the creative dumpster

If the pacing or dialogue are weird it’s bc I forgor how it went while drawing loll

equinox flower (bleach pt. 2), ch 1 — endings and beginnings, pt. 1

tw: death

Kurosaki Hitoka was seventeen when she died.

It wasn’t something anyone could have seen coming. It hadn’t been a Hollow, despite how much they liked to stalk her to try and eat her. It hadn’t been a human, either, despite the dangerous people that would sometimes approach her when she was on her own. It hadn’t been anything in-between, nothing crazy like the stuff that her father had gone through when he had been her age.

Kurosaki Hitoka died on a train wreck.

It was her own fault, even. She had felt the exact moment the carriage had derailed, the way her entire body tensed up with the foreboding that something bad was about to happen. The actual impact came half a second later.

There had been a little girl, maybe four or five years old, standing by the wagon door. Through the door windows, Hitoka had seen, with startling clarity, how a different wagon had been approaching theirs. The train must have failed to take a curve, with the rails already half-frozen even before it had started snowing a few minutes prior, and now its own speed was about to finish the job.

Hitoka had made a split-moment decision, reached out to the girl, and flung her out of harm’s way.

He couldn’t quite pull herself out of harm’s way, though.

Which left us here:

Hitoka was standing in the snow, a few meters away from what had been a train, staring at the scene in shock. She looked down at herself, and found she was dressed in loose, black kosode and hakama. Tucked into the red sash tying her hakama were a pair of identical swords. Her swords. The swords that she shouldn’t be carrying, because she shouldn’t be in her current form right now.

Hitoka hadn’t been carrying her Gikongan with her, not tonight. Tonight, she was just supposed to visit the shrine in Kamigoe City, chat a little with the Plus that still refused to let herself be seen by Shinigami and simply hung out in the shrine gardens, and be on her way back to Karakura City right away. All alone, because Kazui had fallen asleep on the kotatsu right as the clock struck midnight, after mumbling something that sounded like “Happy New Year,” like a grandpa.

Not even their actual grandpa was such a grandpa.

But now she was dead, and she didn’t know what to do.

Her brain was currently refusing to do anything but make her stand there, stock-still. She was trying to process the fact that she was dead, now. She was dead, and she was supposed to—what, go to the Soul Society? Live there permanently? Where would she even live? Maybe with Kuukaku, and Ganju, and his boar? Hitoka wasn’t too fond of the boar. It hated her, and she hated it back. On principle.

Suddenly, the hairs on the nape of her neck stood on point. A chill ran down her spine, and not exactly because of the January cold. A split second later, she heard it: an otherworldly, thunderous roar. Not like anything an actual, living animal would produce.

Then there was another. And another.

Hollows. Plural.

“Well. Shit.”