As you should all know, I died. Well, I'm dead, I mean to say. I got killed on that journey to the real world with Grimmjow and the rest of the Fraccion. Hey, it was two on one. That scary little chick...thing and then that redhead with a fiery temper who seemed to think that I was highly effeminate and sarcastic. Well, when you're subject to torture twice a week, it's true. You do develop a sense of sarcasm. But effeminate? Girls don't normally have scars, do they?

But yeah. I died. I wasn't in pain. In fact, I think I was thinking, "Hell yes!" the second before I died. Simply because I had gotten myself out of Yukidaruka. And gotten back at Zaera for doing those things to me. Of course, I never apologized. So my plan was never completed. And, of course, as a famous poet who dug up a fieldmouse's home once said, 'The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.' And my plan went very, very awry.

After hearing that I had died, Zaera didn't say anything. Instead, he turned on his heel and calmly walked out of the room, as though nothing had happened. However, being dead, I had been granted this sense of perception, and I could tell that he was feeling furious, sad, frustrated, and wanted to kill himself all at the same time. Except, of course, he couldn't kill himself. Aizen-sama had specifically instructed him that he was not to kill himself.

So he didn't kill himself. Instead, he started self injury. Well, I won't say started, excuse me, but he picked up again on his habit of self injury. It had seemed to stop while I was still around, while I was still there for him to hurt, but then now, now that I was gone, it came roaring back. With the passion of ten thousand burning suns.

He cut, he burned, he injected himself. He bled, he cried, he often banged his head against some hard surface because he was frustrated and had all these other emotions that he didn't know how to control. He never slept (not that he had slept much before anyways), he never ate (not like he hadn't eaten enormous amounts before), he often screamed into a pillow or something, and I felt guilty. I felt sooo guilty. For doing this to him. For making him feel this way. Helpless.

Zaera's not helpless. In fact, he's one of the people who would appear to have the most help at his fingertips at any given time. Let's face it:

If he was injured beyond repair, he could use Gabriel to impregnate another person and then eat his way out of them. Except, of course, this made his hair "totally unmanageable" and this was the ability that killed him in the first place.

He could smash other's organs. Including his own. Which he now did on a constant basis.

He could eat his Fraccion to heal himself. Which he usually did after doing the whole organ smashing gig and coughing up at least a liter of blood, which would stain the white surroundings with crimson. Crimson stains that never got cleaned or bleached back to white. I think he requested that the stains be left there. Why? I don't know. I guess it made him feel less alone, made him feel as though I was still there, that it was my blood on the floor.

He had a carbon copy of me. Of course, it wasn't much use now that I was dead, but still, I guess sometimes he could pretend.

In the dead of night, to have someone to hug, even though the body was no longer warm.

To have someone to kiss, even though the lips no longer moved.

To have someone who let you do whatever you wanted to do to them, even though there were no longer protests and even though there was no longer blood.

To have someone who you could tell everything to, even though the ears no longer heard or listened.

To have someone who you could stare into their eyes for hours on end, because the eyes themselves were simply so beautiful, but to know that those eyes were just a glossy mirror and that they would never look at you again.

It must have been devastating for him.

I think he knew what was awaiting him after impregnating that one Kurotsuchi girl. I think he knew. And maybe that's why he did it. Maybe that's why he let himself get so injured that he allowed himself to use Gabriel on her, knowing that he would ingest those drugs to give him superhuman senses that would leave his body in the dust. Because he KNEW. Zaera knew everything. And he KNEW this would be the end.

He wanted to die, but Aizen had ordered him against it. So this was his chance. This was his chance to die with knowing. To die knowing that this was part of the plan, that he'd had it all planned out from the beginning and this was just the final step. To die an "honorable" death, the death at the hands of an enemy. Perhaps that was what it was. A whole plan for him to commit suicide without it appearing that he had done so.

I had not wanted Zaera to die. I had wanted him to get better, to figure out a solution for the problems he was having. But it hadn't worked out.

On February 18, exactly twenty years after he was born, Zaera Aporro Grantz died at the hands of Mayuri Kurotsuchi. A few months before that, I, his older brother, Il Forte Grantz, died at the hands of Ururu and Abarai Renji. And nobody suspected. Nobody knew. Everybody thought that it was just a slipup, that the Grantz brothers hadn't been strong enough, and that, consequently, they had died.

Nobody knew that it had just been a whole setup. A whole plan.

It wasn't carved on our gravestones: "Two brothers in a forbidden relationship, both dead, but because it had been planned that way."

That hadn't been written. In fact, nothing had been written. We were just buried under two rocks in the middle of Hueco Mundo.

But we knew. Me and Zaera, we both knew.

And when he was with me in that place between Heaven and Hell, I said to him, "Zaera."
"What's up?" he asked, turning to me.
"I'm sorry."

Then he smiled, something I hadn't seen from him in a long time. A pure, healthy smile. Then he took my hand, intertwining our fingers, and said, "It's okay, Aniki. It's okay."