Disclaimer: The ideas and concepts used in BLEACH belong to Tite Kubo, as well as any regular characters. Most of the characters in this story belong to me. Thank you.
Down the wooden hallway two young women walked. One carried neat bundle of clean, white bandages and the other carried her sword.
"What do you think of these three?" the bandage carrier asked the other girl.
"I'm not sure" the sword girl said. "The shaved-head-guy is kind of cute, I guess."
"You would say that" the other girl remarked, smiling while her friend blushed. "You always go for the rough and tough looking guys!"
"Well, what about you?" the sword girl demanded. "Which guy do you like, huh?"
"I don't really like any of them" she said. "I'm saving my heart for a strong, sensitive and nurturing guy that will walk through Hell and back for me."
"And you're waiting for him here?" her friend remarked. Then she started quietly laughing while the bandage girl puffed her cheeks in anger and started stomping. Once they arrived at the door, the sword girl opened it and looked inside. "Where'd he go?" The man who was in the room, and the sword that was on the shrine rest was gone with him.
That man, Hoji, was staggering painfully through the garden area with his sword sheathe gripped in hand. "Tch" he grunted, "what in hell happened? I was fighting, then a huge wave of pressure broke the tower...and Shin..." He only wanted to breathe now and stopped talking. Using his sword sheathe as a cane, he hobbled over to the mysterious person seated on a stone bench. As he hobbled he noticed the strange structure of the garden. The further he looked in one direction, the more wild the growth and beautiful vegetation. In the other direction, the plants and grass leveled down to a short, luxurious level. It was like a continuum of gardening that Hoji was walking through.
"Weird landscaping" Hoji noted. "I like it..."
"Hey!" a girl shouted. Hoji turned around and saw a tall girl with short, black hair and a sword in her grip glaring him down. Hoji added the two parts, person plus sword, and came to a hasty conclusion. First, he planned out what a battle would be like in his condition. Then, almost immediately, he made the definite choice of talking things out first. The person sitting on the other side of the garden would be his hostage.
"You shouldn't be up!" the shorter, blonder bandage carrying girl said. "Natsumo, go chase him! He's your husband, after all!"
"Shut up!" Natsumo shouted. "So I'm interested in him, so what!?" She started running after Hoji anyway, and the panicking warrior started hobbling faster toward his goal, the mystery person. Unaware of the coming chaos, that mystery person, a women dressed in shinigami robes, sat calmly sipping from a cup of tea and gazing at the flowers around her.
"Tch!" Hoji growled, loud enough for the mystery woman to hear. He flash stepped forward, stopped behind her, and threw his sword out of his sheathe. With the inertia of his spinning motion, he grabbed the woman by the back of her robe and lifted her up, still in a sitting position with her tea undisturbed, and held his sword to her throat. "Don't try anything absurd!" he demanded. Natsumo stopped with a skip and faced down her now adversary with a now vicious glare.
"Don't talk about being absurd, you ass!" she shouted. Immediately, she dropped her sword and covered her mouth. "I-I'm sorry! I didn't mean to swear! My emotions got the best of me again!!!"
"It's alright" the mystery hostage softly said with a very soft and light laugh at the end. "Excuse me, but could you please put me down?"
"Who are you?" Hoji demanded with strain, "and why am I here?" More importantly, have you seen a guy with short, black hair and an imploded chest!?"
"Of course I've seen him" she politely said. She turned to face Hoji with her warm and caring eyes, her dainty lady-like smile, her evenly parted hair that came down to short curls on her neck and gave him a heart-meltingly cute smile. "I'm the medic who healed him." Hoji was taken aback with shame, then embarrassment, then pain. It's hard to say which force caused him to drop her down and fall on his back.
Now much calmer and sedated on relatively ineffective painkillers, Hoji sat opposite his gracious host in her robes across a tea table. On either side of her sat the girls Natsumo and her blond counterpart Telli, who were now much more wary of their guest now that his sword was back in his hands.
"First off" Hoji said, raising his sheathed sword and slamming it on the table, "I feel the need to apologize. I didn't realize I was being cared for..."
"No worries" his hostess said waving her hand. "You're not the first person to try and attack us without warning."
"Although you are the first to be as stupid as you are and move after the thrashing you must've taken" Telli noted. Natsumo reached over and pushed her swiftly. Telli got up and angrily curled her sleeves back, ready for a fight, but their smiling leader set them both down with the clearing of her throat.
"So what are you guys?" Hoji asked.
"Umm...we're just people like you" the hostess said. "I'm sure you're more a fighter than we are, but deep down we are the same. We are made of the same spiritual particles and soul energy."
"...eh?" Hoji grunted quizzically. "Okay...who are you?"
"Oh yes, I'm so sorry" she apologized. "It's rude for a host not to introduce herself, isn't it? My name is Rei Unohana, and this is my home. I'm sorry you had to awaken in such unfamiliar surroundings, but I had little choice."
"You saved us?" Hoji asked. "I remember some weird-looking dude knocking me out with some weird kido spell, but I don't remember any girls there. Sorry."
"Oh, I didn't save you personally" Rei admitted humbly. "That was just one of my medical scouts. He was patrolling for nearby Hollow activity for my research and found you and your friends in terrible shape. I have to ask, what happened?"
"Ah, we were killing people" Hoji said nonchalantly, taking no care into speaking so lightly of death in front of strangers. "It got a little out of hand. I blame her" as he now pointed at his sword. Rei looked curiously at Hoji, and his sword, and pieced together some equations in her mind.
"Who..." Natsumo cautiously asked, "who were you killing? Just people? Innocent civilians!?"
"The Kyuuhiouto" Hoji answered.
"Ah" Natsumo noted, "then that's alright."
"Those guys are mean!" Telli added. "They always came around here to extort us for having a mansion out in the wilderness, but Lady Unohana always beat them back, right Lady Unohana?" Unohana was still deep in thought, as one could tell by her blank stare forward, past Hoji.
"So" Rei began anew, "your friend destroyed that town?" Hoji thought about it for a second himself, but was preemptively interrupted by the man Unohana asked, behind him.
"Yes" Suichi answered, up and about with not a scratch on him. "Shin Kenpachi is responsible for Gevlav's nonexistence. Is that a problem?" Hoji darted around on his knees, shot up to his feet and rushed over to his friend who leaned against the wall in the shadows.
"Suichi!" Hoji exclaimed, "You're awake?"
"Hello Hoji" Suichi greeted. "Have you met Lady Unohana properly yet? Introduced yourself in a gentlemanly manner as you are so prone to doing and thanked her for her free medical treatment and housing?" Hoji answered Suichi's obviously snide and sarcastic question with one of his own.
"Suichi!" Hoji exclaimed, "You're alive!?" Suichi sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose in anger. "Oh, wait, I thought I heard of you before" Hoji said again, turning back to his person of interest. "You're some kind of scientist, a Hollow researcher, right?"
"Yes, that's right" Rei answered with a dainty smile.
"Cool" Hoji noted. "Got any living specimens I can practice on?"
"Hold that thought" Suichi said, pushing Hoji away as he walked forward. "I thank you and am grateful, don't be mistaken, but I am a bit curious. Where is Shin?" Rei just sat and looked up noncommittally, then tilted her head with a smile as she began her response.
Shin lay, still asleep, on a lavish bed surrounded by a curiously clinging mist and burning incense. His chest, though covered by blankets, was in a normal shape but his organs and bones were still ravaged. Mann's final attack had been too much for his body to bare, but with the incredible healing capabilities of Rei and her fellow medical soldiers, he was on the way to recovery.
"Damn" Hoji noted.
"He was in the worst shape" Rei said with a serious face. "I was unsure of even my own abilities to heal him at all. He has remarkable spiritual endurance to have lived through such a fight."
"Well, he is invincible" Hoji said. "I'm not surprised he's dodged death so swiftly like this."
"Be serious, Hoji!" Suichi growled. "Just look at him! His spirit energy is barely even there! He looks dead as it is, and without a proper field around him he's just an empty shell of the man he used to be. That isn't Shin, that's just his shadow. It'll take a while for the real Shin to come back from the abyss now..." Hoji, rather than burst out some patriotic speech about Shin's strength and his absolute godly capacity in battle, just stood and looked. Shin's field of black, resonating energy was indeed very lose to the ground. In fact, the mist around him wouldn't even go near the energy, like it was scared.
"It will indeed take some time" Rei said, "but not an eternity. Give him a month of rest, no spiritual aggravation or stimulation, and he'll be fine."
"I don't get it" Hoji said. "How'd he get this bad?"
"It may have been his sword" Suichi pointed out. "Isn't that an accurate theory, Lady Unohana?" She nodded and began a detailed explanation.
"Upon the first shikai, or initial release" she said, "some shinigami are prone to getting overpowered by their own swords. In fact, it happened to me. The sudden shift in power, coupled with the event that forced that power out of him, drained his soul of nearly all its energy and threw him into this comatose state. His energy is incredibly dense as it is, and you can imagine the damage it can do when unrestrained. He destroyed Gevlav with an unconscious flex of this spiritual pressure. You can imagine the damage it would do when used all at once from a single source. Honestly...he should be dead..."
"No, I get that" Hoji said, which Suichi leaned in with amazement at. "But...I mean...Shin's invincible. He shouldn't be like this, regardless of how bad the battle was. He's fought bigger, more powerful things before and he always just walked away like nothing happened!" Suddenly, Hoji's mind couldn't help but go back and re-watch all the battles he and Shin had marched through. The Gillian Hollow, the Kyuuhiouto villains, the various other shinigami guards that they dispatched sometimes without their swords, the Adjuchas Danzig...
And as all those battles and their outcomes were played in Hoji's eyes, tears swelled up. Hoji' completely unable to comprehend the situation of an incapacitated Shin, was crying tears of confusion and desperation. "Shin...Shin's a god........." Suichi put a hand on his shoulder for comfort and Rei gave him a piteous look, but Rei was far too focused on the state of this so-called god in her own bed. Even lying down with only a slim chance of suddenly waking, Shin had the most menacing aura of death and power she had ever seen. No Hollows or shinigami could be compared to what she saw now.
Even unconscious, Shin was extremely dangerous to be around...
