Chapter 267: What If
Hitsugaya Toshiro.
Among all the Gotei 13 members who appeared in the original story, he had built himself a reputation that would last. The biggest part of that reputation was a single distinction: the youngest person ever to take a captain's seat.
Though given how vague the records on that point were, whether the distinction came down to actual age or simply to looking perpetually twelve years old -- that was a debate best left for another time.
In any case, hearing his name called, the white-haired kid with the build of a primary school student lifted his head and directed an expression at Matsushita Yusuke that could only be described as deeply unimpressed.
"You've heard of me?"
Polite words. Completely unambiguous expression.
Matsushita Yusuke smiled easily and gave a small nod.
"Of course. There aren't many people who sail through the Shin'o Academy on accelerated promotion the way you did. Honestly, when you graduated, I actually thought about going over personally to recruit you into my squad."
Genius.
That was the other piece of Hitsugaya's reputation, and it was well-earned.
As was generally understood, every Shinigami came with a different set of natural capacities. Learning the same material at the same pace, the gap between someone with genuine aptitude and someone without it was not small.
He had the same thing Gin had: the raw material for an upper-tier captain, clear enough from a distance that it separated him from ordinary people without any effort on his part.
Matsushita Yusuke kept that observation running quietly in the background while his expression stayed exactly where it was -- easy, unhurried, warm.
"But I happened to have other things going on around the time you finished your studies, so I missed the window." He let a small beat of genuine-sounding regret land. "Which is a little unfortunate, thinking about it now."
Years of practice had built this into something automatic. Long exposure to Aizen Sosuke had given it an edge it hadn't started with. The particular quality of a performance so thoroughly worked into the surface that nothing showed through -- he had reached a point where a mountain could collapse directly in front of him and his face wouldn't move.
Aizen really had been a remarkably effective teacher in his own way.
Everything Matsushita Yusuke had absorbed from watching him over the years had settled into his own bones. Maybe not at full capacity, but more than enough to manage a situation like this one.
Case in point: the kid's face had gone red.
Look at that. Embarrassed, are we? Let me get a proper look at you.
"I -- I'm not that impressive. You're being too generous."
There was real craft in knowing how to land a compliment properly.
Watching Hitsugaya's expression do that thing where he was clearly trying to say something and couldn't quite commit to it, Matsushita Yusuke felt a quiet, specific satisfaction.
Because just looking at that face, he was already running through every moment in the original story where this kid had hit his limit and gone loud about it. Imagining those scenes in advance was its own private reward.
"If praising a genuine talent counts as being too generous, I honestly don't know what to tell you." He gave a small, easy laugh. "Hitsugaya -- things are going to work out a little differently than I originally pictured, but we'll be spending time together from here on. So, first meeting. Good to have you around."
There was an old principle that covered this exact situation.
A smile disarmed everything. Nobody argued with a smile.
Hitsugaya covered his expression behind a brief cough. When he surfaced from it, the aggressively self-assured look from the moment they had met was considerably quieter.
"Right. I'm looking forward to working with you, Captain Matsushita."
See, perfectly reasonable.
No wonder Aizen had always had such a good time with this one. A kid with that much visible pride, that much obvious confidence, that specific flavor of irritability -- watching him reach his limit was going to be an ongoing source of quiet entertainment.
"Captain Matsushita, I just want to be clear upfront." Matsumoto stepped in, still smiling, but with a particular quality to it that carried a message. "We're here to cooperate, but this one is still Squad 10's. I'd really appreciate it if you didn't try to poach our people."
Light in delivery. Not entirely light in intent.
It was a reasonable concern. A squad's captain-caliber candidates were not a renewable resource. If someone walked off with a figure at that level, who was left to hold Squad 10 together?
Matsushita Yusuke looked at Matsumoto's protectiveness, found it mildly entertaining, and responded with a perfectly neutral expression.
"I'm not planning anything like that. I just think Hitsugaya-kun has real talent, and from what I've heard, he's been handling the administrative side of things pretty well too?"
Matsumoto's eyes went noticeably brighter.
"You know about that?!"
She closed the distance quickly, came up alongside him, and pulled lightly on his sleeve to get him to lean down.
"Between the two of us," she said, and her voice dropped to something conspiratorial, "the internal vote for who should take over the captain position -- right now it's basically between him and me."
Which was exactly what he would have expected.
With the captain gone, any functional group was going to go through a process like this. It was a natural response. Nobody wanted an unknown figure parachuted in from outside. In the original story there had been storylines covering exactly this kind of internal squad dynamic, though the specific details had blurred over time.
From a procedural standpoint, surfacing the internally preferred candidates and reporting them upward for Yamamoto's consideration made sense. Yamamoto genuinely did take squad preference into account when making decisions.
So tracing the original story forward: Hitsugaya eventually getting the seat was probably at least partly connected to exactly this process.
As an organization with its own specific political logic, running on structures that had more in common with a feudal hierarchy than anything modern, the original story's depiction of the Gotei 13 had mostly been filtered through Ichigo Kurosaki's point of view. A young man from the living world, with no particular interest in institutional structures and surrounded almost exclusively by people who treated rules as suggestions. No reason to go deep on any of it.
Which meant looking at the surface was never enough. That principle held here as well.
Matsushita Yusuke came back to the present, glanced sideways, and said with an easy smile:
"So your plan is to put Toshiro forward for the captain seat and free yourself up. That's what you're telling me."
Matsumoto laughed, the kind that carried a trace of actual embarrassment.
She tilted her head toward him.
"Well, I genuinely can't picture myself in that seat. I've been doing vice-captain work for years now, and honestly, I've gotten comfortable."
Not everyone chased rank.
For Matsumoto Rangiku, at least, the arrangement she currently had seemed to be exactly what she wanted.
Matsushita Yusuke gave a small, understanding nod.
The relationship between those two in the original story had always had something particular about it. Seeing it from the inside made sense of it. The one who joined later with less seniority eventually moved ahead, and the one who had been there longer made space for it to happen. That kind of arrangement didn't settle into something stable without real support behind it.
The bond they had built -- something between mentor and peer -- was probably what made everything work.
With his thoughts running their course, Matsushita Yusuke half-turned and looked behind him.
Soifon had been going through documents and glanced up instinctively, catching his eye.
"Soifon, are you free over the next few days? Take this one around. Give him a proper look at how things run -- captain's responsibilities, vice-captain's responsibilities, the actual substance of the work."
She didn't answer immediately. Her gaze dropped briefly. There was a pause, brow furrowed, the particular quality of someone actually thinking it through.
"I don't have anything scheduled right now. Fine. I'll do it."
Hitsugaya, meanwhile, had not fully caught up with the conversation.
"Wait -- what? What exactly do you want me to do?"
Matsumoto leaned over and got him with a flat-handed slap on the back, tone bright and entirely unbothered.
"This is a rare chance to learn management directly from someone who knows what they're doing. Don't waste it. Come on, Toshiro, look sharp."
The room had dissolved into noise. Matsushita Yusuke gave them a brief, perfunctory smile, then shifted his attention to something the others couldn't see.
A notification, sitting in his field of view.
[Squad 10, now under your joint management, is available for administrative development.]
The management System was still earning its keep.
Honestly, he had half-expected the temporary nature of the assignment to put the whole thing outside the System's scope. Apparently the System had no interest in that distinction.
Temporary or not, you answer to me now.
That was a genuinely satisfying thought.
Managing two squads meant double the administrative returns. That was simple arithmetic.
And specifically Squad 10 -- with a capable, willing vice-captain already in place, and a high-potential development candidate in Hitsugaya sitting right there ready to be built up. If Hitsugaya developed the way he was capable of, the reward output would be comparable to what Gin had produced.
Matsushita Yusuke was smiling broadly enough that he had to make a minor effort to keep it from becoming embarrassing.
And the Quincy panel was still sitting at the very beginning of its development. Running two squads at this level of intensity should accelerate things on that front as well -- give the secondary account something to grow on and close the gap with the primary.
With that settled in his mind, he began thinking in longer terms. Plans took shape. Objectives lined up in rough sequence. The underlying urgency was real.
Because Isshin Shiba was already in the living world, which meant the story's clock had started. Around fifteen years, by rough estimate, before the main events began. Once Ichigo Kurosaki stepped onto the stage in earnest, the window for development closed. Aizen was not going to give him more time after that.
He had spent occasional moments in the past years feeling like the timeline was moving too slowly.
Standing here now, with the end of the long middle stretch actually visible on the horizon, something different had arrived. Something sharper. The specific quality of urgency that came from knowing the quiet period was almost over.
His strength had been growing steadily.
But when he placed it honestly against the names at the top -- Yamamoto, the Royal Guard, Yhwach -- the gap was still there.
Going into that kind of company with what he currently had was not a position he wanted to be in.
Walking out of the office, lost in thought, Matsushita Yusuke spoke without looking up.
"I might go into focused training for stretches of time going forward. If I'm out of contact, I'll need you to handle things on the squad side."
The concept wasn't unusual. It came up occasionally. Soifon understood it well enough. But that wasn't where her attention was.
"What's gotten into you? You're usually so laid-back about everything. What's with the sudden motivation?"
"Could you not make fun of me while I'm being genuine."
"Saying something pointless once in a while is good for relaxing. Nothing wrong with it."
That was fair, actually.
Matsushita Yusuke tilted his head back and looked at the sky, the sun hanging there at the edge of the afternoon, and the figures that came to mind were Yamamoto, the Royal Guard, Yhwach -- each of them a wall at a different altitude.
To survive what was coming, given where he stood, he had to reach their level.
Drifting along at the current pace wasn't going to get him there. And falling behind wasn't an option.
"Hey. Matsushita."
He blinked. "Yeah?"
Soifon rarely used his name directly. He turned.
She had her arms crossed, expression caught somewhere between thinking and reluctant, looking at him in a way that said she had something to say and wasn't entirely committed to saying it.
"I don't know what's brought all this on. But for what it's worth." She paused. "You're better than most of the useless people wandering around this place."
A beat.
"Even if every other captain in Soul Society ran into trouble, I don't think someone like you would be one of them."
It took him a few seconds to process.
"Was that you trying to encourage me just now?"
"Figure it out yourself."
Matsushita Yusuke smiled, quietly, without saying anything.
Soifon on an ordinary day ran at a specific temperature -- composed, guarded, difficult to approach. The occasional moments when she stepped off that and offered something undefended, even obliquely, even wrapped in something that sounded almost like an insult -- those moments had their own distinct flavor.
The tsundere dynamic only worked because it softened exactly like this, once in a while.
She lifted her chin slightly, looking at him sideways in a way that managed to communicate dismissal and attention at the same time, and said in a tone that came through the nose as much as the mouth:
"A nuisance like you would be the last one standing anyway. They'd save you for the very end."
"Ha."
He smiled and let it go without a comeback.
His mind had already moved ahead -- to what might be coming, and to the moment that existed somewhere in the future when everything currently concealed would have to be seen. When, in front of everyone watching, Matsushita Yusuke followed Aizen.
And this person, standing next to him right now with that look of composed disdain --
What would her face look like then?
He couldn't answer that. He turned it over for a moment, and then, on impulse, stopped walking.
"Since the moment's here -- let me ask you something." He looked at her. "If something happened that I couldn't explain, and I had to disappear without warning -- after everything settled, when it was over -- would you still trust me?"
The question landed in a different register than anything that had come before it. Something about the weight of it, or the specific phrasing, produced a brief but visible shift in Soifon's expression. A pause that was slightly too long to be ordinary.
She blinked.
"What did you just say?"
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