Have you ever watched something beautiful die?
He had been watching her for what some would call, forever. For him, for people like them? It was a blink of an eye, a breath between words or a step in a long walk. Forever wasn't truly long at all and he did not mind it, really—this waiting and watching. This is what he did, does. This is how he knows how to say the things he does that makes them leave him alone. Work in peace.
One hundred years ago the trees had been in full bloom and Nanao had been on her way to see Yadōmaru, clutching a book that had nearly been as large as she was. Such a small thing with big, wide eyes larger than the glasses she already wore. Her dark hair had been pinned and properly swept back to keep out of her eyes in the same manner she wore it 100 years later. He surmised early she did so simply because it annoyed her when she'd read. She did a lot of reading. He remembers, because he watched her in the library too. He watched her when she worked.
He does not know what came over him. He does not understand why specifically he has decided to watch a child that should be beneath him. It is perhaps because she seems different to him. She did not appear interested in bowing and scraping to fools. She gave the modicum of polite respect needed and went on her way. She did not spend her time with other children, bullying or shrieking their disgustingly annoying laughter all over the place while he tried to work—chasing each other and getting under foot. She did not say too much, and when pressed to speak said just enough. She was quiet. She was small and he could see her intelligence gleam in the wide, wide eyes that preferred to watch this world. Like he did. Like him.
Like him.
He did not know what pressed him to follow her on her way to Yadōmaru's, where the Lieutenant would read to her. (This much he knew from eavesdropping. But he would not step foot into the 8th Division's domain, as it were. He would rather go out bare-faced actually.
The problem with children was that they were more animals than people. He watched as several boys, fellow classmates on the cusp between the cruelty of children and the insanity of teenage years surrounds her. He watched as she clutched her book. They said things to her—they envied her mind. They envied how smart she was; he could tell. Their petty jealous mouthings to her spoke of how Captain Shunsui Kyōraku must do other things to her when Yadōmaru was not around. How he did things to her when he dangled her from his knee. They pushed her in a circle as if she were a hot potato; they laughed and laughed and laughed at her. She hotly refuted everything they said, she lost her glasses and he only watched as they went spinning into the dying petals coating the ground.
Eventually she stopped saying anything and they grew tired of tossing her about like a rag doll.
He saw his own reflection in the lenses of her glasses, lying like dead lovers in the grass. He bent down and picked them up to the backdrop of her tiny, wet sobs. He turned them over in his fingers as if they were far more than the simple frames he suspected them to be.
It must have seemed to her as if he appeared from thin air, dangling her spectacles by a white painted hand.
"Have you ever watched something beautiful die?" Mayuri asked her. Her tear streaked face jerked upward in surprise, wet down her cheeks. Her nose was running. Her hair was not so carefully pinned. But the tears died quickly to be replaced by fear.
He thought it was fear at least, 100 years ago. What must if be like for a child to be confronted by the long, thin slash of a man who painted himself. In fact, the only color on his person was the ribbon of purplish-blue hair that grew on the top of his head. He painted his hands, his arms, his chest and his face gloriously white. A black bar across yellow eyes burned down at her and judged, weighed, analyzed. He had no ears either, you see. He had replaced them with stylized caps—he looked like a beast, an idol with golden horns hovering over her with her glasses as he lowered himself before her.
And who says things like that, anyway? Have you ever watched something beautiful die? Creepy. Why did Urahara release him from Maggot's Nest? He was dangerous and—
-Holding out her book and glasses patiently.
She took them without a word, watching him like deer watch full bellied panthers slink past them. She wiped her face, dabbed at her eyes behind lenses, took her book without touching him and stood. She was so tiny, so small. So sad.
"Th-thank you," rushed out in one squeak. When she turned tail to run on little feet as fast as she could he did not follow. He let his empty hands dangle between his knees as he watched her go. Watched and watched and watched until there was nothing to watch anymore.
Have you ever watched something beautiful die?
"I have," Mayuri told no one. Maybe the grass and the trees and the skies; they were like cadavers stretched out on tables. They did not question him. They listened. They watched and they waited, too.