Characters: Unohana, Isane
Summary: Seireitei is flooded with faces that shouldn't be familiar yet are anyway.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers
Timeline: pre-manga
Author's Note: I've already made some comment on this in some of my other works, but here, I'm going to explore Unohana's motives in more detail.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
Kotetsu Isane is the latest in a long line of Shinigami Unohana has taken on as a protégé in the area of medical practice. Unohana considers it her right and duty to impart her personal knowledge and experience on at least one Shinigami every couple of generations, so that when the day comes that the Fourth Division is without a captain, there will be plenty of candidates available competent in terms of healing capability.
The young Shinigami, fresh out of the Academy, is a prime candidate to learn, Unohana decides, and, if she's honest with herself, she's taken a liking to the girl she took out of Rukongai two years ago, anyway.
Wide gray eyes never leave her as Unohana settles to her knees in front of Isane, meeting the girl's gaze levelly. And, of course, there is another motive behind Unohana's having taken a personal interest in Isane's development.
The familiar face she finds there.
The girl's name was Isano; Unohana had known her in her first days as the captain of the Fourth Division. She had the same gray eyes as Isane as well as similar expressions and a frighteningly similar name.
She had been a shy, quiet girl, but fiercely intelligent and talented and soon rose through the ranks, becoming the lieutenant of the Fourth Division, and they had befriended each other then. Isano had been possessed of a personality relatively similar to Unohana's own, though without the temper: calm, serene, with an outlook on life that was mostly with peace at the world.
But Isano had died, as all must, and not peacefully either. In fact, her death in a Hollow's maw had been quite ugly and Unohana still holds, to this day, some small guilt that she hadn't been able to save her, that she hadn't even been there at all to save her.
And as for the girl who, in the present day, sits in front of her, towers over her despite not even being fully grown, well, Unohana can see her quite clearly for who and what she is, even if Isane herself has no idea.
Isano's soul has come back, once more, in this girl's body.
This is certainly not the first reincarnation. It was so long ago that Isano herself died that her soul has to have been reborn maybe countless times. But this is the first time Unohana has come into contact with the reborn soul personally.
Oh, Isane's face is hardly the only familiar one Unohana sees, hardly the first she has known to be a reincarnation of someone else. Ichimaru Gin and Matsumoto Rangiku, to name two (and Unohana finds it ironic that they seem just as close as the last two to give a name to their souls), and young Soi Fong and Kusajishi Yachiru both seem familiar as well. Seireitei is flooded with people Unohana should not know and yet knows anyway.
But this is the first one that Unohana has been at all affected by. Some vestige of guilty protectiveness perhaps colors her perceptions of Isane.
So Unohana's reasons for taking Isane on as a student are not entirely charitable.
But she will keep an eye on her progress anyway.
Unohana decides to make it in her best interest make sure that a quiet, earnest girl with gray eyes is capable of saving her own life this time around.
She doesn't want to see Isano die again.