Being alive is such a pain. You wouldn’t think it, by the quiet pleasure on the blonde woman’s face, but to those who know her it is clear how disinterested she has become in this place. How lovely she is, with her hands laid pristine across her upper thighs, fingernails filed clean across. Her skin is pale again, almost as pale as the white cloth wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. She feels naked in it.
The lieutenant gazes out the window, trying to remember what it is he said to her before he left. Her clean fingernails rise to her chin, touching her beauty mark, feeling at her lip, brushing her cheeks. She is she. She is she. She is real. The fingers crest her eyebrow and drop to her eyelashes. Her thumb finds the lobe of her right ear, the spot where an earring ripped away flesh in the battle. Cartilage of her nose, peach fuzz on her upper lip. She is she.
So where is he? Kotetsu said that he died, but that’s the other one. The other one is the one who died, a long time ago, but he is alive, he has to be. Where is he, why hasn’t he visited. What’s going on. Where is everyone.
Why is she so alone here.
She thinks that it’s been days since she was fed, so she rings the little bell they gave her in place of her voice. ‘Don’t speak,’ they’d said. ‘Don’t try.’ She doesn’t understand, though, so when no one is forthcoming she tries to call out. Instead of song is a horrible screeching, though, so she stops and allows her fingers to wander past her lips, past her teeth, to find the emptiness where her tongue used to be.
Once he returns she will have to find a way to speak to him, to let him know how grateful she is that he saved her.
'Your Captain is dead, Lieutenant Matsumoto.'
He can’t be dead. He died a long time ago.
'No, that was your other Captain. Captain Hitsugaya—’
Have you seen him? Where is he?
And Kira? And Hisagi, and Rose and Kensei, and Kaien? Where’s Gin? Where are they all? Why haven’t they come to see me?
Why would they leave me alone like this?