I claim to hold no rights to Bleach.
The Other Side of the Universe
1
The Gates of Heaven
"Alright Chu, how about one last meal before you go?" As usual, the kitten appeared without a sound when Rukia placed the offering of milk on the sidewalk. Squeaking happily, it gave her kneecap a friendly headbutt before lapping at the milk, the chain on its chest tinkling faintly.
Other cats followed out of the bushes but Rukia didn't mind: if Chu were alive she would have shooed them away, but as much as he seemed to like the milk she brought him, he never actually drank any. Three of the strays huddled across from him, giving him his space and begrudgingly tolerating Rukia's presence. Chu lifted his head to blink curiously at their new company before going back to his milk. Rukia couldn't help but laugh and gave him a scratch behind the head. He flopped onto his side and pawed playfully at her hand.
Chu wasn't the first ghost she'd seen, but he was the first animal spirit she'd come across. She'd been able to see ghosts as long as she could remember.
The first had been Sai, a perky young woman with a mohawk, who appeared when she was five years old. Though the woman had always been in high spirits when she and Rukia went exploring Karakura Town's parks and side streets, her neck bruised and her eyes bulged on their own accord whenever Byakuya referred to her as "imaginary." Her brother-in-law had no connection to the woman's death, to Rukia's relief, but she learned that denying a ghost's existence was like a slap in the face. Sai lingered around the Kuchiki household until Rukia turned seven, and she vanished.
The next ghost she met was a sad old man with a mustache who jumped off a bridge after his wife left him. The one after him was a door-to-door salesman caught in a mugging in a downtown alley. Their desperation for her company frightened her at first but, gradually, she learned how to deal with them.
Being a ghost, she gathered, was like being sick: there was pain like an all-over toothache, as a skinny street artist described it while dabbing a gaping wound where his left arm used to be, and a lethargic haze that only lifted when they were around living things that could see them. After that, she felt almost duty-bound to seek them out, but she didn't have to worry: they came to her like a cat to a fireplace.
It was rewarding, if exhausting. Her existence brought them clarity while talking distracted them from their pain. Each year a few old ones left and a few new ones arrived to soak in her presence. Sometimes they stuck around for years while others she barely knew a week before they vanished, but there were always a few within a five-mile sweep. A sixteen-year-old medium, she had known a thousand different people whose lives had come to a thousand different ends.
But there was even something after those ends, she believed. She'd seen it three years running. She had been in the graveyard overlooking the town when it first descended in the business district, hidden by skyscrapers. From such a distance all she could see was a brilliant golden glow before it vanished, and when she returned home she never saw a single one of the seven ghosts that had been haunting her house again.
Their disappearances, the light, and the day were all related, she reasoned. The light always appeared on the first day of fall and whenever it vanished, so did the ghosts in her neighborhood. Armed with this knowledge, she resolved the night before - the last night of summer - to skip her classes and take Chu to the gate. She didn't know if animals passed on in the same way, but it was worth a shot.
The sound of countless people singing in harmony rolled across the sky. It was starting. Rukia squinted as a blinding flash rebounded off the business district's mirrored walls. The living cats lowered their ears and scattered back into the bushes, Chu mewling curiously after them. Rukia scooped him up in her arms before he could follow and gently placed him in the basket of her bike inside her garage. Her helmet was on in a flash: she'd been waiting all year for this day.
"Ready, Chu?" The kitten mewed excitedly as they took off down the street, his fuzzy black tail poking up like a radio antenna. Cars and trees blurred as they passed them, guided by the shining beacon growing brighter by the second. The gates of the afterlife were swinging wide.