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Chapter Text

Shinigami in the Winter War used to wistfully recall the quiet of peacetime. 

Starrk, thrown a century into the past where the world’s end is coming but not set in stone, finds these Shinigami to be liars. 

This silence is alive. Owls chatter in the night. Beneath his bare feet Starrk can feel the cool, damp sensation of soil shaded from moonlight. Grass lies in rare tufts of unhealthy brown, which is more than Starrk could say for the endless fields of charred land he fought upon.

Starrk– loses some time, after that. The world becomes too much for him. Here he is, miraculously, in some field in far Rukongai which war has not touched, and his exhaustion only rolls over him heavier. 

Here he is, the last one standing. The only one standing, alone once more. How many more times can he bear it? 

When he regains his senses, kneeling at a bank of a river as the sun rises, the cold water a shock against his knees, all he can think is that Mimihagi did not ask. But of course it didn’t. Shunsui died eight months ago and the only thing that prevented Starrk from following him was Ise-san telling him do you think you could look my uncle in the eye if you did not see your duty through?  

With no one else, Ywhach defeated, and no duty left to carry forward, Starrk was ready to rest. 

Of course Mimihagi did not ask– Starrk would have refused it. 

He did not ask to be sent away, his rest denied, but he made himself a soldier in this war when he fired that first shot in against the Quincy. He involved himself, and there is no way out which doesn’t end in him, or worse, others, paying the price. The war is not finished, and so his work is not done. 

But Starrk, for all his cursed, abominable strength… stays kneeling on the riverbank. His hands are heavy, leaden weights, his legs numb blocks of flesh. 

Leagues away, Seireitei bleeds light and reiatsu signatures like a dying star, a constellation of a thousand little lights. Its full glory, something Starrk has never known, burns like phantom fire in Starrk’s veins. 

Amidst them, Starrk catches the faintest thread of mercurial, merry shadows– 

He could not move even if he strained to. 

A little longer, Starrk tries to murmur, his vision a blurring, graying mass of colors, only to find his mouth cannot shape the words. A little longer to see the sun rise.  

It is a gentle lie.

–

Before Aizen, Starrk would retreat into his mind and lose years’ worth of time, perhaps even decades or centuries. He would come to awareness like a sleeper waking from dreamless sleep, and find some obvious evidence of the passing of time right in front of him. More bones, usually. 

Snow is falling in whatever deserted corner of Rukongai he occupies. Its touch wakes him. Its touch startles him, though he is too numb to flinch or shiver. 

Starrk heaves up to his feet, knees breaking free of ice. He sways back and forth, his joints cracking. How much time was wasted? Ah, but it isn’t worth wondering how long he knelt. 

Onwards, his soft animal heart urges him. 

He goes. He doesn’t know what else to do.

–

The Shinigami Academy is a series of tall, long buildings with shining, lacquered roofs. Sprawled in the middle of Seireitei, lower than the other sectors which have been built over and on top of, it seems like an old, isolated valley surrounded by mountains, for all that one could easily cross the border into the city by climbing the stairs. 

With tidy green training grounds and ancient, golden gingko trees, it is distinct enough that passing pedestrians could look down and believe the city grew to encase it like a bug in amber.  

Starrk knows, of course, that this is not true. He knows the history the Gotei 13 refuses to advertise, told to him in fits of tears and laughter by Shunsui in the spaces between battles. The Shinigami Academy was a post office before it was a dojo, built on the main street of an older, buried Seireitei. As Starrk closes his eyes, he can almost hear the rise and fall of Shunsui’s voice, cracking jokes about the history books leaving out the Postmaster part of the Postmaster-General Yamamoto. 

It hurts worse than being stabbed. Shunsui’s absence is a presence of its own, a stone in his lungs and a burning in his eyes. 

The one he has left. 

How foul, that Starrk is the one eyed war veteran this time around. How bizarre, that he has spent centuries upon centuries in the sunless sands, and this is the first time he has entered a place of learning. 

There is sputtering and surprise. It is not the traditional time for accepting students. The administrator is busy. No, the secretary is not pleased that Starrk is willing to wait, but he cannot say anything without appearing shockingly rude. Starrk is a fully grown man with a half-healed eye wound which screams i am neither reputable or sane, and this is apparently offensive to an institution that typically teaches unmaimed children. 

A different official appears to urge Starrk to go to a hospital. Starrk thanks her for her concern, and affirms his wounds are well taken care of. This is, he knows from the twitching of her eyelids, not the answer she wanted.

Starrk yawns. He regrets it. 

Part of his jawbone cracks, a heartbeat’s space of agony, only for something damp and heavier than blood to…. slide past his haphazard, soaked bandages. He gingerly wipes his cheek with a hand, and brushes the mixture of eye-flesh and clotted blood off on his ragged hakama. It’s dirty enough that it won’t matter. 

The hospital official gags and runs from the room. The secretary turns a spectacular shade of green. 

Starrk is tired. 

“Is there any paperwork I can do while waiting?”

A third person arrives, armed, unlike the other two. They sit between Starrk and the entrance from the admissions office into the Academy while unconvincingly sighing over a dusty book. 

With his reinforcements called in, the secretary is willing to hand over the first of several application forms. 

Ise-san would be very displeased with not only the hostility the Academy officials are creating with their judgement, but how obvious they are about it. Starrk is not so easily irritated, but if he was the rough barbarian he’s been profiled as, this would be grounds to escalate. 

As he is not, Starrk only finds it– puzzling. His eye socket throbs with pain to the beat of his slow, vestigial heart. Somehow, he is not seeing clearly. Is this city not the one which produced Shunsui and Ise-san? 

But clarity strikes like an avalanche a moment later, twice as harsh. So too is this the place Aizen set down his roots and thrived. 

The brush makes soft, smooth sounds against the mulberry paper and Starrk stalls his flinch. He didn’t expect there to be something visceral about its softness. He didn’t expect the paper to crinkle so gently between his fingers, or for his fingerprints to leave red, coppery stains. 

There are a series of short questions. Handwritten instead of a standardized form, messy, the ink still tacky. Starrk exhales quietly. The secretary could have simply told him no.

His estimation of the Shinigami Academy goes down another notch. 

The administrator is a dark haired woman with a bent back. She looks at Starrk like he is some strange, potentially poisonous bit of foliage she found stuck to her shoe. It is the first honest face in the past several hours. 

Starrk bows in greeting and repeats his intentions for the third time. He has spiritual talent. He wants to join the Academy. He desires to kill murderous hollows. What is unsaid is that he is persistent, patient, and a frightening enough sight that the admissions office has not told him to leave, for all they want to. 

The administrator, Arakaki-sensei, clearly already knows these details, but something in her eyes shift as she stares at Starrk’s face. Nothing in her posture changes, but Starrk suddenly finds her more obliging than before. 

“Follow me,” she says, decisively, not looking back to see if he obeys.  

There are thirteen tests. Someone in the Academy must either be overly patriotic or have a sense of humor. 

The first three are written exams. Each focuses on a subset of the organization, traditions and problem solving that the Gotei 13 must undertake, asking for a dizzying range of information that no one who is not an experienced Shinigami, much less passed through the Academy, would know. Starrk does know the answers, having learned the Gotei’s bureaucratic system and all its finickity forms the hard way, filling out whatever requisition forms were most intuitive and progressing from there. 

A test of perseverance, then. Of keeping calm in the face of overwhelming, impossible odds. And– a look into a potential student’s sense of strategy. Not knowing proper protocol means they must instead draw from their own experiences and give what they think is the best answer. 

So Starrk writes the careful, unpolished words of a man who has had no proper instruction but has fought for his life and survived. He writes the words of someone who is clever and mature, but no prodigy. His maths riddled with errors, his actual writing slow and painstakingly legible in a way that implies he did not learn how to write as a child, and has not had much opportunity to practice. 

He writes his name first in the Roman alphabet in a fit of performance, then crosses out his mistake and transliterates his name into katakana. He leaves little smudges of copper on the edges when he turns each page. 

I am brilliant, Starrk communicates, implies, misleads, but unpolished. Your people looked at me in that waiting room and saw a half mauled barbarian, but this is only true for my origins, not my temperament. Japanese is not my first language, and yet I have learned to write. I am persistent. I can withstand pain. I will work hard and improve.

He finishes the tests. He takes his time looking over his completed answers, brows furrowed, and then stacks the papers neatly. He does not sweat, or bite his nails, or fidget. 

Arakaki-sensei’s face might as well be stone. But her reiatsu unfolds. Starrk has interested her. 

For the next test, Arakaki-sensei brings him through a maze of courtyards, narrow hallways, and stairs to a dirt-floored basement which holds a thin chain, its silvery links reflecting strange beads of green akin to oxidized copper. A few meters lie on the ground, only to disappear into a cavernous hole in the ground. 

“Pull it out.” 

A great deal of Starrk’s power is currently focused on keeping the left side of his face together instead of sliding off his healing bones like chunks of wet mochi. It will be perhaps a month before he can take out the cloth he packed into his eye socket and expect it to not immediately collapse.  

This is a good thing. 

Starrk’s ability to control his reiatsu is excellent, but his ability to rein it at its full state is not. Even now, his only options are unrestrained vaporization, captain to lieutenant level reiatsu, or shutting down so firmly he appears as powerful as a grain of sand. 

He grabs the chain. It pops and fizzes in his hands, so blisteringly hot it feels like a knife of ice, melting through each layer of his skin. His reiatsu rushes forward to his hands, violently, like it is being pulled and concentrated into one singular point. 

Starrk grunts. He fights it. His face feels wrong beneath the bandages.

Pulling back as much of his reiatsu as he can feels… wrong. This is a device that wants to measure everything he is. And Starrk picked it up, yielded to its judgement. 

But Starrk has a duty, a mission. He tightens his fists and steals back a core of power by force. What little remains in his hands stretches out into the chain, several meters of links flying out of the hole, and then, like those Human rubber bands, snaps back into him. 

Starrk comes back to himself and gets the impression that no time has passed at all.  

“Is it supposed to glow?” He asks idly, staring at the fading gleam of the long chain still grasped in his hands. 

“Yes.”

Arakaki-sensei does not seem alarmed, nor does her reiatsu. She has changed from looking at him like a piece of moss in her sandals to a strange, possibly valuable rock she has found on the road. Pleased, but not overly excited. This is how Starrk knows he has not succeeded wildly beyond her expectations nor below them. 

It is also how he knows that he has completely fascinated her. 

All the other tests are a formality after that. 

–

Afterwards, Starrk is shown back to the waiting room and told to wait until Arakaki-sensei comes to get him. This surprises the secretary– prospective students must typically be sent away and return at a later date when everything is analyzed. 

More hours pass. The sun transitions from hanging high in the sky to dipping lower and lower toward the horizon. 

Starrk is brought to an office, where Arakaki-sensei sits seiza behind the low desk. Another two officials stand behind her, one with ash brown hair in four long braids and one who wears sunglasses with lenses that flash either green or bronze depending on the angle, like some sort of beetle. 

On the desk is a large, wrapped buddle, a smaller box, and a stack of papers bearing his name.

Starrk sits seiza before Arakaki-sensei like he has never done so before. He waits to be spoken to. 

“It is not typical for students to be accepted midway through the year,” Arakaki-sensei says mildly, hands folded behind her back. “Much less one from far Rukongai. There will be challenges.”

“I did not expect any differently,” Starrk says when it becomes clear she is expecting him to reply. 

“Good,” she says, and it is not praise but a declaration. She motions to the man with sunglasses. “Now let us talk about finances. Shin'ō Academy is not free to attend, but loans and spaced payments are available to students who cannot afford the full cost immediately.” 

The man with sunglasses, Kuna Haruki, already has multiple options prepared. And is rather excited about talking about it. 

Much of it goes over Starrk’s head. He is not well acquainted with how money works. But a decision is reached, minutes or hours later: Starrk takes out a loan to cover his first year, another meeting scheduled at the end of the year to ascertain if he will continue his schooling and thus take out another loan. 

Starrk will need a part time job to pay back his borrowing. If he does not, the Shin'ō Academy Grant Association will take the money directly from his paychecks as a Shinigami, or hunt him down and repossess all his valuables if he is kicked out. 

Starrk supposes that this is fair. Kuna-san and the Academy are taking a chance on him. 

The last person in the room, with the braided hair, Minamoto-san, is one of the officials who assigns students to the classes that suit their knowledge and instincts– accelerated, average, or poor. Starrk has been placed in the average track for Hohō and Kido, poor for Zanjustu and Hakuda, and accelatered for Logic, Bureaucracy, and History. 

Starrk additionally has the option of choosing an elective. He chooses Finance. It seems fitting.

Kuna-san cracks an enormous smile. His sunglasses flash bronze. “I teach that! Perhaps you’ll have my class.”

Ah. Kuna-sensei then. “Perhaps,” Starrk agrees. 

Starrk is given a small, rudimentary map of the campus grounds, his copy of the papers detailing his loan, his schedule, and the bags on the desk. The larger wrapped buddle is three sets of the uniform, sandals, a towel, and a small pillow. The smaller box contains an asauchi, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. He already has a zanpakuto but revealing that would only invite suspicion. 

Starrk exhales. He will deal with it as the situation develops. 

Kuna-sensei and Minamoto-san leave first, admitting time constraints. 

As he too prepares to leave, loaded down with packages, Arakaki-sensei clears her throat. 

“Koyōte-san, the Gotei is hard but we take care of our own,” Arakaki-sensei says, steel in her eyes. “There are many who have been permanently harmed by hollows: it is nothing to be ashamed of.”

She holds up a hand with only two fingers and a thumb. 

Starrk’s ears ring. Ah. That’s…. certainly a conclusion to reach.

Starrk thanks her, as he thanked Kuna-sensei and Minamoto-san. He feels like one of those human inventions the gentle girl with the fairies in her hair used in her metaphors at the beginning of the war– a broken record. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

He bows. He leaves. He is a student of the Academy. 

Shunsui would find it funny. Ah, my wolf, he would lament, how cruel of you to make me seem a cradle robber. 

Somehow, Starrk did not expect it to be this easy. He feels– confused. Alone. But he has been alone for eight months, and eight years, and eons more. This is a weight he can bear. 

Starrk’s living space is marked on the map, a small x with a number written over it. The admissions office and Arakaki-sensei’s office are also labeled. Through the clean hallways and open courtyards, covered in snow, a little barracks stands, proudly labeled Green Quarters, Rooms 250-300 on a sign next to the door. 

The roof and the wood of the building are not green. 

Starrk does not think he will ever understand Shinigami. 

Starrk’s new dorm room is small and musty, even though the two windows are open to let fresh, cold air in. It is designed for a single occupant and even has an attached, albeit cramped bathroom. A great privilege, privacy, but likely his only because he has arrived half way through the school year. 

Or perhaps he was a little too gruesome a sight for the admissions office, and this is an attempt at appeasement.

He doesn’t remember sitting down beside the rolled up shikibuton and folded kakebuton. He doesn’t remember setting his bags down on the cramped, scratched desk. All he knows is that his hands are empty. 

Starrk lifts a hand to his face, shading his forehead and eyes from the weak winter light, and the ensuing bolt of relief is shocking in its intensity, relieving a pressing ache he wasn’t even aware was there. 

The air is cold enough to remind him of Hueco Mundo, and the walls are dyed orange by the sun’s setting. There is no smog, no choking power unable to be processed by a system that has irrevocably broken. His bandages are halfway undone, loose and slipping down his cheek. His skin itches with dried blood. 

He realizes, in hindsight, that while he remembered to steal civilian clothing before entering Seireitei, he forgot shoes. 

He tastes saltwater. 

Is Lilynette alive?

She can’t be. Starrk would have felt her by now. Their souls would recognize each other, mirror-siblings, two great halves of the same grieving beast. Starrk’s spirit would have even reached for his other, younger self. 

But instead, absence: a presence of its own. 

He’s weeping, and his perception of what is happening around him, to him, feels slow as clay and strained through the world’s smallest sieve. He touches his kosode, and feels dampness enough to tell him he has been crying for longer than he thought. 

He misses Shunsui. 

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.