Jūshirō
Ukitake

Jūshirō Ukitake captained the 13th Division for over a thousand years while chronically ill, coughing blood through half his appearances and recuperating at his family estate between them. His hair turned white over three days during an attack in his youth, which is why his eyebrows are still black. He and Shunsui Kyōraku were the first graduates of Yamamoto's academy and have been each other's closest friend ever since.

His Zanpakutō, Sōgyo no Kotowari, is a pair of blades joined by a rope, and it works by catching an incoming attack in one blade and firing it back out of the other, amplified. It is a defensive weapon in the hands of a man who spent his life avoiding fights he could talk his way out of. He is the captain who stops Byakuya Kuchiki from executing Ganju Shiba, questions wartime orders in front of the people who issued them, and destroys the Sōkyoku with Kyōraku rather than watch Rukia die on it.

The illness was never really an illness. As a child he was dying, and his parents offered him to Mimihagi, the right arm of the Soul King, which kept him alive and lived in him afterwards. When the Soul King is killed, Ukitake gives that arm up to hold the realm together, and it takes him with it.