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

Before I Died

The Twisted Path

Once upon a time there was a brother, a sister, a mother and a father. The family lived closely, closer than others of their time. They had a genuine affection for each other which was nourished and protected. The father was a hard worker who wished he could make more time to play with and teach his children, as they didn't earn enough for a tutor for them so the parents had to teach them reading and writing themselves if they did not wish the children to be illiterate. The mother was devoted to her house and family. She had the habit of dressing the daughter up and saying how pretty she was. The girl never really liked dressing up but it pleased her mother so she pretended to enjoy it. The boy, who was the girl's elder, was not physically strong or fast, but was quick of mind and had the knack of seeing how things fitted together. The girl was the youngest. She was a quiet, shy thing who nevertheless became delightfully sweet and charmingly funny amongst those she trusted.

The family lived together, thrived together, ate, slept, and played together. As all families do they fought amongst themselves, but it never came to anything more than a few minutes of hurt feelings. The boy was proving to be very intelligent in the workings of machines. That knack which told him how things fit together made him able to know the precise workings of mechanisms, which was especially useful when they broke down. He first delighted his family with his ability to make absurd-looking machines work., then his neighbours. He became renown throughout the neighbourhood as the boy who could make anything work. Villagers came far and wide to ask him to fix what little machinery they had, but this soon bored the boy. He began inventing machines himself. Anything new which he came across he would pull it apart and work out how it worked down to the most minute detail before becoming bored with that as well. The boy's inquisitive mind would ingest all sorts of information with a rapidity which astounded others. Even so he always remained a happy boy full of delight and an unquenchable curiosity. All of his family were extraordinarily proud of him.

But, as it turned out, it couldn't last for ever.

When the girl and boy were still children disaster struck.

The girl began to sicken.

At first it was barely noticeable. Slight shadows appeared under her eyes where previously there had been none. She was less active. Her laugh was a little quieter and seemed to drain her.

But, after a while, things got worse and worse. She did not get up until far past sunrise, when previously she had been an early riser. She also began sleeping earlier. While she did sleep it was fitful and she would moan at regular intervals. Eating became an effort for her, then almost impossible.

It became clear that she was sickening.

The family tried to do everything they could for her. At first they insisted she sleep and eat. But it was impossible for her to do either. All she would want to do was stay near her brother. She liked her parents to be there, but it became a necessity for her brother to be there. If he was not there she would cry tears she could not afford, tears which seemed to take a little more of her life with each salty drop.

So he stayed with her.

The parents watched this with fearful and sometimes jealous eyes, and something in each of them twisted, just a little.

Then something occurred to the father.

"Son," he said one day in an epiphany of hope. "Could you cure her?"

His mother and father looked at him with eyes wide with hope as they ate in the daughter's room. She slept, unaware. The hope in his parents eyes pinned the boy like a steel pin would a butterfly and he could not outright refuse.

He told them he probably could not do it. That medicine was a tricky science. That he had never studied it. But they looked at him with wide, hopeful eyes, and the boy said he would try.

For the first time the innocent boy feared his parents.

What made him scared, so very, very scared, was the thought of what would happen if he killed that hope that filled his parents eyes.

The hope was all there was.

No love any more.

So what would happen if he failed?

If he killed that hope?

There would be nothing.

They boy began to study.

He studied the workings of the body and medicine harder than anything he had ever done. It became everything. He would sit with doctors and books on the body, which his parents would buy with a frantic eagerness for him with their hard-earned savings, learning how everything fit together.

For the first time learning something new did not bring him joy.

His hands shook as he turned the pages.

His minds grasped at the facts and swallowed them with an almost unnatural speed, his dying sister beside him serving as a reminder of why he learned.

But it was doomed to failure from the start.

The boy grew more and more frantic as he realised, with a horror which made him want to die himself, that his sister had a disease for which there was no cure.

His parents came in once every hour to visit him. They would inquire about his studies with a false brightness which was actually that horrible, horrible hope. Their visits would always end with the question, "do you know what she has?"

He figured it out early, but could not say it, for to say it , to put it into words, would be to acknowledge it as a certainty. He would always answer, "not yet."

As his sister's illness progressed the visits grew shorter and shorter.

It became that the boy was no longer their son in their eyes.

In those horribly hopeful eyes.

He had become nothing more than an end to a means.

Their visits now consisted of them, once a day, coming in without the false smiles and fake conversation which was so dreadful a parody of days gone past, just looking at him with those eyes which were like bright suns in their heads, blinding and burning the boy with their hope.

"Can you cure her yet?"

"Not yet."

He could not take away the 'yet'.

For, if he did that, those suns would be gone and their would be nothing but a dark nothingness which would so much more awful than the hope.

And, even though the hope burned him, it was better than having two empty, dead-on-the-inside parents.

By now he had realised that they did not care about him.

They only cared about her.

And he realised that he felt the same.

The only thing in his world...

...Was her.

Was dying.

He no longer went outside. Neighbours wondered about the bright, happy, curious boy and cheerful family which had always been out and about. But soon, even they heard the rumours. Even they realised that an illness had wracked the family.

Deep inside each of those people who had known the family, something unacknowledged, some remnant from the days of predators and prey, where prey had to stick together or die, told each of them that something had turned predator in that house and was preying on the family.

Something was twisting them all.

They all stayed away.

Each and every one of them.

The boy soon became the youngest expert on medicine in the area, not that he or anybody else knew it. He had not the time to explore his knowledge, only to swallow more and more of it as if it were medicine and he the sick one.

But it didn't help.

And the sister died.

She slipped away during the night, like she had never been alive, and all there had ever been was her pale, thin, dead corpse, lying there, clutching at her brother's hand.

The funeral was small.

There was only three people.

Four, if you counted the girl.

She was lowered into the cold, dark earth, in what had been her favourite dress. It was one for festivities, a bright, colourful thing. It seemed out of place in that world of muted browns and dark colours.

And, then, as if she had never been, she was gone.

Something inside each of them twisted a little more.

The boys fears came true.

The sun was gone.

All there was was darkness.

They could not count on each other for condolences. Or, at least, the boy couldn't count on his parents.

His father never looked at him any more. It was like two children had died instead of one. Or maybe the father had, in his mind, sacrificed his son to the gods so his daughter would live. But his daughter was gone and, to the father, his son was as well, even though he was always there. If the boy spoke to his father his father would ignore him or look at him like he did not recognise him.

Soon the boy stopped speaking to him.

The father had also seemed to lose faith in the gods, of what ever had kept him going before the sickness. He went from work to home.

He was empty.

But, though his father's betrayal made the boy want to die so he would not have to see the constant rejection, his mother made him want to run away and never come back. He tried ignoring her, at first, but it never worked, instead making her cry, which was, somehow, worse than anything she could do.

The mother had gone insane.

She had broken where the son and husband had twisted, and the broken shards of her mind cut at what sanity there was left.

She could not accept that her daughter was dead.

Like her husband, she had long given up on her son, as if he were the dead instead of her daughter, and could not accept that the boy lived and the girl didn't.

So her mind turned it around.

It became clear to her that the girl had lived.

And she never mentioned the boy's name.

It was like he had never existed.

But the girl did.

She would smile at the boy, call him to her with arms wide, as if in love, but the boy was not fooled for a moment. He saw the way her smile trembled and quaked. The way her whole body shook, as if in rejection of the lie the mother forced herself to believe in. Her eyes were the worst.

After a while of being empty, they filled with a terrifying insanity.

But, if he opposed her in the slightest ways, she would call him by his sister's name and wail and cry and beg him not to scare her so, beg him to stop pretending that she were a boy, or get angry and attack him.

She rarely attacked him and always denied it after, as if the slightest crack in what she thought was her life would make it all come down like the facade it was.

His mother saved all her deceased daughter's clothes and began dressing up her alive son in them, telling him not to wear boy's clothes. She would make him cook and clean with her in the dresses, prattling on about inconsequential things with an insane glint in her eye. If the boy did anything wrong she would snap and attack him.

The mother and son twisted a little more.

The boy could not stand these episodes so he began to drug his mother, growing special herbs in the little garden he had. He felt soothed when he was digging in the earth. At all other times an undercurrent of anxiety was present, but when he dug in the earth, gardening and the like, he would feel like he was accomplishing something.

It never occurred to him that, maybe, he felt soothed because he felt like he was accomplishing something.

Like he was looking for something he had lost deep in the dark, cold earth.

Something very, very precious.

When he was alone things got odd. He did not have the same bright curiosity as he did before. He still learned things, but with a frantic, almost necessary hunger that was too similar to the hunger with which he had consumed the medical knowledge for the boy to be comfortable with. But he felt he had to learn.

He, quite literally, could not stop learning.

He needed to know everything.

His methods of learning became more perverted. Caterpillars were his favourite test subjects. He would test numerous acids and chemicals distilled from plants on them. He carefully documented the ways they writhed in their dying moments in his mind with no more emotion than he would notice a cloud in the sky.

One day his father came home and they all had dinner together. They ate in silence, as they always did. His mother's sick games always stopped when the father came home.

At mealtimes it was like he didn't exist.

This particular day he was silent for about half the meal before he spoke up.

"A co-worker's wife had a baby yesterday," he began. His speaking to them was odd in itself, the content of his speech even odder.

Then he made his meaning clear.

"I think we should have a child."

The thing that stuck out most for the boy from this was the 'a child'. Not 'another child.'

He truly didn't exist to them.

"That's a good idea," his mother said in a parody of joy. The boy recognised it for the insanity it was. "I can't think how we didn't have a child before this."

The boy left the table.

He glanced back a while later and saw his mother clearing away his bowl and utensils, looking at them oddly like she didn't know where they had come from.

They had all taken the twisted path.

The days improved for the mother and father. The father came home with something a little like life

in his eyes. The mother stopped dressing up the boy as a girl.

They still ignored the boy.

After about half a year the mother's stomach began to rise. She had fallen pregnant after a few months of trying.

The boy found himself in a turbulent storm of emotion so different from the apathy that had stalked him from so long.

Another child.

Another sister.

Joy.

Another child.

To replace the one who had been lost.

But what of the one had been forgotten?

Sadness.

Desperate grief.

Anger.

His mother still laid out three places at the table.

Would she continue doing this when the child came?

Anxiety.

Back and forth he whirled from one emotion to the other. He saw his father come back to life like a corpse raised from the dead. He saw the insanity in his mother's eyes fade a little every time she smiled, every time she rubbed her growing stomach.

Sometimes he even felt content.

It was a rare thing.

Then it happened.

One day his mother was clearing the table. She was now heavy with child. She and her husband were talking about the room they would put the baby in. None of them had gone into the girl's dead room since she had died. Like the boy, it stopped existing to them. They spoke of using the boy's room, blanking him out of their minds, wondering aloud why they never thought to put the room to use before.

The boy found himself questioning where he would sleep. But the question was without force. He found he did not mind giving up his room.

His mother paused in mid sentence.

His father looked up at her.

He looked at her.

On her face was an abject expression of mild shock.

She gasped.

She dropped the bowl she was carrying.

It clattered on the ground, the wood drumming a beat onto the hard ground which sounded like a heart beating quicker, then stopping.

She clutched at her belly.

She fell to her knees.

Then, in a moment of horror.

With disjointed.

Unconnected.

Thoughts.

Which were like glass in his mind.

In his brain.

The boy remembered the herb he had given her.

To sedate her.

That the herb.

Was rumoured.

To be.

Dangerous.

To women wanting children.

As it.

Increased.

The chance.

Of the child.

Dying.

Before it was born.

The woman rolled over to throw up, the liquid smelling foul.

But what was fouler in it's horror was the blood which streaked the back of the woman's skirt.

He was a murderer.

There was no question of what had happened. The father took care of the wife, taking away the stillborn child. She cried the tears that would have been the baby's. The remnants of her sanity were skewered on the broken shards of her mind.

The father put the stillborn child in a box and left it in a corner of the room. His grief made him silent once more.

The boy blamed himself. Something inside him had snapped forever, something which, before then, had only bent. He took the body of the child away to perform experiments on it.

It seemed to be like another caterpillar, just with the face of a baby.

The next month, things continued as they had done before the talk of another child had interrupted the broken state they lived in. His mother got worse. His father did too. He became coming home less and less. His mother began playing her games again. This time the boy bore the full brunt of it, not drugging her any more. He saw it as a fit punishment for murder. The games were worse, however.

'Accidents' began to occur regularly.

It was like something inside his mother blamed him for the death of the two previous children.

She never knew he felt that way too.

When they were cooking, she would spill boiling liquids on him and then apologise for it, brightly admonishing him for being so clumsy, as if it were his fault, belying her own apology. She would then, in a falsely relieved voice, state how it was lucky that it was not serious, even if it was.

One time she 'accidentally' pushed him into a fire.

He screamed in the incredible pain, rolling until the fire went out. He had a few serious burns. She admonished him, still calling him by the name of the girl long-deceased. Afterwards he treated his burns but he was forever marked in those places.

A few times he tried to hide from her, fear overriding his guilt. He would cover his body and face with mud, feeling good in the earth, like a part of him thought he should be underneath it. But his mother found him, wiping the mud off his face, ignoring the terrified tears which created tracks in the black mud, calling him silly for getting so dirty.

When he was alone at night and all was silent all he could her was his mother calling him by the name of his dead sister.

He would clutch at his ears and try to pull them off in an effort not to hear.

It could not continue like this forever.

One day the mother was cooking with a long, sharp knife.

She smiled with that trembling smile and asked her 'daughter' to hold the vegetable while she cut.

It was then she 'accidentally' cut off his middle finger.

The boy rushed out of the room, screaming and crying. He knew he had to immediately stop the bleeding or he would die. His medical knowledge saved his life.

But his mother spoke to the empty space like her 'daughter' was still there.

When he ran out of the room his mother gasped and said, "oh! I'm so sorry."

While he screamed she said, "you shouldn't have gotten in the way, you know."

As he wailed she said, "if you keep having these accidents, you might get seriously hurt."

As fresh screams arose, these more high-pitched than the last, as he splashed alcohol on the wound in an effort to clean it, she said, "you've got to be more careful, my daughter."

As he began to bandage the wound, muffled sobs and moans still coming from his eyes and lips, she looked at the empty space her son had been in and said, "at least it wasn't too serious this time."

She looked down and frowned. "Oh, dear. I must have spilled some sauce here. These vegetables are ruined now. What a pity."

She threw out the blood-covered vegetables and cleaned up the blood. She also threw out the severed finger.

The boy later retrieved it and buried it, one handed, in the earth above where his sister lay in her eternal rest.

A seed of defiance had been planted in the boy's heart by the incident. The presence of his father at the dinner table a few nights later made the seed grow. Before the man went to bed, after his mother had cleaned up, the boy went up to his father.

"Look at me," he said.

His father ignored him.

"Look at me," he repeated.

His father continued to ignore him.

But the boy would not be ignored.

He unwound the bandage around his hand and, without warning, thrust his hand in his father's line of sight.

The man was caught by the sigh of a four-fingered hand, blood still seeping from the wound where a fifth had been like a red eye weeping tragic tears.

"This is what your wife did to me," the boy accused. "I am your son and you have ignored me all this time and now look what has happened."

For a long moment the man was silent. Then his horrified eyes glazed over. He stood and exited the room.

He still had not said a word to his son.

The boy stood, pale and silent for a moment. Then, with tears of a real nature, he re-bandaged his hand.

It was then he heard two cries.

One was a male's grunt of pain and exertion.

The second was the high-pitched squeal of a woman's horror.

He walked into his parent's room.

His father had stabbed himself.

And a small part of him cried out in despair.

And an even smaller part cried out in joy.

His mother remembered her daughter's funeral. Then she tried to forget it. But something in her remembered it and forced her child to dress in clothing of the same sort her other child had at that other funeral.

So the boy went to his father's funeral in festive clothes.

His father's acquaintances from work came to the funeral and looked at him with shocked eyes.

He felt ashamed.

But not over his father.

It was over that little spark of joy he had felt.

He hid his hands in the long, brightly coloured sleeves.

He didn't look at his father once.

It seemed fitting to ignore the one who had ignored him in life.

He went home with a queer smile on his lips which was more like a snarl.

It showed his teeth.

From then on her only wore the palest or darkest colours.

Only black and white, if he could help it.

The nearest thing if he couldn't.

A few nights after the funeral he dug up the body, dissected it, and reburied it before anyone noticed.

He found that he finally loved his father again.

He loved anything which taught him things.

The seed of rebellion, having sprouted, now grew up a twisted frame, digging thorns darkened by a twisted heart into the boy's mind.

The ultimate rebellion seemed to be murder.

After all, he already was one.

Three out of five members of his family were dead.

His sister.

That stillborn child.

His father.

All his fault.

He decided to finish the job.

So, one day, he snuck into his mother's bedroom while she slept. He stepped closer to her prostrate body where it lay, sleeping.

She rolled over and looked at him with eyes flat and heartless. Really, it wouldn't be murder. She was already dead on the inside.

She looked at the knife raised in his hand.

She sat up, smiling and called him his sister's name one more time.

"Sapphire."

Sapphire.

After the way his sister's hair had shone Sapphire blue in the sunlight.

His mother seized the knife as he got ready to stab her.

She helped him do it so it was more suicide than murder.

And, afterwards, to complete the job, he stabbed himself as well.

In his last moments he was at peace.

A woman awoke. She had been tired for such a long time. A lethargy hung upon her spirit.

And, on top of that, she felt disturbed.

She got up and looked around, looking for something.

Something which would soothe this disturbed feeling.

A...Man?

She got up and began looking.

Mayuri Kurosutchi awoke. He screamed, a sound alike to chalk screeching on a blackboard, and found he liked the sound. He thought he heard something. An echo of a name. He found the sound made him want to pull off his ears, so he tried to do it, but they would not come off.

He stood and began looking around. He passed people, people who swerved out of his way.

Soon he passed a puddle and saw why they were afraid of him.

The blue colour of his hair made him want to hide it in the same way that the echo of a name which he couldn't quite make out made him want to tear off his ears.

He didn't know what that reason was and didn't care.

Mayuri began smearing mud onto his face. It was brown. Not dark enough.

He wanted it to be black.

He wrung his hands and found the feeling of it odd. Something about his middle finger. He felt, almost as if in compensation for something, that it should be longer.

But it was his eyes that disturbed him the most.

They seemed to glow like suns in his face.

And he was terribly and perhaps illogically afraid of what would happen if those suns went out.

Rumours of a frightening man dressed in odd attire reached the ears of another man, a Captain. He ignored these at first. Then he heard reports of the man's intelligence, one who pursued knowledge with a kind of insanity, and he was intrigued.

This man was Kisuke Urahara.

One day the echoes got worse than ever. Mayuri tossed and turned as he tried to sleep. He had tried to recall the name many, many times, but it had always failed. He seized his ears, trying to pull them off, the make the noise stop.

What was that name?

He could not remember it.

And a part of him did not want to.

He reached for the knife he used in his dissections and cut both ears off.

As he screeched, Urahara found him.

He was never bothered by the echoes again.

Urahara made new ears for him, ones which didn't make him hear half-remembered echoes. He gave him a home, a room. Mayuri knew he was expected to stay in it. He did not care.

He was given everything he asked for.

He did not request for overly controversial objects of study, like certain people, even thought he wanted them. This was partly because he enjoyed the endless study this new life gave him and partly because he respected and even, though he would never admit it, liked Urahara too much for him to endanger it with his odd requests.

He liked the way Urahara came to him when he could not find an answer.

For the first time his his known life he was useful and it sparked off something which had been crushed down long, long ago.

The Urahara left.

And Mayuri took over.

And he could do what ever he wanted.

Which compensated for the fact that he felt like he had lost something with Urahara's departure.

He began to experiment.

But a feeling nagged at him.

It followed him everywhere.

It stalked him constantly.

He felt like he was missing something.

But he did not know what.

And, with his more ruthless experiments, he sometimes heard a flicker of a voice. That of a little girl.

He never knew where it came from.

He just wanted it to stop.

Most of the time he ignored it and got on with his experiments.

But sometimes, in the privacy of his chamber, he would ask the voice who it was.

It never answered.

And sometimes.

Some rare times.

He cried.

Mayuri's experiments had ventured more and more towards the extreme. He had, lately, become interested in machines and would test them on unsuspecting people. He had been told to stop but refused to, as he could normally revive the people. He found he was extremely talented in medical matters.

He was especially interested in machines of death.

It was almost as if a buried talent had worked it's way up through the years and come up twisted. For a short time he had become interested in machines of life and had even created a few that prolonged life when the liver was on the brink of death.

It was like something inside perceived the future and prepared for it.

The machine he was working on on that day was one which killed with a poisonous gas. He had already given himself the antidote so it would not affect him and had gone to test it in an abandoned stable a little way away from the street.

He thought it a safe enough place.

He thought wrong.

A woman who had long been looking for someone was walking down the street. She was nice to everyone she met, but in a distant kind of way that said her thoughts were elsewhere.

They had been elsewhere ever since she had awoken.

Suddenly something tugged her off the path.

It was not a visible or material thing.

It was like an invisible string linking her to someone.

Someone she had been looking for for a long, long time.

Feeling a cautious hope, she ventured off the path.

In the stables, Mayuri began the machine.

Now, to see if it works, he thought, ignoring the childish, female voice in the back of his head which cried that he stop.

The woman walked towards a stable.

He waited for the machine to start.

She opened the doors and knew instantly that she had found him. She cried out in happiness.

He felt a curious peace as he looked at the woman and a rush of something warmer as he recognised her voice as the mature version of the child's one which whispered things at the back of his head.

She looked around at a hissing sound. A gas had begun to squirt from an odd machine.

The warm feeling changed to fear.

He turned the death machine off but if was too late.

He was too good at what he did.

The gas began to kill her as he watched.

The woman could feel something was wrong.

Her legs collapsed under her.

Darkness came.

But she did not want it to come!

Mayuri acted instantly.

He used the same stable to store several of his machines, including the life-prolonging ones. But only one of them would work.

Mayuri was very good at what he did. The poison would kill off every little part of the woman. Not even her Spirit-particles would be salvageable.

But the core would be untouched.

Not questioning why he needed to save her, just knowing that he did, Mayuri saved the woman's soul and left her body to die.

But he could not leave it like that.

A woman awoke.

She felt a moment of Deja-vu.

Hadn't she done this before.

She felt a moment of anxiety, but then her gaze fell upon an odd-looking man who she felt that she could not live without and she was calm.

"My name is Mayuri Kurosutchi," he told her in a grating voice. "I am your Captain."

"Hello," said the woman.

"And yours is Nemu."

"Yes, Captain," she agreed respectfully.

Mayuri looked at her. He didn't know why but he felt a hate for her.

As if he blamed her for something.

Something which she could not help.

"Don't just lie there," he snapped.

"Yes, Captain," she conceded, getting up. She felt a moment of dizziness but it cleared up.

Nemu would be fine.

Mayuri felt a moment of anxiety for her when she swayed. When he saw her stand straight he was relieved, then angry at her for making him worry. Even so, he felt a spark of something warmer for her. Something he wanted to deny.

Anger and hate was safer than warmth.

He snapped at her that she would be his Lieutenant now. She thanked him softly, feeling a little sad that she had done something to make him angry.

They walked out of the stable together.

From then on, the Captain's experiments were that little bit less tortuous. That little bit less horrifying.

He never heard the child's voice again.

The path was twisted but it was the one they walked now.

And they walked it together.