Bandage it in Paper (Bleach OC-Centric Fanfic)

Chapter 8 | Mildly Morbid Meetings

The 12th Division housed various buildings and laboratories, including the Spiritual Wave Measurement Lab, predominantly used to monitor the spiritual stability of the Human World. However, a good portion of its resources were used to closely monitor Soul Society itself. Various, screens lined the walls with blue dots representing souls on the maps. Occasionally a hollow would appear in the Human World, and their communications team would send whoever was stationed there to take care of it.

While Akon was working on improving the system, he took a moment to glance over at one of the screens showing the spiritual waves and signatures at the Shino Academy. Minor irregularities in the monitoring equipment were appearing around the female dormitories, the kind that naturally popped up everywhere, but he knew that this particular one was Lyn. Akon knew this because if you watched it long enough, it would suddenly behave erratically; the tiny pixels on his screen expanding and contracting rapidly around Lyn's location before turning to normal half a second later. The only time he couldn't identify Lyn's position was when she was standing next to another soul, almost entirely masking her. And that was quite often.

'Well, even if Lyn-san probably won't want to tell me anything about the memories of her death for a while, my research into her reishi signature and recognising minute patterns in spiritual waves is helping make our monitoring system more accurate.'

Captain Kurotsuchi walked into the lab, holding up a vial of black reishi pills with Nemu following silently behind him. "Just what kind of pet are you trying to kill with these, Akon? Reishi this dense can't be digested properly."

"One with a unique digestive system that's not very efficient at circulating her own reiryoku through her soul, Captain Kurotsuchi," Akon answered while altering the code of their monitoring system.

"So, you're still wasting your time playing with that half-dead thing." Akon had mentioned he had started a side project out in the Rukongai, and Kurotsuchi didn't mind as long as it didn't get in the way of his usual duties. "Deformed, defective souls aren't as interesting or rare as you're treating them, Akon."

"Well, I'm finding this one in particular to be quite interesting."

"Then why don't you just keep it in a cage here at the S.R.D.I.?" Kurotsuchi grinned unsettlingly wide as he leaned closer. "And been a while since you've taken on a personal project. If you want to dissect it and chop it up, you know it would be simple to make sure no one interferes or even knows. It's just a small thing from the Rukongai, isn't it?"

Akon gave his captain a mildly annoyed look at how excited he was getting at just the mention of dissection when he wasn't even interested in Akon's research on Lyn. And this was the third time he had suggested it.

"Not everything needs to be dissected to understand it," Akon snapped.

Truly, Captain Kurotsuchi was only one of two – no, it had become three now – people that could make him lose his cool.

Kurotsuchi stared up at the monitors with a low hum and uninterested expression. Dryly, he commented, "Oh, it looks like your pet died."

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It was the kind of all-encompassing pain that pulled her apart atom by atom all at once. The kind that while her entire body screamed in agony was completely deafening. She made to shriek from her lips from her throat to her vocal cords but found that she had become but a bloody soup soaking into her futon. A rapidly dissolving asauchi was a temporary topping, dispersing into her.

In one instance, she was crimson liquid and bleached bones.

In the next, she sat atop an endless lake that reflected the blue sky above.