Aizen Sayuri doesn't actually learn her last name until she is three years old. Then again, it takes her a while to learn much of anything.

The first few weeks are the worst. Everything is a blur of panic and denial (nononononothiscan'tbehappening), of terrifying, frustrating confusion as her brain (slow, sluggish, useless) refuses to work properly. In the beginning, all she knows is that her body is not her own, the woman calling her by a strange name and who speaks to her in Japanese is not her mother, and although the man who sometimes rocks her to sleep has a deep, rumbly voice that reminds her of her father's, his scent and the texture of his hands are wholly different. As days go by, however, the pieces begin adding up to form a picture she cannot accept (she cannot accept that she has died because that would mean she can't go back—that all she has worked towards has come to nothing, that she will never see her family or friends again). She ignores what logic is telling her and instead, she screams until her throat is rubbed raw in an attempt to wake herself up from this nightmare that cannot be reality. It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop her from trying anyway.

The thing that pulls her back from the brink, that stops her from going insane, is the energy. She hadn't noticed it at first, too caught up in trying to adjust to her body's new limitations, but it is so completely foreign that eventually it breaks through her shell of angerpainfeardenial and she latches on to it with the desperation of a drowning man. It gives her something to focus on, to distract herself from the pathetic helplessness of her current body and the crushing grief as she slowly, gradually, begins to face the fact that this is her life now.

The mysterious energy is especially concentrated around her new…brother (she finds it bitterly ironic that she'd wanted a sibling all her life, and it had apparently taken being strangled to death for the universe to grant her one). It feels warm and pure and so bright that she can almost visualize it, shining like a sun in her mind. Her parents have it too—it flows like a gentle breeze around her mother, bringing to mind images of spun sugar and delicate wind chimes. Her father's energy is starkly different, and it curls around her and her brother protectively, possessively, the hard durability of steel mixed with the heat of an open flame.

She spends hours, days, observing the signatures of those around her, honing her sensing ability until even without her sight (the most she can see with her eyes right now are blurs of color), she can tell exactly where they are. It's how she senses her mother's energy spike sharply late one night, lashing out wildly in what she somehow knows is grief (it's too raw, too uncontrolled to be anything else). It's how she realizes that her new father is never coming back, as the traces of his aura around the house fade until all that remains is a gaping hole where there was once safety and confident assurance.

There isn't much to do as an infant, and as Sayuri feels her mother withdraw from her and Sousuke (her energy, once hopeful and gentle, now clings defensively to her like a coat of armor), she spends long moments exploring the strange energy coursing through and around her body (a cleansing type of coolness, the sensation of a wet towel on a feverish forehead). On the days where that is not enough, she loses herself in the feel of her brother's innocent aura. The purity of his energy is incredibly calming—like sinking into a warm bath at the end of a long day—but most importantly, it has the added bonus of distracting her from the gnawing hunger whenever their mother forgets to feed them, the panic she feels whenever she wakes up with the sensation of hands around her throat, and the all-consuming sense of loss she faces whenever her thoughts accidentally stray back to the life she should be living right now.

As time goes on, she begins to learn how to read it, the subtle ways it reacts to his emotions. It's not quite empathy, as she cannot feel what he does—rather, it's more akin to learning a language based on intuition and sensation rather than words and structure (it helps that he's so unguarded, the simplicity of his feelings making it easier to match the way his aura thrums and quivers with his specific emotions), and it…anchors her, keeps her from losing herself in memories.

Still, it isn't until almost a year passes that things start getting better—not that she knows this. In this body, where the only routine in her life is provided by a depressed, grieving woman, she has no concept of days, weeks, even months. All she knows is that eventually, while she still buries herself in the sensation of her brother's aura (she cannot quite think of him as her twin, as someone the same age as her although she knows that physically, they are only minutes apart), it is more out of boredom than a need to escape. Her throat still burns and her eyes sting whenever she thinks of her family and friends, the way they must be grieving for her, but she thinks the fact that she can bring herself to think of them at all is an improvement. Slowly, oh so slowly, she begins to stop hiding away and it hurts, it hurts so much, but she's already allowed someone to take one life from her. Like hell she's going to let them ruin this life too.

She picks up a lot more information once she starts making an effort at accepting her situation. Her infant mind, while utterly useless at computing problems expediently, seems to pick up languages far quicker than her adult mind was ever able to and it takes astonishingly little time to relearn the half-forgotten Japanese of her childhood. Her new mother helps in her own way—while she is hardly in the state of mind to devote herself to teaching Sayuri and her brother how to speak properly, she has developed the habit of muttering to herself as she goes through her daily routine (time to get up Shiori, one of the vendors is having a sale so remember to go out and buy more food, the water is running low so you need to refill that sometime, make sure to feed Sousuke and Sayuri two more times today). The blanks she leaves are often filled in by Sayuri's own knowledge and she practices enunciating the words by babbling at her brother (the English she mostly keeps to herself. Her new mother already looks at her warily enough; she doesn't need to add to that by showing unexplained knowledge of a foreign language). By the end of her second year, she can almost call herself fluent.

Still, despite her newfound resolve to learn more about her new life, it isn't until four months past her third birthday that she hears her last name for the first time.

"Aizen-chan."

She doesn't pay it more than a passing thought, although a part of her is amused by the fact that apparently her brother shares the same name as the antagonist of a manga she'd once liked. At the moment though, Sayuri is far more preoccupied with the fact that a stranger has her mother pressed against a wall, hungrily devouring her mouth even as he whispers filthy things into her ear, what little energy she can sense from him thrumming with something she will later identify as desire, while her mother's shrinks back infinitesimally in a manner Sayuri will soon associate with shame.


Sayuri doesn't figure out that she's somehow landed herself in a fictional universe until she is four years old. She knows that the world she is in is not quite the same as the world she left behind—for one, the people in her world certainly didn't have auras (or if they did, she lacked the ability to sense them). For another, she seems to have regressed in time; there's no other explanation as to why she seems to be in ancient Japan, and then there's the fact that she and Sousuke are aging…slower than expected. It takes her a while to learn more than that—given that her mother refuses to let her and her brother go outside, opportunities for learning about her environment are rather limited. Sadly enough, her primary source of knowledge are the men her mother brings home. Still, she gradually picks up small pieces of information, and they come together to form a conclusion so ludicrous that she discounts it the first, second, and third times she comes to it. But the puzzle pieces keep on coming—words like Rukongai, shinigami, souls, Seireitei, hollows—and eventually she cannot dismiss the similarities as mere coincidence anymore. When she adds in her observations on the strange energy that surrounds all the people she has come into contact with (everyone seems to have it to some extent, although some people have it more than others), well…she has no definitive proof, not yet, but for the first time she feels a spark of unease as she looks towards where her brother is taking a nap next to her. Because if she is right, then—

At that moment, Sousuke rolls over so that his face is pressed against her cheek. Sayuri sighs heavily as she feels his sticky-wet drool on her skin and makes a face at his sleeping form. Of course, rather than wake up in the face of her silent disapproval, her brat of a brother instead nuzzles closer to her and continues to slobber messily all over her face. In response, Sayuri resigns herself to a future of baby-spit and chooses to feel grateful for the fact that at least her body has retained some essential functions—like the ability to roll her eyes.

She takes her suspicions and locks them away in a dark corner of her mind. Even if she has been reincarnated into a manga (god, even thinking that feels ridiculous), there is no real evidence that Sousuke, her brother (her one constant in this world that is terrifyingly foreign at times), is the same person as Aizen, the man who gave up everything for power. So what if they share a name and some physical features? It's certainly not out of the realm of possibility for two people to have the same name, and brown hair and eyes are not exactly uncommon. And even if Sousuke's energy (reiatsu, she corrects herself) surpasses that of anyone around them, it's not like she's had the opportunity to compare him to that many people in the first place.

No, she decides firmly, as her brother mumbles something in his sleep about running away from monster natto. There is no way that Sousuke, with his bright laugh and innocent questions, who trusts her so much it almost hurts, could grow up to be a criminal mastermind with a thousand masks.

(She doesn't let herself consider the alternative.)


"Sayuri? What's that o'er dere?"

"Hmm? Oh, by the windowsill? That's a butterfly, Sousuke."

"I like it. Can I keep it?"

"Keep it? Oh, no. No, you never want to cage something with wings, Sousuke. There are some things that are just meant to fly."

"But it's pwetty."

"Well you know, it wasn't always that way. Interesting thing about butterflies—they start off as these fuzzy little worm-like creatures called caterpillars that are pretty much completely helpless. Can't walk fast, can't fight…the only thing they can do is blend in with their surroundings and hope something doesn't eat them. After they grow big enough though, they form a cocoon around themselves and that's when the real change happens. Their body transforms completely and when they come out...well, you can see the result over there."

"Really? That's so cool! Hey, d'you think I could be a butterfly someday?"

"…a butterfly?"

"Yeah! So that I could grow wings an' fly wherever I want an' no one would be able to stop me…unless they try ta catch me, but then I could just out-fly them."

"That sounds very nice, Sousuke, but I don't think that's how it w-"

"Great! And you'll come with me, right? 'Cause it'd be kinda boring bein' by myself all the time."

"…"

"Sayuri?"

"…yeah. Yeah, I'll fly with you."

"You promise?"

"Promise. We'll see the world together someday."

A/N: Four chapters in and I still have no idea where I'm taking this ahahaha

Also, please stop leaving reviews asking about Walk Two Lifetimes here. I have no plans to give that up, and if updates seem to happen faster here right now, it's because finishing a 2k word chapter is a hell of a lot easier than finishing a 10k one. Demands for me to work on WTL don't motivate me to do so (quite the opposite actually) and they make me feel more discouraged about writing this story as well, so really, it's a lose-lose situation there.

To the rest of you who have been nothing but encouraging and supportive, you are all wonderful and your reviews keep this story going :)