It was one of those mornings when the sun shines through Captain Hitsugaya’s bedroom window and wakes him up—all as a result of his having forgotten to draw the curtains the previous night: a grievous mistake, and one, as Hitsugaya told himself as he got up, cursing, that must never be committed again. Alas for him, said mistake was notoriously and inexorably recurrent, and Hitsugaya was infallibly awoken in the same manner every two or three days. One may attribute this misfortune to forgetfulness occasioned by stress at work.
Even as Hitsugaya sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing the last vestiges of sleep out of his eyes, his prodigious mind resumed contemplating his work plans for the day at the point at which he had left off the night before. He made several mental notes, including one to get a couple of his unseated officers to lower the height of the power switch of the public address system in his office, since he nearly always had to stand on his chair to reach it, and also because he addressed his squad more often than the other captains did theirs.
Once satisfied that he had made sufficient plans to last him through the day without feeling the slightest hint of discomfiture or surprise at any point, Hitsugaya stood up and trudged over to the bathroom to enjoy a nice, hot bubble bath.
He sighed sonorously as he lowered himself into the welcoming blue bubbles, the moderately hot water getting rid of the fatigue in each part of his body as it was lowered into the tub.
He reached out and grabbed the rubber duck that he always placed at the edge of the bathtub.
“You know, Shiro,” he said, addressing his rubber duck, which was white instead of the yellow that one usually expects to see on rubber ducks. “I think I should keep a particularly close eye on Rangiku today. She seemed happier than usual when she left the office yesterday. I’m sure she’s up to something.”
He gave Shiro a couple of idle squeezes, absently registering the squeaks that proceeded from him (the duck), as he tried to figure out what it was that could have occasioned his lieutenant such elation the previous day. She looked even happier than when she went out with her saké buds—and that was saying something.
Hitsugaya tilted his head idly to one side, causing some of the foam that he had rubbed into hair to fall back into the water with a faint plop.
“Rangiku’s really troublesome,” Hitsugaya said. “She’s so vivacious and carefree that I’m half-afraid that my eligibility for captaincy of the Tenth Squad is going to be reconsidered someday because of her.”
He glanced at the green rubber eyes of his rubber duck.
“You understand, though, don’t you?” he said.
He sighed, dropped Shiro into the water, and watched him being pushed around by the ripples for a few silent minutes before he picked him up again, washed the foam off him, and replaced him on the edge of the tub. He proceeded to open the drain outlet of the tub and dry himself with one of his numerous, prized and immaculately white towels.
He walked over to the sink and opened the medicine cabinet. Pulling out a tube of hair gel (that Rangiku had bought him on one of her visits to the World of the living), he squeezed some of its contents out onto his palm and rubbed it into a specific portion of his hair before styling it to hang vertically over his forehead.
He smirked at his reflection. He was remotely aware of people conjecturing that he styled his hair to stand straight all the time, and the portion that hung over his face was in fact how his hair naturally was. It was the other way around, in reality. In his younger days, Hitsugaya would actually use the juice from watermelons to try and flatten his hair since the other boys in the Rukon District teased him for its spikiness. When he became the captain of the 10th Squad, he confided in his lieutenant his desire for hair gel, and ever since then, Rangiku never fails to bring back a tube of hair gel for her captain every time she visits the World of the Living. As time passed, however, Hitsugaya had learned to live with his spiky hair, and he used the gel only for styling it.
Giving his hair one last flick, Hitsugaya proceeded to put on his shihaksho, haori, tabi, sandals, and sash and Zanpakutō before leaving his quarters and heading to his office.
“Rangiku isn’t here today,” Hitsugaya observed to himself as he entered his office. “No surprise. She’s probably at her quarters, recovering from a hangover.”
He wrinkled his nose contemptuously. He had zero tolerance for alcohol, and yet his lieutenant managed to get herself drunk every other night, and arrived late for work the next day.
As Captain, Hitsugaya had made it a point to ban alcohol in his squad’s barracks. The unfortunate thing was that he had no power over the other squads, so Rangiku could skip over to her drinking buddies whenever she felt like a shot or twelve. Moreover, the other captains were disinterested in imposing restrictions on alcohol in their squads insofar as Hitsugaya had the impression that they were apathetic toward it. Especially Captain Kyoraku, who had conspicuously changed the subject to the weather, which wasn’t remotely interesting, when Hitsugaya had asked him to impose said restrictions.
He sat down at his desk and opened a drawer. He pulled out a piece of printed-paper from within it, read it, and smirked.
“It’s Friday today,” he observed smugly; “Rangiku’s going to have a mountain of paperwork to do.” His smile turned upside down. “What if she already knows and is going to skip work today?”
The contingency was a disconcerting one. Of course, Rangiku had access to everything within the office, and could easily open up a few drawers when he wasn’t around. Why didn’t he think of that before? Rangiku was exactly the kind of person to stay back at home, malingering every two or three days.
Hitsugaya shook his head. There was just no way he could deal with his insubordinate lieutenant. Rangiku’s behavior wasn’t exactly insubordinate, but Hitsugaya preferred to call it so—for lack of a better word more than anything else.
Just as Hitsugaya was about to begin his paperwork, there was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he said authoritatively.
A meek-looking messenger walked in and bowed before him.
“Yes?” Hitsugaya said, staring haughtily down at the messenger.
“Sir, the Head Captain has decided to hold a Captains’ Meeting.”
“A Captains’ Meeting?” Hitsugaya said. “At this time? I wonder why.”
“He did not confide in me, sir,” the messenger said.
“Tch,” Hitsugaya said in irritation. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“A thousand pardons, sir.”
“You may go.”
“Yes, sir,” the messenger said. “I’ll go right away, sir. I don’t want to waste any more of your time, sir. I—”
“Go!” Hitsugaya said sharply.
The messenger started, uttered a small yelp and scurried out of the room as men of his position are wont to do when they are in the presence of someone so far superior to them in rank that there is no comparison.
Hitsugaya shook his head. He felt discombobulated. Why should the Head Captain hold a meeting that early in the morning? Surely nothing bad could have happened.
He shuddered. He was secretly a person of nervous disposition, and his blood ran cold at the mere thought of trouble or violence.
Could it be... Aizen again?
He shuddered once more. The mere thought of the formerly bespectacled former Captain gave him the creeps.
He inhaled deeply.
He told himself that he shouldn’t jump to conclusions before he even knew what the matter was. And at any rate, there was no way he could find out unless he attended the Captains’ Meeting.
Hitsugaya slapped his forehead.
Attending the Captains’ Meeting was an obligation! There was no question of ‘unless he attended’ it.
He shook his head and sighed. How on earth could he subdue his excited emotions within such a short period of time? It usually took him several hours to completely overcome a bout of nervousness.
He smirked to himself.
The answer was there. He reached down into the darkness underneath his desk, and ran his fingers over the inner side, smirking when he touched a small doorknob.
The doorknob belonged to his secret cabinet—an adjunct to the desk that he had added himself, and of whose existence nobody but he was aware.
From the depths of his robes, Hitsugaya pulled out a small silver key and adroitly inserted it into the invisible keyhole.
He turned the key. The lock clicked. He smirked.
He impatiently groped for the doorknob, and yanked the secret cabinet open when he found it. He thrust his hands inside the cabinet and closed them around the object his cabinet contained.
Correction: He closed his hands around the object the cabinet was supposed to contain. Instead, his hands passed through air and hit each other.
Hitsugaya blinked in confusion.
He groped again, but even this time he felt nothing.
“That’s odd,” he said to himself.
He pushed his chair back and kneeled down on the floor in order to have better access to the cabinet. He plunged his hands deep into the darkness, and they collided quite painfully with the other side of the not-so-deep cabinet.
Hitsugaya didn’t register the pain so much as he did apprehension.
He sat back on his heels and placed a hand under his chin as he stared thoughtfully into space.
“I’d put it right there,” he mused aloud; “So why isn’t it there?”
He was immensely perplexed. He had never encountered such a situation before. Even though he had mused on the matter briefly once or twice during his idle hours, the contingency of someone finding the object seemed to remote to him that he had brushed aside the thought as though it were a speck of dust, and completely forgot about it soon afterward. As far as his knowledge was concerned, no one other than him knew of the existence of the cabinet, and even if some prying bum chanced upon it during one of their covert prying sessions, they could never open it unless they had the key, which Hitsugaya carried with him at all times. On top of that, he had sealed the cabinet using Kidō, so unless the prying bum in question happened to be a captain—which he highly doubted—they couldn’t open the cabinet.
Hitsugaya got up and sat down in his chair. His heartbeat was rapid, and his breathing heavy. The fact that he was five minutes late for a potentially significant Captains’ Meeting didn’t even register in his head. He was thinking just one thing:
Who could have stolen my jar of peppermints?
He began consuming peppermints as a means of keeping his mouth fresh all through the day. It developed into a habit when he realized that the sharp taste gave him the sort of supreme carnal pleasure that only a virgin or a kid would know. At the time with which this story deals, the habit had evolved into an addiction.
Beads of sweat rolled down Hitsugaya’s forehead, and the only thing that prevented his teeth from chattering was self-control. (He did, after all, have a vast reservoir of it.) His world seemed to have come to a veritable standstill. His brain could neither comprehend nor rationalize the situation.
In other words, he began to feel as prodigious as any autistic retard in the Rukongai, and his self-esteem plummeted to a new low. Without peppermint, he was nothing.
Hitsugaya shook his head as he finally registered consternation.
“Oh no...” he breathed. “This is terrible!”
He stood up as though he had received an electric shock, and began pacing his room like one who has just been informed that they would be killed by a notorious mass-murderer within the next twenty-four hours.
He absently went and stood in front of a mirror that his vain lieutenant had planted in his office, and started when he noticed his reflection.
And that’s when Rational Thinking returned to her throne.
“That’s not me!” Hitsugaya said, eyeing his reflection critically. His eyes were wider than he would have ever permitted them to be if he were in a better frame of mind; his lower lip was quivering like a lone grape at the end of a vine in strong wind; one of his eyebrows was twitching like the tail of a house lizard after being separated from the body.
“That is not me,” he said vehemently.
He returned to his desk.
“Think, Toshiro, think,” he told himself, slumping into the chair. “Who could have stolen your cand—mint.”
His eyes alighted for a moment on the vacant lieutenant’s desk at a far corner of the room, and it all came to him in an epiphany.
“Rangiku!” he gasped. “Of course! She’s the only person apart from me who has official access to this room.”
He groaned.
“Why didn’t I think of it before? She could have discovered my secret cabinet anytime when I wasn’t in the office. And she’s decided to skip work today because she thought I’d figure out. Damn it!”
He punched the surface of his desk with all his strength, and immediately regretted doing so. The pain, starting at his knuckles, which became numb from the impact, shot up his arm like a bolt of lightning and made him dizzy.
He winced as he gingerly touched his sore knuckles in a futile attempt at alleviating the pain.
He opened the drawer of his desk to check if he had any painkillers (he was a staunch believer in first aid), and his eyes fell on a pocket watch and widened. Unless the time the watch showed was wrong, Hitsugaya was twenty-seven minutes late for the Captains’ Meeting.
“Oh, damn!” he cursed, getting up so abruptly that his chair fell backward with a loud thud.
He dashed out of his office, wincing as his foot collided with one of the couch’s wooden legs, but not slowing down.
In exactly three minutes, Hitsugaya had reached Squad 1’s barracks and flung wide the doors of the Head Captain’s room.
He walked in, panting as though he’d run a marathon.
“I’m really sorry, Head Captain, I—”
“You have some explaining to do, Tenth Squad Captain,” Yamamoto said. His manner was as austere as ever, but to Hitsugaya, it seemed particularly menacing that day.
“Yes, sir. I can explain—”
“I should like to hear your explanation.”
“Yes, sir. I was—”
“Well?”
“Sir, I was in my—”
“Where is your explanation?”
“Sir, if you could kindly let me—”
“I can’t hear it.”
“Sir,” Hitsugaya said forcefully. “There has been a theft at my office.”
Yamamoto’s eyes widened.
“A theft?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was it a very serious theft?”
“Quite.”
“So serious that you were held up because of it for half an hour? And you did not even send notice to us?”
Hitsugaya opened his mouth, but shut it quickly when he realized that Yamamoto had pushed him into a very tight corner. He couldn’t tell him the truth—in front of all the other captains—that the reason he arrived late for the meeting was that he couldn’t find a jar of peppermints. He could not compromise his self-respect like that; no way. Nor could he achieve sufficient verisimilitude with any of the lies that he came up with. Yup. The corner he was pushed into was very tight indeed.
Kyoraku cleared his throat, and all eyes were on him. He straightened his hat in an important-looking way and smiled slyly.
“But Old Man Yama,” he said. He looked as though he could burst into laughter at any moment. “How would you know if he didn’t send notice? You arrived only five minutes ago.”
Yamamoto shuffled his feet unconsciously. He opened his mouth and grunted something incoherent.
“Well, I...”
Then he banged the ground with his stick.
“Captain Kyoraku, I will not stand for any of this nonsense. Show some respect to your superiors.”
Kyoraku smiled.
“I’m sorry, Old Man Yama,” he said. “I was just saying that Young Toshiro here did send us a message saying that he would be arriving a little late for the meeting because of a theft in his office.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” Yamamoto said. He stared stupidly at Kyoraku, and then at Hitsugaya.
He cleared his throat.
“Captain Hitsugaya,” he said weakly, “you may fall in line so that the meeting may begin. And just out of curiosity, what was it that was stolen?”
“Oh,” Hitsugaya said as he went and stood in between Captains Kyoraku and Kurotsuchi, the latter grudgingly making way for him. He was in the process of thanking Kyoraku for his help when the Head Captain asked him the question.
“Nothing, really,” he answered guardedly. “It was an article of immense, er, sentimental value.”
“I see.” That was Byakuya. He rarely spoke during the meetings, but when he did, he spoke smoothly—like he had a history of talking.
He pointed at the scarf he was wearing.
“Similar, I fancy, to this,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hitsugaya said out of politeness.
“Although,” Byakuya went on, “the object you are referring to could probably not measure up to a quarter of my scarf’s worth.” There was more than just a hint of pride in his tone.
“I guess not,” Hitsugaya said. He swallowed mechanically and refrained from making further comment, since doing so could greatly offend the noble Kuchiki’s noble pride.
“But are you sure it was stolen? That’s the real question,” Soifon said, stepping forward in order to speak to Hitsugaya face to face.
“I’m sure,” Hitsugaya said.
“And how is it that you’re sure?”
“Well,” Hitsugaya said, weighing the question. He didn’t know how much he could reveal without compromising his social respect. Eventually, he answered, “There’s this... secret cabinet in my office, of whose existence only I’m aware. I carry the key with me at all times, and I’ve also sealed the cabinet with Kidō.”
“I see,” Soifon said. “Then this object of yours must have been extremely valuable.”
“You have no idea,” Hitsugaya said.
“And then what happened?”
“Huh?”
“How did you find out that it was gone?” Soifon said irritably.
“Well,” Hitsugaya said, “I discovered that it was gone only a while ago, actually. When I opened the cabinet, I saw that it was empty.”
“When do you think it could have disappeared?”
Hitsugaya raised an eyebrow. The Commander of the Stealth Force seemed awfully inquisitive that day.
Nevertheless, he answered, “I’d say yesterday evening.”
“And how do you know it did not disappear earlier?”
Hitsugaya flushed.
“I open the cabinet every morning,” he mumbled.
“Ah,” Ukitake said, beaming at Hitsugaya in a fatherly fashion. “You like to make sure that your possessions are safe, is it? Being careful is very good.”
“Ukitake, if you could allow me...” Soifon said through gritted teeth.
“Certainly, certainly,” Ukitake said. “Carry on.”
Soifon nodded.
“So it was there when you’d opened your cabinet yesterday morning?”
“Obviously,” Hitsugaya said, wondering why anyone would ask a question that stupid when it had already been established that he suspected that the theft had occurred in the evening of the previous day.
Soifon flushed.
“Never mind that, then,” she said hastily. “So you’re absolutely convinced that it was a theft?”
Hitsugaya nodded.
“Do you have any suspicions?”
Hitsugaya wondered if he should tell her that he suspected his lieutenant. After all, one usually expects the relation between a captain and their lieutenant to be harmonious. And the Head Captain would definitely castigate him for suspecting his immediate subordinate—someone he was expected to trust with his life.
“Yes,” Hitsugaya answered when he decided that a truthful answer was what the situation called for. “I suspect my lieutenant.”
Most of the captains present in the room gasped, and began whispering among themselves as if Hitsugaya had admitted to perpetrating a most terrible crime.
Yamamoto hit the ground with his stick to restore silence in the room.
“Why is it,” he said, “that you suspect your lieutenant, Captain Hitsugaya?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Kyoraku said before Hitsugaya could answer. “She’s the only person other than him who has access to the office.”
“Shunsui, I wish you would stop interrupting,” Unohana scolded mildly.
“Moreover,” Hitsugaya said, “she hasn’t shown up for work today.”
Soifon nodded.
“Hm. Very suspicious indeed.”
Hitsugaya nodded, too, since he didn’t want to give Soifon the impression of being dumb.
“So she had the means,” Soifon said thoughtfully, “but what could have been her motive?”
“Maybe she just wanted to annoy me,” Hitsugaya suggested. “She always annoys me.”
Soifon cast Hitsugaya a reproachful look.
“Please. Grow up! That’s not nearly a strong enough motive.”
Hitsugaya flushed in embarrassment and muttered something about the motive being strong enough for the likes of Rangiku, but Soifon paid him no attention.
“I’ll have to think the matter through and perform some investigations before I conclude anything,” Soifon said, turning to the Head Captain, who nodded.
“Thank you, Captain Soifon,” Hitsugaya said.
“It’s all right,” Soifon said. She was very fond of detective stories. She read every one of the Agatha Christie books that Yoruichi sent her during the latter’s exile in the World of the Living. Of course, Soifon didn’t know it was Yoruichi at the time: she thought it was some secret admirer of hers, or a member of the Stealth Force who was posted in the World of the Living. In any case, she devoured all the books, and every time she finished one, she made a vow to herself to solve a real mystery someday. This was the day.
Yamamoto let out a grunt to attract everyone’s attention.
“This meeting is now dismissed. Captain Hitsugaya, Captain Soifon will help you on your investigations.”
The captains filed out of the Head Captain’s room.
“Oh wait!” Yamamoto said when realization dawned on him. “I forgot to talk about the real reason for my summoning the meeting!”
He made to bang his stick on the ground again in frustration, but this time, it made contact with his foot.
Yamamoto bit his lip to suppress a scream.
When he returned to his office, Hitsugaya saw Rangiku lying back on the couch and munching on an apple.
“Rangiku!” he said.
Rangiku turned to him.
“Oh, hi there, Captain!” she said, waving, but not getting up from the couch. “I’m a little late today.”
“That you are,” Hitsugaya said. “Anyway—”
“You won’t believe how crowded it was at the Store. Sheesh! I couldn’t even buy a lipstick without standing in line for an hour.”
“Oh?” Hitsugaya said unconcernedly. “Anyway, Rangiku, I need to ask you something. What were you doing here yesterday evening?”
Rangiku brought the apple to her lips, but stopped abruptly, and Hitsugaya smirked inwardly.
“W-what I was doing?” she stammered. “Nothing! No, of course. Nothing at all. Why should I have been doing anything? I was... going home, of course. Didn’t stay back late. Not a minute late.”
“I see,” Hitsugaya said. “Then it was definitely you.”
“W-what?”
“Nothing,” Hitsugaya said as he walked over to the desk.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a large stack of paper.
“You have a lot of paperwork today,” he said, rolling the words in his mouth. “I suggest you get started right now by delivering these reports to Squad 9.”
“On the double,” Rangiku said, tossing her apple core in the direction of the trashcan. It missed it by several feet and landed in one of Hitsugaya’s Golden Cups of Efficiency.
Hitsugaya suppressed a yelp.
“And after that?” Rangiku said, gathering all the reports into her arms.
“After that,” Hitsugaya said slowly, “I’ll tell you what to do.”
Rangiku nodded and left the office quickly.
Hitsugaya sat back in his chair.
“Triumph,” he said smugly.
Even as Hitsugaya sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing the last vestiges of sleep out of his eyes, his prodigious mind resumed contemplating his work plans for the day at the point at which he had left off the night before. He made several mental notes, including one to get a couple of his unseated officers to lower the height of the power switch of the public address system in his office, since he nearly always had to stand on his chair to reach it, and also because he addressed his squad more often than the other captains did theirs.
Once satisfied that he had made sufficient plans to last him through the day without feeling the slightest hint of discomfiture or surprise at any point, Hitsugaya stood up and trudged over to the bathroom to enjoy a nice, hot bubble bath.
He sighed sonorously as he lowered himself into the welcoming blue bubbles, the moderately hot water getting rid of the fatigue in each part of his body as it was lowered into the tub.
He reached out and grabbed the rubber duck that he always placed at the edge of the bathtub.
“You know, Shiro,” he said, addressing his rubber duck, which was white instead of the yellow that one usually expects to see on rubber ducks. “I think I should keep a particularly close eye on Rangiku today. She seemed happier than usual when she left the office yesterday. I’m sure she’s up to something.”
He gave Shiro a couple of idle squeezes, absently registering the squeaks that proceeded from him (the duck), as he tried to figure out what it was that could have occasioned his lieutenant such elation the previous day. She looked even happier than when she went out with her saké buds—and that was saying something.
Hitsugaya tilted his head idly to one side, causing some of the foam that he had rubbed into hair to fall back into the water with a faint plop.
“Rangiku’s really troublesome,” Hitsugaya said. “She’s so vivacious and carefree that I’m half-afraid that my eligibility for captaincy of the Tenth Squad is going to be reconsidered someday because of her.”
He glanced at the green rubber eyes of his rubber duck.
“You understand, though, don’t you?” he said.
He sighed, dropped Shiro into the water, and watched him being pushed around by the ripples for a few silent minutes before he picked him up again, washed the foam off him, and replaced him on the edge of the tub. He proceeded to open the drain outlet of the tub and dry himself with one of his numerous, prized and immaculately white towels.
He walked over to the sink and opened the medicine cabinet. Pulling out a tube of hair gel (that Rangiku had bought him on one of her visits to the World of the living), he squeezed some of its contents out onto his palm and rubbed it into a specific portion of his hair before styling it to hang vertically over his forehead.
He smirked at his reflection. He was remotely aware of people conjecturing that he styled his hair to stand straight all the time, and the portion that hung over his face was in fact how his hair naturally was. It was the other way around, in reality. In his younger days, Hitsugaya would actually use the juice from watermelons to try and flatten his hair since the other boys in the Rukon District teased him for its spikiness. When he became the captain of the 10th Squad, he confided in his lieutenant his desire for hair gel, and ever since then, Rangiku never fails to bring back a tube of hair gel for her captain every time she visits the World of the Living. As time passed, however, Hitsugaya had learned to live with his spiky hair, and he used the gel only for styling it.
Giving his hair one last flick, Hitsugaya proceeded to put on his shihaksho, haori, tabi, sandals, and sash and Zanpakutō before leaving his quarters and heading to his office.
*
“Rangiku isn’t here today,” Hitsugaya observed to himself as he entered his office. “No surprise. She’s probably at her quarters, recovering from a hangover.”
He wrinkled his nose contemptuously. He had zero tolerance for alcohol, and yet his lieutenant managed to get herself drunk every other night, and arrived late for work the next day.
As Captain, Hitsugaya had made it a point to ban alcohol in his squad’s barracks. The unfortunate thing was that he had no power over the other squads, so Rangiku could skip over to her drinking buddies whenever she felt like a shot or twelve. Moreover, the other captains were disinterested in imposing restrictions on alcohol in their squads insofar as Hitsugaya had the impression that they were apathetic toward it. Especially Captain Kyoraku, who had conspicuously changed the subject to the weather, which wasn’t remotely interesting, when Hitsugaya had asked him to impose said restrictions.
He sat down at his desk and opened a drawer. He pulled out a piece of printed-paper from within it, read it, and smirked.
“It’s Friday today,” he observed smugly; “Rangiku’s going to have a mountain of paperwork to do.” His smile turned upside down. “What if she already knows and is going to skip work today?”
The contingency was a disconcerting one. Of course, Rangiku had access to everything within the office, and could easily open up a few drawers when he wasn’t around. Why didn’t he think of that before? Rangiku was exactly the kind of person to stay back at home, malingering every two or three days.
Hitsugaya shook his head. There was just no way he could deal with his insubordinate lieutenant. Rangiku’s behavior wasn’t exactly insubordinate, but Hitsugaya preferred to call it so—for lack of a better word more than anything else.
Just as Hitsugaya was about to begin his paperwork, there was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he said authoritatively.
A meek-looking messenger walked in and bowed before him.
“Yes?” Hitsugaya said, staring haughtily down at the messenger.
“Sir, the Head Captain has decided to hold a Captains’ Meeting.”
“A Captains’ Meeting?” Hitsugaya said. “At this time? I wonder why.”
“He did not confide in me, sir,” the messenger said.
“Tch,” Hitsugaya said in irritation. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“A thousand pardons, sir.”
“You may go.”
“Yes, sir,” the messenger said. “I’ll go right away, sir. I don’t want to waste any more of your time, sir. I—”
“Go!” Hitsugaya said sharply.
The messenger started, uttered a small yelp and scurried out of the room as men of his position are wont to do when they are in the presence of someone so far superior to them in rank that there is no comparison.
Hitsugaya shook his head. He felt discombobulated. Why should the Head Captain hold a meeting that early in the morning? Surely nothing bad could have happened.
He shuddered. He was secretly a person of nervous disposition, and his blood ran cold at the mere thought of trouble or violence.
Could it be... Aizen again?
He shuddered once more. The mere thought of the formerly bespectacled former Captain gave him the creeps.
He inhaled deeply.
He told himself that he shouldn’t jump to conclusions before he even knew what the matter was. And at any rate, there was no way he could find out unless he attended the Captains’ Meeting.
Hitsugaya slapped his forehead.
Attending the Captains’ Meeting was an obligation! There was no question of ‘unless he attended’ it.
He shook his head and sighed. How on earth could he subdue his excited emotions within such a short period of time? It usually took him several hours to completely overcome a bout of nervousness.
He smirked to himself.
The answer was there. He reached down into the darkness underneath his desk, and ran his fingers over the inner side, smirking when he touched a small doorknob.
The doorknob belonged to his secret cabinet—an adjunct to the desk that he had added himself, and of whose existence nobody but he was aware.
From the depths of his robes, Hitsugaya pulled out a small silver key and adroitly inserted it into the invisible keyhole.
He turned the key. The lock clicked. He smirked.
He impatiently groped for the doorknob, and yanked the secret cabinet open when he found it. He thrust his hands inside the cabinet and closed them around the object his cabinet contained.
Correction: He closed his hands around the object the cabinet was supposed to contain. Instead, his hands passed through air and hit each other.
Hitsugaya blinked in confusion.
He groped again, but even this time he felt nothing.
“That’s odd,” he said to himself.
He pushed his chair back and kneeled down on the floor in order to have better access to the cabinet. He plunged his hands deep into the darkness, and they collided quite painfully with the other side of the not-so-deep cabinet.
Hitsugaya didn’t register the pain so much as he did apprehension.
He sat back on his heels and placed a hand under his chin as he stared thoughtfully into space.
“I’d put it right there,” he mused aloud; “So why isn’t it there?”
He was immensely perplexed. He had never encountered such a situation before. Even though he had mused on the matter briefly once or twice during his idle hours, the contingency of someone finding the object seemed to remote to him that he had brushed aside the thought as though it were a speck of dust, and completely forgot about it soon afterward. As far as his knowledge was concerned, no one other than him knew of the existence of the cabinet, and even if some prying bum chanced upon it during one of their covert prying sessions, they could never open it unless they had the key, which Hitsugaya carried with him at all times. On top of that, he had sealed the cabinet using Kidō, so unless the prying bum in question happened to be a captain—which he highly doubted—they couldn’t open the cabinet.
Hitsugaya got up and sat down in his chair. His heartbeat was rapid, and his breathing heavy. The fact that he was five minutes late for a potentially significant Captains’ Meeting didn’t even register in his head. He was thinking just one thing:
Who could have stolen my jar of peppermints?
He began consuming peppermints as a means of keeping his mouth fresh all through the day. It developed into a habit when he realized that the sharp taste gave him the sort of supreme carnal pleasure that only a virgin or a kid would know. At the time with which this story deals, the habit had evolved into an addiction.
Beads of sweat rolled down Hitsugaya’s forehead, and the only thing that prevented his teeth from chattering was self-control. (He did, after all, have a vast reservoir of it.) His world seemed to have come to a veritable standstill. His brain could neither comprehend nor rationalize the situation.
In other words, he began to feel as prodigious as any autistic retard in the Rukongai, and his self-esteem plummeted to a new low. Without peppermint, he was nothing.
Hitsugaya shook his head as he finally registered consternation.
“Oh no...” he breathed. “This is terrible!”
He stood up as though he had received an electric shock, and began pacing his room like one who has just been informed that they would be killed by a notorious mass-murderer within the next twenty-four hours.
He absently went and stood in front of a mirror that his vain lieutenant had planted in his office, and started when he noticed his reflection.
And that’s when Rational Thinking returned to her throne.
“That’s not me!” Hitsugaya said, eyeing his reflection critically. His eyes were wider than he would have ever permitted them to be if he were in a better frame of mind; his lower lip was quivering like a lone grape at the end of a vine in strong wind; one of his eyebrows was twitching like the tail of a house lizard after being separated from the body.
“That is not me,” he said vehemently.
He returned to his desk.
“Think, Toshiro, think,” he told himself, slumping into the chair. “Who could have stolen your cand—mint.”
His eyes alighted for a moment on the vacant lieutenant’s desk at a far corner of the room, and it all came to him in an epiphany.
“Rangiku!” he gasped. “Of course! She’s the only person apart from me who has official access to this room.”
He groaned.
“Why didn’t I think of it before? She could have discovered my secret cabinet anytime when I wasn’t in the office. And she’s decided to skip work today because she thought I’d figure out. Damn it!”
He punched the surface of his desk with all his strength, and immediately regretted doing so. The pain, starting at his knuckles, which became numb from the impact, shot up his arm like a bolt of lightning and made him dizzy.
He winced as he gingerly touched his sore knuckles in a futile attempt at alleviating the pain.
He opened the drawer of his desk to check if he had any painkillers (he was a staunch believer in first aid), and his eyes fell on a pocket watch and widened. Unless the time the watch showed was wrong, Hitsugaya was twenty-seven minutes late for the Captains’ Meeting.
“Oh, damn!” he cursed, getting up so abruptly that his chair fell backward with a loud thud.
He dashed out of his office, wincing as his foot collided with one of the couch’s wooden legs, but not slowing down.
*
In exactly three minutes, Hitsugaya had reached Squad 1’s barracks and flung wide the doors of the Head Captain’s room.
He walked in, panting as though he’d run a marathon.
“I’m really sorry, Head Captain, I—”
“You have some explaining to do, Tenth Squad Captain,” Yamamoto said. His manner was as austere as ever, but to Hitsugaya, it seemed particularly menacing that day.
“Yes, sir. I can explain—”
“I should like to hear your explanation.”
“Yes, sir. I was—”
“Well?”
“Sir, I was in my—”
“Where is your explanation?”
“Sir, if you could kindly let me—”
“I can’t hear it.”
“Sir,” Hitsugaya said forcefully. “There has been a theft at my office.”
Yamamoto’s eyes widened.
“A theft?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was it a very serious theft?”
“Quite.”
“So serious that you were held up because of it for half an hour? And you did not even send notice to us?”
Hitsugaya opened his mouth, but shut it quickly when he realized that Yamamoto had pushed him into a very tight corner. He couldn’t tell him the truth—in front of all the other captains—that the reason he arrived late for the meeting was that he couldn’t find a jar of peppermints. He could not compromise his self-respect like that; no way. Nor could he achieve sufficient verisimilitude with any of the lies that he came up with. Yup. The corner he was pushed into was very tight indeed.
Kyoraku cleared his throat, and all eyes were on him. He straightened his hat in an important-looking way and smiled slyly.
“But Old Man Yama,” he said. He looked as though he could burst into laughter at any moment. “How would you know if he didn’t send notice? You arrived only five minutes ago.”
Yamamoto shuffled his feet unconsciously. He opened his mouth and grunted something incoherent.
“Well, I...”
Then he banged the ground with his stick.
“Captain Kyoraku, I will not stand for any of this nonsense. Show some respect to your superiors.”
Kyoraku smiled.
“I’m sorry, Old Man Yama,” he said. “I was just saying that Young Toshiro here did send us a message saying that he would be arriving a little late for the meeting because of a theft in his office.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” Yamamoto said. He stared stupidly at Kyoraku, and then at Hitsugaya.
He cleared his throat.
“Captain Hitsugaya,” he said weakly, “you may fall in line so that the meeting may begin. And just out of curiosity, what was it that was stolen?”
“Oh,” Hitsugaya said as he went and stood in between Captains Kyoraku and Kurotsuchi, the latter grudgingly making way for him. He was in the process of thanking Kyoraku for his help when the Head Captain asked him the question.
“Nothing, really,” he answered guardedly. “It was an article of immense, er, sentimental value.”
“I see.” That was Byakuya. He rarely spoke during the meetings, but when he did, he spoke smoothly—like he had a history of talking.
He pointed at the scarf he was wearing.
“Similar, I fancy, to this,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hitsugaya said out of politeness.
“Although,” Byakuya went on, “the object you are referring to could probably not measure up to a quarter of my scarf’s worth.” There was more than just a hint of pride in his tone.
“I guess not,” Hitsugaya said. He swallowed mechanically and refrained from making further comment, since doing so could greatly offend the noble Kuchiki’s noble pride.
“But are you sure it was stolen? That’s the real question,” Soifon said, stepping forward in order to speak to Hitsugaya face to face.
“I’m sure,” Hitsugaya said.
“And how is it that you’re sure?”
“Well,” Hitsugaya said, weighing the question. He didn’t know how much he could reveal without compromising his social respect. Eventually, he answered, “There’s this... secret cabinet in my office, of whose existence only I’m aware. I carry the key with me at all times, and I’ve also sealed the cabinet with Kidō.”
“I see,” Soifon said. “Then this object of yours must have been extremely valuable.”
“You have no idea,” Hitsugaya said.
“And then what happened?”
“Huh?”
“How did you find out that it was gone?” Soifon said irritably.
“Well,” Hitsugaya said, “I discovered that it was gone only a while ago, actually. When I opened the cabinet, I saw that it was empty.”
“When do you think it could have disappeared?”
Hitsugaya raised an eyebrow. The Commander of the Stealth Force seemed awfully inquisitive that day.
Nevertheless, he answered, “I’d say yesterday evening.”
“And how do you know it did not disappear earlier?”
Hitsugaya flushed.
“I open the cabinet every morning,” he mumbled.
“Ah,” Ukitake said, beaming at Hitsugaya in a fatherly fashion. “You like to make sure that your possessions are safe, is it? Being careful is very good.”
“Ukitake, if you could allow me...” Soifon said through gritted teeth.
“Certainly, certainly,” Ukitake said. “Carry on.”
Soifon nodded.
“So it was there when you’d opened your cabinet yesterday morning?”
“Obviously,” Hitsugaya said, wondering why anyone would ask a question that stupid when it had already been established that he suspected that the theft had occurred in the evening of the previous day.
Soifon flushed.
“Never mind that, then,” she said hastily. “So you’re absolutely convinced that it was a theft?”
Hitsugaya nodded.
“Do you have any suspicions?”
Hitsugaya wondered if he should tell her that he suspected his lieutenant. After all, one usually expects the relation between a captain and their lieutenant to be harmonious. And the Head Captain would definitely castigate him for suspecting his immediate subordinate—someone he was expected to trust with his life.
“Yes,” Hitsugaya answered when he decided that a truthful answer was what the situation called for. “I suspect my lieutenant.”
Most of the captains present in the room gasped, and began whispering among themselves as if Hitsugaya had admitted to perpetrating a most terrible crime.
Yamamoto hit the ground with his stick to restore silence in the room.
“Why is it,” he said, “that you suspect your lieutenant, Captain Hitsugaya?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Kyoraku said before Hitsugaya could answer. “She’s the only person other than him who has access to the office.”
“Shunsui, I wish you would stop interrupting,” Unohana scolded mildly.
“Moreover,” Hitsugaya said, “she hasn’t shown up for work today.”
Soifon nodded.
“Hm. Very suspicious indeed.”
Hitsugaya nodded, too, since he didn’t want to give Soifon the impression of being dumb.
“So she had the means,” Soifon said thoughtfully, “but what could have been her motive?”
“Maybe she just wanted to annoy me,” Hitsugaya suggested. “She always annoys me.”
Soifon cast Hitsugaya a reproachful look.
“Please. Grow up! That’s not nearly a strong enough motive.”
Hitsugaya flushed in embarrassment and muttered something about the motive being strong enough for the likes of Rangiku, but Soifon paid him no attention.
“I’ll have to think the matter through and perform some investigations before I conclude anything,” Soifon said, turning to the Head Captain, who nodded.
“Thank you, Captain Soifon,” Hitsugaya said.
“It’s all right,” Soifon said. She was very fond of detective stories. She read every one of the Agatha Christie books that Yoruichi sent her during the latter’s exile in the World of the Living. Of course, Soifon didn’t know it was Yoruichi at the time: she thought it was some secret admirer of hers, or a member of the Stealth Force who was posted in the World of the Living. In any case, she devoured all the books, and every time she finished one, she made a vow to herself to solve a real mystery someday. This was the day.
Yamamoto let out a grunt to attract everyone’s attention.
“This meeting is now dismissed. Captain Hitsugaya, Captain Soifon will help you on your investigations.”
The captains filed out of the Head Captain’s room.
“Oh wait!” Yamamoto said when realization dawned on him. “I forgot to talk about the real reason for my summoning the meeting!”
He made to bang his stick on the ground again in frustration, but this time, it made contact with his foot.
Yamamoto bit his lip to suppress a scream.
*
When he returned to his office, Hitsugaya saw Rangiku lying back on the couch and munching on an apple.
“Rangiku!” he said.
Rangiku turned to him.
“Oh, hi there, Captain!” she said, waving, but not getting up from the couch. “I’m a little late today.”
“That you are,” Hitsugaya said. “Anyway—”
“You won’t believe how crowded it was at the Store. Sheesh! I couldn’t even buy a lipstick without standing in line for an hour.”
“Oh?” Hitsugaya said unconcernedly. “Anyway, Rangiku, I need to ask you something. What were you doing here yesterday evening?”
Rangiku brought the apple to her lips, but stopped abruptly, and Hitsugaya smirked inwardly.
“W-what I was doing?” she stammered. “Nothing! No, of course. Nothing at all. Why should I have been doing anything? I was... going home, of course. Didn’t stay back late. Not a minute late.”
“I see,” Hitsugaya said. “Then it was definitely you.”
“W-what?”
“Nothing,” Hitsugaya said as he walked over to the desk.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a large stack of paper.
“You have a lot of paperwork today,” he said, rolling the words in his mouth. “I suggest you get started right now by delivering these reports to Squad 9.”
“On the double,” Rangiku said, tossing her apple core in the direction of the trashcan. It missed it by several feet and landed in one of Hitsugaya’s Golden Cups of Efficiency.
Hitsugaya suppressed a yelp.
“And after that?” Rangiku said, gathering all the reports into her arms.
“After that,” Hitsugaya said slowly, “I’ll tell you what to do.”
Rangiku nodded and left the office quickly.
Hitsugaya sat back in his chair.
“Triumph,” he said smugly.
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