, first year student, and the only unusual thing about him is his arrival far after the start of the term and the wound on his face. No one knows him as Aizen’s former Primera Espada, or the new Captain-Commander’s pet monster.
He doesn’t. He feels old. Sick. Like a raw, exposed wound.
We knew them and they were ours, his terrible heart says. Does it have to be a betrayal, that we cannot survive on scraps anymore?
Starrk turns away from the courtyard, away from the blinding edge of snow, away from the light of hundreds of souls, wedging himself in the dustiest, most deserted corner of the library.
Like the schedule, the Academy’s coursework is punishing. The majority of the coursework is done during classes, but some amount of supplementary studying is warranted. The more pressing concern is that Starrk has none of the basic, common knowledge all residents of Soul Society share, the diluted histories and the traditions.
Does it have to be a betrayal?
During the war, Starrk had evolved one more time. The last time.
It was always theoretical, that a hollow, with enough time and power, could heal itself. It was the problem Urahara’s Hogyoku was originally created for, but the solution was never found on account of the first war, and then the second. But amongst academics and scientists it was the most puzzling, overlooked question: why would hollows eat each other, and profess relief from hunger upon doing so, if it did nothing?
This line of debate was debuted long before anyone had the faintest idea of something like Starrk and Lilynette, the first natural born arancarr. Now it is Starrk alone, hollow hole scarred over, that is first of this new, nameless category.
A table’s worth of books split open before him and all Starrk can focus on is the ringing in his ears. Fresh, living soil sleeps underneath the snow banks outside the window, and Starrk cannot see it. His hands are ice frosted over steel, hierro unbending.
Ise-san once told him that humans shiver to fight the cold, not because they are bowing down to it. The body shakes, and muscles create friction and heat, the body leeching warmth into the world, trying to satisfy the cold, a yawning absence of heat rather than a force of its own. Living creatures have to trap their heat beneath their skins and in layers atop it, or else it will drift from them, like fire jumping from a controlled blaze to wild dry grass.
Starrk cannot shiver. His fire is his and his alone, locked away, and if he were to give it all to the world, it would burn down to cool white ash.
He needs only an ember to survive. He doesn’t need to be warm.
It is a lonely thing to be at the top, he thinks, and he knows the words in his own voice, and Lilynette’s, and Aizen's, and Shunsui’s.
Please, he finally begs of his howling heart, the way he never did of Aizen. Please. Don’t ask me again. I can’t bear it.
–
Starrk has perhaps spent half his life or more asleep. Not from need, but for escaping his circumstances the only way he knew how.
Starrk has spent half his life or more asleep, and every moment he has been awake he has been tired. Bone deep, achingly tired, in a way that had nothing to do with rest or respite.
It was easier when Lilynette was alive. Lilynette would take all his restless energy and he would sleep the day away so she could race through the forever-lit streets of Las Noches, and she would sleep during what passed for night so Starrk could wander down the sleeping city’s halls and obsessively check that all its inhabitants were still alive.
This was what Aizen and the rest of his Espadas misunderstood. Starrk and Lilynette were not one beast split in uneven halves, but two distinct creatures, connected and able to fuse together by virtue of their birth from the same burning corpse. Though they formed a symbiotic relationship, turning their shared origins into a bond as strong as hierro, that was a choice, not biological necessity. And so Lilynette had died, and Starrk survived it, even when the threads they had woven between them had snapped.
And so Lilynette is dead, and she can no longer kick him in the ribs and steal the insomnia that has been his all along.
He tries to use his nights well. Laundry. Reading. Planning. Reminding himself to breathe, to be moving flesh instead of a flat, still, dead thing. Weaving barriers to protect his room from eavesdropping ears and thieving hands, over and over until his fingertips are burnt, bleeding things. All the necessary labors of a living person. But more often than not he loses time, coming back to himself with Los Lobos unsheathed in his hands.
He tries to pair the activities together. Laundry and practiced exposure to all the little things his body has forgotten how to handle. He can withstand fire and brimstone but somehow, the unfettered light of the moon, and the harmless touch of cool water make him flinch.
Planning and sharpening Los Lobos. Tending to his eye wound, and breathing through it.
Planning, paired with staring at his cold, clean hands, made alien to him.
The gates of Seireitei are a significant problem. They loom tall like a solid white cage, walling him in Aizen’s base of operations and the site of Yhwach’s numerous prying eyes. Seireitei could just as well be a zoo as it is a military.
Under these circumstances– alone, exhausted, expecting sudden violence at every corner– he can’t even doze with one eye open, every noise in the night a different, dangerous possibility. Without his cobbled together wards, his dorm walls are permeable, fragile things. Even with their addition, Starrk can hear two bodies snoring in the room to the right and a couple having muffled intercourse down the hall.
A new noise joins the choir, high and small and impossibly familiar. A spell? An alarm?
Los Lobos growls in Starrk’s hands.
His room’s new defenses are a cage of their own, power sunken into the old wood that takes whatever may trespass and holds it there in its maw.
But in his trap’s teeth is not Gin, or even Aizen, but a furry creature with beady eyes, the size of a large walnut. Starrk gazes upon this strange, familiar-unfamiliar thing and suddenly knows that this is a beast that acts but does not, precisely, think .
Squeaking. That’s the word. It squeaks .
“Fuck," a low, hushed voice curses, coming ever closer.
Like a trance, Starrk is sitting, staring at this impossibly small, fragile thing, and then he is standing in his open doorway, his other hand bearing the ghost of the touch of worn wood but not its memory. Like stringing together distinct events without the transitions to join them.
Another snapshot moment: a bedraggled figure kneeling, feeling the floor and walls blindly with their hands. Moonlight from the window behind him bleeding into the hallway, and Los Lobos readying itself for whatever may come–
A boy’s face, pale and scarred.
The boy’s eyes, Starrk notices against his will, are dark and nervous.
He looks like Lilynette, the first and last time Nnoitra cornered her in those first years in Las Noches.
The little creature squeaks, and Starrk’s gaze darts down. The furry thing is in his hand, a white knuckled grip, too tight for anything without hierro. It’s soft, like Lilynette’s hair was, the few times she let him brush the sand from it.
Starrk drops it like he’s been burned. He has no reason to. He can’t even tell himself why.
The boy propels himself forward, a graceless, flat fall, his hands stretched out to grab.
Starrk feels some sort of way about that. Both buzzing and empty.
“I’m sorry, senpai!” says the boy, forgetting to be quiet. (Down the hall, the couple having intercourse roll off their futon, and murmur shit, who heard us?) He’s on his side, his knees nearly to his chin, clutching the furry thing close like it’s precious. “It’s my fault Eri got out, and my fault she got in your room. You can punish me, but please don’t make me get rid of her! The administrator is already suspicious and I can’t let anybody know! She’s not vermin, I promise!”
His eyes shine like wet glass.
“...I’m a first year student,” Starrk says, “not your senpai.”
He closes his door in the boy’s face, suddenly exhausted like he went two rounds with Ywhach.
Something has come for him, as he knew it would, and of every dangerous possibility, it was a confused student looking for a helpless animal. Starrk smiles without humor, the tension underneath his hierro snapping like a puppet’s strings breaking.
The fear will return.
But he has learned two valuable things tonight. First, that his trap works. And second, that the gossip over him, new student he is, has stopped its spread and not yet caught Aizen’s eyes, for not even a fellow student from the same dorm recognizes him. He is still a hidden man, one unremarkable person among the greater student body.
His fear will return. He sleeps, before it does.
When he wakes, the clarity of the world is just as disorienting. Silence alight with birdsong reverberates through his eardrums. His hands, knotted in his pillow, are needlessly cramped from gripping too tight.
Somehow, it hurts a little less.
–
At first glance, Shin-sensei in Kido wants her first year class either dead or humiliated.
Amidst the chattering of students, speculating wildly about summoning fire to their hands or reading minds, a colossal THUD startles everyone into silence, heads darting toward the source of the noise.
Starrk carefully looks away from where Shin-sensei has slammed a heavy wooden box on her low desk, but not before she peers at him, and looks… disappointed, maybe, for not having scared him. She seems to be enjoying the echoing silence.
“As there is a new student here today I will start introductions again,” she says, brusquely, as Starrk’s classmates swivel their heads towards him. “Welcome to Introduction to Kido. In this class, you will be held to high and harsh standards, as Kido requires perfect control and no little amount of ingenuity.”
“If,” she suddenly hisses, leaning forward, “I catch any of you misusing Kido equipment, attempting to use Kido on other students, or cheating, I will throw you out of this classroom and have you removed from the Academy. Is this clear?”
A chorus of voices answer her, subdued. A few students glare at Shin-sensei from their bowed heads and they, Starrk is betting, will not last much longer. What a clever way to do this: the brusque teacher, wielding her brashness to weed out students that cannot be trusted with the power Kido brings.
She opens her box, revealing small, rectangular tiles of wood. Crooking one elegant finger, she motions to the standing student Starrk has been observing from the corner of his eye, who steps out of the shadows to pass out the tiles.
“My assistant, Nanao,” Shin-sensei says. “She’s in her fourth year, and as your senpai, you bring your questions to her, not me”
Nanao… isn’t a name Starrk knows, nor one he can match a face or a position to. The girl is the sort of small and pale that humans label delicate and hollows consider a trap for greater strength, with short, bobbed dark hair and a thin, worried mouth. Something about the bones of her face is achingly familiar, enough that it hurts, a blinding pressure in his head.
Her spirit feels strange: as unformed as Starrk’s classmates, yet tethered to some distant, gleaming point out of her reach.
Upon handing Starrk his tile, Nanao turns away, and then turns back, peering at Starrk’s face, eyes wide. The wound, presumably. She keeps darting glances at him even when she completes her task and sits beside Shin-sensei.
She could be one of Aizen’s, Starrk muses, holding himself completely still, eye half lidded against the terrible brightness of the windows and the pain of scattered memories. But his heart rebels against the concept. Part of Aizen’s downfall was his refusal to see women as they were; had he given Harribel an advisor’s post rather than a number among his soldiers, or tried to seduce his former lieutenant to his side, the Gotei 13 would not have been able to scrape together that first victory.
Shin-sensei takes them on a mediation exercise, using the tiles as focal points, so as to 'make something happen.'
Starrk, halfway playing the part of a country hooligan, dozes. His classmates around him squeeze and scrunch their faces, trying to light the tile on fire, or soak it in water. The student closest to him starts quietly swearing.
Shin-sensei, an indeterminable amount of time later, laughs at them all.
“So far, you have been learning theory,” she says, “the matrixes which make up spells. But Kido, in addition to spatial awareness and power, always needs an incantation. If Kido only took a desire to make a spell succeed, then the whole world would know it. Let this serve as your first lesson. Effort is not enough. Instead, your effort must be skillful.”
Another student near him, with flaming red hair in a ponytail, stares ahead blankly like his future is disappearing before his eyes as his neighbor, a lively girl with violet eyes, faithfully notes this information down.
“Our real practice for the day,” she says crisply, rising to her feet and beckoning the class closer, “will instead be…”
–
The boy from the mouse incident finds Starrk at lunch.
Starrk keeps his head down, miming absolute focus on the remedial pamphlets Shin-sensei off loaded on him. The boy rocks back and forth on his heels, his gaze carrying the cutting edge of expectation with no action.
He makes his decision, brazenly sitting down next to Starrk. Doesn’t he know enough not to get within stabbing distance with strangers?
“Hisagi Shuuhei.”
“Coyote Starrk,” he introduces himself in turn , barely dragging his eyes to the boy’s face. The scars raking down his skin look like claw marks. Shredding, jagged damage instead of a series of clean cuts.
“Koyōte Sutāku,” the boy tries, glowing with earnesty. It says something about his character that he attempts the full name, when everyone else so far has defaulted to only Koyōte, an easier bit of foreignness on the tongue.
“Sure.”
Starrk turns back to his books. Faces wear on him now more than they did this morning. Seeing Nanao’s gave him the start of migraine.
Paradoxically, the boy breathes slower and clearer. His words spill out of him awkwardly, rushed, like throwing a handful of sand to the wind and seeing it flung in a thousand different directions.
“Why did you give Eri back?”
It’s an odd question. “Why wouldn’t I? It wasn’t big enough to be worth eating.”
Hisagi stares out at him, wide eyed, before bursting out into high, crackling laughter, covering his mouth with both his hands. It’s a relief– Lilynette never made herself small like this.
Starrk watches the boy. It wasn’t a joke. He doesn’t see how it could be one.
Hisagi shakes an open hand back and forth, trying to clear the air from his muffled chuckles. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeats, all timidity gone, “Just– you’re not going to tell anyone? I could get in a lot of trouble with the Academy for keeping pets.”
Ah, a pet. Starrk didn’t know creatures that small could be chosen for that.
“Why would I?”
Hisagi smiles at him. The details of his features swim and slide on his face, but Starrk sees that his teeth are very bright, and one of his canines is chipped. On a hollow’s mask this would be aggression, the chipped bone a sign of weakness. It’s something different here.
Hisagi doesn’t get up and he doesn’t leave. Instead he pesters Starrk incessantly, asking questions and sharing details about his strange, soft life, the rats he’s breeding selectively for soft fur and the story of the hollow that clawed his face and the shinigami that saved and inspired him.
Gradually, Starrk sets down his papers, instead focusing on Hisagi’s chatter, full of little details and asides that reveal more about the traditions and behavior of Soul Society than he must realize. Starrk gives quiet, curt answers to effusive wonderings, and tries not to ache.
Hisagi seems to grow even more pleased, the scent of damp, cool metal swelling around him.
“–and then Akon said Itsumi-sensei was full of shit, because Kido can’t be strictly up to visualization, or how would blind officers like Captain Kaname Tōsen of the Ninth be so skilled? I tried to use sound as my focal point and it worked, like– well, like magic!”
Starrk never knew this was a debate. When he summons his wolves, he does so by focusing on the bleakness inside of him, the howling, and then by personifying it, giving them their own voices. The wolf-shape is incidental.
Hisagi springs to his feet, squinting his eyes at the position of the white winter sun. Starrk follows his gaze: it’s been hours.
“I have to go, but you should have lunch with Akon and I,” Hisagi declares, before scurrying off like one of his pets.
Starrk rises to his feet, his knees popping, and watches the strange whirlwind of a boy go. He spares a glance to his research, and then to the far off window, gleaming white, before trudging over to sit under its light.
He leans his back against it, chilled skin meeting chilled glass, a touch that should hurt but doesn’t. He reads better this way, especially as the sun goes down.
–
Akon turns out to be a fellow student and Hisagi’s roommate.
He’s pale like Hueco Mundo’s sands, his hair bluish darkness, with budding horns in the center of his forehead. He looks more like an arrancar than an Academy student, except for how gangly he is.
The two of them consider each other for a stilted moment.
Unbidden and unwanted, Starrk knows that this boy’s sin is not apathy like Ulquiorra but a ravenous kind of curiosity.
“Do you know how to play Mahjong?”
“No,” Starrk says, and he recognizes this face now, the salt sting of his undeveloped reiatsu, even if he had forgotten the name. The exasperated scientist. But then, why would Starrk remember? It was war.
Not the first contact he thought he would make, but a suitable candidate. Shunsui, his heart cries, and Starrk turns away. A terrible idea.
Starrk accepts the game. Hisagi drags in a fourth and final player, a bored looking girl with jaundiced eyes. Starrk loses, and Akon wins. Starrk loses, and Hisagi wins. Starrk wins the next two rounds, and then the jaundiced girl cracks the board with a kick and storms off.
Akon’s reiatsu jumps and skitters, his face a blur beneath all the curses he growls while they pick up the pieces. Hisagi rushes after the girl to scold her, four dwindling to two.
Starrk breathes. The crack of the wood is not the same as the crunching of bone but it is close enough for his reiatsu to flicker, and for his hands to ball into tight fists, bones creaking. Similar enough for his mind to empty into a haze where color and sound become meaningless, like looking out through a layer of boiling water.
“Hisagi-san told me that you also breed rodents but with a different goal in mind,” Starrk says, finally, when control doesn’t feel as thin as sugar-glass. An invitation. “It was not clear.”
The set of Akon’s shoulders relaxes. He bites the bait. It makes sense. He is very young, young enough compared to the average Academy student that even Starrk can tell, and Starrk sets his scattered, fraught mind to cultivating a connection that will benefit him in the future.
He listens, hanging in the threshold between a void and the bright young man in front of him that he should be pleased to sit beside.
Akon asks for another game, when he acquires a new board.
No, some strangled part of Starrk wants to say. No, I can’t. This entire plan is folly. Don’t ask more of me, let me go, let me sleep. Let me be both a knife and its wound instead of this farce.
But Starrk has never lived for his own sake before and he can’t start now. Always for the future. Always, what he could have, what the world could be. Always for Lilynette and Shunsui and Ise, and even the older, dead version of this boy in front of him.
Overachiever, Shunsui sings somewhere distant, but Starrk is so rarely angry, and he won’t be moved. He knows how to pick his battles.
“I look forward to it,” he lies, scream trapped in his throat.