The room Ukitake led them to was mostly bare, just a single low table set to one side and a closet to the other.
“There’s one futon folded up in the closet, and another in the room next door,” Ukitake said as Erich stepped into the room and gave it a once-over. “I… think I have a few extra spares around somewhere, and if I don’t, Kyoraku-taicho will fetch some.” When Erich cast a glance over his shoulder at the Shinigami, Ukitake just shrugged and gave him a small smile as he said, “I figured you would want everyone nearby, given everything.”
Erich made a soft hum of agreement and dipped his muzzle in thanks. “I won’t need one, but everyone else will,” he reminded Ukitake as he padded over to the closet and pulled it open to fetch the sheets and futon.
“You… you don’t need to keep watch,” Uryuu murmured awkwardly, even as he trailed after Erich. “If… if that’s why…”
“You’ll experience this when I teach you how to shift forms, but our Draconic forms don’t sleep the same way our human ones do,” Erich answered the unspoken question. “It’s also a bit uncomfortable to properly lay down in this form, except on my side, so I don’t tend to bother unless I have to.”
“Oh.” Uryuu blinked at him, head cocked and gaze thoughtful as he took in Erich’s form. “The second bit makes sense, but… what does that even mean, that you don’t sleep the same way? Sleep is sleep, isn’t it?”
Erich couldn’t resist a soft laugh at the question, casting an amused look over his shoulder at Ukitake as he did; the fact that how he slept was one of the curiosities two such disparate people shared about him was more amusing than it probably should be.
Ukitake met Erich’s look with one of his own, the two of them sharing a quite moment of humor, before Erich abruptly tore his gaze away and focused on hauling the bedding out of the closet without tearing holes in it with his claws.
Finding any sort of shared amusement between them felt… wrong. Strange. Uncomfortable.
(No matter how well they’d worked together over the last day or so, Ukitake was still a Shinigami and he was still a Quincy.)
(It felt like a betrayal to find such easy common ground with someone who he should be fighting tooth and claw with.)
(Ugh, why did this Shinigami have to be a reasonable one?)
He heaved a sigh and dragged the bedding the rest of the way out, catching sight of the odd look Uryuu was giving him in the process. “Sorry,” he said a bit awkwardly, forcing his tail not to lash with discomfort. “I’m not laughing at the question,” he clarified, then nodded towards Ukitake and finished with, “he had a similar question about my sleep. It… amused me perhaps more than it should, that the two of you would ask such similar questions.”
Uryuu’s brows furrowed as he looked between the two of them, then hesitantly asked, “But… isn’t it a reasonable question?” He pursed his lips and gave Ukitake a thoughtful look, then said, “I… sorry, I guess I don’t really know that much about Shinigami, but you basically need sleep just like the rest of us, don’t you?”
“I do,” Ukitake confirmed with a small smile. “I was born here in Soul Society, but I’m functionally human, with very similar needs to any living human.”
“We dragons are not,” Erich said as he unfolded the futon and laid it out properly. “Human, that is. Even when we look human,” he added with a glance at Uryuu which was met by blank incomprehension. Which was a concerning outcome, because how could he not know any of what Erich was trying to hint at? It was supposed to be things that young dragons learned before they reached ten years of age!
Instead of saying any of that out loud, however, he just hummed and knelt beside the futon, considering the sheets for a moment before closing his eyes and focusing—
His claws faded away and his fingers took on a more human look; it took more effort to do a targeted partial shift like this, but he wasn’t about to try and make a human style bed with claws. That was just asking to tear holes in things, and that would be rude.
Twin noises of fascination made him give his audience an exasperated look. “It’s hardly a complex trick,” he told them as he started to make the bed, wings partially spreading to help him balance as he worked. “A dragon’s shift has three stable points: full dragon, full human, and this midway point I’m currently in, but experience lets us more finely control our shift, even if the changes aren’t stable,” he offered, politely leaving off the fact that his current form was most often referred to as the war form.
(He didn’t need to concern Ukitake or confuse Uryuu, especially since they would assume the wrong reason behind the name.)
(But who would believe that it was named their war form because it was the easiest way for them to fight alongside human allies?)
(His kind hadn’t embraced outsiders like that in generations, dragon generations.)
Ukitake made another soft, fascinated noise at the information he was so freely sharing. “A question if I may, Rerugen-san?” When Erich made an inquiring noise, Ukitake cleared his throat and asked, “On Sokyoku Hill, you mentioned that your kind had been maintaining the cycle of souls since before humans existed. If that’s the case… why do you have human forms?”
Erich carefully clamped his jaws together to keep from laughing, though he couldn’t quite stop his wings from rustling or his tail from twitching. He tipped his head just enough to see Uryuu on the edge of his peripheral vision, debating exactly how literal he wanted his answer to be; Uryuu was a teenager, but a woefully uneducated teenager in regards to his own kind. Would flat out saying ‘some humans had a taste for the exotic and every one of my ancestors reciprocated’ be too much?
(Well, perhaps best to start with the much more accurate truth of his kind.)
(He could decide to hit Ukitake with crudeness later, if he felt like it.)
“We were not always dragons, either,” he answered without answering, flicking the last of the blankets in place and letting the partial transformation slip away as he settled back on his haunches and cocked his head at the two. Uryuu was clearly dead on his feet but forcing himself to listen, and there was a gleam of curiosity in Ukitake’s eyes that was impossible to miss.
“I won’t go into detail right now,” Erich settled on, beckoning Uryuu over and tugging the boy down to the futon despite the mulish look the action earned him. “But the shortest answer is that we aren’t even properly souls, not the way you know of them. We came into existence the moment the first soul died, an extension of the universe intended to guide that energy back into the cycle if it lost its way. As living beings, and thus souls, became more complex, their impressions of the world influenced us, changing us to be more complex in turn. I was told that, for most of our existence, we more often reflected whatever species was the most self-aware. When humans came about, however, our forms started to take on vastly different shapes because of your imaginations, until we finally settled into the forms that you name dragon, and so we call ourselves dragons and wear scales and claws and often wings, though our precise forms tended to vary between regions.”
Until the Shinigami brought war upon them and wiped out many of those variants, though Erich was certainly not going to bring that up at the moment. The fact that Uryuu had a war form very similar to Erich’s own indicated a shared heritage that he refused to overlook; whoever Uryuu’s parents were, at least two of his grandparents had to be related to the Quincy that Erich brought to Japan with him while escaping his former country’s descent into madness before the second world war.
“And to answer your question,” Erich said, focusing on Uryuu again a last. “Not all creatures sleep the same way. Dragons like myself are akin to birds, so I will sleep much like a bird will, in short bursts while upright.” And able to snap awake the instant something disturbed him, much like the previous night. He couldn’t live that on edge for too many more nights before he started to suffer from it, but hopefully his wariness would start to die down before he became too affected.
(And hopefully he could catch some quick naps throughout the next few days without anyone noticing.)
Uryuu frowned at him, head cocked just enough to indicate thought, and asked, “Will I… I mean… I hadn’t noticed that about myself…?”
Erich let a soft rumbling-hum build up in his chest as he lifted his head enough to give Ukitake a pointed look, hoping the man would take the hint—
“I’ll see about finding other futons,” Ukitake said without hesitation, a tiny smile curling the corners of his mouth as he bowed and slipped from the room, closing the door behind him.
Inordinately pleased by Ukitake’s actions, Erich rustled his wings and let them relax at last, feeling no need for any display with only himself and Uryuu in the room. Uryuu, too, seemed to relax as soon as the Shinigami left, tension draining from his limbs and a wary hardness fading from his expression. He even reached up to rub at his eyes, a small yawn escaping as he did.
“You would not have noticed anything,” Erich reassured the boy, settling more comfortably into his spot. “Part of it is your age, of course. We don’t tend to truly settle into ourselves and our powers until we’re about twenty, and until that point your human heritage will hold more sway than the part of you that’s a dragon.” The look on Uryuu’s face was one of slowly dawning, and incredibly awkward, understanding, and Erich had to chuckle at that. “Yes, we don’t just look human, some part of us is human these days,” he confirmed with a small smirk, the tip of his tail thumping against the tatami mat in amusement. Amusement that drained out of him almost as quickly as it rose, as he solemnly added, “You will be hard-pressed to find a dragon that doesn’t have a fragment of humanity bound up in our Selves these days. Hatchlings born as human can sometimes be mistaken for human, if one doesn’t know how to look and their caretakers know how to mask the last little traces.”
“Oh,” Uryuu whispered as he drew his legs up to his chest and curled his arms around his knees. “The Shinigami… did they really…? Ryuuken won’t talk about our history at all, and all Sensei would say is that I should be careful about Shinigami, and that he would tell me the whole story when I was older, but… but then he died…”
Erich sighed softly and moved himself closer to Uryuu, cautiously pressing his side against the boy’s and then, when that touch wasn’t rejected, draping his wing over him as well. “Once,” he started, voice barely a rumble as he stared at the far wall, “once, our forms were as many and as varied as the stories humanity has about dragons and dragon-like beings. My form is similar to stories found in Europe. I have only once met a dragon who did not look similar to myself, and she was a direct survivor of what the Shinigami did.”
The wounded-broken-aching noise Uryuu made tore at Erich’s heart, as did the way the boy leaned further into his side. “How could you ally with them, then?” he demanded. “Shinigami… Shinigami are why my grandfather is dead! And… and that one I was fighting! He was gloating about capturing and cutting Quincy open to find out what made us Quincy!”
Fire crept up Erich’s throat at Uryuu’s words, and he had to work hard to swallow it back before it spilled through his teeth and lit the tatami mats on fire; Uryuu’s words made him desperately wish that he had purged that Shinigami soul from the world, severing it from all connections and cleansing it of all its history, never to be reborn as that specific soul ever again. If he had known exactly what Uryuu was facing…
But no. It was for the best that he not overly antagonize the Shinigami, and burning that Shinigami to ash would have certainly done so. He would not have found such a welcome from Ukitake, nor the wary acceptance from Kyoraku, and without those two, any attempt at saving Uryuu’s hoard would have been doomed. The Shinigami would have met him with blades bared and hearts steeled, united in their effort to kill him, and the bloodshed would have made the hilltop run red. He would have taken many down with him, but he would have fallen in turn, and so would the teens.
“Strong as I am, I am but one dragon in the heart of the Shinigami stronghold. Not allying with a Shinigami would have led to all of our deaths,” Erich said once he had his flames under control at last, though a few sparks still spilled from his jaws and glittered as they spun through the air, driven by his breath.
“But…!”
“Revenge is a fool’s errand,” Erich added a touch sharply, tipping his head to pin Uryuu with a piercing, sidelong look, knowing exactly how discomfiting his acid green eyes could be. “I do not trust them, not even the one we are staying with. Not really,” he admitted more softly when Uryuu started to wilt under his stare. “I am… reluctantly charmed by him, especially his determination to save his subordinate, but that does not translate to trust. We had the same goal and came to a truce because of it, but there is… too much between our people for any sort of true trust on either side. Not so soon. Staying here is an extension of that truce, and because we are safer here under his aegis than anywhere else in Soul Society.”
Uryuu heaved a sigh and wiggled even closer, pulling his glasses off and tucking his face into Erich’s side. “I guess,” he muttered resentfully. “They’re… not all terrible…”
“They’re not a monolith,” Erich agreed with his own sigh, twisting his neck around to nuzzle at Uryuu’s hair with the tip of his muzzle. “Unceasing, blind hate will drive you into obsession,” he murmured half to himself as a very pointed reminder; even that fool of a Shinigami who spat vitriol at him atop Sokyoku Hill did not deserve such dedication from him. He would watch her, would guard against her, but there were things other than hatred that he needed to dedicate his time and energy towards. “In fact, we often must work harder to avoid obsession than if we were truly human, for our origins mean we are uniquely primed to focus on singular tasks to the exception of all else.”
“What does that even mean?” Uryuu demanded, though he didn’t move away from where he was practically buried against Erich’s side. “You said… you said we aren’t even properly souls, but then… how does that work?”
Erich considered how to answer that as he lifted his arm and draped it over Uryuu’s shoulders, and then finished closing his wings around the two of them like a blanket. “We are… something like the opposite of souls, I suppose you could say?” he tried, tapping the claws of his free hand against the scales of his leg as he tried to put his understanding into words. “Ah… wait, let me try again: a soul as I mean it is found in every living organism, it is the energy of life itself, a spark of the universe given form and freedom to act independent of the greater whole. Everything alive has a soul, from bacteria to plants to humans, though the more complex the being, the more complex the soul. Humans have some of the most complex souls in existence, which is why places like Soul Society are capable of existing, because human souls are complex enough to affect things outside of themselves on a vast scale.”
“What, some ancient human imagined there was an afterlife, so suddenly there was?” Uryuu asked in disbelief, wriggling enough to fix one narrowed eye on Erich.
“Something like that,” Erich agreed with amusement, then rumbled a laugh at the annoyed noise his answer received. “It was well before my time, so I don’t know the full story of how it happened, but I imagine that’s close enough to the truth,” he said, glossing over the why behind not knowing.
“I suppose,” Uryuu grumbled. “But if that’s what you consider a soul, then what are we? A lack of energy?”
“No, you’re looking at the wrong opposite,” Erich gently said, nuzzling at Uryuu’s hair again in reassurance. “We are not a lack of energy, we are a lack of disconnection. A soul is entirely disconnected from the whole. It is a droplet of water on a leaf, separated from the ocean that spawned it. We are tendrils of that ocean, reaching beyond its shores to sweep up any lost droplets and bring them back where they belong. We have no soul because our individuality is purely a function of how far from the origin we are.”
Uryuu stiffened against him, and Erich couldn’t say he blamed the boy; to be told that, at his core, he wasn’t anything he’d believed himself to be… that he, by definition, wasn’t a person the same way everyone else around him was…
“We are truly far from the origin,” Erich murmured in an effort to comfort Uryuu. “And it doesn’t care what we do, or how we do it, so long as we maintain our duties to keep the cycle of energy in motion. You and I will not be subsumed until we are either killed or release ourselves back to the origin. But it also means that we are, in a way, more unique than the souls all around us, for once the I that is I and the you that is you are subsumed, we will never be born again. Our experiences and selves will become part of the origin, but no dragon is born with any link to those experiences and other selves.”
“Is that… why we can’t Hollowfy?” Uryuu asked softly.
Erich made an agreeable hum. “Hollowfication is the corruption of the soul. As we have no soul, and are just extensions of the greater universe, any attempt to Hollowfy one of us will lead to our dissolution. It is… a protective measure, to prevent the corruption from reaching the source of all life.”
Silence settled between them as Erich let Uryuu consider his next question, but a quiet yawn had him chuckling. “Enough for tonight. We can continue this conversation whenever you think of more questions,” he said kindly, unfolding his wings and carefully pulling Uryuu away from him in order to guide him down onto the futon.
Uryuu grumbled at him, but still went down without actively resisting Erich’s efforts. He slipped his glasses off and held them out, then hauled the blankets up over his body and got comfortable. “You…” he started to say, then trailed off into awkward silence, shoulders drawing up and his head ducked.
“The furthest I will go is back to the room where the others are,” Erich said, guessing at Uryuu’s concern. A guess that proved at least partially right when Uryuu’s tensed shoulders relaxed. “I will not leave Ukitake-san’s home.”
The soft little noise of relief that Uryuu made broke Erich’s heart, but instead of commenting on it he just leaned forward and ran his claws carefully through the boy’s hair and murmured, “Get some rest, you’ve earned it, Ishida-kun.”
It didn’t take long for Uryuu to drop off to sleep, his body exhausted from the stress of the day, but Erich didn’t quite have the strength to leave him just yet.
(His.)
(His hatchling.)
(His to guide and guard and protect.)
(…if only Alexis were here too…)