The pressure was suffocating. Regardless, you need to breathe. Ignore the voices arguing and screaming in the back of your mind, and breathe. In out, in out, in out. Fairly simple, really. Only it isn't, when you know you're going to die.
XxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxX
It is almost like dying, except death would be far too merciful, you think sourly. The physical pain of the first transformation, the emotional pain that comes with losing your friends, your family, your home. It hurts, and sometimes, you stare longingly at your zanpukuto and wonder what it would feel like in your gut. Or through your heart, where it hurts the most. Or maybe in your mind, which is under constant siege from the hollow spirit inside you, and in unceasing pain from the fighting between the zanpukuto and the beast and your own consciousness.
You catch yourself on occasion, turning around to give an order or talk to Aizen, or to another one of your old subordinates, only to find yourself in an old, rundown warehouse with no one but the other unfortunate victims of your fukutaicho.
And the guilt will crash down on you once more all over again and you'll find that once you're alone, you can't breathe and you just want to go home but you know you can't and it hurts it hurts it hurts ithurtsithurtsithurts…
But saying sorry won't mean anything but more physical pain because they don't blame you- they blame your fukutaicho even though you should have seen it sooner and sent your subordinate to the executioner's block. So you don't apologize, and instead, you suffer in silence. Suffocating silence.
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Eventually, it gets a little easier. Breathing gets easier, and the voices begin to quiet because you assert your dominance and the hollow learns. Slowly, oh-so-slowly, he learns.
You all learn, and it all gets a little bit easier.
Of course, you all have your days when everything comes crashing down again and you just have to sit in the corner of your room with your head in your knees and breathe. Just breathe, and during those times it's all you know how to do. You have no idea what they do during their bad days, the unspeakable days, because usually, they just disappear and don't return for hours, or days, or weeks, or sometimes months. You understand.
The pain is still always there, lurking just beneath the surface, ready to climb out and reopen the wound that gushed blood when it was first inflicted and start the process all over again. But it gets easier to overcome every time it does break free, and it gets easier to hide the bad days, the unspeakable days. It's a little less painful, and over the course of a century or so, you can handle it without a break down, and can go months without pain.
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It was so difficult the first time, you have no idea why they would invite you back, title and Division and power back and all. You have no earthly idea why they would dare to even start to think that it would be okay to just welcome you back with open arms, and pretend like they hadn't tried to kill you and turned their backs on your for something that wasn't your fault over a century before.
When you get the invitation, you have your first bad day, unspeakable day in over five years, and you curse them silently while you shake and hyperventilate in your bedroom in the warehouse you can now call home.
And the worst part is, while you hate them all so, so much- you never knew one person could be so hateful- you want to go back. You accept the invitation under the conditions that they understand you are not their ally. That you will turn your back on them at the slightest provocation or sign of hostility- or the word from Ichigo.
…
You hate yourself later, but when you look at your comrades' overjoyed faces, you know that if you had declined, they would've too, and then they would sink back, undo all of the progress, into depression all over again, and you can't let that happen. Ever.
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You feel a lot of different things when the time comes for you to leave. Unlike them, you had time to fall in love with the world around you, and part of you doesn't want to leave.
You ignore it and leave anyway.
It hurts. It hurts leaving, it hurts going back- but you know it would've hurt staying, too.
You wonder, idly, it you would eventually drown in pain, and if you were destined to do so from the moment of your birth.