Just In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time [Closed/Nao]

They were going to pay for what they did to Zenji. The last thing Nao wanted to do was go back to Earth after her business with Anatoly, but someone in the know had to do the right thing with the Quincy. Zenji would have sooner executed them in the street, and for all she knew their co-conspirator Watari might try to befriend them in some shortsighted play for more power and control. Of the three of them, Nao was the only one with the patience or foresight to play the long game.

Patience had been her strong suit throughout her entire time in the Gotei. Nearly a century spent in an obscure office in First had taught her the virtue of keeping her head down. Decades of hiding her secret love for Tetsuya Akimoto had trained her when to watch and wait. Her recent surge to Third Seat of First had been the most important lesson, though. Nao had learned when to strike.

She ought to have done something about the Hollow. It pained her to watch it, but creatures like the Quincy needed baiting, and the snake she’d spotted would serve wonderfully. It was newly transformed, from what she could tell. A weak energy emanated from it. If souls had to be sacrificed, if she had to violate her vows, best to keep that number low.

She had watched it fail in its hunts for hours when it finally stumbled upon the school. She nearly interceded when it took off after the boy. It was different when it had been going after the spirits of fully grown men and women, but a child? Nao had to draw the line somewhere. She’d drawn Murat and prepared to call out to him when her true target appeared.

Casually tapping the child spirit on the forehead to ease its passing, she walked down the alleyway quietly, staring down the man in front of her. He seemed cultured, refined, intelligent. That would make him dangerous, but it would also make him more valuable than the dumb meat head Zenji had run into

”Quincy!” she called out as she put her blade to the side in as non-threatening a stance as she could without sheathing it, ”I don’t want to have to hurt you.” She was honest. She didn’t want to hurt him. She wanted to learn from him. If someone other than her had to hurt him to allow that knowledge to flow, it would be a necessary sacrifice, just like the souls he’d carelessly obliterated.

”I don’t want any trouble either,” she assured him as she took a cautious step forward, ”For you or for your race, but these are troubling times, Quincy, troubling times indeed.” Her nerves were running at a fever pitch beneath the surface, making her glad for the distance between them. Were they closer, he’d no doubt pick up on the light shaking of her hand, the depths of breaths she was taking to try and calm herself, or possibly even feel the agitation swelling in her aura.

”Surely you have heard by now how our people have resumed their struggles. A short while ago, a close personal friend and subordinate of mine ran into two of your race. They severed his hand and, in return, he blasted them to pieces,” she recalled, her blade hand twitching more perceptibly than before. She had been terrified for Zenji, especially given his encounter with Anatoly. He was lucky to be alive. If she hadn’t shown up when she did, Nao knew the odds at which he would have reentered the cycle these Quincy tried to destroy.

”His wounds were quite severe, and the two Quincy who he killed no doubt suffered greatly before they passed into the cycle. I don’t want any more suffering like that to have to happen for either your people or mine. There has been enough death and war, but I think you might be able to help with that, if only you’d be willing to come with me freely,” she offered, outstretching her free arm in a gesture of goodwill.

This would all be so much easier if he said yes and came along peacefully.

Nao shook her head and, against her better judgment, sheathed her blade. She continued her walk forward, arms slightly outstretched to show she wasn’t hiding anything. ”Look, I’ve only been a Shinigami for 8 decades. I didn’t take part in killing any of your ancestors and, if possible, I’d like to find a way to protect the cycle without shedding any more unneeded blood.”

Pausing slightly to assess his retreat, she felt a pang of regret for not having taken the easy way out. His cooperation wasn’t essential. If anything, Zenji was going to berate her for trying to bring one in without cutting him up some, but she had an empathy that he lacked. Yes, the Quincy were monsters, but they weren’t mindless. Perhaps, if they could be stripped of their powers, they could serve as liaisons in the world of the living. Subservient, yes, but they would still be alive, and wasn’t that what mortals prized above all else?

”I could have easily knocked you unconscious, bound you, and let you wake up in a cell somewhere buried underground. I didn’t do that, Quincy, and do you know why?” she asked rhetorically. ”I didn’t do that because I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes that led us to this point. I don’t want some clerk to be reading over my reports another thousand years from now in the early nights of another purge and asking why we didn't try something better.”

Steeping her fingers in thought and bringing them to her lips, she adopted the accommodating demeanor and tone she’d been trying to break out of since assuming the Third Seat. It felt weak, but it also felt comforting to her, and she’d been able to get results with it in the past. She wasn’t about to bow to him, but she could find ways to make this less painful to hopefully ease him along the path she wanted. ”What can I do for you to make this offer more appealing? I am third in line in command in our First Division, seated just below the Lieutenant of the Captain Commander. If there’s any assurance I can give, I’m sure we can work something out. I’d be happy to station a Shinigami or two in the area if you are concerned about leaving it unguarded in your time away.”

She’d tried, nobody could fault her for that. She really hadn’t wanted to need to stoop to the barbaric ways of the Fifth, but he was leaving her with no option. If this man was going to be so ignorant as to throw her overly kind carrot aside, then he would need the stick. She could only shake her head at his decision as he turned and walked.

”Murat, Inin-jō,“ she said with exasperation dripping from her tongue as she pulled her blade from its sheath with a flourish, a brief sparkle of light illuminating its transformation into its quill form. She did not want to have to use it on the man, but he just didn’t seem to be able to understand the gravity of the situation he was in. ”I’m afraid I can’t let you walk away, Quincy. There’s no telling what you’d say to your comrades. Your choice here is if you want to come with me freely as our guest so we can better understand your people and find a way to preserve the cycle or if you want to come with me bound, gagged, and possibly intercepted by my much more aggressive friend and taken to a dissection lab. If you leave now, one of our Fifth Division will kill you. If you’re lucky, they’ll stop with you and not work their way through your family line.”

She resumed moving toward him again, partly to make herself more visible and partly to close the distance in case he decided to do something stupid. ”You can save your people and walk away from this alive, Quincy. Surely that’s better than throwing everything away because of decisions made by other people over a thousand years ago.”

”Shoulda just bagged him.”

She grimaced as the twin projectiles were readied and thrown. She’d really wanted this to go off smoothly, but it looked like the Quincy wasn’t going to have any of it. Positioning the pen tip toward her target, she called out ”Bakudo 39. Enkosen!” As the barrier started to form, she jumped in the air, angling it down beneath her feet and catching the full force of the blast in her shield.

The propulsion was unexpectedly strong. Evidently, the Quincy she had stumbled upon was much more of a spiritual powerhouse than she had pinned him for. Still, Nao wasn’t the Third Seat for nothing. Her barrier held as the shockwave pushed her up and aided her jump, tossing her onto a nearby rooftop.

As she landed, she quickly assessed her surroundings, listening carefully for the telltale sounds of the Quincy’s footsteps, but finding his flared up spiritual signature a far more promising target. If she were able to sense his calming aura, then he no doubt could pick up on her much more energetic and chaotic one.

Pressing her hands together and holding the quill between them, she knelt down and pushed the hawk feather out of her face. Quietly, she spoke the incantation that she anticipated would be the way to her victory, ”Closed eyes. Blinded eyes. Take light and throw it aside. Unseen. Unknown. Scatter to the winds. Bakudo #26. Kyokko.”

As her physical form faded from the world, her own flared up spiritual presence followed it. It was awkward and slower than she’d like to be moving across the rooftops like this, but so long as the Quincy kept himself nice and visible, she needed only follow and find a better moment to strike the way she ought to have from the start.

She’d been able to keep pace with him better than she had expected. This Quincy might have been quick to run, but it seemed he somehow had even worse physical conditioning than her. In a traditional sprint, she might have lost, but he had grown winded before she’d even broken a sweat. As quietly as she could, she made up the lost ground as he slowed his pace and drew out his cell phone.

She listened in to the call, regretting her decision to not rip it out of his hand after he finished speaking. It had been a good call until he’d mentioned the war, too. It was just the sort of thing that she would have allowed him to say if he had been willing to come along willingly. Maybe a little too crass with calling her a crazy bitch, but Nao had heard worse than that from harsher men than this Quincy.

As she saw him throwing his cell phone, Nao leapt into action and hurled a book at it from behind her camouflage. Spelling out ‘snare’ in the air with her quill, the pages in the old copy of the Seireitei codes she had carried with her stuck to each other, snaking out and wrapping around his bow arm and yanking it back so he could not target the device. A moment later, the Bakudo she’d been hiding behind dissolved away, revealing a more than slightly pissed Nao to her target.

”I do believe I warned you of your other options. I’m going to give you one last chance, Mr. O’Donovan,” she said, letting the ‘tail’ of the paper snake come to rest by her side. The use of his family name was deliberate and, she hoped, a far sharper threat than a sword to the throat.

I know who you are.

I know how to hurt you.

Don't make me.

Was this how someone like Watari felt all the time? How could the man sleep with himself at night? Giving the snake a loving tap, she nodded to the phone as the reinforced paper gave him enough slack to move again. ”Call back this Aine person and explain to them that we are trying to avoid war. If you don’t, I’ll have to report this to our covert operations and combat divisions, and they will not be so free-wheeling with the same generosity I’ve been showing you. Give them my name, Nao Aoki. If they give that name to any Shinigami, they’ll know my position within our society and will be able to direct any inquiries about your safety to me, which I will then be able to pass on to you for the duration of your stay with us.”

The mental image of Zenji’s severed hand and the memory of how hard it had been to heal him fresh in her mind, Nao hastily let loose of the phone as she saw the Quincy firing at it. She had only recovered from the blast when he reached into his pockets again. She wanted to explain to him how stupid he was being, that she wasn’t a murderer, that she was trying to make it so that her people didn’t have to be murderers, but there was nothing getting through his thick mortal skull.

It was as he threw the vials that she finally gave up hope for a peaceful solution. She’d seen what one of those could do, and was of no interest to find out what more than one might be capable of. Twisting Murat in the air as soon as she heard the clinking of glass, she spelled out ’cone’ in the air, pulling the binding snake back and causing it to fan out in front of her.

On the other side, the reinforced paper met with the Reishi blast, catching it and funneling the energy away from Nao. She’d hoped to aim it over the Quincy’s shoulder, but couldn’t see where the actual detonation point was going to be once her barrier had set into place.

The blast of light sizzled against her shield, ripping through in several points and blowing small bullet holes in street signs and buildings, but it held in the most important part, protecting Nao from the onslaught. As the wave passed, she let the barrier fall only to realize that she had been more on target than she’d thought.

She had succeeded in directing the blast over the Quincy’s shoulder, but there had been so much force that said shoulder was nothing but a smoking hole, the arm barely held on by a thin strip of muscle and skin. The man had fallen from the force of the suicidal blast, planting himself a few feet away from where the pavement cracked and fizzled with residual energy.

Nao sprinted across the gap, her feet tingling uncomfortably as she passed over the area infused with the Quincy’s wicked magic, and knelt down by the man. Upon closer inspection, she could see that most of the hair on the left side of his head had been burnt off by the blast, and he was missing an ear. His eyes were unfocused and, though he appeared to be dead on first glance, she could feel his heart beating as it pushed blood out of the gap in his shoulder.

Wasting no time, she lifted her quill aloft and wrote ‘shoulder cast’ in the air, summoning the remaining sheets to her side and binding them around the wound. ”You’re not getting off so easy, Mr. O’Donovan,” she told him, gritting her teeth in spite as she said his name. It was a bigger chunk than what she’d dealt with on Zenji, but this time she wasn’t going to be wasting precious energy with unsupported Kidou.

Nao sized up his other shoulder, giving his weak muscles a squeeze and feeling the bone structure as best she could. He felt much softer than Zenji, a realization that made her smile as less muscle mass would require less energy to replicate.

Confident enough that she’d gotten a feel for what she was going to be replacing, Nao pricked her thumb on the quill and traced the path of the bones on the makeshift cast in her blood. The pathway complete, she set her healing hand to work, pulsing wave after wave of healing Kidou into the cast, her spiritual pressure surging and overpowering the weakening signature of the dying Quincy, the faint blue mist of his aura being overpowered by vibrant greens and chaotic sparks of other colors.

It took her some time to finish infusing him with her energy, but Nao soon felt the weak tissue beneath the makeshift bandage sticking in place. Letting her the effect of her Shikai go, she checked his pulse again. It was weak, but stabilized. Still, if he woke up like this, the man was liable to start fighting again. Taking one of the few sheets of paper not scorched or totally covered in blood, Nao took Murat and scribbled a message on the sheet, only returning her blade to its tanto form so she could use the handle as a hammer to pin her letter it to a wooden post with a piece of metal she suspected must have belonged to a trash can before the Reishi blast shredded it.

Attn: Aine O’Donovan

Your friend injured himself. I have taken him under my custody for his own safety and recovery. I will attempt to return him as soon as is safe. Your understanding and patience in these matters is greatly appreciated.

Nao Aoki
Chief Administrator
First Division of the Gotei 6

It was a big downgrade from a reassuring call on the man’s phone, but this would have to do as Nao wanted to get him back to Soul Society before he woke up and caused more trouble. Hefting him on her shoulder, she looked down and spotted the case he had been carrying. Opening it out of suspicion it might contain more of the vials, she huffed in amusement at the discovery of a violin.

”You might have a bit of a stay ahead of you, Mr. O’Donovan. Perhaps this will make things less unpleasant,” she told her unconscious captive as she closed the case back up. Hefting the Quincy over her shoulder and holding the violin case in the other, she exited the alleyway and headed back home.

Hopefully Zenji's cousin likes classical music.