• Chapter 2
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    I don’t see what they think is so bad about America, Hitsugaya thought to himself. So it’s strange. That doesn’t make it bad. 12th could be really good at times. They had the woman located down to the street address. She was living, it appeared, with a husband and son in an apartment complex. A day of discreet watching – no gigai, as he didn’t want to alert her to his presence – and he learned that the best time to catch her alone was after her son got on the bus for school in the morning.

    He looked her over with a critical eye. The basics he had from Unohana were there – pale skin, red hair, glasses, freckles – but he hadn’t expected her to be quite so… overweight. And if nobody was around, it must not matter to her what she looked like. Her hair was sort of up off of her neck, but the way it stuck out at the moment reminded him an awful lot of Abarai Renji.

    He watched her take some medicine, then sit to read the paper. Well, he heard her sit. Her bones made funny crunching sounds when she moved. And the pain – she was radiating pain that even he could sense. Not just physical pain, although there was that, but emotional pain. This was going to be troublesome. If she really had reason to want to die, odds were she wouldn’t last long before becoming a Hollow afterward.

    Hitsugaya followed her as she walked wearily to her bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed and strapped an odd device to her face, a sort of mask with a tube attached to a machine on the back of the bed. Then she looked up and saw him.

    She took the mask off.

    She put her glasses on, took them off, rubbed her eyes, and put them on again.

    “I see you, whoever you are.”

    Hitsugaya was truly startled. He slowly turned – and she was looking him straight in the eye.

    “I don’t know who or what you are, but I have to assume you are a hallucination. The door’s locked and there’s nobody here but me. Bloody rip. I knew I was tired, didn’t know I was this tired. There’s nobody here, there’s nobody here, there’s nobody here…”

    She walked into the kitchen. Intrigued, he followed.

    She had a glass of Coke in her hand. “You’re still here?” She shook her head. “This is what I get for twenty plus years of sleep deprivation.” Twenty years? She’s not THAT old... “I’m seeing things. Yeah, that’s it. Some kid with white hair dressed like he’s going to an anime convention shows up and glares at me like I’m a criminal…” Wait a minute, I didn’t THINK I was glaring at her! “… and I’m twisted enough that all I can think about is wishing I could hug him.”

    That stopped him short.

    “What did you just say?”

    “Oh, the apparition speaks. Now I really am losing my mind. Visual and auditory hallucinations brought on by sleep deprivation. Now I can add insanity to my diagnoses. Let’s see, arthritis, asthma, allergies, sleep apnea, hypertension, depression, mental instability… Next they’ll be sending me to the Psych Institute for study like some blasted specimen.”

    He winced. That’s almost exactly what Kurotsuchi-b*****d – ahem, taichou – had in mind.

    She laughed bitterly. “Take your pick, figment of my imagination. What would you like me to repeat?”

    “The part from before about what you wanted.”

    A raised eyebrow. “Since when did anyone really honestly care what I want? I want to be freed from my misery. I want to be out of pain. I want somebody to give a damn. And I’m confessing all of this to some picture I’ve made up out of my head like a crazy woman.” Tears were streaming down her face. “You know what I really want? More than anything else in the world? What I’m never going to get, that’s what. I want somebody to actually love me. Not say it to sound nice then kill my spirit with torture or criticism. Or say it then walk away and leave me to wallow in the hell they created. I want somebody to love me enough to believe I tell the truth. I want somebody to love me enough to treat me with respect. I want somebody to love me enough to kiss me and hold me tight even though I’m fat and ugly and… and…”

    She was shaking with years of repressed grief. Hitsugaya just… looked.

    She looked up again. “Yeah, and now my glasses are messed up. Again. And my sinuses get screwed up whenever I cry and I can’t breathe. Again. I know better than to cry. Damn it all.”

    Hell to my Heaven,

    Yin to my Yang,

    Sorrow to my Joy,

    Heat to my Ice,

    Darkness to my Light,

    “My Shadow, your Sun,

    My Silence, your Song.”

    She stared at him. Hitsugaya didn’t even realize he had spoken the words aloud. Hyourinmaru’s words.

    “Who exactly are you – no. What exactly are you?”

    “I’m not sure you would believe me if I told you anyway.”

    She closed her eyes in weariness. “Then at least tell me a name. If I’m going to fantasize, I at least ought to have a name for you.”

    “Toshiro.”

    She tilted her head. “To-shiro? Like, Japanese, right? Doesn’t ‘shiro’ mean white? I guess that was for your hair then.”

    It was Hitsugaya’s turn to close his eyes. That joke was getting old… but she didn’t mean it cruelly like some had.

    “Ok, Toshiro. Make you a deal.”

    Now his eyebrow raised.

    “You’re a pretty nice fantasy, I have to admit. Not like I’m ever actually going to tell anyone I dreamed of some guy straight out of a manga volume came to talk to me. Nobody – and I mean nobody – knew about those words. I never even wrote them down. Not even on a computer file. And here you come quoting them back to me. Which means you can’t be real and have to be from my imagination. So I’m going to ask for a little help from my overactive imagination, ne?”

    “I have been called many things, but ‘fantasy’ was never one of them.”

    “Irrelevant. ‘Fantasy’ sounds better than ‘apparition’ or ‘ghost’ or even ‘invisible friend’. Ouch. Makes me sound like I belong in the loony bin again. Or maybe suffered some brain damage after the other night. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

    Hitsugaya shot her a sharp look. “What do you mean, ‘after the other night’?”

    She narrowed her gaze. “I mean ‘after the other night’ when ‘someone’ accidentally unplugged my CPAP machine. I don’t have enough lungpower to pull in air if I’m wearing the CPAP mask without the airflow turned on. I nearly died from suffocation. But I guess I must have some value, because eventually he changed his mind and woke me up before it was ‘too late’.” She laughed bitterly. “Better had he left me to die. After all these years, he still says most of my illnesses are fake. But I’m the only one who can take care of Andrew. I am his mother after all. And who else would have the patience to learn enough about autistic spectrum disorders in general and Andrew in particular to try to deal with it all? Not to mention doctors, medicine, insurance, school, IEP meetings…” She shrugged, deflated. “Not that it matters. Not that I matter.”

    That explained a few things. Like how she showed up in Soul Society but was still here. Hitsugaya was going to have to ask someone in 12th about this “near death experience” stuff. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly her that came to Soul Society – maybe it was this presence Hyourinmaru was resonating with that caused the trouble… seeking help?

    But he wasn’t sure. “Is it safe to leave you alone like this? I mean, you aren’t going to try to kill yourself if I leave, are you?”

    She looked at him blankly, sniffed to try to clear some of the tears, and shuffled back to the bedroom. He followed, not knowing what to think.

    That funny pulsing indigo/red/black sensation was back. She sat on the bed and took the mask in her hand.

    “No. I’m not brave enough for anything like that. When the hurt gets too bad, I just let myself die a little. Then the dead part gets numb, and I can bear to go on. I don’t get to do much of what I want in this life. For example, you look like you need a kiss, right there.” She pointed to his cheek. “Oh, lose the deer-in-the-headlights look already. My son won’t let me kiss him, so how would you expect me to violate anyone else’s personal space? So as much as I would like to, I don’t. Or won’t. Or can’t. I am restrained from it.”

    All Hitsugaya could do was stand and blink at her. He simply didn’t understand a need so great, a personality so totally emo, that she would say something like that to a total stranger. But then again, she still believed he wasn’t real. What on earth was he supposed to do about this?

    “OK. Toshiro. You want to be of some real use? Something you can do to help?”

    “And what might that be?”

    “Sunday morning there’s this song on the order of service… I can’t stand to sing it, especially the last line… I have a really hard time envisioning ‘not like a stranger or a guest but like a child at home’ and not fervently wishing I were the stranger or the guest because they got better treatment.” She sniffed. “Anyway. You want to help me? I dare you, then. I dare you to come Sunday morning when I’m in the choir loft singing. I dare you to find me during that song and hold me close. Pretend to cherish me, just for a verse or two. Pretend to love me. Since pretending is the best I can get, and I’m not always the best pretender. That’s why I can’t stand that song. I can’t pretend strongly enough to get through it without crying and making a scene and I don’t want to do that in church.”

    She “dares” me? It’s as if she’s expecting me not to come or something.

    “What would prove to you that I’m real?”

    She blinked at him. “If you ignore me, or treat me like crap, that’s normal life. If you were to actually hug me… well, I would assume I was pretending really, really well for a change. Come visit me in my dreams, why don’t you? Maybe when I’m in REM sleep I won’t hurt so much.”

    He just shook his head. “I can’t enter human dreams. But I will try to follow you long enough to help with that song.”

    Another raised eyebrow, this time with a wry twist to her mouth. “Really? Then I’d better get some sleep in order to pretend well enough. Besides, I might get distracted with those… eyes… of yours.” Her expression softened. “Hey, at least if I’m going to imagine a guy, he turns out to be really good-looking.” Hitsugaya almost blushed at that one. “Must be because I’m so not.” This self-deprecation was really getting annoying. What could he do to put a stop to her?

    She put on the mask and rolled onto her side. Evidently she felt the conversation was over. Hitsugaya was utterly nonplussed. Hyourinmaru simply must have been mistaken. There was no possible way this messed up middle aged woman could play host to a dragon. And on top of it all, she had dared him to pretend to love her – hell, he wasn’t sure he even liked her – because of her own emotional crises. What a troublesome mess to be in.

    Time to retreat and think of a plan. He couldn’t solve her problems, but he had to try to neutralize her threat.