Author's note: This is my take on what could happen in canon after episode 149, which makes it AU. Most of the grammar mistakes (run-on sentences, ect) are purposeful. This is meant to be dark, this is meant to be a little confusing, and it was damn fun to write that way. I wanted to experiment with a stream of conscious-type piece, and here it is.

Isolation

There is no one here but me

Soldier-Side, System of a Down

Talking to himself was a dangerous past time that Ashido spent a hundred years forcing himself to avoid, and the next fifty trying to make himself sane again after the fact. Ten years to scream at the stone forest, five to contemplate dying on the cliffs, and nine hours talking to dead men.

The stones are jagged, shadows cast from his kido making them sharper than they have a right to be. Green light makes the blood look like something else, and dead men circled him as Ashido wonders if he's really dying this time. This time rather than all the others that came before it, the clock-pieces just points of reference to a map he hasn't had for too damn long.

He didn't used to think in images, but assumes it comes with insanity.

Anzu dances, covering his eyes with her delicate hands, nails painted a color he can't remember, and can't see clearly. Shinji sits in the corner playing dice with no one, and Momohime stabs her broken zanpaukto into his neck over and over again. Ashido regrets that it's just his insanity and can't actually make him bleed. It's been a long time since he's received an injury unrelated to Hollows, or the forest of stone that always seems to get colder, no matter how much power he gives to the kido heating the cave, energy he shouldn't spare—can't, really—but does anyways.

Always so damn cold, the little place that stopped seeming like a reference a long time ago, and now it's just another world that erases everything but the memories he doesn't want. Even though it's selfish to forget, he wants to, but then the memories hit him full in the face, knife-point into his ribs, and there should be blood, but the hurt is all behind his eyes and none in his bones where it should be.

"You should get that fixed," Shinji tells him, rolling the dice and coming up with three. "Before you die, I mean."

"I'm not dead," Ashido tells the wall. Not looking at them, the teammates of the squad he can't remember the number of. He remembers how they died, though, every single one of them, right down to the way the blood splattered and faded into dust like everything does in this nightmare, and if that isn't fucked up, he doesn't know what is.

Anzu laughs, dark eyes glittering behind her shimmering hair, the purple shade that has to be a kido. Nothing could ever be that luminous, nothing born to anything but a monster, and she wasn't. Ashido doesn't know what she is now, besides dead and defined by his twisted little world, dead and buried but never gone for long enough to let him sleep, just like the rest of them. "Well on your way and that's not funny."

"Nothing is funny," Ashido whispers, covering his eyes even though it doesn't help. He doesn't want to see them, knows he isn't supposed to, but their voices follow him anyways. They're problematic that way.

Anzu clicks her teeth and Ashido looks at her again from behind his fingers, skin broken and as pale as the bone it reveals under a few of the cuts, the injuries he can't avoid long enough and isn't good enough to fix completely. He's going to be scarred from this—not that he isn't already—and the girl whose name Ashido isn't going to forget (just so long as he doesn't die, in which case he's going to forget every damn thing that ever happened just because he can), Rukia, isn't here anymore to help him.

Not that she stayed to do much in the way of helping, but he figures the conversations they had will be enough to keep him sane for another ten years, if the Hollows don't get to him first.

Before her, before she and the rest her group came—for reasons Ashido knows he would respect if he could remember them, but they're fading, not quite gone, but that means less and less the more he bleeds out—he talked to nothing, which wasn't good. The Hollows were real, but they were also taunting bastards trying to kill him, which wasn't so productive. His memories provided conversation, replaying too many of the same thing until they lost importance and became white noise, but that was marginally better than silence.

Memories could be likened to blood sometimes—they're not supposed to be, as it isn't good to be so lost that the only things a mind can come up with are dead or so close to it that there's blood involved. Blood and memories, the same in that they're inside until you get cut, and then you lose some, little bits until the sword comes and cuts too deep, and then it's all gone. Severing lines, severing veins, and Ashido should remember everything, he's had so much goddamn time to think, but it works in the opposite, and he loses more every year.

Rukia is something that isn't defined from memories, and won't go away because Ashido won't let it fade. Dark wording for thoughts that aren't, or at least aren't intended to be, but it's all he knows, and Ashido tries to remember a time when he wasn't crazy.

He comes up blank and isn't really surprised.

"Always getting caught on the details," Haruko chides, hands ghosting over Ashido's forehead. The kindness only the living can offer twists into something different coming from the dead, and Haruko is most certainly dead. "It would be a good idea to fix it now, before you're crippled, you know."

Dead things in his memories, and flashes of hot pain that are reality and nothing else make Ashido pull his hands away, the blood catching and marking his face, twisted war-paint even though Shinigami never use any. He looks and sees nothing but the cave; no dead squad-mates taunting him with their faces that he knows are long gone.

The bones are under the cliffs, stones piled up in rows because he can't give them better, and they're gone. Rot takes everything away after a hundred years. It's been more than a hundred years, groups of ten strung together to make a whole, all chapters of his story that shouldn't have continued as long as it had. He lost count a while back, couldn't remember anymore and saw less and less of a need to try.

"I'm crazy," Ashido whispers, and then his voice breaks when he tries to say something else. He's whispering because it's better than screaming, which is what he really wants to do. It's a dangerous thing he's doing, talking to the air holding nothing but memories he can't label as bad because they're all he's got left, but living dangerously is something he's good at.

Well. The dangerous part, at least. The blood on the rocks proves that he needs to work at living a little bit harder.

He doesn't remember shattering his ankle until he tries to stand, and then passes out, cracking his forehead on the floor—more blood to lose, and maybe this time he won't wake up. Bad thoughts to be having as one passes out, but he does wake up, vision blurry and warped so bad he can't figure out which way is up, so he thinks it could be worse.

It could always be worse.

"Get up before you die, stupid," and it's Raidon this time, Raidon who'd been Third Seat and almost Second, almost Assistant-Captain. If he could have found his bankai before a Hollow took his head off, spread his ribs across the stone trees like jelly, maybe it would've been different, but it didn't happen like that.

Sometimes Ashido thinks about that, about how it could have gone differently, how he would've risen from Eighth Seat to Seventh, and maybe even Sixth—he's gotten good now, and maybe asked Tamami from Third-Company out for sake like he'd been meaning to, and all the others things that would've been done.

It's pointless, though, because he's still here, still in Hueco Mundo, and maybe Tamami's dead, maybe she's buried like the rest of his friends are, or maybe she's the fucking Captain, who the hell knows. Ashido's the only one left, and he's listening to a dead man talk at him, and it shouldn't be as normal as it is.

Raidon talks to him, Raidon who's dead like the rest of them, the rest of the ones who talk when he doesn't want them to, and remain silent when he screams for them—life is a bitch that way, and the dead don't give a damn about the living, they just find something amusing in watching him squirm. Ashido's convinced that's the only reason they stick around.

"Stand up, Ashido, stand up now before you're dead."

It sounds so fucking simple when it's said like that, but nothing ever is.

"I can't," Ashido hisses, fingers scratching the ground, trying to find a purchase, but its worn smooth, no cracks to be found, nothing to hold onto.

Laughter now, high and sharp—when did Raidon ever laugh like that?—and the dead men are back again, maybe they were never gone at all, and Ashido feels like screaming. The pain in his foot makes him consider it for a while, and his bad eyesight too, seeing things that aren't there, that can't be there (some things just aren't real, even in this fucked up nightmare world there are rules, can't break them or else it all falls down). It all makes a strong assertive to the positive, and some things can't be argued with.

Ashido laughs instead of screaming—being contrary is a good thing, sometimes. The intention is to make himself strong again, but it fails like most everything else has, and his voice breaks raw and harsh at the end. The sound breaks like most of his bones have, souvenirs of a hundred (or is it two hundred?) years of combat in the desert that isn't one.

"You're gonna bleed out, just like that?"

It's Haruko or Hanabi, or maybe not, maybe it's just his own head making things up and assigning names, but Ashido just bares his teeth at the things he can't see. Not a smile, but then, he never smiles. It's not faith he takes it on—he doesn't think much of faith, hasn't for a while—but on himself, on the thin little line that divides nothing that hasn't already been crossed. It's just a thought, but it keeps him laughing, which means he isn't dead, and that's an improvement.

"Don't you know," he asks slowly, "when to go away?"

This time he's pretty sure the laughter is all in his head.

Bones creak, almost snapping again, and he doesn't try to stand again, knows he can't do it, and just drags himself back to the wall—at least he can die sitting up. The sword doesn't have a name—at least, he doesn't know it—but it's his, and he reaches for it. Three inches up on a ledge never seemed like that far before, but now it might be the sky, for all he can reach. Ashido tries anyways, and fails twice, but then throws a rock at it, hits the guard and it tumbles down.

Its name was never revealed to him, but that doesn't matter now. A sword is a sword, and he's kept it for almost too long. It would've been called a miracle that it hadn't broken yet, but miracles don't happen to Ashido, just bad luck. Green wrappings around the hilt and a dented sheath, once it might have been fancy, once he might have been proud of it (fools always die first), but not anymore. Now it's just his sword, the thing that keeps him alive like the masks do, only he's broken most of those and needs to get more, and that blade is still there.

He needs to clean the blood off before it rusts and becomes useless. There isn't a place for a broken sword, not in Ashido's personal nightmare world, where he's ruined just about anything else. If he loses the sword, he'll lose his life, or maybe just wish that he had. It comes to about the same conclusion, and there's no humor to be found in it, but Ashido laughs anyways.

Laughter that's only his this time, bouncing and echoing off the ceiling, broken rocks that might come crashing down any second, and it wouldn't be such a bad way to go, but he's still breathing. It cuts down on the homicidal potential (is it homicide if nobody cares?) too much, and Ashido coughs, hacking up blood onto the stone. He coughs and can't laugh; it hurts too damn much to try.

He can't stop, either, can't make the skin knit back together and his bones go back to where they're supposed to be, not without help, and there isn't any. There's almost humor in it—he's going to die from a broken ankle, and whatever else he hurt in the fall, when he took a misstep, timing off from something, maybe the memories or just thoughts that Rukia and her crew brought about. He's survived for too damn long, a string of tens that end up at one-hundred something, and he's going to die from something that would be trivial back in the Soul Society, not even worthy of a sympathy date from one of the pretty girls from Fourth-Company.

The irony is bitter, sharp and metallic. Drawing the comparison to blood takes far less time than it should. Ashido cares less and less, but that's the pain talking, anything to make it stop, and if he's thinking, then it's not stopping. There's no helping it, no helping him, and maybe it won't be so bad, being dead.

But going down that path, that mindset, hurts just as much as his ankle does right about now, so he doesn't. Ashido knows he's going to die, but pretends otherwise, pretends that it's just another cut that'll scar and be counted along with the others, that he's going to get up and fight again in the morning.

If he can find the balance, it'll all go back into the right places, and just for a minute Ashido pretends he knows what those are.

"She'll come back and find you rotting, won't that just cinch everything?"

It's no one he knows this time, but it doesn't matter.

Ashido's ribs feel like they're trying to reshape his stomach and it isn't a good feeling. "She's not coming back."

Her name is Rukia, her name was Rukia, and Ashido barely notices how easy it is to slip into the past-tense about things that happened not so long ago. Pretty girl—but he'd be prone to thinking of any girl he saw was pretty after being away as long as he had—and indignant, full of life and other things Ashido hadn't remembered how to be. She was pretty and she said (promised) things that wouldn't happen.

"Do you know that?"

There wasn't anything Ashido felt like saying in response, so he didn't, and concentrated on hacking out his lungs, or what was left of them. He wondered how much blood he'd lost, if that was how he was going to die, just pass out on the stone and not wake up again. He knew Rukia—pretty Rukia who'd done what he couldn't so easily with her ice-technique—wasn't coming.

No one came back into the Menos Forest. Ashido is just another dead man, and he's going to die with his friends, the last one standing, but soldiers always fall in the end.

He tells himself that it's not so bad.

"Here's to you, Kuchiki Rukia," and he salutes the air in front of him, imagines he can see her—it's a better thing to see than the bloody mess he's left everywhere, all the things he can't live without spread all over the cave, somebody's macabre art project gone wrong. One last thing to see before he dies—and he is dying this time, no more delusions, and because it's her, Ashido's alright with the fact.

It could be worse.

She's blurry, standing at the entrance and he can't see her face, just her outline, but it's enough. Ghosts of something make the memory clear, and somehow the illusion Ashido's created for himself is more realistic than anything he's hallucinated before. It's fucked up, but he's dying, so what isn't?

The dead men don't talk, and Ashido's thankful—their voices grate, and he's got enough pain as it is right now—and then Rukia's in front of him, saying things he can't understand, but that voice is hers, can't be anyone else. He tries to smile at her, tries to remember how to smile because he used to know. It doesn't really work, but she touches his face, not looking at him, but something behind her shoulder, voice to loud, and he asks her to be quiet (voice not quite gone, but that describes most of him, not quite gone), and then coughs. Blood gets on her face when her head snaps back to him, right between her eyes, and it's not a good look for her, not at all.

It's not funny and he doesn't laugh, but then she's prying the sword out of his hands, a kido spell glowing the bright green that his never achieved, and telling him things he can't understand.

He thinks for a moment that she's real, but then remembers he's crazy and dying, and the combination twists things, and this is probably another cosmic joke the universe is playing on him, one last laugh before he kicks it and stops being entertaining to whatever it is that gets cursed when things go wrong.

Dark hair and dark eyes—gods, she's beautiful, and he can't tell her, his voice isn't working enough for the right words—and the kido lights up her face in green, jade light and it's not so bad to die right now, even though she's telling him not to.

"—you're not dead, look at me, goddamn it!"

He does, and she's in his face again, and maybe there's somebody else behind her, maybe not, but then the pain comes back full force, and Ashido closes his eyes against it, maybe the last defense, or maybe not, because Rukia's making a nice argument for living, and maybe it'll be enough for him to stick to it.

"You came back," and maybe he said it right, maybe none of it came out at all—his hearing's fucked like a lot of things right now—but Ashido doesn't care. She's there, trying to fix him, and maybe she will—she's an odd woman like that, and she kept her word when he'd though—known—she wouldn't.

And his twisted little world is falling to pieces, bleeding out like he was, but Ashido supposes that's fine—there's a limit to how much anyone can take, and he's found where his mark on that scale is, passed it back five years and three days. Rukia with her kido and too-loud voice tries to fix him, and he passes out before he figures out if she succeeds.

The dice roll, come up with seven, the snake eyes Shinji aspired to and Haruko achieved three times out of five, and he's not dead yet, another fight to be had, and Ashido smiles briefly while they take him back, another path, and this time it might be home.

--

11/2/08