WOUNDED SATELLITE

A Bleach One-Shot

DISCLAIMER: Bleach & its characters belong to Kubo Tite.

RATING: T

For sacrificing their time & effort to edit what might possibly a white elephant, I thank my betas LizzayBT & MisterJB for their hard work & help :) You guys make writing a joy.

"Wish you were here,
I'm a wounded satelitte:
put me back together, make me right."
- Anna Molly, by Incubus
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The university where she has been studying, faithfully, since the Winter War ended is almost nineteen kilometres from Karakura Town. It is located on the far edge of a slouching bay front, whose twin headlands on either side branch out like arms embracing the Pacific Ocean. From her hostel room, the route to Karakura looks like a single-lined, lamp-post pocketed highway. Nineteen kilometres, she knows, is a good distance for a morning run.

Nonetheless the campus provides a free shuttle bus service which ferries students from campus to Karakura town at 25-minute intervals. With her window ajar, she can hear the bus and its engine, like a sick man clearing his throat, struggling up the hill behind her dormitory. She can throw her books into her Timbuk2 bag, and rush out of her room in time to catch the bus for classes.

But today, Tatsuki Arisawa has decided to skip her morning lectures. Her knuckles are still sore from the previous night's sparring, and her head is hurting today, as if sleep had enhanced her weariness instead of relieving it. She drinks a glass of milk for breakfast. When the groans of the bus slip into her room from her window (as a rule, she never closes it), she plunders her dresser for a sweater and arms herself with her bag.

Before she leaves, she eyes a certain skull-shaped badge. And decides not to take it with her.

She is the only one boarding an empty bus, but the driver self-consciously delays even after she takes a seat. She always sits on the right side of the aisle, two seats from the end, at an angle which allows her to perch her right arm by the window. Peeling like a layer of skin from the blank space above is a poster. It reminds her to be socially responsible and quarantine herself if she has a fever.

It takes exactly eight minutes for the shuttle bus to finish its tour of the dormitories and make a left turn near her faculty. She stares at the pavements green and black with students, the feeble sunlight slashing itself into reflected shapes the glass canopy. She stares at a girl fighting her way up the stairs on the side of the building, her arms draped with books – and then Tatsuki remembers what her Shinigami-senpai, Soi Fon, said to her earlier in the week:

"You could give it up, you know. All this useless – studying. What point does it serve?"

Soi Fon – no, Soi Fon-taichou – never looks at her in the eye when she talks about life. Still, not even her professors or career counselors have been this straightforward to her. Tatsuki imagines her, in her white haori, by her dorm room window. The curtains flutter around her like the spilling petals of a huge flower. Unlike the other veterans of the Winter War, Soi Fon-taichou is the only one who refuses to don a gigai when in the world of the living.

Her voice is always sweaty and sharp, her words spoken as if prepared on a blade's edge, sometimes with a slight stab of cynicism:

"You think you're of any use here, in the human realm, Arisawa?"

As the bus pulls away from the faculty, an insect-like buzzing fills the aisles: students fresh from their tutorials murmur behind their seats. Tatsuki sees the building where her morning classes are being held; she sees it descend into a foreground of other buildings, until the bus hits a turn and roars out onto the road leading towards the highway to Karakura.

On the highway, the trees part to unleash five parallel lanes of traffic, confined by white road markings. The huge grey shore opens up, filling her entire window with a vision of the sea, interrupted by the hulks of ships anchored in the bay. She can see for at least several kilometres if it were not for the pitiful weather: the sun is like a chalky yolk above, surfacing in a sky cluttered with heavy clouds, amassing on the horizon like an army.

Everything – the clouds, the pale-faced sun, the sea – reminds her of the day the Winter War was won.

She thinks it is probably noon; the digital clock at the front of the bus (12:09) confirms this. She will reach Karakura in time for lunch, with an hour to spare before her next class begins. However, she does not want to think about school, or Karakura, or the Winter War. She tugs at the exposed flap of her orange Adidas sweater and hunches into the embrace of her seat.

The bus trudges through traffic caught at intersections in the Karakura town centre, patches of the sea flooded with sunlight still visible through tightly-built buildings. She knows, from her years living in Karakura, the districts facing the sea are new developments. Orihime Inoue stays somewhere in one of those gated condominiums, facing the sun over the ocean, with her tall thin boyfriend with the glasses. Elsewhere, the town centre is weedy with low-rise apartments, scattered shops, empty asphalt plots, power cables coiled around the rooftops of buildings. Everything has a certain drab shabbiness to it – an all too familiar sense of disrepair.

She remembers, too, that after the Winter War, Orihime finished school and went to do something else. The bus passes by her place: a towering, glass-fronted block which Tatsuki herself has never stepped foot in. She finds she does not know what Orihime is doing – at once a sense of loss warms the places where her sweater is pulled too tight.

She wonders – absently, abruptly – if people change after war.

At the city centre, the bus regurgitates all its students, and the driver takes a break, leaving the bus engine running and wheezing. Tatsuki does not budge. Instead her eyes try to filter the streets, trying to find familiar landmarks. She remembers them with a devoted tidiness: the Kurosaki clinic, the Urahara shop where she and Yoruichi-senpai had trained to prepare themselves for the war – And the MacDonalds, somewhere beyond the intersection where, irony would have it, they had their last meal before joining the fight against Aizen.

"You know what you're fighting for, right?" Yoruichi had asked her, her arms flexed and curled, her hands digging through packaging to find stray French fries.

It has been, perhaps, almost three years. Still, Tatsuki can remember the interior of the MacDonalds: fake violets on the windowsills, un-cleared trays with the wreckage of late dinners on other tables, the way the wind tugged at Yoruichi's ponytail as the doors opened. She has not gone back there: too far, too little time – are her reasons. But the ultimate irony, Tatsuki thinks, is Yoruichi not surviving the war herself. Tatsuki thinks she should know better now. But sitting in the stationary bus, letting time drip away like condensing fragments of dew on the window, she cannot tell anymore.

"We're here for a reason," Yoruichi had said. "We don't fight, someone else dies."In the halogen glow of the light hovering above their table, she had been able to see her senpai's eyes, flooded with the colour of promise, mirrors in a face tightly clenched, tensed with purpose.

"So you don't die on me, ok?" Yoruichi had said. Cold air visualizing her words in slips of steam.

And then she remembers her own mouth opening into a deep, straining excess of voice at seeing Yoruichi fall –

The bus driver returns. The doors seal, and the bus steepens as it banks left on its route back to the campus. Tatsuki knows she probably isn't alone in the bus, but she nonetheless says aloud:

"I won't, Yoruichi-senpai."

On the road out of Karakura town the bus offers her a view of Orihime's sprawling block again. She catches a glimpse of curtains creeping out of windows. A girl in high school uniform is smoking by the entrance. Everything, she thinks, looks pretty normal – almost perfect, really. She wonders what is Orihime doing now – probably, by her window, slouched in the shadow of those floral-print curtains, staring out at the bus passing by – Perhaps she should call her and tell her to talk. Just like old times, before all this Soul Society nonsense. But instead, the bus picks up speed and Orihime's apartment dissolves into the distance.

The bus breezes back onto the highway. It takes just five minutes for the bus to turn back into the campus, given the lighter traffic. The bus route now passes through all the dormitories, and from her window, Tatsuki can see the hill, and her own dormitory tucked into a corner on its crest.

The digital clock on the front of the bus reads 13:11. She knows she can still make it for class if she gets down and makes a sprint through the post-lunch crowd. Yet, as the bus rolls past the dormitories with their moss-haunted walls, Tatsuki latches her hand to her chin and breathes a sigh so deep she feels her chest shudder. Looking out at the buildings, she can almost make out the blank mouth of her window, as if her own room were calling out to her.

She squeezes the restlessness out of her arms, smoothening the lapel on her jacket. She thinks of her own room out of morbid laziness, thinks of the skull-shaped badge lying stranded on her bed.

"You can be so pitiful sometimes," Soi Fon-taichou would say to her, whenever something did not seem to work out. "So war changes people, war kills people. So what? Live with it."

Tatsuki knows Soi Fon-taichou, who never fails to appear at her dormitory window at 23:45 hours sharp with her reiatsu ablaze like television on full volume, is just trying to be frank and helpful. But on some days – like later tonight, perhaps – she is too exhausted to go out for their hollow-hunting patrols. She resents the Captain's insistence, but feels somewhat flattered at her companionship. That some second-hand, untrained Shinigami like her can be in the presence of a Captain.

No one is waiting at the bus stop at her dormitory, so the bus skips it completely and heads back towards campus. Tatsuki counts the trees, their late-summer shades like cringing faces, till she loses count, and then closes her eyes to rest them from the speckled blur of objects outside, seen from her place on the bus. When her eyes close, the darkness within them is negligible: she knows she has seen enough darkness to make any kind of self-constructed blackness a wistful fantasy.

So now, with her eyes closed, she sees people who fought the Winter War with her: she can almost imagine herself back there: the filthy detritus of hollow skeletons and Shinigami bodies dissolved with the wreckage of too many buildings – the gripping stench, like decay, easing itself over her like a noose – her crushed fingernails and fingers broken at their joints from fighting too hard – the hard-knot of fear that everyone else was dead – everyone else had fallen – this whole thing a stupid mistake

"Live with it," she tells herself.

When she opens her eyes, she breathes. The memory of the ghost-filled street of downtown Karakura is replaced by that of her faculty, speeding quickly away to her left. The clock at the front of the bus reads 13:25. Class, she thinks, but now for some reason, she cannot bring herself to care. She admires the sloping, supposedly avant-garde rooftop lines of her faculty's buildings, made wavy under the brunt of the afternoon sun. New passengers clutter the seats around her. They pay her no heed, as if she were – in totality – part of the spirit world.

It takes close to 15 minutes – the driver collects more students as they end their classes – for the bus to make it back to the highway again. A guy on the motorcycle competes with the scenery for her attention. The emblem, a red-streaked flame, curls its way around his helmet like a python. With the bay curling inward on itself in background, he snakes through traffic. When he tilts his helmet upwards at her, she smiles, then quickly withdraws it. She has not allowed herself to smile, she understands, for a long time and now – today – is definitely not the day.

She imagines what she will say to Soi Fon-taichou to get herself excused from their mandatory patrols later.

"Live with it," Soi Fon-taichou would tell her. "Soul Society can't afford another Kurosaki wannabe in Karakura."

"And what's wrong with Kurosaki?" she would ask back. "He's got a right, doesn't he? To say no after all that he's done for Soul Society. People change."

"That's not the point, Arisawa."

"Then what is?"

The point, Tatsuki thinks, is this: as the bus slowly heads back to Karakura, she again catches the crescent of concrete and windows of Orihime's apartment block. And then: the arches of the MacDonalds logo peeking over the low buildings, like a head crouched in defeat. And the point, Tatsuki thinks, is that there is no point at all.

Soi Fon-taichou would definitely disagree.

"What do you mean there isn't a point?" she would ask her, her white haori sweeping across the open window like a wayward wave. "When did justice need a justification?"

"I'm getting tired of fighting, taichou."

"But you're good at it."

"I know."

"I mean, you've been fighting off hollows without a zanpakuto, for a year now."

"Yeah."

Soi Fon-taichou would turn to show her the hollow, empty left sleeve of her haori: "And you're one of the few that survived the Winter War in one piece. That's something you should be proud of."

She would entertain Soi Fon-taichou's praise with a dissident smile, unused to all things Shinigami and friend to credit her with. But, knowing the subject could swing into another plea for recruitment or the inevitable topic of her most intimate involvement in the Winter War, she would brush past the elder Captain and position herself away from the window, as if fearful Soi Fon-taichou's presence would instigate an untimely draft of sea breeze.

"You're doing a good thing here, Arisawa. It'll be a shame to stop now."

"I've heard."

"With a little more experience, you could be on the same level as Kurosaki. I can help you get there."

"Like Kurosaki, huh?"

"I mean, you almost killed Aizen."

"Almost."

"You failed. But you almost killed him."

"Yeah."

"That's not something easy."

And Tatsuki would reply: "No, it wasn't."

She glances at people on the sidewalk as the bus pulls out of Karakura for its return trip to campus. She can remember, however grimly, as if through a strangling coat of fresher memories, how she had dragged Yoruichi-senpai to safety along these very streets. And she would tell Soi Fon-taichou, again, how it all was really nothing. She, the novice Shinigami Urahara did not even train properly, was just lucky.

She would tell Soi Fon-taichou how Yoruichi-senpai knew, and how now she too knew, that all they were doing was, really, a suicide mission. She would tell her of the entire plan: wait for the Vaizard's attack, and then coordinate to take down Aizen from both sides. She had been meant to take Aizen's weaker left arm; Yoruichi's Aizen's much stronger right. And if the Vaizards had not delivered the killing blow, it would be up to Yoruichi to deal the fatal kick to the neck.

She would tell Soi Fon-taichou how the sky on that day, despite the fighting, had been absolutely blue, stripped of clouds. She had been able to see from their meeting point all the clusters of Shinigami and Arrancar colliding, and figures – dots, really – falling out of the sky, discarded. Like satellites surrendering to gravity. She could remember hoping none of them were people she knew.

Everything had seemed to be perfect: Aizen's reinforcements, the arrival of the Vaizards, Hirako Shinji's frontal assault – everything had followed the plan right to the letter. So when the top three Espada begin to diminish their positions, Tatsuki had known: this is it.

She would tell Soi Fon-taichou that, just before their departure for their mission, it had begun to rain. A drizzle, even though the sky still seemed recklessly clear. A drizzle first, she remembers, and then heavier rain, but not that heavy. Was it the rain that screwed everything up?

"You should know by now, Arisawa, that there're some things in battle we can't control," Soi Fon-taichou would admonish her.

But she would tell her that, as they rushed out to deal with Aizen, everything was under their control. As Hirako Shinji danced with Aizen in the rain and struck so hard that the noise could be heard from where they were, everything looked good. She would say that, there, they had succeeded: Yoruichi seized Aizen's sword hand, and she turned the other in a simple twisted bar-hammer lock like she had been taught in Karate. And Hirako Shinji had drilled the blade into him. Just above the heart.

The bus slams to a stop at a dormitory, and Tatsuki can catch a glimpse of the digital clock glowing in front like a lantern – 16:30. Her classes should have ended at the university, and now she should be making her way to Karate training. She knows: it is her turn to lead the sparring. And she needs to punch and kick out the strain closing in on her head anyway.

"I don't know how you live with – with all that," these words from Orihime suddenly flare in her mind. Sweet, innocent, non-partisan Orihime. Always the peacemaker, her healing strength like a fragile glass flower perched on the side of her head.

"Live with what?" she had replied.

"With all this violence." This was before the Winter War, before Orihime's abduction, when they were still able to tell the truth to each other with the veil of pretense which, since Orihime had acquired her powers, seemed to hang between them.

Orihime had continued: "You are like Kurosaki sometimes. Fighting with your hands, not your heart."

She tries to imagine Orihime – now: her face blossoming in sunlight, the generous shoulder length hair raked by the wind, walking hand-in-hand with that tall thin guy with the glasses down Karakura with a shopping bag adorned on her left hand – And Tatsuki stirs, then sits very still. She does not really notice as the bus fills, and another girl takes the seat beside her.

Orihime, she thinks, at least you came out of the Winter War fully intact.

She knows what Soi Fon-taichou thinks of Orihime:

"She's not weak, you know, just fickle. You can't fight if you're fickle." And Tatsuki cringes at the words her taichou levels at her former-best friend. Soi Fon-taichou says fickle like a swear word.

Soi Fon-taichou drives home a point: "A fickle warrior could never have come that close to killing Aizen."

No, Tatsuki wants to tell her, because you're wrong. A fickle warrior, in that situation, would not have hesitated with victory spreading itself across her face.

"I got weak," she had admitted.

"What happened, happened," Soi Fon taichou slices away the feeble excuse. "You had Aizen's life in your hands for that moment. That's all that matters."

"Yeah."

"And you weakened him enough for him to fall later to Kurosaki. Now that's something."

"Uh huh."

She wants – badly – to tell Soi Fon-taichou that failure a fraction of an inch from success is the hardest to take, especially when it involves so many deaths. She would describe to her how, the supposed fatal strike had not been fatal, and Aizen had but to twitch his finger to decapitate Hirako Shinji. She would (but might not, out of courtesy because of Soi Fon's close relationship to her former senpai) describe in full, gory detail how Yoruichi-senpai had swung her leg at Aizen and how he, ruthlessly, had caught the limb and tore it from her body.

She would say the part that she is the most unsure of: she, Tatsuki, untrained Shinigami,had uttered the kido spell Yoruichi had instructed, and forced it at Aizen's neck. She did not wait to see how much damage she had caused, because she had dived for Yoruichi-senpai, who was falling, falling, surrendering –

The bus over-eases into a sharp turn and the girl sitting beside her momentarily crashes her foot into Tatsuki's ankle. She nods apologetically at her, but does not really say sorry. From the scenery outside, she can predict the bus will soon be caught in some evening rush hour traffic upon entering Karakura town. She contemplates getting off.

She contemplates the training going on without her – boys and girls, all slaked with sweat, punching and grappling onto each others' bodies in the Dojo. And she, watching over all of them, the esteemed senpai, the fearsome Tatsuki Arisawa. She can imagine herself, like Soi Fon-taichou, marking the freshmen, singling them out for throws, her fists working on the punching bag till her knuckles respond with a numb, greasy redness.

She lifts her fingers to the seat in front, feels the cushion; it reminds her how soft things can be.

"You know you don't have to talk about this," Soi Fon-taichou would say, in an astonishing display of softened concern, her hand gliding over the empty sleeve of her haori.

"You brought this up."

"But you don't have to talk about it if you feel uncomfortable."

"I know that."

"It's okay, really. You don't have to talk."

"Right."

"There are better things to do on a night like this."

"Like patrol the streets?"

"Correct." Soi Fon-taichou has mastered the art of changing subjects:

"Like you said. Change. Change in routine. Change in people. Someone's got to take up the slack, right Arisawa?"

At last the bus reaches the Karakura main street and again every single student disembarks. She is alone in the bus, and from the darkening window she can see still landmarks from the war. A STOP sign curled at an ominous angle. A slice of pavement crunchy with debris. The low hanging signal of the MacDonalds.

She starts to feel a bit uncomfortable, so Tatsuki gets to her feet for the first time in hours and stretches. She flips around, seizes her bag, and stomps past the empty seats.

Outside, she jostles for place with people on the street. She lets the crowd pull her along with it, past roads cloaked with office workers returning home from a day's worth of work. She is not sure exactly how long she walks, but she can see the day is turning to black all around her.

When she finally feels weary enough of walking, she finds herself in a plaza – outside the very familiar MacDonalds, with its bricked-up pathway, its burgeoning glow and automatic doors. The plaza which leads to where she thinks – she feels – she must go is a maze of tables. She navigates them, enters the fast food joint and blankly orders the meals she last had with Yoruichi.

The counter girl assembles a Big Mac, French fries and a coke. Tatsuki picks out a greasy fry.

She feels nothing. She just does not want to stop moving.

All the tables are occupied, so she sweeps herself outside to where the wooden tables, stacked at right angles in the plaza, are also beginning to fill – And that is when she sees him, slouched with his Zanpakuto on the ledge of one of the furthest tables. He looks worse for wear, but he still manages to seem like a sentinel, his bird-like eyes moving with the crowd. She sighs. She approaches him.

She sets her meal before him. His eyes follow her.

"Any hollows today, Mister Shinigami?" Tatsuki asks, not staring him in the eye.

He startles, and asks the question she expects him to ask:

"You can see me?"

She clamps her teeth on the straw and takes a deep, draining chug on her coke before returning his stare. She knows that, as it is with all Shinigami who meet humans who can see them, he thinks she is a hollow. So she indulges him.

"They say those who have seen enough death can see the world beneath this world," Tatsuki ventures.

"That's not been proven."

"Ever heard of Ichigo Kurosaki then?"

Understanding flits across the Shinigami's face. She notices he has visibly relaxed. She offers him her meal. She sees that he does not know whether to accept, that he is uncertain. But, as always, she passes to him her smile – hardly a convincing effort – and he numbly seizes the burger and takes passionate bites out of it.

"You a substitute Shinigami then?" he asks her.

"Sort of. But it's a tough job."

"That bad, eh?"

She has hit the dry bottom on her cup, and she responds to him with a crawling, empty sound of a straw straining on air:

"Not really."

"You have something you need to get off your mind?"

She hesitates, looks at his offer, written in honest expectation on his face.

"Nope."

"Look, I'm not going anywhere. I'll be here until the evening watch anyway. So I've got plenty of time."

She crushes her cup, the straw bending. And says, "It's fine. I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"Sure." She swings her back over her shoulder and then leaves the scattered remnants of the meal she did not eat on the table. "Don't forget that you're working."

The streets are beginning to clear – at last – and a long, luminous shaft of light pierces the night where she knows the shuttle bus will be waiting. Among the vast sea of downtown Karakura, she can sense the flowering of a hundred thousand spiritual signatures; they slip against the exposed skin on her fingers like wind, and they tear on her conscience like dry leaves swirling in a hollow. Somewhere, in that mass of unreadable sentiment, is Orihime – is Kurosaki – is everyone who has survived and is living on.

The driver does not acknowledge her: his scowl at having to fetch students back to campus so late is etched in the swallow-light of his mirror and the 21:20 digital LED display. Again, in the dark, Tatsuki stares out the tinted bus windows at a night too black to be night, and catches the radiant crowns of night lights sprawled on skyscrapers and tower apartment blocks.

She tries to think if Soi Fon-taichou will be waiting for their mandatory patrols in her room, by her window. She will expect her admonishment for leaving the skull-shaped badge, the so-called stamp of a substitute Shinigami, the badge which Kurosaki had given her when he stopped being a Shinigami – in her room, instead of taking it out.

"You're walking hollow bait, Arisawa," she would say. "Even Kurosaki had the sense to bring it out with him. What's your problem?"

She knows she has a problem. But, nonetheless, after she exits the bus, she walks away from the glare of her dormitory, away from the second-hand light streaming from the windows, till she is all alone, nothing but the crickets speaking, the faint throb of other people's souls moving within her own head.

And she takes a deep breath, and lies down on the grass. Wet dew massages her head. The furious sprinkling of stars hovers over her.

"We're here for a reason," she remembers Yoruichi telling her.

And Soi Fon-taichou: "Isn't defending your life reason enough, Arisawa?"

At least – she thinks as she tries to make out the constellations – Orihime and Kurosaki had their own reasons to do what they did.

She closes her windbreaker tight –

At least she doesn't need anyone to understand hers.

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END

(Edited 29.11.09)

NOTES: I enjoy writing stories about the female characters in Bleach because they offer so many opportunities for situations, past & present. In this story, I took liberties on the outcome of the Winter War & took Tatsuki to be a university student indulging in a student's favourite pastime: stoning. Like Migration of the Animals, I wanted to experiment with stream of consciousness in present tense. I wanted to try writing a story where all the action is in the head. It was a challenge & even after I've written it, quite annoying to read too.

If it was hard to read, please help me improve by answering this question: where did I lose you/ where did you lose interest?

But thanks for reading!

Now to work on something more substantial.