Full Summary: "If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?" ― Chuck Palahniuk. Fortunately for Aizen Sousuke, madness doesn't usually have a chance to carry over to the next life. Unfortunately, neither do memories.

A/N: A prologue to a short story that has been bugging me for a while. For the first and last time, disclaimer! Mayuri!

Mayuri: What? Oh, you want me to do this disclaimer stating that you do not own Bleach. Very well. Bleach is only owned by Tite Kubo and Shounen Jump. Goodbye, and do not disturb me again unless you wish to be a test subject.

Kenzie: Precisely.


"There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now you realise you're going to have to look a lot of people in the eye today and you're sober now and so are they but you can both remember." - Terry Prachett.


Voids are difficult to describe when one does not have coherent thoughts, much less senses or a voice.

The entity floating in it wasn't much – just a stripped-down set of instincts and basic programming – the threads of a personality without the cerebral power required to process it.

Eventually, though, through a length of undetermined time – because time passes differently in vaccums, and logic is required to mark time – the entity grew and grew. Not physically, of course – who knows if it actually had a physical body or was just a mind floating in intangibleness – but mentally, growing more and more complex until it could remember.

And it remembered a name – Aizen Sousuke.

Well, after that, the memories poured back in – the loneliness, the distance between the entity and the other people who could have been considered comrades – the wanting to become transcendent, the urge to share that loneliness, the depravity that the emptiness brought.

All in all, it had not exactly been a good life.

The being that had once been Aizen Sousuke had gotten a second chance, and it sure as heck wasn't repeating the last time. It was too smart for that.

All of a sudden, there was a sensation of dissolving – the entity, the void, and the narration just

dis

a

ppea

red.

It was time to start again.