Bleach: Awakened — Chapter 61 - A Few Odds and Ends After the Battle

"...Ah?" Ichigo blinked, sure he'd misheard. "What did you just say, old man?"

"I said." Captain-Commander Yamamoto repeated slowly. "Would you consider taking the position of Captain of the First Division and Captain-Commander of the Gotei 13?"

"...You're joking, right." Ichigo's mouth twitched. "Captain-Commander this, Captain-Commander that—I'm still a human. I only just turned sixteen not long ago."

"Naturally, not right now." Captain-Commander Yamamoto said unhurriedly. "Though I am getting on in years, serving another ten or twenty is no problem. Going by the human growth cycle, thirty is the prime of one's life."

"So. Would you consider it, Ichigo Kurosaki."

"No." Flat refusal. Ichigo crossed his arms. "I want nothing to do with it!"

"Why is that." Having already anticipated a rejection, Captain-Commander Yamamoto's voice stayed even. "There must be a reason."

"Captain-Commander is no easy post." Ichigo said, not hiding his irritation. "Don't go dumping a thankless job like that on me."

"Besides, I'm a human. I want to live out my life as one."

Over the past two days Ichigo had gotten a rough picture of how Seireitei was actually structured. At the top sat the Central 46, a body made up of individuals recognized throughout Soul Society as sages, alongside representatives of the noble houses. It was an authority above even the Gotei 13 in all matters of law and governance, one whose directives even the Captain-Commander was bound to follow in order to uphold the rules and order of Soul Society.

Then there was the Gotei 13 itself, each division carrying out its own designated duties. Outside of emergencies every division handled its own assignments, and the distribution of tasks and the final review of results all ran through the First Division.

On top of that, the captains held enormous individual authority. Under the current rules of Seireitei, moving against a captain without conclusive evidence was essentially impossible, which was precisely why Sosuke Aizen had been able to stay hidden for so long.

Factor in that certain captains had personalities that made them a genuine headache to manage, and trouble had a way of bubbling up when you least expected it...

All things considered, the role of Captain-Commander was truly not a job fit for any reasonable person. Orders from the Central 46 pressing down from above, the affairs of every division needing to be coordinated below, and in the middle, keeping all those captains in line...

Honestly, the fact that Captain-Commander Yamamoto had managed it for a full thousand years was nothing short of extraordinary. Grueling didn't begin to cover it. So when the burden was offered to him, Ichigo refused without a second thought.

"Is that so..."

Captain-Commander Yamamoto shook his head and said nothing further. What he had primarily seen in Ichigo was that transcendent power, more than enough to hold the position securely.

And from his observations over this recent period, while Ichigo did not appear to be particularly sharp mentally, he was not the reckless, dull-witted type either.

Most valuable of all: Ichigo had no entanglements within Soul Society. His father was the branch house head of the once-great but now fallen Shiba Clan, yes, but the Shiba Clan itself kept out of the affairs between noble houses. Someone like that as Captain-Commander would have been the most ideal outcome imaginable.

Many merits, and yet the person himself was unwilling. Such a thing could not be forced. It wasn't wartime, after all, it wasn't like he could simply leave a final letter and march someone off to the front, whether or not they came back be damned... Hiss.

Captain-Commander Yamamoto, silently working through all of this, suddenly stiffened. His gaze drifted to a certain wayward disciple. He had been counting on that one to take over for years now, only to be turned down just as consistently. Following that line of thought to its conclusion, whether it was Sosuke Aizen in the near future or the Quincy in the years after that, couldn't both of those situations...

"Ahem... ahem..." After a long silence, Captain-Commander Yamamoto cleared his throat twice, signaling the end of the meeting. "Then let us adjourn here. Mayuri, prepare the Senkaimon and see Ichigo Kurosaki and company back."

"Understood."

Mayuri Kurotsuchi turned and departed without ceremony, already turning over one particular question in mind, whether there was anything worth tinkering with on the Senkaimon...

"Wait just a bit! I have something I need to take care of first!" Ichigo said suddenly. "Oh, and get me some kind of transit pass."

"I want to make a trip to Rukongai."

West Rukongai.

The dirt road was the color of dry clay. The buildings on either side looked like relics from a forgotten century, worn, lopsided, held together by time and stubbornness more than anything else. Most of the residents gave Ichigo and Orihime Inoue a wide berth. Only a handful of bolder children dared peek their heads out and stare, though the adults yanked them back almost immediately.

"Hey." Ichigo stopped in the middle of the road. "We don't mean any harm. We just want to ask about someone."

Silence. Long enough that Ichigo started scratching the back of his head, an awkward grin creeping onto his face. He was just about to try again when a frail elderly figure came shuffling out, trembling with each step.

"This Soul Reaper..." the elder said slowly. "I am the elder of this area. Might I ask who it is you are looking for?"

"Do you know Kukaku Shiba?"

"!" The elder startled. "You're looking for her... is there something the matter?"

"Ah, no need to worry. I'm not here to cause trouble." Ichigo smiled. "I'm here to... hmm... you could call it looking up family."

Rukongai was divided into four main districts corresponding to the four great gates of Seireitei, East, South, West, and North, each further split into eighty smaller wards. The ranking climbed higher the closer a ward sat to Seireitei, and the territory grew larger with it.

"Even though it's the First Ward of West Rukongai, life still looks pretty rough out here."

Walking through the outskirts of West Ward One, the land opened up into something close to open grassland. Grass soft underfoot, sky wide overhead. Ichigo felt an oddly pleasant sense of just being out for a walk, the low mood that had been clinging to him since yesterday's battle lifting a little.

"It does." Orihime Inoue bounced along, clearly in high spirits. "But they seem to be doing well enough in their own way. Since they have no spiritual power they don't need to eat, so they just support each other through the days like this. It feels very peaceful, honestly."

"Well... compared to modern society it obviously doesn't hold up." Ichigo laughed. "What's that saying—once you've had the finer things, going back to simple living is hard."

"If I ended up coming to Soul Society someday, I'd push for real reforms. Bring in all kinds of things from the modern world. It would absolutely not stay like this."

"But Ichigo, didn't you say you didn't want to be Captain-Commander? Can you even carry out reforms without the title?"

"What kind of logic is that—you can only reform things if you're Captain-Commander?"

"Hmm... fair point, I suppose."

"Anyway... this has to be the place... hm..." Ichigo's mouth twitched involuntarily. "Sure enough. Just like the elder said, you really can't miss it."

Before them stood what appeared to be an ordinary single-story building. Rising behind the structure was an enormous chimney-like column, unusual, but still within the range of explainable.

The truly outrageous part was on either side of the building: a pair of stone hands, each two stories tall. Between them, stretched across the full width directly above the small house, hung an enormous banner. Red background. Black characters. Four large words.

[Kukaku Shiba]

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