Yoji turned around.
Yoruichi was still leaning in the doorway, completely at ease, and the corner of her mouth was doing something it wasn't quite managing to suppress.
She reached up and patted her stomach lightly — twice, deliberately — with the expression of someone who had just pulled off exactly what she'd planned.
"Oh? Did you lose something, Yoji?"
When did she— He hadn't felt a thing. Not the slightest disruption in the air. Her speed — has she gotten even faster than two years ago? Is this what the Flash God actually is?
His eye was twitching. He kept his voice level with considerable effort.
"Yoruichi... could you give the manuscript back?"
While he spoke, he was quietly, methodically pushing his reiatsu toward his legs.
"Manuscript? I have no idea what you're talking about." She produced the folded pages from inside her shihakushō and waved them in front of him with cheerful innocence. "I just found this lying on the ground by the door. No idea whose it is. Careless of someone."
She tilted her head, as if something had just occurred to her.
"Could this be... what you called it... the writer's dignity? The thing more important than life itself?"
She switched to a tone of stern mentorship, the kind reserved for teaching important lessons.
"Yoji. Yoji. This is your dignity as a writer! You can't just leave it lying on the ground! What if someone with bad intentions found it first — published it themselves, turned around and accused you of plagiarism? Do you understand the kind of trouble that would cause?"
She extended the pages toward him, the picture of virtuous concern.
The vein in his temple was very visible. He could feel the urge to fire off a Hadō rising from somewhere deep and primal and had to consciously step on it. Mainly because he would lose.
"I am," he said, through his teeth, "so grateful. For the rescue. Of my dignity."
He reached for the pages. His fingertips were almost there—
Her hand snapped back like she'd touched a live wire.
The gold eyes caught the last of the afternoon light, bright and entirely too pleased with themselves.
"Right~" She tapped the manuscript with one finger, drawing the syllable out. "Your dignity."
The smile went somewhere that had no business being on someone's face.
"The dignity of Soul Society's number one distinguished young nobleman... is currently in my hands."
Yoji's posture shifted. He let the stiffness go, softened his voice, tried sincerity.
"Yoruichi. Please. Could you just... give it back?"
"You really want it?"
"Yes."
"If you really want it—"
She vanished.
The air where she'd been standing was still moving when she reappeared on top of the courtyard wall — one foot on the stone edge, purple hair and captain's haori catching the wind, completely at ease at that height, looking down at him with the expression of someone who had been looking forward to this.
"Then come get it."
She held the manuscript up and gave it a small, taunting wave.
"Catch me, and I'll think about giving it back. Don't catch me — or can't catch me — and I'll let Suzumebachi and Kukaku have a read when I'm done with it."
She lowered herself into a runner's stance, gold eyes burning with something that looked a lot like genuine excitement.
Yoji moved.
Everything he'd been quietly loading into his legs detonated at once. The ground under his feet cracked. He shot toward the wall like something fired from a bow.
"Give it BACK—"
His voice carried across the Second Division rooftops and probably beyond.
"Ha! Come on then! Show me what you've learned!"
Yoruichi's laugh rang out like something metal and bright, and then she was gone — flickering across rooftops and wall edges with that particular quality of motion that made it look like the air itself was cooperating with her — and only the laughter remained, trailing behind her as she went.
"STOP RUNNING—"
Two figures crossed the Seireitei's evening sky, one chasing and one not particularly worried about being caught, moving fast enough that the fading red light barely had time to register them before they were gone.
In the courtyard, Urahara Kisuke stood alone.
He looked at the direction they'd disappeared, adjusted his hat, and smiled the smile of someone who was filing several things away for later.
"Those two," he said to no one. "Still get along so well."
His eyes had a particular quality to them just then.
He thought about the manuscript — the fraction of a second he'd had to see it before everything happened.
That was a strange piece of writing.
Yoji was running out of breath and had not meaningfully closed the gap.
He had compressed every last thread of his reiatsu into his legs and he was still watching the distance between them stay essentially constant, occasionally increasing when Yoruichi got bored of the current pace. Worse, she kept stopping completely — landing on a roof edge, crossing her arms, watching him arrive with the air of a cat that has caught a mouse and isn't in any particular hurry about the next part.
"Something wrong, Yoji?" She looked down at him as he reached her position, unhurried. "Why aren't you using that unusual acceleration technique of yours? What was it called again?"
She tapped her chin thoughtfully, then brightened.
"Oh, right — was it Sōkotsu? Geppō? One of those, wasn't it?"
She lifted one foot and demonstrated — rapid, staccato impacts against the surface beneath her, each one leaving afterimages and producing the faintest suggestion of a sonic crack.
"Using burst force to push off air or the ground — it's genuinely useful for straight-line sprints! I'll give it that." She lowered her foot and tilted her chin up with the particular ease of someone who has never needed to settle for second best. "Of course, compared to Shunpo — actually reading the reishi flow in your environment, moving with it rather than against it — there is a certain gap. In elegance, at least."
The nerve in Yoji's temple had opinions about this.
He thought, without wanting to, about the Academy — about how ordinary Shunpo had felt insufficient, how he'd spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to develop something more explosive, more vertical, how the techniques he'd come up with through sheer stubbornness had apparently been precisely interesting enough to attract exactly the kind of attention he hadn't wanted.
"Against the Flash God herself," he said, when he had enough breath to say anything, "everything else is fairly amateur, yes."