Author's Note: Yay, putting history in Bleach! I promise not every chapter will be like this though, hehe...
The 1970's was a huge time of change, for both America and Japan. Japan was overrun with polluting factories and industries, and in the mid-to-late-70's, a cholera epidemic happened there, in several major cities. Unfortunately, not too much is known about it, as most cholera outbreaks tend to be left undocumented. All the concerns about air and water pollution made science kits with water and air pollution testers hot items back then for children.
Uh, look up cholera. It's a pretty nasty disease...
Mariko means 'nice village child'.
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"Don't eat so much!" Mariko's tutor snapped at her one sunny March afternoon. "I'm giving you a snack, not a dinner!"
"But I love spiced beef!" Mariko answered with a grin, shoveling more of the spicy dish into her mouth.
It was a game they liked to play. Mariko's tutor, whom she simply called Yamada-sensei, was the total opposite of Mariko, who was free-spirited, loud, and not to mention messy. Every time she came over for lessons, Yamada-sensei would feed her some sort of highly-processed food and tell her not to eat it all to exercise her self-control. Mariko never won those games.
"What are we learning today, Yamada-sensei?" Mariko asked happily, eating more beef. Its juice dripped down her chin and onto her orange scarf. It went along quite nicely with her orange hot-pants, white sweater, and white go-go boots.
"More language practice. Just because you're raised in a low-class family does not mean you have to talk like them!" Yamada-sensei griped, adjusting her glasses.
Mariko pouted. "Awww, I don't have bad language!" She finished off the plate of beef, and her eyes slowly grew wide as she felt the spice backfire on her and set her mouth on fire. "Eeeeek! IT'S SPICY!" She yelled at the top of her lungs and darted outside, making a beeline for her tutor's water faucet. She held her mouth and hurriedly turned the faucet on, and succeeded, making water guzzle out at a fast rate and splatter into the dirt at her feet.
"Stop!" Yamada-sensei yelled at her, running outside after. "Get back inside!"
"No way! My mouth is on fire!" Mariko laughed, placing her head under the water and lapping it up.
"But you can't drink from there!" This Mariko rolled her eyes at and continued drinking, only stopping once her mouth no longer burned. She stood up with a stretch and turned the water off, feeling rejuvenated.
"It's just water, is it really that bad?" She laughed.
"You are a smart girl. Bring that science kit of yours here tomorrow and test my water. Haven't you noticed I never drink from that faucet?" Yamada-sensei went back inside, and Mariko followed her, wondering what was riling her up so much.
Once they were back inside, Mariko pushed aside her empty plate and set a place aside for her language textbook, which was an obvious hand-me-down her school had been using for eons.
"I see you brought your book with you this time. Open it to page 36 and read that passage for me."
"Okay!" Mariko did as she was told and started reading the passage out-loud. It was a paragraph from a famous Japanese novel, and she had to memorize it for the class by Tuesday. And she had to do it in front of them! She was super excited and couldn't wait.
After she finished reading, Yamada-sensei awarded her with a nod, making the black-haired girl beam.
"You posses fine reading abilities for a girl of your age, but your accent is still very thick. Work on that and you'll be fine."
"Far out!" Mariko blurted out, covering her mouth. Yamada-sensei stiffened at her use of dreadful American slang, and Mariko bowed her head in apology.
"Next, let's work on your math."
"Awww, I'm terrible at math!" Mariko pouted again as she threw her old math textbook onto the table, the force making the creaky table wobble.
"That is why we are here. Now, do your assignment and when you come across a question you have, feel free to ask me." With that, Yamada-sensei stood up from her seat and cleared away Mariko's plate and toss it into her sink, then placed a glass of milk in front of Mariko. The black-haired teen barely noticed this action, as she was deeply engrossed in her math homework.
Seeing as how she hadn't asked for help yet, her tutor sat back down at the table and started reading, but to her surprise, Mariko breezed through her homework without so much as a second glance.
"Done!" She said happily, and presented Yamada-sensei with her workbook.
"Don't you think you should go back and double-check that?" Her tutor asked in disbelief, but Mariko shook her head.
"Besides, it's getting late. I gotta go back home!" She gathered up her materials and threw on her backpack, then skipped out of her tutor's house, Yamada-sensei's warning about the drinking water still fresh in her mind.
But surely she was just overreacting? After all, how much harm could drinking a few small sips of water possibly do?
The next morning after breakfast, Mariko eagerly skipped back over to her tutor's, science kit in tow. She decided not to go to school because her stomach was hurting something fierce, but chalked up to her period coming early and decided to spend the day with Yamada-sensei.
"Sensei! I brought my science kit!" She announced, knocking on her door.
It was opened almost instantly by Yamada-sensei, who looked at the seventeen-year-old girl with grave concern plainly on her face.
"Good. You know how to take water samples, don't you? I don't know how advanced those little kits are today, but it's worth a try. Learn something about being reckless." She ushered Mariko out into her backyard, and Mariko eagerly turned the water back on and opened her kit and quickly got to work, taking multiple water samples and doing numerous tests.
"Your orange belt is new." Yamada-sensei commented randomly, startling Mariko and making her nearly drop her sample. "Other than that, you wore this outfit yesterday."
"Oh, I don't like to change clothes very much. Besides, orange and white is such a good color scheme on me, is it not? Don't fret though, they're perfectly clean!" Mariko reassured her with a smile. "Oh, the tests are done!"
She removed the slide and stared at it under the mini-microscope, racking her brains to see if she remembered any pathogens from her science class.
Mariko dropped her sample on the ground in shock, shattering it. "No..." She stammered, readjusting the microscope out of fear she was reading it wrong. "It's gotta be wrong...it has to be wrong...there's no way...!" She looked up at the feeling of Yamada-sensei placing her hand on her shoulder, and her face told Mariko everything she needed to know.
"This is why you shouldn't go through life so recklessly." She said simply.
"No...I can't be sick with cholera, I can't be!" She scooted away from her microscope in terror and hid her face in her knees. To her, cholera was a disease of the low-class, the Europeans and Americans. And it was ancient! Nobody got cholera anymore.
"They say a majority of cholera cases are fatal."
Mariko started to sob.
"What's your favorite TV show?" Yamada-sensei asked Mariko an hour later, having comforted the girl and brought her inside her cottage. "I might check it out."
"Kamen Rider." Mariko answered without hesitation. "I really like the man character, who dresses up like a giant grasshopper! If I die, I want to come back as him."
"You certainly strike me as a fan of such things." Yamada-sensei answered calmly. Mariko groaned and laid on the couch, clutching her stomach.
"It hurts, it hurts!" She whined loudly.
"Your parents will be here soon to pick you up."
"Oh, I won't last that long!" She continued to whine, rolling around on the couch.
"You can, and you will." Yamada-sensei continued her calm sewing.
"Maybe it isn't even cholera. Maybe it's just period cramps, or a regular bug, or-!" Mariko sat up and exclaimed in a hopeful voice, but before she could finish, her cheeks bulged out and she loudly hurled clear water all over herself. She sniffed in a miserable way.
"No, that was the final nail in your coffin. Only a cholera victim has vomit that looks like that."
"Ah...ah..." Mariko panted, still covered in vomit. The thing she found odd was that it had no smell, unless you considered 'water' a smell.
"I know what cholera victims look like."
"Nng..." Mariko could only manage before vomiting again, this time leaning over and puking all over the couch's armrest. "Where's your bathroom?" She nervously tugged on her sweater, upset that it was white.
"The first door on your left in the kitchen." Yamada-sensei looked up briefly from her sewing to point, and Mariko nodded and sped off in that direction.
She locked herself in the bathroom and leaned against the door, clutching her stomach in sheer agony. To her, it felt like she had swallowed a bag of nails and they were being forced through her gut. Perhaps she did. If she had cholera, anything impossible suddenly seemed possible.
"Why, why, why?" She moaned, nearly toppling over from a strong wave of pain in her stomach. Her stomach then dropped, resulting in her making a straight beeline for the toilet and plopping herself down on it, still tightly holding her stomach.
The other strange thing to her was that the ensuing diarrhea was painless and incredibly watery, so it didn't take very long at all for her to empty herself of it. Afterwards, she flushed the toilet and started washing her hands in the sink, catching a strong whiff of-fish? Was that her? She had so much to learn about this disease.
After she washed her hands and dried them on a towel, she dampened a washcloth and started scrubbing down her sweater free of vomit the best she could, but her stomach dropped again and she had to finish the job on the toilet.
This time, she wasn't emptied for several more minutes, and even then it seemed to be starting and stopping. All she could do was scrub her sweater, although that too, was soon covered in a fresh coat of vomit.
Once she was emptied of both hands, she felt incredibly thirsty and staggered back into her tutor's living room, searching for water.
"You can't drink my tap water either, it's just as bad." Yamada-sensei perked up from her corner, looking over the skirt she finished showing.
"Need...water..." Mariko croaked out, grabbing an empty cup from the cupboard and holding it over the sink, filling it to the brim with water and drinking it greedily. It ran down her chin and down into her scarf, which she barely noticed. She filled the cup up again, and again, and again...
She barely registered her head hitting the floor and the screams of her just-arriving parents as the glass she was holding shattered on the floor.
"Just keep her hydrated. It doesn't always work, but she's a hardy girl. She'll get through this." Mariko awoke in her bed to her tutor explaining this to her parents, who simply looked gravely concerned.
She still had a massive stomachache, but her vomiting and diarrhea seemed to stop, so she happily tried jumping out of bed to tell her parents she was fine, but found to her horror she couldn't move her legs. She lifted up her blanket to find she still had her legs, although they were missing her go-go boots. Of course her parents would remove those before she entered the house, conscious or not.
Her legs registered her attempt to move them and tightly compressed, making her flinch. So not only did her stomach hurt, but her legs now too? She dropped the blanket with a cry of pain, making everyone look over at her.
"Oh, you're awake now!" Her mother said happily, running over to her. "Yamada-san said to keep you in bed and keep you hydrated, but she asked we move the TV in here so you won't be bored."
"Look what she brought for you!" Her father exclaimed, pulling out a bundle. Mariko had trouble focusing her eyes on it, but once she did, they instantly lit up.
"Is that...?!" She nearly squealed in delight, reaching out her hands for it. Her sensei had bought her a little figure of the main hero in Kamen Rider!
"It'll go right here, so it can be the first thing you see when you wake up in the morning, and the last thing you see when you go to bed." Her father promised, setting it down gently on her nightstand and making it face her. It was the original rider, the first one she saw, who was dressed like a green grasshopper and was sitting on his motorcycle. Oh, how she wanted to be like him!
"It's a shame the show ended though," She managed.
"Maybe it'll come back on air! A perfect recovery treat for her!" Yamada-sensei smiled, the first genuine smile Mariko had ever seen on her. She quickly bowed and took her leave, leaving Mariko alone with her parents.
"Just yell if you need water or anything, okay?" Her mother instructed.
"If you can't talk, don't worry. Periodically we'll come in here and give you water ourselves." Her father left after that, and her mother left after giving her a kiss. Mariko didn't indicate that she wanted the TV on, so that must've been why it was left off.
She managed to shift her eyes over to the small window by her bed, which presented her with a smoggy view of the city. The sky was usually a dark brown during the day, but to her surprise, the color had shifted in tone, making it a lighter brown. Perhaps some of the factories were shut off?
As she laid there, she also wondered how many of the people in the city had cholera, like her, and what they were doing to cure it. Were they shocked and upset about it, like her, or did they expect it? Or was it simply another consequence of living in the big city?
Mariko laid there some more, her legs hurting too much for her to properly get up and do anything, at least until her stomach dropped again.
Quick as a flash, she climbed out of bed and literally crawled towards the bathroom, not trusting her legs to work well enough to permit her access. As she was crawling, though, she felt her cheeks bulge, and she loudly vomited onto the hardwood floor, collapsing.
"Mama! Mama!" She cried, vomiting again. "Papa! Papa!"
They soon came running, finding the image of their daughter lying on the floor crying, halfway to the bathroom.
"What happened here?" Her father asked. "And is that fish I smell?"
"I'm okay, I'm okay..." She struggled, her dry tongue slipping on the words.
"What is happening to our daughter?" Her mother asked in horror, and Mariko passed out again, although whether it was from her thirst, illness, pain, or all combined, she didn't know.
She just hoped it all ended soon, so she could go back to school and to her tutor Yamada-sensei and she'd be more careful about what she put into her mouth and she'd donate to cholera disease research around the world and she'd petition for Kamen Rider to be put back on the air...
A bucket was placed next to her bed, and her clothes were swiftly changed and she was put into her light white pj's, but she barely registered the function. Her eyes were open, she could tell that they were, but she couldn't see anything. She tensed up slightly when she felt someone handling her tangled locks of shiny black hair, and flinched when she felt all that weight get cut away.
"It'll be better for her if she has short hair," Her father explained. "That way she won't get her vomit tangled in it."
"You'll be so stylish with your bob now!" Her mother reassured her, and Mariko smiled inwardly. Yes, a bob would be a nice change of pace. Every Japanese girl had her hair bobbed nowadays, mimicking a popular style from America. Some even curled and teased their hair. Maybe she could do that too!
Her stomach flipped, and all she could do was lean over and vomit, hearing the watery mess hit the bottom of the metal bucket. She laid back down, and her mother brushed her hair gently.
"It's okay, Mariko. Just drink." Her father held a straw to her mouth, but she had no energy left to even suck from it.
Her mother finished brushing her hair and pinned it out of her face with two giant barrettes."There, you look so pretty now!"
She sure didn't feel pretty. If she could move, she'd be squirming and writhing in agony from the combined pain of both her legs and abdomen together. All she could really do was tense her body up, and even then...
"Come on, just take a sip. If you don't drink, you'll never get better!" Her father coaxed, a bit more sternly this time. Mariko responded to him by rolling over and vomiting on herself.
"Oh..." Her mother sighed and left the room.
"Drink it. You want to recover, don't you?" Her fathered thrust the straw back into her mouth, and to humor him, she slowly wrapped her lips around the opening and sucked, and only when he tipped the cup slightly did she finally taste liquid flowing into her mouth.
What was this stuff?! It was delicious! It was water, she knew that, but it had sugar and salt mixed in! It was tasty! If she had more energy, she'd certainly gulp it dry!
But she had no energy left, and just taking a couple sips took everything out of her, so she stopped sipping. Her father nudged the straw further into her mouth, but she looked at him with her hazel-brown, sunken-in eyes, and with a sigh, he took the cup away.
"Suit yourself." He said simply yet sadly, and left Mariko alone again.
She wondered what her class was doing in school today. They were working on language, she remembered now. They had to memorize a famous poem by a certain poet...what was his name...she struggled to recollect her memories. She also found it harder and harder to think in a positive way like she was so prone to, and that was what truly upset her.
Mariko worried that if she didn't smile during her illness, she'd die, and dying from cholera was the last thing she wanted. Who died of cholera in 1976?! Her stomach dropped again, and she mustered up a tiny bit of energy to jump out of bed and empty herself into her bucket.
Afterwards, she climbed back into bed and sighed. That fish smell was going to make her vomit again, she just knew it. Not having anything else to do, she glanced over at her Kamen Rider action figure, happy to at least have that by her side. If she died, would they burn it along with her remains? Or, since she died of an illness, would they just bury her in the ground? Could she be buried with the figure?
She fell asleep with all those thoughts knocking around in her head...
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Mariko sped faster and faster down the road. She was riding on a motorcycle, and she was letting her archenemy escape! Well, they wouldn't be escaping for long. She leaned forward in her seat slightly to build up more speed, then stomped on the gas. Yes, there was her archenemy, right there!
He turned to gaze at her as she forced her motorcycle to a halt and jumped off, clad as usual in her grasshopper mask and attire. This guy, didn't anyone give him the memo? He wasn't some kind of animal at all, he looked like a big hulky boxer in a hockey mask. Well, that wouldn't matter once she defeated him.
With a cry, she threw up her right leg and brought it down square on his head, knocking him down. Not wanting him to gain the upper-hand, she swung her leg back and kicked him right back in the stomach, then smirked.
"You think you can beat me? Scum like you is too easy for the likes of me!" She did a victory pose. Her mouth was killing her. After all that fighting, she needed a drink of water. She started to head over to her motorcycle, when something heavy grabbed her arm tightly, making her blood run cold.
"Where do you think you're going, bitch? I'm not finished with you yet!" He growled out, throwing Mariko to the ground. The impact hit her stomach the worst and caused her to vomit up blood...no...water...? Why was she puking up water? No matter. She readjusted her mask and stood back up, striking a fighting pose.
"You are no match for Grasshopper Lady!" She cheered, kicking his stomach in several rapid kicks in succession. However, instead of going down, he stood there calmly, and she fell down instead. "W...what?!"
"Bitch, you're dying. You still think you're an equal match for me?" He challenged, and she slowly stood back up.
"I'm...not...dying...!" She barely managed, coughing.
"Look at you. Yes you are."
"Liar!" She charged at him and threw a punch, cracking part of his mask. "Mariko won't die from cholera! She's much too hardy for that!" She insisted, punching more holes into his mask. Was that really her voice, or someone else's?
Why did it matter? Soon she had managed to knock her foe unconscious, and she got off him with a smirk. "Next time, think twice before you say Mariko is dying!" She flipped her black bob of hair, coated in barrettes, and got back onto her motorcycle and sped off, not thinking about her foe anymore.
One thing was certain for her: she wouldn't die from cholera. She could die in any other way at any other time, but it was not from that and it was not today.
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"Mariko? Mariko!" Her mother yelled anxiously, shaking to wake her up. "Why can't she hear me?" She looked despertly at the doctor.
"How well-hydrated was she?" He asked in a stern voice.
"I gave her several cups of water for the past day, but she only had the strength to sip a few drops." Her fathered explained, running a hand through his hair.
"What kind of water was it?"
"The kind her tutor, Yamada Aiko-san, told us to give her. Regular water with a teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt mixed in."
"Oh, her? You mean that woman with the long black braid in her hair and the glasses, always walking around like she disapproves of you?" The doctor asked in a curious tone, and her mother nodded.
"That's the one. Said her husband fell ill with cholera shortly before he moved to the States, so she has experience with it." She answered.
"Well, my best guess here is that she simply didn't get enough water to balance out her electrolytes, and she became too dehydrated for her body systems to properly function."
Her parents looked over at Mariko, who was sleeping soundly in her bed. Vomit covered her chest and mouth, and a strong fishy odor emitted from her. Yet, despite that, she somehow looked peaceful, if it wasn't for her wrinkly, bluish skin and sunken-in eyes.
"You don't mean to say...?" Her mother asked nervously, and the doctor nodded.
"I'm sorry to say it, and I truly am. I haven't seen a cholera case like this since the war, and I'm sad that she couldn't fight it off." He left the room to give them some privacy, and her father picked up her action figure.
"Let's at least bury her with this. She is sick, so they won't cremate her-but let's at least give her some sort of happiness anyway." He explained, placing it beside her head on her pillow.
"She was only seventeen, honey!" Her mother sobbed.
"Who says life is fair?" He held her.
However, Mariko was sitting on her bed in utter confusion. Dead? She wasn't dead! She was right there! A long chain bound her to her bed, but she could still reach out and hug them, if she stretched.
"Mama, Papa! I'm still alive! See? I'm healthy!" She smiled weakly. "Can't you see me?" She reached out her arms to touch her mother's shoulder, to get her attention, let her know she wasn't dead-but it went right through her.
Mariko stared at her hands in confusion. She could feel them, know they were there, so why couldn't her parents?
"Mama? Papa?" She asked again, but they took no notice that they heard her. "Am I really...dead?" She looked at her reflection in the window, finding herself looking exactly like her body did, but when she tried looking in her mirror, she had no reflection. So...was she dead?
Mariko leaned back against her wall and sighed. What was she going to do now? Nobody ever talked about this part of their lives. Was she supposed to sit and wait for something to happen? She glanced back over at her parents.
"Don't worry, guys. When I go to where-ever I'm going, I'm going to become super powerful! I'll make you proud. I'll come back as a queen or something! So don't be sad anymore. Smile for me, okay? Then, I'll smile every day in the afterlife to remind myself to be more positive. If I'm happy, bad things won't affect me as much! So smile, 'kay?" She ended her little speech with a big smile of her own, and even though nobody could see it, it still made her just the tiniest bit happier.
"And to die on April 1st, too..." Her mother sighed. Mariko jumped off her bed, but was limited by her chain so had to remain at the foot.
"Even better! I'll use this to improve the lives of the people around me, whether dead or alive!" She smiled more.
As she stood there, a bright light suddenly appeared beside her, and a serious-looking woman stepped out, wearing a long black kimono.
"Ready to go?" She asked sternly.
"Go where?" Mariko asked eagerly.
"To the Soul Society. You're dead now, yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm excited to go! Can I be whatever you are? A spirit guide?"
"Maybe, if you meet all the requirements. It's very hard though, we barely have enough Soul Reapers as it is." She pulled out a katana with a pink hilt.
"I'm sure they're not that bad!" Mariko said cheerfully, and soon the sword came down on her head, splitting it. "I'll become a Soul Reaper thingy too!"
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The newly-banded together Vizards were given giant boxes of their stuff that Yoruichi found when they asked her to visit their old houses, from so long ago.
"It was hard to find everyone. If you died a few years ago, it was easier, but if not...well, I still tried my best anyway!" She smiled a bit. "Hopefully this'll boast your morale!"
They eagerly tore open the boxes and looked through the things inside, wondering what they'd find. They didn't remember very much about their human lives, so what they considered special to themselves was a total surprise.
"Hey, here's my old tracksuit! I used to wear this all the time!" Hiyori said, pulling out a bright red jacket with a white stripe. "Hm. It still has my living last name on it...I need to change that."
Nobody was as excited as Mashiro though, who squealed when she opened her own box. "I forgot all about this!" She pulled it out and showed it off to everyone. It was her old Kamen Rider figure. "This thing encouraged me to get through my illness. I so wanted to be like this guy when I was alive!" She squealed.
"I'd say you're halfway there," Risa said simply, referring to the form Mashiro took when she was training.
"I know! When I found out I could turn into a grasshopper, I was so happy, I nearly lived! That's why I can control it so well-it's my dream!" She held the figure to her chest.
"Who knew dying could give us a chance to redeem our lives?" Risa adjusted her glasses.
Mashiro separated herself from the other Vizards, wanting to spend some time alone with her old action figure. She didn't have a shelf or anything to display it on, but that didn't matter. With a big grin, she laid it beside her pillow, where it could be the last thing she saw when she went to bed and the first thing she saw when she woke up.
Hey, where had she heard that before...? She shook her head and smiled, assuming Kensei said it to one of his subordinates at some point, and skipped off to empty out the rest of her box.