Disclaimer: I, of The Great And Terrible Stick Figures, do not own Bleach. Be grateful.
She gets up slowly, wincing at the bruises over her back and her stiff joints. How long has she been lying here? She checks herself over. Head, eyes, mouth, nose, hair, arms, legs, ears, ten fingers, ten toes, all are where they should be. But where was she? She had never seen houses as bad as these, or streets so dusty. At least, that's what she thinks. She can't remember anything, except her name, her age, that she is dead and that this is a place called Rukongai. Not impressive. She scrunches her eyes and frowns in irritation, trying to recall some detail, some tiny fragment of her human life. She blinks twice, shrugs, picks a direction and begins to walk away from the barren land she woke up in.
She doesn't stop walking for days, until she is close to collapsing from hunger. Can spirits be hungry?
She sits, her bony spine pressed to the wall of wooden slats that makes the back of the alleyway, and surveys her surroundings in tired acceptance. She eats the apple she picked from the garden on the other side of the fence slowly, savouring it. Tasting the sharp tang of the fruit on her tongue, she is grateful that the apples are green and sour, and not red and sickeningly sweet, but she knows that even if they were red, she'd still eat them. Beggars can't be choosers. She remembers the house that the garden belongs to, and the gleaming surfaces inside, the hot water tap, the cupboards lining the walls. She imagines them stuffed with food and pots and pans, gently rounded wooden spoons and metal ones too, that would shine in the sunlight. She shakes her head to dispel the hunger-inducing images. Noting that the houses have been of better and better quality along her random route, she decides to stay here, at least while the apple trees are in fruit.
She breaks a stick off one of the trees and takes it back to the alleyway. She sits and begins to scratch in the dust, the point of the stick parting the dirt to form kanji in its wake. Her name first, over and over, until the strokes are as perfect as she can get them without a brush, or even a pen. She writes out all the kanji she knows next and finally, practices writing out sentences, until she falls asleep, stick still in hand, surrounded by lines of script stretching out around her.
She mumbles in her sleep that night, repeating in her head strokes of kanji, imagining the sharpness of black ink against a white page and dreaming up intricate, complex sentences to practice the next day.
She gets hungrier and hungrier as the apples grow fewer and fewer and she leaves her alleyway less often. It is humid and filthy and horribly damp and as she stands to get another apple, the dull ache in the pit of her stomach sharpens and she moans aloud for the first time.
When the season is over, she gets up to start walking again, her pace slowed down by the pain. But she has barely set a foot into the sun-lit road when she trips over a pair of feet and crashes clumsily to the ground, half-eaten apple, which was in her pocket and intended as her evening meal, in the dirt. She lifts her head a fraction, glaring as indignantly as possible at the idiot who tripped her up, when she sees him picking up her apple. She panics – that's the only food she has – and cries out, mostly in protest, but also in pain. His head snaps back to her and he hears him, asking for her name. She moans in response, burying her face into the dirt so that he won't hear her. He's louder now, the insistent baboon. She turns her head a fraction, to speak, faltering a little. It's been so long since her own name was on her lips.
'Unohana Retsu. My name is Unohana Retsu.'
She strains her neck to see better, but doesn't manage to see his face before she blacks out.
