Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach or any of it's associated fictional characters or locations.

Before I Died

A Courageous Heart

Once there was a child. The child was brave and strong with a true heart which was somehow both innocent and knowledgeable. The child did not consider himself a child. On the contrary, he thought that childhood ended when one learned to walk and talk, and as he had long ago learned those things he considered himself as mature as those who were his seniors by decades.

In all honesty he probably was more mature as they. His heart, though being pure, was not light. It was a serious one, weighed down by thoughts and considerations. The child was one of those who thought only about others.

The village nearby thought the child was homeless as he would only live in the village half of the time, and never at night. He would set out for the forest before night fell. They all presumed he had a home alone in the trees or perhaps in an abandoned shack. But no-one really cared enough to investigate.

They had almost gotten it right.

Because the child did live in the forest. But he was never alone.

The child lived with his family. The child never thought in terms of 'human' or 'animal' so he never actually realised that his adoptive family was something different. He never realised that the way his family walked on four legs instead of two, the way they had elongated noses, the way they were covered in thick hair, were features which set his family entirely apart from the people in the village, except maybe on a subconscious level.

The child's family adopted him when they came across him crying in the woods as a babe. They cared for him as they would one of their own and so the child learned how to live as one and talk as one of those who had become the boy's family. The boy's adoptive mother saw this and also recognised that the boy was different, and needed to learn how to speak in the curious speech of the humans. So she brought him to the village, to an old woman. The old woman and the boy's animal mother had a long history together. They acknowledged each other as equals and sometimes even friends. The old woman owed the other from a favour long ago, so the old woman decided to take on the duty of teaching the boy how to be human.

She taught him the art of speaking first, as that was what she deemed to be the most important. His mouth was not used to forming the intricacies of structured spoken language and he had lost some of the elasticity of mind which enables the very young to learn very fast, but he learned it. It was slow and, at times, frustrating but eventually, as the old woman told him, "you can speak now. Well enough, anyway. You will need to practise more but you are understandable and that is what matters. Now in the way you walk."

She then taught him not to walk on all fours, as he had learned from his adoptive family, but on two legs, upright. This was perhaps more difficult than speaking, and certainly more irritating, but eventually the child learned that as well, though his gait always carried an element of wildness which caused others to automatically be warier of him.

But, by this time the woman was old and near death. One somewhat cool summer day she sent the boy away in the evening, as she did every evening, to go back home to his family, with words which stayed with the boy for the rest of his life.

She had folded her arms, shivering slightly. "It is a very cold summer this year. Odd, that. Cold when it's supposed to be hot. A little like you."

He had looked up in confusion.

"A contradiction, just like you. Raised by animals, yet you are considerate and humane. Wild, yet you have a gentleness about you which doesn't allow you to do harm." She had looked away. "Try to keep that aspect. The habit of contradiction. It's easy to go too far with being too brave, or being too wild, but if you have the other part of you which outweighs it, then it's much harder to take it too far. Still possible, but harder."

He hadn't understood what she meant and had told her so.

"You'll understand when you're older. I jut wish I could be there when you do. I have the feeling you'll be a good person one day. You'd better get home now."

He never saw her again. She died that night, old age stealing her away in her slumber like a gentle hand leading away the blind.

For years he would no longer go into human society. He had never seen the need for it in the first place and now the woman nor his mother was there to urge him into it, the old woman because of her death, his adoptive mother because she had birthed a litter of cubs, the first since he had taken in the child, and devoted all her time to them. He would help her take care of them and she was too grateful for the assistance to request him to go into the village and play with others of his kind.

Years passed and the cubs began to be uninterested in the child, as they did not need him to take care of them and did not want to play with him. Some even left, deciding to live in places far away from their mother. The child visited them a few times but found it disconcerting how those he had previously regarded as siblings would either ignore him or try to fight him. Eventually his mother told him it was time for him to resume human company.

And so his human life began. He would spend half his time in the human world. Normally he simply watched people, but sometimes someone would talk to him. And the rest of his time he would pass in the world of his adoptive mother, running and hunting and being more beast than man.

The child would sometimes catch his mother looking at him cautiously, as if he were an unstable element which she had to keep an eye on. He asked her about this questioning gaze and she simply told him, "it is not yet time. I will tell you later."

This annoyed him, but he kept his feelings to himself.

One day when he returned home from the human village his mother greeted him with news. "I am with cubs."

"Again?" he asked cheekily.

She swatted him. "Yes, again. I have the feeling these will be my last."

Her words had the ring that the old woman's last had and this disturbed the child. His adoptive mother's sides widened slowly. Almost unnoticably. When her birthing day came it was a day which would turn out to be so much more than that which the boy thought.

It was more difficult than the last time. That the boy recognised. He was not allowed to be present for the birthing but he could hear it from outside the small cave. His mother screamed. Several times he got to his feet only to reluctantly sit down again when his mother yelled for him to stay outside.

Eventually she weakly called for him. He entered and a horrifying sight beheld him. Three dead cubs sat in a pool of blood. His mother weakly licked at something smaller than the others, but which occasionally moved. It was the only living cub out of the litter.

"My son," she said and at first the child thought she was talking to the new cub, but then she looked at him. "My son, take care of this one."

"Why will you not be able to?" asked the boy with a heavy weight on his heart which told him the answer.

"Because I am dying."

The boy thought about breaking. He felt like a thin stick which trembled with the weight of death. If he broke he would scream. He would rage. He would fight. But there was nothing to fight. There was only himself, his dying mother and his new brother to break. And screaming would do no good. So he stayed whole, and in deciding to stay whole gained a new strength which he had not previously thought himself capable of.

He gained resilience.

"Then I will have to take care of him," he nodded.

His mother smiled in that animal way which was not nearly so obvious as a human's smile, but all the more precious because of it. "yes son...I have been meaning to tell you something since I first found you.

"I have been meaning to tell you how your mother died."

For a moment the child was confused, then, like a cupboard had been opened in his mind, he thought of things which he had never thought of before. He had always known that his mother was not his birth mother, but he had never gone the extra step in thinking of his birth mother. His human birth mother.

"She died giving birth to you."

It was a crushing blow. He was a murderer.

"Before you begin to blame yourself, look at this cub. Would you blame him for my death?"

He shook is head in an automatic negative. "No." It was true. The thought had not crossed his mind.

"Then do not blame yourself for the death of your mother. Instead, search for your father."

Males had never really been a part of the child's life. Fox males would mate with his mother without him seeing them or knowing of the union. There were the male fox children, but those were more children than male, and when the slow progression from child to male was complete the child would not see them again. Indeed, the last member of his family, apart from his mother, had left in the month before his mother's final birthing. And that had been a female. He had next to no contact with the men of the village. He had next to no contact with any sort of adult males. So the thought of a father was alien and unusual. So much so that it was inconceivable of him to imagine a father figure.

"Do you remember the old woman who tutored you?"

He nodded.

"She was the mother of your father."

The child reeled. The mother of his father? So many questions suddenly sprang up, so many answers he would never receive. But his mother's strength was failing her and he was silent.

"She spoke sometimes to you of her son, who lives alone, in a small house far from the village, did she not?"

He nodded.

"That is your father. Whether you find him or not is your decision. My strength is failing fast, my son. Please, take the cub."

He did so, gently moving the small cub, as if it were the most breakable object in the world. It made a little, high pitched noise.

"He is hungry," explained the fox mother, lying back in the place her newest child had previously been in. "Feed him on the milk of other animals until he can feed himself."

"I will do so."

Her last matriarchal duty fulfilled, the child's adoptive mother shut her eyes so the human boy whom she had come to consider her own would not see the life drain from the globes which had, for all of his life, looked upon him so fondly. "I...Wanted to say one last thing." Her effort in speaking her instructions had drained her life.

He moved closer so she would only have to whisper.

Her whiskers brushed his ear as she whispered, "you are human. I am not. But we have, first and foremost, always always been mother and son and I love you."

Her words said, she lay still.

The boy whispered back, "I love you too, mother."

She said nothing.

"Mother?"

But, without hearing the boy's last words of love, she had died.

From then on, to distract himself from the sudden yawning pit of emptiness that was in the place his mother had been both inside and outside his heart, the child devoted himself to the cub. He found cow's milk when he could find no other, but most of the time was able to coax a little from a pregnant female, or one who's child had been born still and dead. The cub grew until it was a sleek animal with a coat which was thick, glossy and the colour of a flame. He and the cub hunted together, as one. Hey became the contradiction the old woman, the child's grandmother, had spoken of, but housed in two bodies where previously it had been kept in one. The boy was strength. The animal speed. The boy was confused. The animal clear-minded. The boy was compassionate. The animal cold-hearted. They grew together not as man and animal, not as brothers, but as one entity in two bodies.

The boy-animal knew there was something they had to do. Some quest spoken of by the mother of them both. But there was always some new quest to distract them. Or some new game to play. Or some new prey to hunt. The quest was pushed further and further into the back of the boy-animal's mind until it was locked away.

But things don't like to be locked up in the mind. Thoughts are like flowers. The like the light of being thought, and in the back of the mind, being pushed away, puts them into darkness. When there thoughts mutate. The grow from flowers to weeds and spread, a cancerous growth in the back of the mind.

So it was with the boy-animal. The roots of the thought were in everything. Every time they saw an animal with their parents the roots pulled and infected that thing so that soon everything could be linked back to fathers.

It was the animal who finally decided. The animal looked up at the sky by one day, one rainy day when they were huddled together under a tree. The large, luminous golden orbs which were so different from his own sturdy brown ones looked at the boy and recognised both itself and another. The animal said, "this can not go on. We must find the father."

The boy nodded, seeing the sense of this. But he could not agree. Some terrified part of him stubbornly refused.

But the animal was not finished. "You must be courageous. I sense your fear over this. I sense you are scared. But you must confront this. You can not keep living until you confront this."

And the child knew him to be correct.

So they began their journey. The woman who was the mother of his father had told him that the place her son dwelled in was a place high in the mountains where the village was set in, a place where no trees grew. It was a secluded cave surrounded by rocks which made up a dangerous decline down the hill, which was almost a cliff on that side. To get there the boy-animal had to walk one foot at a time, up a slim path which shrank and widened at random intervals. The journey was both perilous and wearying, the path crumbling several times and one or both jumping out of the way of certain death just in time. But the boy-animal was driven upwards and onwards by the thought of what lay at the end of their path.

What would be said to this father, the figure whom neither boy nor animal had never seen or heard? Would the man show happiness at seeing his long-lost son? Would he show regret at leaving?

Or would he hate the boy and the fox? Drive them away? Not want them near?

This thought preoccupied the boy's mind. But the animal's words drove him on. "Be courageous." With every step a danger, he had to be, or else he would have long ago turned back.

The animal did not fare well in the mountain air. It's nose was constantly dried cracked with the cold wind. The boy was troubled by this. The animal's eyes constantly wept. His own did as well, but not in the same way as the animal's did. But the animal told him to stop worrying and keep going and so he did.

Eventually, with great feelings of relief in both creatures, they reached the cave. The sight of it's mouth was both a mercy and a trial, it meaning that they would no longer have to travel but that it was time that they faced something neither had really desired.

Despite his exhaustion the boy hesitated. The animal looked back at him and said with his eyes what he was too exhausted to say with his mouth.

Be courageous.

The boy swallowed, nodded, and stepped forward until he was inside the cave, ready to face what he was sure would be the greatest trial he would ever face.

And inside was the long-dead skeleton of his father.

The disappointment and acute relief were inseparable. They were one and the same, even if their very contrary nature felt as if were tearing him apart. The animal gently snuffed against his hand, pained as much as the boy. As if numb the boy walked up to the skeleton. It was yellow-white and obviously had been there for a while. Something was inside the skeleton's hand. The boy automatically reached out for it and released it easily.

It was a sketch of a woman. In her face the boy saw some of his own features. He turned it over after a long minute examining the picture. On the back were written two words.

My beloved.

Be courageous, the memory of the animal's words whispered in his mind.

My beloved.

Be courageous.

There was a time for courage.

There was a time for tears.

This was the latter.

Afterwards it was as if a great release had been sprung. Both animal and boy cried over their dead mothers and father. Over the rejection of their other siblings, especially when compared to the furry balls of joy and love they'd previously been. Over life and how it changed things. How the past could not be rewritten. How life could not be rekindled. How it seemed that they were contrary in a straight forward but oh-so-complicated world.

And when it was finished they made a decision together.

"We will live now," said the animal.

"With courage and mercy and everything else," agreed the boy.

"Together," they said the one as one.

They spent a night in the cave together, eating the remnants of the food they had brought. The next morning they set out.

During the night there had been serious rains. The water was like a constant force, gentle but unyielding. Over years it had weathered at the stone, weakening it.

So it was really no surprise to anyone but the two involved when, under the boy-animal's feet, their first step sent them falling down the rocky slope.

First came the bruises.

Then bones broke.

Then they stopped and more debris rained on top of them, half-burying them both. They were so entangled at this point that it was unsure where animal ended and boy began in not only the mental and emotional state as it had been before but physically as well.

More rocks were raining down and the boy-animal knew that it marked their end.

There was only enough room for the boy to shift his arm so it provided that little bit more, a meagre amount more, protection of the fox.

There was only enough life in them both for the fox to huff softly against the boy.

That was all.

*****

It was a difficult situation.

Two entwined souls.

Together in life.

Together in death.

But only one awoke.

*****

Sajin Kommamura awoke. He felt different. Stronger, that was the first thing he noticed. But he also felt more natural. He opened his eyes, his eyes which weren't a luminous gold but which weren't a sturdy brown either. He could see something which was furry and twitched when he inhaled, something which hadn't been there before...

Before?

Before what?

There was something...A sense of someone being missing. But then a feeling of peace rushed through him and he knew nothing was gone. Everything he needed was locked in his heart.

His courageous heart.