The downfall of prideful men

Uryu awoke to the sound of his phone alarm. He peeled his eyes open, expecting to see the white ceiling of Wandenreich, and instead he was staring up a cream-colored one with slight water damage. Belatedly he remembered he hadn't touched a phone for years, not ever since he went to Wand-Soul society. It was reminiscent of his younger years, back when he was only fifteen instead of twenty something. He looked around to see an apartment, looking the same way he would set up his apartment when he was fifteen. The scene felt something like a sick joke to Uryu, nausea and uneasiness filled him.

Yet everything was his, he remembered all this furniture. There was still even the small black stain on the inner side of his desk he had put out of suspicion. It was a small, barely visible mark that could only be uncovered with slight reishi manipulation. He checked the phone. Same password. Same everything. This certainly was a realistic setup. Paranoia and fear settled deep into his mind. This was certainly an elaborate setup by the Quincies. Knowing that this would resolve nothing, he opened the apartment door and ran outside. Same setting. There was nothing different or changed. Uryu pinched his arm. The pain felt realistic enough. Slowly he went back inside, worry eating his mind. In a burst of energy Uryu started flipping over all the furniture and throwing all the contents of the room the room. When he was finished, the room was a mess. Yet, even then it felt real, that it wasn't a trick.

Only when he had calmed down he investigated the tickling suspicion in his head. It had been present since he had woken up, but never went in depth to it. Then he realized that the air was completely different. With the sinking feeling of desperation Uryu tried to sense the reishi in the air, and instead he found only a slight humming.

Shock washed over him, because he knew he was no longer in Wandenreich. He was in the living world. The Wan-Soul society had a heavy purr of reishi constantly in the air, and a certain feeling to the materials made from reishi. Nor could he feel any of the corruption from the Soul society into the living world. It was untouched and pure, the definite sign of the past. That the tremors never affected the Living world. There was none of that here, and the surface beneath his body was clearly not reishi. Driven deeper into his panic he checked his reflection with his phone.

His fingers slackened from disbelief and dropped the phone to the ground where it clattered with finality. His face was completely different. While Uryu didn't check on his appearance often he knew that he looked miserable. His face pale and sickly, dark circles beneath his eyes, a stray wisps of early white hair from stress. He had none of that. His face was soft and round compared to his older one, his appearance neat and healthy. Uryu started to furiously feel his face, knocking off his old glasses from his nose.

It felt real to him. A horrible suspicion told him he had gone back in time, and so he promptly started hunting through the room, a stranger's room, to find calendars and agendas. He found the horrible bird calendar he had bought and a school planner. He rummaged through both, and it lead to the fact that he was in the skin of his fifteen-year old self. Realization struck him and he grasped the quincy cross around his arm. Summoning his bow, horror and annoyance filled him when he found out that his bow was incomplete and was in it's spiritual state. He blanched when he struggled to use his finer control to maintain and rein the reishi under his control. He strained against his horrible control and gave up when the bow almost felt like it was snapping under his hand.

Uryu gave up on common sense and accepted that he had gone back in time and he was fifteen years old. There was no point in denying such a thing, after all the facts made it clear. The living world untarnished from the two worlds merging, his lacking skill, and the room around him. He suspected something must had happened during his moments in death that he was sent back.

He paced around his apartment room, his emotions were indistinct and there was a pressing urge to cry that grew the longer he wandered around his room. Uryu realized that he would have to do everything over, leaving his friends, trying to kill Ywac-Uryu couldn't think, his head wouldn't work. So, he walked and walked, pacing in the tiny apartment like a caged tiger.

Then he tried to sense the other teens, the ones from when they were fifteen years old. Ichigo's reiatsu was always present, and this time it was no exception. Yet, somehow it felt different, more pure and unrestrained. His Ichigo, the Ichigo from the dying world, had a reiatsu that was stifled. It had the feeling of a tiger forced into a smaller container, and there was something diluted into his reiatsu that affected even his reiryoku. There was none of that here. He was blessedly whole, unaffected and unmarred by the wars, by all the fighting.

Uryu stretched out farther. He found Orihime, with her spiritual power although it was very faint. Then Chad, whose spiritual power was much higher than Orihime unsurprisingly. After all, before this all began Chad had often been around Ichigo. He could swear he almost even picked up Urahara's reiatsu, although that was probably just his imagination. Urahara had impeccable control.

Uryu roughly estimated that he had three months before Rukia would come to Karakura town. After that calculation he wondered what he should do. 'I've been given a second chance. What should I do?' wondered Uryu. It was the most common thought on his head. For an entire week he ignored the rest of the world and lazed around his apartment. He just wanted a break from everything. The longer he lazed the more he wondered if he was insane, or if it the situation was an insanely detailed flashback. So, Uryu who had gone back in time was curled on the floor in the mess of his apartment room. He was afraid of moving, he was in fear that he would end up making the same mistakes.

The second week he took to writing his memories down. He started with the events that lead up to him fighting Ywach. His betrayal, all his murders. Then he would go back from there to writing down his memories. Hueco Mundo, Aizen, Ichigo's loss of powers. He wrote and wrote, taking only times off to go to the bathroom or eat. The more the word Quincy popped up, the more he grew to hate it. The more he wrote the more his absurd hate for the Quincies would grow within him. He hated how he acted, how he used his pride to run around acting as if he was the best, he hated everything about it.

His bane of existence was no longer his savior, but the disgusting devil ridiculing him. He hated that Ywach's blood was flowing through his veins. Uryu knew that the almighty couldn't affect him the way it affected other Quinces but knowing that Ywach's power and compulsion resided deep within him made him sick. So, grew his fear and hate for the Quincy lineage he had, encouraged whenever the thought of Ywach popped up into his head.

A month passed this way. Uryu didn't care enough to go to school. His memories of the future haunted him.

During the middle of the second month Uryu realized that more of his memories were growing foggier. Sometimes he would suddenly stop, unable to describe a person or how something looked. It happened twice when he was writing about the Quincy war and about Ichigo's Vasto Lorde form. Even once when he had to write what Orihime was wearing when she got kidnapped. Whenever that happened it was as if for a moment he was freed, emptied of all the bloodied thoughts and memories. When he snapped out of it he wrote even faster, scrambling for extra notebooks. Writing and writing about Ywach, mistakes, about his hubris.

At the end of the second month he couldn't remember anything about the arrancar and most of the quinces were gone from his memory. Then he couldn't remember most of what happened in Hueco Mundo, and the had little to no recollection left of the Quincy invasion. Desperately he wrote over and over in his notebooks, trying to gain recollection, but as more days passed the more he forgot. The Shinigami's faces and their abilities were trickling away into nothing. Soon Uryu's memories would become so faded it would become like it never happened, but he knew that he hated the future, and he wanted to change it.

The third month he gave up trying to remember, his memories were as evasive as a trying to grasp a fading illusion. He slowly realized he still felt emotions, and remembered certain muscle memory, despite not having the actual memories to match with them. Uryu settled on trying to change his mindset to prevent the future outcome by instilling distrust and dislike towards the Quincy. He knew his trust and pride for his heritage ended the other future, much like Icarus. Icarus flew high to the sun out of foolishness, and Uryu grew too close to the Quinces and lead to his downfall.

He let Ichigo get brainwashed and ignored Orihime's and Chad's pleas for help. He let Ywach destroy the balance of the world and then he died without fixing anything he did wrong. Whenever he though of them, guilt and shame flooded his mind. His shame was further deepened with the thoughts of Quincy pride.

On April first Uryu woke up feeling strange in his apartment with notes scrawled everywhere and unable to remember the past three months. He found out his feelings had also completely changed, and he had no idea why. The thought of Quincy pride filled him with shame and slight revulsion and a need to confess or apologize. Sometimes a wandering thought of friendship and sorrow filled his mind, but Uryu had no idea what it was exactly. He tried reading the notes, but he couldn't make out the words. The handwriting was too desperate and illegible. It grew worse the more recent the notes were. Yet the few illegible words repeating were, 'DON'T BETRAY. IT'S NOT WORTH IT. THE QUINCIES WERE WRONG' and with some words that looked like names.

Orihime, Rukia, Neliel, Ywach, Jugram, Chad, Renji were some of the more decipherable names. Once he found a sentence written, 'I don't deserve friends, never trust the quincy', and oddly enough he agreed with the words.

He went back to school the following week. For some odd reason he had a feeling that something would happen soon.