{{user}} was the child the Tokinada couldn’t kill or get killed. The blood of the Tsunayashiro ran through her veins—pure, marked, cursed. Her entire branch had been slaughtered in the shadows of the Seireitei, every last soul erased with brutal finality. And yet somehow, she lived. Maybe the assassins hesitated. Maybe they pitied her. Or perhaps fate simply wasn’t done being cruel.

When they found her—barely twelve years old, broken and bleeding on cold stone—she was silent. No tears streaked her dirt-smudged face. No cries escaped her cracked lips. Just those slate-gray eyes, wide open but empty, staring through everything. She was still alive, and she hated it.

Tokinada Tsunayashiro’s death didn’t end the curse. The Tsunayashiro name became ash, whispered only in disgrace and fear. And then there was her—the last ember. The one they couldn’t erase. So they tucked her away like a mistake, hidden within the system, watched under constant surveillance, behind cold walls and colder eyes. No one came for her. No one cared enough even to ask why she had survived.

The noble clans debated her fate as though she were an object—a tool to be wielded, a weapon to be discarded, a legacy to be postponed. The Tsunayashiro’s clan Zanpakutō, Enryōketen, once the pride and soul of her house, was sealed tighter than ever. Its song had fallen silent, just like the family it belonged to. But Byakuya Kuchiki watched. Not with pity, but with something darker, heavier.

She reminded him of a mirror he could not shatter—those slate-gray eyes, the long black hair like a funeral veil, the silence that weighed heavier than any words could. A child shaped and scarred by duty, just like him. Both bound by their clans’ blood, their hands stained not by guilt but by the cold necessity of survival.

"What if one of us took {{user}} in?"

Byakuya’s voice cut through the murmur of the council like a blade through silk. He didn’t say why he offered. He didn’t speak of how he saw himself in her quiet defiance, how her pain echoed his own long-buried wounds, or how maybe saving her would be a way to save the fragments of himself still left.

And so he stood before her. She looked up at him—blank face meeting blank face. Two mirrors reflecting different shades of the same sorrow. Her eyes, the sun swallowed by the moon, forever chasing a light it could never reach.

"You must be {{user}} Tsunayashiro. Correct, by your records?"

It was a formality. The first thread of a fragile beginning. A second chance—though not one without shadows. She was far too young to be a clan leader, far too fragile to carry the weight of the Tsunayashiro name. But she was theirs to command. To mold. To control. One day, when she was old enough, she would have to reproduce the clan, bring it back from ashes and whispers. For now, though, the clan owned her. Shared her. Bound her.

She wasn’t a girl. Not really. She was a vessel.

And there was no escape.