DISCLAIMER: I don't own Bleach.

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"Next stop: Shouhossa Platform!" the conductor announced over the intercom of the train. [1] A few seconds later, the train came to a halt in a tiny district crowded with people. I stepped out of the train, glad for a little more personal space than I had on the locomotive. Then the strange feeling hit me. I froze where I stood, and, for some reason, I was scared. I noticed the peculiarities of the people around me, yet it wasn't abnormal to see these same kind of people walking the streets around my neighborhood. I studied the boy with the mohawk, the woman carrying two small children, the old man with a mole smack in the middle of his cheek. I couldn't help but feel that I had seen this all before, but I'd never seen these people in my entire life. It was a feeling of jamais vu, if you will. I felt like I'd seen the entire scene before, but the reality was that I'd never been in a situation like it in my entire life.

A darkness began to overtake me. I couldn't see the mother and her children or the old man. All I saw were dark, blurry figures. The figures didn't make a single sound. It was as if I was watching a silent film before me. Suddenly the blurred figures began to change into a single, clearer shape. They began to take on the form of a disfigured, old man on the verge of death. His grey skin was dry and severely wrinkled. The mustache setting below his nose reminded me of a cobweb. I guess you could say he was very much like a demon you would see in a horror movie. He spoke to me, but his words were unintelligible and slow.

All I could remember after seeing the old man was reaching my hand out. After that, my surroundings became hazy once more, and I could hardly recollect any of what had just happened. The next thing I remembered clearly was waking up in the emergency room.

Apparently after getting off the bullet train, I seized and collapsed on the platform. A couple weeks later, I would find out that I had been seizing in my sleep, whereas I had previously dismissed the episodes as nightmares. The buildup of stress between managing my grades, college entrance exams, and my parents' arguing had caused an increase in the frequency of the seizures. [2]

When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed surrounded by a bunch of blurry figures. I recognized two of them as my mom and dad by their voices. When my vision became more clear, I could see that my mom was crying.

"Don't cry, Mom," I said groggily as I rested my hand on her forearm. I couldn't help but allow a couple tears to escape my own eyes at the sight of my mom crying over me. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and whispered my name. My dad put his arm around my mom and looked at her with care for the first time in awhile.

"Let's leave Akane alone for awhile so she can rest. She must be tired," he told her and escorted her our of the room.

A nurse came in shortly after they left to flush my IV. After she was finished, she let someone into the room. "You have a visitor, Akane-chan," she said.

A smile slowly spread across my face as Uryu walked into the small room. "Hey," I said.

"How are you feeling? Are you ok?" he immediately asked.

I sighed heavily. "What do you think? I'm tired out of my mind."

"The doctor said you were at the train station. Do you remember what happened before that?" I put my hand over my eyes, trying to dig up any memories I had from the past twenty-four hours, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what I had done moments or even the day before my spell. I knew it was something that I wanted to remember, but no matter how hard I thought, I couldn't think of what went on. I began to cry silently at the failure of my memory.

Uryu wiped the tears from my face. My cheeks were stained a crimson red from the saline that spilled from my eyes. "Shh, it's ok. You're going to be fine," he said as he wrapped his arms around me. I buried my face in his chest, silently sobbing away.

"That's not it," I choked out. "I don't remember. I can't remember. I know there was something important, but I don't know what it was."

Uryu pulled away from me and smiled at me sweetly. He knew what I couldn't remember. It kind of made me angry to see him smile while I lay there in emotional turmoil, but that didn't last long.

"Happy birthday, Akane."

'Of course, my seventeenth birthday. How could I forget it?' I thought to myself. Of all the things that had happened that day, there was perfectly good reason to. After I slowly started to recollect the things that had happened before my hospitalization, I realized that maybe it was for the best that I forgot some things and remembered others.

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Akane's birthday is actually March 14th. (I give all my OCs birthdays for fun.) I was just a little late on getting a chapter done by then. Don't think I was making that stuff up about what Akane saw and felt when she seized. I'm epileptic. This was just an issue I hadn't ever addressed in my writing before, so I put it in LIY. It was going to be addressed some time or another anyway. It was not an attempt to have her be more like me so I could have a self-insert.

Happy reading,

~Kai

1. It just so happens that "shouhossa" means petit mal seizure

2. It is possible to seize in your sleep. Akane's particular seizures are complex partial, meaning she doesn't shake but she has a dizzy spell where she becomes dazed or unresponsive to those around her. Her consciousness is impaired even though she's still awake (if she wasn't asleep when she had it). If you don't understand, PM me and I'll try to explain it better.