This Disease

AN: So this is my very first fanfic, so criticism is very much accepted! I hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach, or any of its characters.

"One of the most tragic things in the world there can possibly be is to watch this slow and cruel disease take hold of someone you love."

This disease, it is killing her. I can see it in her eyes, the way they wearily watch the world around her. They are duller than I can remember. Hadn't they been that deep, beautiful brown? Hadn't they been full of luster, happiness, love? This disease, it is taking over her life. She hardly eats, now. And it shows, her eyes sunken, face pale. She's so thin. I wonder what it is that even keeps her alive.

I come to visit her every day. That is what I promised her, when she was still fighting against this sickness that has taken her very mind. I think back to the event that made her this way, made her so spiteful towards life. Back to the day when her beautiful smile fell from her face, only to be seen when she became manic. In those times, it is her smile that scares me the most.

This day, this tragic day, was what had broken her. It was storming, as it does when most tragedies such as this occur. It was this day, the man she loved, and loved so dearly, had died. As it happens to so many, it was a horrific collision that had done him in, by a drunken driver no less. They had an argument, from what I could gather from her, and it had resulted in him storming from their small apartment. I was with her when she received the call, this fateful call that would ruin her, that he was gone. She had been frantic, so understandably frantic. It seemed that she had accepted it easily. However, it was only the shock of this tragedy that had kept her torrent of emotions at bay. Only after the funeral did that shock ware off, and it was then that she began to deteriorate.

Her deterioration was a slow one, at first. She went to her psychiatrist, almost daily. She still spoke, albeit not much, and never started a conversation herself. I thought that she just needed time, a lot of time, and love, and that eventually she would become herself again. How wrong I was. It was when I found her prone form lying in her bathroom that I began to fear for her life. She had attempted one of the cruelest acts a human could perform. I had her move in with me immediately after she was released from the hospital. It was then that she became listless, retreated to just a shell of her former self. And the mumbling, she said she heard him, that man she had loved, speaking to her, telling her that if she tried harder they could be together again. I knew that I would not be able to give her the proper care when this started, and did something I would regret for the rest of my life.

She became worse, worse than I ever thought was possible, when I moved her into that mental facility. It almost broke me, the way she looked at me, with so much hatred in her eyes. It was then that she stopped speaking altogether, and then she stopped eating. I heard the nurses speaking one day, saying she was a "lost cause", and "just like the rest". I felt defeated, because I knew it was true, she had only gotten worse, and there was no coming back from this state. This disease that had shattered her heart, had now encased her mind, and broken it as well.

This leads us to where we are now, where she has been moved to another hospital. Where, as I hold her hand, she lays dying. It is this day that she gives her final breath, and succumbs to the disease that has tormented her body and soul since that day so many years ago. Her funeral followed soon after, and it was then that I knew what she had felt, all that time. How it felt to lose the one person you loved the most. I smiled to myself, as I lay in my bed, listening to her voice. She was telling me that we would be together, very soon. I had completed the task that she had not been able to. And now I know, so very well, that her disease is contagious. This disease, that has killed me too.