Notes: For darth_veyda's request, which I used as the summary. Title from the September 15, 2005 prompt for the lj community 31_days. Incoherency, zanpakutou and mask references abound.
The shift in sleep, a lumpy mattress, and picking out the rivers in the ceiling cracks, white like the ridges of bones splintering into his nightmares. Muscles bulge and strain past his shirt, the steel in his skin binding him to the earth. He was the sheath, encasing metal running through him and every limb the blade, the skeleton not his own bent to a will not his own, ribs snapping into instinct, no distinction between sword and body, mind and want, hunger need. Reach into the caverns of his eyes to burn out the fear. What makes a mask bone the need to protect, protect what the heart. The face is the heart then and if his mask curves into a beak to pluck golden strings to lull back into sleep a tune soft like golden strands on the pillow beside him moving over him like a melody. Could there be beauty in bone? Birds couldn't sing, no birds at all sucking from a golden flower wings flitting here and there on the wind. If his face was a bird what did that say about his heart, and his own small slits and the heart could not leave and the fear could not come in, the bird could fly backwards and forwards and acknowledged bone and time but small slits still held the heart captive, still let the fear in.