Chapter 057: The First Time They've Actually Met
Matsushita Yusuke spent a good while hunched over the bathroom sink before the dry heaving finally settled.
He straightened up, ran cold water over his face, and looked at himself in the mirror. Eyes a little sunken. Slight puffiness around the rims.
He shook his head slowly.
Staying up late. Never worth it. Two nights in a row and the evidence was already visible.
As for what had actually happened last night, there wasn't much to report.
He and Soifon had been drinking at a comfortable pace when she suddenly went alert. She covered the top of her cup and turned her head away, cheeks faintly pink.
"I'm done for tonight. That's my limit."
She swallowed once. The effect was visible.
"Men and women drinking together past a certain point leads to situations that are hard to explain afterward. So I stop here."
Then, a beat later:
"And don't sit so close. Move over."
Responsible. The kind of guest a parent would be relieved to hear about.
Not particularly surprising, though.
Between this conversation and the various smaller ones they'd had before, Matsushita Yusuke had built up a reasonable picture of how Soifon actually operated.
Work, she took seriously. No question there.
Outside of work, she had her own careful set of habits and standards. Precise about things that most people didn't think twice about.
Bad temper, yes. The volume went up when she got frustrated. But underneath all of that, the upbringing was solid. Anyone who looked past the surface would have to call it good.
And when it came to anything touching on romance, she was, apparently, straightforwardly old-fashioned about it. The conservatism wasn't a pose. It was where her line actually was.
Huh. Under all that edge, she was kind of innocent about this stuff.
Honestly a more interesting gap than expected.
For his part, Matsushita Yusuke didn't have any particular angle on it. He had some goodwill toward her at this point, nothing more. The mild frustration at the evening was purely practical: he'd been in a drinking competition with Aizen two nights ago and now couldn't finish what he'd started tonight. Inconvenient timing.
That was when Kishinoshin appeared across the room, clearly well into his own evening, waving enthusiastically.
"Matsushita-kun! Don't sit over here drinking with boring company! Come to our side, we've got a proper vat going!"
The normal Kishinoshin would never say something that tactless in public.
He was absolutely drunk.
Soifon didn't react to it. She pressed her lips together and looked the other direction, apparently deciding it wasn't worth acknowledging. Matsushita Yusuke took one look at the situation, picked up the bottle, and went over.
Much livelier over there.
He paid for it.
His last clear memory of the night was Soifon helping him walk back. He'd ended up leaning on her.
Hadn't planned on needing that kind of help. A little embarrassing.
He shook his head once more, pushed back to his bed, and lay down with his eyes closed to let his body finish catching up.
By the time he actually felt like a person again, it was somewhere around midday. He got up, went to the cafeteria and ate something, then headed out through the Academy gates.
He walked directly toward the Squad 5 grounds.
As had come up before in various conversations, each of the Gotei 13 squads had its own designated area of responsibility and its own corresponding territory inside Seireitei.
Squad 5 sat at the boundary between the commoner and noble districts, toward the northeast corner. Not an inconvenient location, exactly. Just not somewhere you'd end up by accident.
Matsushita Yusuke found the entrance, spotted the guard stationed there, and called out from a short distance before walking up.
"Sorry to bother you. I'm looking for Vice-Captain Aizen. Is he in?"
"One moment. Let me check."
The guard smiled and nodded, asked a colleague to hold the entrance, and headed back inside to pass the word along.
Squad 5 had a warmer atmosphere than he'd expected.
It was one of the topics that came up occasionally at the Academy: the general reputation and character of each squad. Squad 5 fell into the category of units that didn't have much information available about them. That tracked, given their function as a support squad. No defining specialty, not much that made them stand out. Volunteer applications were consistently low every year.
According to something Aizen had mentioned at some point, they occasionally ended up taking transfers from Squad 1, people who hadn't originally been assigned here and hadn't exactly requested it either.
A recruitment problem, basically.
Matsushita Yusuke was still turning this over when the guard came back.
"Sorry for the wait. Vice-Captain Aizen is inside. I'll take you in."
"Thank you."
The appointment had been made in advance, so the process wasn't complicated.
Past the entrance and into the interior of Squad 5, the scale opened up. The first thing he actually saw was the courtyard.
It wasn't large.
Smaller, if anything, than the private grounds at the Shihoin estate.
That gap between what a noble family occupied and what an ordinary administrative unit got by on: visible, once you were looking for it.
The whole place had a plain quality to it. Nothing elaborate on the outside, nothing elaborate on the inside. Whether that came down to budget constraints or just institutional indifference to appearances, the result was the same.
"Here we are. The office just ahead. I'll leave you here."
"Thank you very much."
Matsushita Yusuke watched the guard head back, then took a moment to straighten his collar and settle his expression.
First time at Aizen's actual workplace.
He walked up, approached the door, raised his hand to knock.
The door opened from the inside before he got there.
Both of them went quiet.
The person standing in the doorway had long bright yellow hair and a loose, unhurried look about him. First impression: slightly unfinished, like someone who hadn't quite grown into themselves yet. There was a lightness in the expression that could read as careless depending on how charitable you were feeling.
He looked Matsushita Yusuke up and down. Curious. And something else underneath it.
"Who are you?"
One question became three in rapid succession.
"You're not wearing our uniform. You're not one of ours. A student? What are you doing all the way out here?"
There was something in Matsushita Yusuke's brain that was registering faster than his mouth.
The hair. The face. The energy.
No question about it.
This was Hirako Shinji.
Current captain of Squad 5.
He'd talked about this person in unflattering terms more than a few times, in private, where no one could hear it. An actual face-to-face was a first.
So this was the man Aizen was going to put a knife in.
He opened his mouth to answer.
Another voice came from behind Hirako first.
"Captain Hirako. This is the young man I mentioned to you previously."
Aizen Sosuke stood up from behind the desk, straightened his glasses, and came forward with his usual measured composure.
"Strong academic record. Exceptional practical performance." He let it settle for a moment. "You remember?"
"Oh!" Hirako's eyes went a little brighter. "The kid who pulled off a Sokatsui?"
He was already smiling. He reached out, gave Matsushita Yusuke's shoulder a solid clap, and looked him over with something close to enthusiasm.
"What do you say, kid. Any interest in coming to work for Squad 5?"