Gateway 44

I backhanded the man in front of me as I dodged the man trying to stab me from behind, right into the path of a wooden staff swung by a third man. I let it hit, noticing with satisfaction the dread in the man’s eyes as his weapon was reduced to splinters.

Now I finally understood why Zaraki told Yumichika to give me a new set of clothes when I was leaving. This was the third group to attack me since I arrived, and I could already feel a fourth one waiting to attack after I dealt with them.

I thought the 64th district was a shithole. I was wrong. That place had some rough edges, but it was still livable. The 80th, on the other hand? If its name wasn’t Shithole I’d personally petition the Head Captain to make it so. Not only because of the general state of the place, the violence, or even the culture of doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted, but because of the smell.

The cloying smell of deep-seated rot and death permeated every part of the district, making simply existing in its general vicinity hazardous to one's health.

And the people were relentless. I could see it in their eyes, the glee at finding out that I hadn’t killed anyone, the malice as they pounced at such ‘weakness’, the dread at being defeated, only to loop back around when they didn’t die.

But my patience had limits, and that’s what I realized Zaraki wanted. For me to let go, to kill anyone who stood in my way, not because they were a threat to me or anyone I cared about, but because leaving them alive would be annoying.

It almost worked, too. When the third group immediately attacked after I dealt with the second, my hand was halfway raised to cast something nasty their way when I realized Zaraki’s plan, prompting me to change my attack into a backhand while the others fanned out around me.

I didn’t want to kill these people, not really, I was just annoyed and lashing out. Killing them would be just as meaningless as everything I had done up until that point. I’d just be going along with what was expected of me, either from Zaraki or the people here.

Which reminded me of the time I did kill with intent. The first Death Eater was just an accident, although I fully intended to cause him harm. But the others? No hesitation, no pulling back my punches, just go in, kill, and move on. Clinical, dispassionate.

Was that who I was? Underneath it all, was I just some cold-hearted killer? Holding myself back with delusions of humanity? Or was I the weak-willed moron who went along with whatever was expected of him? Maybe a mix of both? Neither?

I shook my head, dispersing the thoughts at the same time I knocked out the last member of the fifth group to attack me. I needed time to think. Try Jinzen again to see if my Zanpakuto could help. The girls hammered the point home about my disconnect with it, so maybe that was the reason for it.

Looking around, the only people left were the ones hiding in their makeshift homes and the knocked-out thugs surrounding me, so with a shrug of my shoulders, I walked away to find somewhere I could meditate in peace.

___

Finding a secluded spot on the outskirts of the village, I sat down cross-legged on the ground and drew my Zanpakuto out, resting it atop my knees as I closed my eyes and focused.

It was a hard thing to do. The sounds of fighting from further out mixed in with the screams of the dying had a way of grabbing attention. But the worst offender was the smell. The more I focused, the more I could distinguish the smells, and it was worse than anything I could imagine.

I ignored it, focusing solely on my Zanpakuto. Each millimeter accounted for together with the whole, no detail spared. I looked, really looked, at the point in my soul where my sword and I connected, and I asked just one question.

“Who are you?”

___

“And he finally asks the correct question!” A voice in front of me sarcastically said in a British accent.

I opened my eyes. I was sitting on a marble floor, in the middle of a corridor made by huge bookcases filled with books. And in front of me was a clean-shaven white man in his 40s, with graying hair, glasses, and wearing a tweed suit.

The man had a bitter, sarcastic smile on his face, although his eyes held no emotion.

“Did I do it?” I asked, thrown off by the man’s (my Zanpakuto’s?) reception.

“Indeed,” he said, turning his back on me as he started walking, before looking back at me, still sitting on the ground, and asking, “You’re coming?”

I quickly stood up and rushed after him, falling in lockstep with his pace as we walked through the corridor.

“So, this is my inner world, huh?” I muttered, looking at the vaulted ceiling high above us, and noticed the lack of light fixtures around, even though the area was perfectly illuminated.

“Correct,” He nodded, still looking straight ahead.

“And you’re my Zanpakuto spirit,” I said, noticing how his jaw tightened as I said it.

“Indeed,” he muttered.

“So…” I dragged on the ‘o’ for a few seconds, “What’s your name?”

He stopped, slowly turning to look at me with an incredulous expression on his face, before he turned back with a snort and kept moving.

“You don’t deserve my name,” he said, his tone bitter.

“What? Why!?” I exclaimed, rushing to follow him as his pace increased.

“WHY?” He stopped and turned to me, fast, but he looked different. The tweed suit and dress shoes were replaced by a pair of boots, ripped jeans, a purple shirt, and a black leather jacket. He looked my age or a little bit older, with long, untamed black hair and a wildness in his eyes that made me take a step back.

“You ask me why I don’t give it to you? Tell me why I should!” He exclaimed, looking at me like I was a bug. “Is it so you can ‘just have it’ like the other tools in your arsenal you barely use? Just another ‘accomplishment’ handed to you on a silver platter?”

“Hey! I don’t just get things handed to me!” I screamed back.

“No?” He said, dark amusement creeping into his voice. “So tell me, when’s the last time you worked to get something you wanted?”

“I got you! I killed Odin! Janus! I’m dating Luna! I worked for all of that!”

“Oh, did you?” He laughed. “You literally got me handed to you after asking, and you still half-assed your fight with Kenpachi after that.” He took a step towards me. “Even you have doubts if Odin didn’t just let you kill him. He obviously could have finished you off at any point with his powers.” Another step. “I’ll admit, you put a little effort into killing Janus, but that was mostly because you were hyped up by your first brush with magic.” Another step, he was right in front of me, his finger pointing at my face. “And Luna!? Don’t even get me started with that clusterfuck! That relationship literally fell into your lap by accident! If it wasn’t for Xeno pushing you to go to the Yule Ball to get it started and that shit at the Depertment of Mysteries you’d be strangers by now!”

“What did you say about my relationship with Luna?” I asked, my voice sounding small and faint to my ears.

“Of course,” he sighed, his form slowly turning back to his older self. “That’d be what you focused on. I didn’t know why I expected differently.”

“What did you mean when you said we’d be ‘strangers by now’?” I pressed forcefully, my hand holding my locket. But I didn’t feel her heartbeat from it. Instead, I felt it all around us.

We looked up in unison to see the lightning start to beat too.

“Oh, no,” he muttered, looking around in fear. “It’s happening again!”

And with that, he turned and started to run, with me following close behind.

We barely made three steps before he did a sharp right turn into a crossing corridor that wasn’t there before.

He did that two more times in quick succession, too soon for us not to have hit a previous point, and we found ourselves in front of a closed wooden double door.

Rushing inside, he immediately went up a small balcony to a door glowing gold at the back of the room and started muttering incomprehensible incantations in front of it.

The room was hexagonal. The small balcony was shaped from half of the hexagon facing opposite the entrance, with a pair of stairs each lying at the end of the balcony, which also had bookshelves within. A long table with six chairs on each side sat in the middle of the room, and a counter with a door behind it at the side of the entrance I had just come in from.

On the other side of the entrance door, I did a double-take at the fully stocked bar sitting there before moving my gaze along.

There were bookcases all around the room, with a particular focus on the balcony.

“My soul is a library,” I snorted, before sobering up at the realization that it made a surprising amount of sense. “At least the bar breaks up the monotony,” I muttered.

The man’s incantations increased, his left hand extending out, and a book from one of the balcony’s bookcases flew out to it. He opened it and started reciting from it, but I still couldn’t understand any of it.

Finally, whatever spell he was casting came into effect after a dramatically punctuating word, prompting the beating to stop and the glow of the door to dim.

He slowly made his way back before slouching in one of the chairs at the center table, and with a wave of his hand, indicated that I take a seat.

“So,” I paused, trying to carefully choose my next question before giving up. “What was that?”

“That,” he sighed, waving his hand towards the bar and prompting a tumbler full of amber liquid to come flying into his hand. “Was the result of your little adventure into the Department of Mysteries.”

“I got that from the feel of Luna’s heartbeat. But what does it mean?” I waved my arms for emphasis.

“The simple answer is that I don’t know,” he said, regaining his composure and taking a sip of his drink. “The long answer is that I believe that the room in the Department of Mysteries linked both of you together much more deeply than you first thought.”

“So, that door would let me see Luna?” I asked, feeling my heartbeat speed up at the opportunity.

“Probab-” he barely started saying it, and I was already up and moving towards the door. But with a wave of his hand, I was thrown back in my chair, and I couldn’t force my way out of it.

“Probably,” he said, taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. “But I don’t think this particular situation was intended,” he waved at the library. “You have to understand, that door, that connection between you and Luna, only started existing when your inner world and I first formed. Because if it were there before, Luna’s soul would already have been taken over by yours.”

“But we already had a connection before that!” I exclaimed, pulling on my locket.

“That connection used the locket as a focus, so it wasn’t as deep,” he waved my argument off. “Now, thanks to physical matter not existing in Soul Society, the connection spread,” at my look, he explained further. “The Door you used to enter the Soul Society converted your body’s physical matter into spiritual matter, which is different from the ectoplasm body your soul would normally be back home.”

“How the fuck do you know that? I didn’t know that!” I said in exasperation.

“I live inside your soul,” he pointed out.

“Fair,” I sighed, waving him to keep going.

“As I was saying, the connection must have spread when you were converted, or when you first started using your spiritual power in earnest in your fight against Kenpachi.”

“That makes sense,” I nodded. “So, what can we do about it?”

“We? There is no ‘we’, I will keep the door sealed until you’re worthy of my name. Until then, your focus will be on achieving it,” he said with a glare.

“Now hold on a seco-” My mouth clicked shut as he made a pinching motion towards me.

“Anyway, come back soon for us to talk more about how you can learn my name,” he smirked. “For now, you have more pressing concerns.”

And with a wave of his hand, I opened my eyes back at the Rukongai, a disgustingly dirty foot heading directly towards my face.

___

A/N: And that’s that.

God, I’ve been wanting to get into this part for months. I had the name for his shikai and the layout of his inner world set for a long time.

I flip-flopped a lot on the appearance of his Zanpakuto spirit. At first, I wanted something more inhuman, but then I realized it’d make no sense within the plotline, so I scrapped it and went with this old/young wild-rebel/orderly-gentleman dichotomy.

And yeah, at first I didn’t realize it, but after I did, I decided to lean a bit into the Buffy parallels, although it’s only aesthetic.

As always, thank you for your support, and hopefully see you Thursday, but it’ll probably be Friday again.