A/N: I was highly inspired by fics like To Love a Monster by Coolio101 and what Aizen could be, outside of an antagonist. My OC replaces the existing Momo Hinamori and will also toe the line between good and evil. This story starts before the events of Bleach and will eventually catch up with major canon events. I may deviate in terms of when and how certain characters meet, as well as play around with relationships. I hope you'll stick with me and be an active reader.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my OCs and concepts. Cover art by Kasiq Jungwoo.
"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating."
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
I. One Thousand and One Nights
"He hurt mommy again," Senya says, while watering the almond blossoms. "This time, for good."
In a single column of light, the eight-year-old girl tends to her indoor garden one last time. The balcony curtains rise overhead and cast a long shadow on her face. It mixes with the marbled bruise on her cheek and the red river running down her neck. She remains unperturbed and lets the knife wound drain into the carpet; it helps to lean forward and smell the flowers.
"Mom used to whisper mountain stories into my ear," she begins, "stories of the ghost women and the stars in their hair. They would ride the wave-crest of Okinawa and leave sparkles on the beach path for curious passersby. Tiny ocean gods that played with the humans all night long."
The snipping of leaves is interrupted by a low moan. On the plastic couch, nursing a broken arm and multiple stab wounds, Charlie lies in his own pool of blood. His bald spot shines upward between dark tufts of hair, as he foams at the mouth and stretches for something on the ground. The girl spares him no glance; the ceremony must go on.
"She was a good woman." Soundlessly, Senya lifts a vase into her lap, rocking in the slight breeze like dandelion fluff. "Not a full-time mother, but she did her best. Always waited for me with open arms after school and cooked omurice between the black eyes and bottle cuts. I grew flowers, so she'd forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts, but Charlie killed most of those, too."
A damp pause. Senya inhales, haunted by this room, this house full of neglect. "You are the lucky ones." She stands and brings the blossoms with her, balancing them on her good shoulder. With a swift kick, the cellphone flies out of Charlie's reach as he lets out one final, garbled scream.
In the master bedroom, the girl places the plant by her mother's head with the utmost care. It mingles with the dozens of other dead flowers. Moths have chewed through most of the stems, feasting on the utter absence of life in the space.
The comatose patient appears no different from the rest of them—gaunt and brutalized—but at least she's asleep. There is nothing left for them here. In her dreams, she must already be at the edge of the world, with her old leather satchel and favorite novel in tow. Ready for the next big adventure. Maybe the afterlife will look like Barcelona; she's always wanted to go there.
"I'm sorry I wasn't home." One by one, tears fall from the daughter's face. "I'm sorry you were all alone with him, but we'll be together now. It won't hurt anymore, I promise."
After giving the woman one last kiss, Senya winds her fingers around an iron cord with practiced nerve. The oxygen machine rattles in her grip, beeping to the rhythm of blood loss. She tilts her head up to the ceiling in penance.
"Give her my next life, won't you?" the girl begs the sky. "Somewhere by the sea, where the ghost women are. She belongs with the stars."
She pulls the plug, hard. Lights out.
Senya has always hated spring. The sakura lining the cookie-cutter buildings and flatbread highways of Karakura Town like powdered sugar. The sparrows between the eaves of a blushing dawn. Old and awful memories of dying in a grocery store parking lot, hours before an important science exam. The darkness. Waking up as a child, all over again, only for this new world to have no place for her.
One can imagine the utter disbelief when Senya finds herself sitting on the steps of the apartment complex, still fully cognitive and aware. She watches incredulously as the police and coroners make quick work of the scene, as though only moments had passed since she'd committed her crimes. The body bags disappear into two black vans, the neighbors' statements ringing in her ears.
The girl prepares to call out to the people, but when she raises a transparent hand, she knows that there is no case to be made. The window to her right produces no reflection, and there is no worldly sensation other than the rusty chain, endless and provocative, jutting out of her breast.
The metal seems all-too familiar, but the most pressing matter is how she fails to vanish, long after the red and blue lights leave.
"I'm still here," Senya whispers to herself. "Why am I still here?"
The half-answer comes from another "ghost," his entrance signaled by a snicker. A teenage boy observes her from the middle of the courtyard, donning striped overalls and fiddling with a yo-yo. His neck is cut clean and deep; absently, Senya notes that their wounds match.
"You too?" She points to his chain, which is visibly shorter than hers. The ends are speckled and frayed, as if it has been eaten and regurgitated. Senya cringes at the invasive thought.
"Dead? Yes, very." The other spirit crosses the path quickly, meeting her with a handshake and smile. "The name's Nori. What do they call you, ragdoll?"
She stares at his flickering hand for an uncomfortable amount of time. Nori retracts it with a nervous laugh.
"Er, Senya, right?" He throws his yo-yo out, blue and beige and deadly. "I heard it from one of the uniforms. Stabbed father with shears. Cut off mother's oxygen supply. Died by self-inflicted blood loss. Now that's what I call a grade B movie!"
When there is no response, Nori looks abashed and adds, "Sorry, you must've had it rough."
"Rough would imply that I had no choice," Senya finally says. Her eyes glaze over, nails tapping down the length of her chain. "I just picked the most painful outcome."
"Why?"
"Because nobody would notice otherwise, and..." The girl pretends to think about it, before the satisfaction settles between the whites of her teeth. She tilts her head for good measure. "Because I could."
Dissatisfied, and more than a little disturbed, Nori opens his mouth, but Senya beats him to it.
"I remember you. You're the boy from four years ago who made national headlines."
"Yep, that's me. They never did find my body."
"Is that why you're still a ghost?"
"I… I couldn't tell you," Nori admits. He seems more subdued, as if sharing a secret. "I just know that one moment people could see me, and the next, they couldn't. I don't think we can leave this place."
"Have you tried?" Senya crosses her arms and frowns. "It's kind of unfair that we spent our lives stuck in a bad place, only to have to stay there forever."
Nori shrugs, returning to his bench. "I don't make the rules, and as you can see, nothing changed until you showed up." He pulls out a pack of cards, which shift in and out of existence. "Care for some Poker? Solitaire?"
Seeing Senya walk towards the gates, the boy shakes his head and shuffles the deck.
"Don't resist it!" he calls. "It only gets harder from here."
And it certainly does. Every time the girl tries to leave, whether climbing the wall or sprinting past the mailboxes, some invisible force reels her chain back. On more than one occasion, she even throws Nori's yo-yo for good measure, but it boomerangs back into her face. The teen just laughs at her, especially when she lands in the fountain.
"Never seen someone with so much resolve." Nori whistles, throwing down a flush. Beat, Senya scowls and cleans up the cards for another round. She gave up after getting her chain caught in a tree. "You're gonna go places if you defeat this."
"I can't even win at card games," she says. "And I don't know what this is. Maybe if two people worked on escaping, it might make a difference."
"Hun, I don't do difference," he says. "I don't have ambitions and nobody's waiting for me. Better to just let things remain as they are."
"Stagnation is what killed me and my mother," Senya replies. A couple of minutes pass in awkward silence, before she changes the subject. "Do you believe in a god?"
"I do." Several expressions cross Nori's face, each more confused than the last, until he settles on a fond smirk. "Well, actually, my sister was the true believer. She used to take me to church until I got into some bad shit and stopped going. At home, she always reminded me that I was a child of God, no matter what I did."
His eyes grow murky then, like the soil at the bottom of a rainforest. "I think the big guy created the world and then left us to figure everything out. Talk about an existential crisis."
Senya nods, thinking about the hundreds of scriptures and books she poured over about reincarnation, only to recognize the futility. Maybe the universe did have something to tell her, but she isn't sure what lesson dying twice is supposed to teach.
Picking up on her melancholy, Nori takes her hands into his. "Hang out with me," he starts, "until you feel better. Until all of this goes away."
Senya looks at him long and hard , wondering if there really is a deity in this world. She wonders what they'd look like, what form they would take. Do they enjoy anything? Do they hate anything? Would they have mercy on a pair of wayward children?
Why did they let their creations live in the first place, only to be met with a lonely eternity?
As the seasons change from the hateful spring to a groggy summer, and finally, a gentle winter, the girl feels these questions die in her heart. She and Nori still haven't disappeared, which comes as no surprise to either of them, but as the days drag on, the latter looks increasingly sick. Senya can see the outline of his teeth peek under his sunken cheeks. He rarely seems to blink anymore, eyes suspended by the skin.
Their ending comes with the first snowfall. There should've been nothing out of the ordinary. The girl initiates a snowball fight while Nori makes a lopsided angel. But something shifts in the air, closing in on their space for two, and when the projectile hits him, the boy begins to convulse. She rushes to his side immediately as his face turns a blotchy purple.
"Nori, I'm so sorry! Are you okay? What's happening?"
"I-I don't know," he coughs. He scratches at his skin, particularly where his neck wound lies, like he wants out out out OUT. "You s-shouldn't touch me. Leave me-me alone."
"I can't do that," Senya says. She reaches out to grab his hands but he pushes her away.
"Don't," he seethes, embracing himself tightly.
"Nori—"
Taking a step back, the girl can see the nub of his chain clearly, hollowing into the cavity of his chest, where his heart is supposed to be. The remaining metal appears diseased, rupturing into shades of black. No blood falls from the growing hole, but it drains from Senya's face as her friend suddenly screams and screams and screams.
"Nori, it's me! Senya! I'm here for you!" She kneels by him and grips his shoulders. "We need to get you help."
Help? she thinks. What help? Nobody can help us. Not even God.
Abruptly, the teen goes stock-still, resting his head against a rock. Senya breathes a sigh of relief at the stabilization, until she hears a charcoal-filled laugh. Nori rises and knocks the girl away, eyes rolling back into their sockets. His face begins to peel, like pale paint from a rusty bench, before a milky sheen sprays from his mouth and a light bursts from his pores, blinding the world.
When Senya has come to, gasping from the equivalent of punctured ribs, she is face-to-face with evil incarnate. The boy no longer exists, but a gray, bulbous creature. It looms overhead and tugs at the barbed wires around its neck, never once looking away from its prey. She smells dead animal from its exhale and dry-heaves. What appears to be a white mask molds around the head into grotesque bull horns, thick-jawed and uneven, pulling back from around the blue jugular to reveal a set of pin-needle teeth.
Like something out of a manga, her mind provides. An old, beloved manga with an orange haired hero and spirits and sword-fighting…
She doesn't dare breathe or move, trying to find some semblance of Nori and piece together the incoming memories—that is, until the creature chomps right down into her left arm. The limb almost comes clean off the shoulder, held on barely by the veiny seams. It takes seconds for her flight instincts to kick in and another minute for the pain to pound a migraine into her brain, like a marching band on funeral grounds. She bites back the hysteria in her throat.
Senya throws a leg out at the monster's glowing eye, scrambling from under its black hole as it makes an absolutely miserable sound. She runs towards the street, but abruptly her chain yanks her back into the danger, mercilessly trapping her in the area. The creature catches on quickly to her escape plans, aiming those massive, grimy hands at the metal.
In a last-ditch effort, she hooks the chain between the incoming teeth and yanks hard, effectively breaking half of the links, as well as the majority of the monster's jaw. It screeches at the cloudy sky and salivates over its broken calcium. In its slow recovery, Senya wildly peers down at the damage.
Now I've really done it, she thinks. Am I going to become an eater, too?
She then catches sight of Nori's yo-yo, discarded at her feet. As she bends to pick it up, Senya notices the little red star on its side, twinkling against the snow. Just as the first tear slips from her lashes, a warped voice breeches her daze.
"... sorry… di… not… want… hurt you…"
Her head snaps up, honing in on the creature and how it drags itself across the white expanse. She almost takes a step back, prepared to run, until she sees it catch a glimpse of its own hands as if for the first time. An awful wail hits the air as it twists and writhes on the ground.
"This… not... me… ahhh!"
"Nori," Senya says. In her stupor, her feet carry her to him, yo-yo unfurling between her good fingers. The monster howls, attempting to right itself and get away from her.
"... leave… you… die… please…"
She finally stops and stares death right in the grisly, horned face. As it claws at its own chest, pulling at the hole where its heart used to be, Senya reaches out with the toy. It views the object with hesitant fascination and coos.
"Your sister gave this to you on your thirteenth birthday," she begins, "a year before you were killed by her partner. You've been waiting for her to come back, haven't you?"
Slowly, the girl raises her undamaged arm and the yo-yo, the winter sun on her back. What had once been her friend crawls even closer, whining and gnashing its broken teeth. There is little distance between the two now.
"The truth is, Nori, people make decisions without you in mind. Even when you beg them to leave bad people, to wake up, to come back, to not become the ghost stories they used to tell you, people do what they think will hurt the least… when it will actually hurt the most."
Gently, she brings her hand down to the forehead of the creature. As she taps across its bone mask, searching for the emptiest sound, it gets a whiff of her blood and starts to salivate.
Clunk!
"I always go for the pain first," she says. "Saves everyone the trouble later." The beast growls lowly. "You can stop waiting now, Nori."
Before it bites into her, Senya smashes the star toy into its skull, digging deep. The monster shrieks once, twice, before flailing and swinging the girl away. When the darkness sets in, she almost misses the man in the newspaper cap catching her and slicing Nori—Hollow, her half-brain supplies—down the middle with what appears to be a... katana?