It doesn't work. Nothing works. The demon is going to devour him from the inside out and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Shinji has come to this realization the way he reaches all his best ideas: alcohol. Specifically, enough of one of Kyouraku's brews that there's still some left after Shinji and Lisa are blind drunk.

It was her idea, naturally. Nobody's going to drink for a bunch of Hollows/traitors/just plain freaks when they die. Or as Lisa herself put it, 'If these things don't kill us, the Soukyoku will. Might as well make it harder for them to light us up.'

Shinji doesn't see what she meant, though. His mouth is bone-dry. The elixir that could quench it, could put out the coals smoldering in his lungs and throat and bones is within arms' reach, curled up beside him on the floor of her quarters. Thankfully for Lisa, reaching out his hand to her neck makes the world spin too much for Shinji to do anything.

"They're going to kill us when they find out," he tells her, giggling. "Right through the chest, boom! A Zanpakutou. Or fifty." This sends him off into a fit of giggles again, cut off when he starts coughing. Lisa curls in on herself, but even blurry-eyed he can see her shaking with laughter.

"You can speak Tokyo-ben," she slurs. "Hah. I win the bet. How long do you think it'll take to get Kyouraku to cough up the kan?"

The response—undoubtedly hilarious, everything's hilarious right now—on Shinji's lips dies. Lisa doesn't have the time to nag Kyouraku into giving up the money. For all he knows, they could both be dead tomorrow. He says something without processing the words and she laughs softly, hoarsely.

"I don't wanna die," he whispers, too quiet for her to hear. "Not now."

But until something burns away the foul bloodhatebonepain that's spread through his veins, Shinji's got nothing but death in his future. Hazy fantasies of himself dead with a cup of poison by his bed, killed by a Hollow that's not the one invading his brain, beheaded cleanly after admitting to what he is drift through his head. The reality won't be that way, the part of him that hasn't been clouded by sake and Hollow knows. Poison won't work, or he'll finally lose it and annihilate the Hollow along with the rest of the patrol, or (and this is the most likely scenario because the universe fucking hates him) Yamamoto will have him barbecued by the Soukyoku for betraying Soul Society or whatever he thinks when he finds out one of his captains is turning into a soul-sucking crazy beast.

"I'm gonna die."

He's dead. It doesn't matter that his heart's still pumping (somehow he still has a heart) or that his thoughts are clear (for now, the insanity lurking in the corners of his brain has left them untouched) or that nobody reacts to seeing a corpse walking around (the decay hasn't begun yet, but soon.)

Kensei is dead. It's the first thought that runs through his mind (what's left of it) when he wakes to death-white masks and Urahara saying that traitorous bastards have made them traitors too. He doesn't use those words, of course, but it's obvious to Kensei because Shinigami are not Hollows and since he is one he can't be a Shinigami anymore. Even if he didn't make the choice to be this thing, sooner or later it's going to make the choice for him.

But he puts on a stony expression and walks out of there with Mashiro in tow and prays to every kami he knows that no one will see the gaping hole he can feel in his chest. Just because it's covered over with skin and muscle doesn't make it any less there and he just knows someone will catch his mincing steps on half-healed feet and the not-quite-right twist of his shoulders where rods of bone pierced them.

Focus, Kensei. His thoughts have been spinning on and on all day and Kensei wants them back to what they were. Efficient, short, and all about his job. No more of his mind going in eighty different directions because someone walked in the door and they've got a sword are they here to kill him. No more endless torrents of words. No more nattering on about do they know and how much longer before death catches up.

He wants peace and doesn't. Wants it because if there's peace things are normal. Because he won't hurt anyone without meaning to—no, he won't mean to hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it. (But he doesn't want peace, not really, and that's really most of why he wants it at all.) Doesn't want peace because something in him has changed and he can't make it go back. The something that makes him wonder how many blows it would take to down a gatekeeper and how sweet blood—his or someone else's, it doesn't matter—would taste in his mouth, that something shouldn't be there.

And most of all he doesn't want peace because the only peace a monster deserves is death. As long as he keeps fighting himself Kensei has a chance of coming back to life so he has to fight. Fight like he's fought everything else. All the prejudice (a miller's son can't make it as a Shinigami), all the fear (he should be immune to Hollows by now but it comes back every time), all the responsibilities he carries for the Ninth (they'll crush him one day.) He fights them and that is how he has clawed his way up the ranks.

But for now he is a dead man walking. (And he doesn't deserve the privileges of the living.)

His fingers (shaking again, the most minor of his problems) fumble through seals and he recites the incantation by heart (remarkable, that he still possesses one) but Hachi cannot command his reiryoku to form Kidou. He tries, but there isn't anything there. Nothing he can use (bloodshadowdespair when he reaches for lightshieldpower.) He falls back as the creature possessing Muguruma Kensei's body howls in rage and spits red fire.

Tessai's eyes are on him when they have cover, as are Sasakibe Choujirou's. Unlike Sasakibe's, they do not show the horror-struck stare of someone for whom the pieces are falling into place. They show nothing but a questioning intent. What will you do?

"Seal me," Hachi says. Despite the burning Cero he is chilled to the bone, has been for months (two exactly), and it is a genuine surprise that ice chunks do not fall from his lips. "I do not have the reiryoku necessary." Only the knowledge, born of many hours of study when he was searching for a stopgap measure until he could rid himself of the Hollow. It isn't possible, even in theory, but the next best thing is a seal to contain a Hollowfied Shinigami indefinitely. And painfully. But Hachi has no other options, so he offers it anyway.

The Hollow shoves hard at his mental walls, pressure building in his head and chest until Hachi thinks he might explode. In short, pained gasps he explains to Tessai and Sasakibe what has to be done. Sasakibe agrees quickly (disturbingly quickly, but he hasn't had the time to process the idea of a Hollow-Shinigami hybrid like Hachi and Tessai have.) Tessai agrees after a moment of silence, punctuated by the flare of mindlessly hateful Hollow power and the collapse of the Shinigami shell containing it. (Lisa or Rose; he remembers the shared coolness of their reiryoku from before everything started to burn.)

Tessai puts the first seal into place and Hachi bites his lip, tasting blood. "Please keep going," he whispers when Tessai stops, worry creasing his face. There isn't time for personal feelings to get in the way of this. So Sasakibe puts the second one into place. By the fourth, Hachi is screaming. and there are sixteen. (Death upon death, was it chance that sixteen was the minimum?)

By the eighth, he feels, hears, sees, breathes nothing but pain. By the tenth, the seals no longer let him speak and the screaming stops everywhere but Hachi's shattered mind. When the fifteenth is put in place after an eternity of drowning and burning and bleeding, Hachi realizes he forgot to tell them something.

The seals were never really meant to contain him. They were meant to trap reiryoku inside Hachi, to use the Hollow's strength against it and kill him.

Black takes his vision before the sixteenth seal can go into place, just as Hachi decides that he is fine with dying.

Rose stops painting when he realizes that his only inspiration is blood.

Well, that isn't completely accurate. His other muses are entrails, murder, sex, and death.

The inspiration that comes from intestines is subtle. It hides behind blood, behind the red paint Rose finds himself reaching for each time he begins a piece, and behind shadow, the black paint he changes to when he realizes how the Hollow is warping his mind. With the dribbling of paint when he hesitates—or is paralyzed—the entrails manifest themselves. Long, twisting trails, thickening and thinning. (Are they his own guts? Other people's? Does it matter?)

He tries painting people instead of abstractions next. But that doesn't work when the finished piece invariably shows a corpse. Rose has killed in the past, will kill in the future (if he survives, if this demon doesn't kill him), but he still hates the bloody corpses that end up on his canvas. The killer is never portrayed, but there are always hints. A white feather on the victim's lips, bruises on their throat from strangulation (sometimes hands, sometimes a whip), long slashes (knives? talons?) across their chest. And Rose knows that he must switch his focus or he'll wake one day standing above a corpse right out of his paintings. (His sister Rin? Or that man from the Sixth, every inch of him delicious muscle? Or maybe the victim'll be mutilated beyond recognition. He doesn't know which one he prefers.)

Rose turns to trying to preserve a word that is losing meaning for him day by day: love. He breaks a brush in rage when he notices that every painting that begins as love ends as sex. He starts with the intent of a simple kiss and ends with two people—more, sometimes—intertwined, mouths anywhere but each other's lips. This inspiration is perhaps the most bizarre but also oddly understandable. People these days smell like mochi packaged in fresh meat and drenched in sake; it is all Rose can do some days to keep his hands off them. (The interplay of sex and violence is very artistic, he thinks wryly, because he needs some humor to keep from snapping.)

So he begins to paint self-portraits. If even his artistic vision is being twisted by the Hollow within, Rose needs to remember who he is. As the Hollowfication advances, he needs them to remember who he was. And Rose outright screams when the person that stares back at him from the mirror he uses for self-portraits is no longer himself. Sometimes he sees a bird with razor blades for feathers. Other times it is the Hollow, neither bird nor man. Rarely, very rarely, the mirror shows a skin-and-bones stranger, blond hair disheveled and eyes glassy as a corpse's.

So it is that Rose barely reacts when he wakes up the morning of a captains' meeting and the world is silent. He is dead, and the music has finally died with him.

You are a monster. You are dead, you are dying. You deserve to die.

Love tells himself that every day. It's not out of despair but more of an attempt to get himself used to the idea that some day soon there will be no more Aikawa Love, Captain of the Seventh Division. Who or what he'll be after that is anyone's guess. A Hollow, roaming the dunes of Hueco Mundo? A corpse, and then when his body's dissolved into reishi, part of Soul Society? If he's really lucky, the reincarnation cycle will go on as normal and he'll wake in a new body and a new world. (Just without his memories and then Aizen will get away with murder. Extended murder, but still.)

You are a monster. You are dead, you are dying. You deserve to die. (Demon, get away from me, we trusted you, you make me sick.)

He really hopes he won't turn into a Hollow. It's humiliating enough to have this thing making him sick. (He is supposed to be invincible, up on a pedestal that will come down when and only when he chooses to retire.) Evil beating good? Love doesn't know how a story would go on after that plot twist.

You are a monster. You are dead, you are dying. You deserve to die. (Rinse and repeat.)

Love began telling himself that after Jin'emon nearly lost his eye. There was no ignoring it, no hoping things would work themselves out for the better. Not anymore. He'd better get things straight with himself: his will is not his own, his body is not his own, his soul is not his own. (If it ever was, in a totalitarian government. But you'd sell your soul for power and prestige and a paycheck like the one a Shinigami gets too.)

You are a monster. You are dead, you are dying. You deserve to die. (But it never really, truly sinks in. His mind accepts it but not his heart. He still has one.)

Love wants too much to live to understand in his soul that he will die.

"Shut up! Don't talk to me! I hate you!"

Hiyori doesn't know whether she means those words when she screams them at Urahara. Her condition (it's not a condition, like high blood pressure, it's a curse) is his fault, at least a little bit. He didn't foresee what Aizen would do. (Shinji didn't either, but that doesn't cross her mind.) He couldn't bring them back to normal. (But he saved their lives.)

She decides later, crying on the roof of the Twelfth (even her tears are cold, like the lump of ice she calls a heart), that she meant it and didn't. Meant it because she already knew she was dying without him saying it. Just because she's blunt about everything else doesn't mean she has to declare stuff like that.(Hiyori has too much to do to die now. Find Hikifune. Kill Aizen and Tousen and Ichimaru like they're killing her. Make Urahara someone else's problem. Meet someone who'll love a temperamental, scrawny brat of a girl. Maybe even grow.) Didn't mean it because he's done what he can (and he can't really think that she doesn't notice how his eyes are red and puffy after time spent in his office alone. That she doesn't notice the breathy stress in his voice.)

Hiyori doesn't have the energy to worry about when she'll die, or how. She refuses to get her affairs in order. Let someone else sort her stuff and make way for a new lieutenant. (Somebody Urahara deserves, she hopes, but doesn't know whether that's a good or bad thing.) And so what if she turns into a Hollow and goes on a rampage? (It doesn't matter that every night she wakes up in a cold sweat from nightmares of cutting Shinji down. Over and over and over again. Her memories are hazy from that night but she remembers vividly the miracle/act of will it took for her to keep her Hollow-self locked in place.) It's their fault anyway, for letting those bastards into the Gotei 13 in the first place. For not seeing the beasts growing inside their own people like sentient cancers. For not being strong enough to deal with whatever she ends up becoming.

By then she'll be dead anyway. She knew that the second she couldn't stop coughing long enough to warn Shinji.

Kensei confesses to Mashiro that he's known they're as good as dead since they woke up in Urahara's lab. Not to be outdone, she boasts to him that she's known since she stepped outside the tent that night (death all around, blood and guts and Kensei convulsing on the ground.)

It was obvious, you idiot, couldn't you feel their reiatsu guttering?

She wants to say that, but that'd push Kensei into dark thoughts, the kind that are so dangerous for them. Better to keep him away from the idea that if he'd just figured out it was an attack he could've gotten clear and they wouldn't be what they are.

What they are (gods, monsters) is a question Mashiro hasn't puzzled out the answer to yet. She wakes up one day feeling like she can take on (destroy) the world but can't make her dumb body get out of bed. The next day it's the opposite. They're not human, never have been, but their bodies ping-pong between Shinigami and Hollow so fast that they really aren't either one. (The temptation to declare herself free of Shinigami laws is incredible, as is the hungerlustdespair that boils up within her at the sight of Shinigami throats, so vulnerable. But the smart ones catch her look and shift so she can't see so well, or cover up. Whatever works. And that reminds her who she is, beyond what she is, and Kuna Mashiro doesn't eat people.)

It annoys her (annoyance is the last real emotion she has left, which in turn annoys her) when Kensei transforms before her (and that still doesn't answer the question of god or monster, because only a god should have the power crashing over her but he looks very much like a monster.) A step in front of Rose's lieutenant (turns out annoyance isn't the only emotion she has, but the other's a drive to protect) fixes that. Mashiro gets to appreciate just how razor-sharp not-Rose's feathers are for an instant before shadows take her vision.

(Funny, it doesn't feel like death.)

Lisa has everything set in order. Neat, planned-out, and efficient. Nobody will have to go through her belongings and mess them up trying to get everything cleaned out. That way they won't find the knives slick with her blood. Not slick when they find them, of course. No, the blood will be dried, maybe even a little bit rusty. (Depends on how sharp their eyes are, to see the loose floorboard, or how much they want to root out the 'traitor' of the Eighth.) The thought of the dried blood crumbling into dust and making a mess sparks irritation in her. Even dead she won't have control of her own body.

Her body is, at present, curled up next to the enemy. To Kyouraku. She has introduced the idea that her long-time lover is an enemy who would take her head off as soon as breathe with less clinical detachment than she'd like, but repeat something enough times and it starts to feel true. And Lisa's been telling herself that ever since she had first seen Kyouraku after the mission from hell. (She wishes it was from Hell; Hell has the decency to warn you by its very existence who's likely to try to kill you.)

He had been utterly terrible at concealing his relief. Anybody else would've missed it, hidden beneath sake vapors and the sakkat-floral kimono combination. To Lisa it had been as obvious as the Sixth Seat fucking a different guy every night. The toned-down flirtation, sake flask at his waist instead of in his hand, the genuine 'such a joy to see you, Lisa-chan' that had sprung from his lips, all these had given him away. Each sign had been like an exploding firework, emblazoning in Lisa's mind the knowledge that his world wasn't hers anymore. (Hueco Mundo feels more natural, but sand is so messy.) She didn't belong by his side, didn't belong in a shihakushou, let alone wearing her badge. That position belonged to Yadoumaru Lisa and the person he was greeting wasn't her (Lisa wouldn't feel the visceral bloodlust that consumes this creature every time she sees Kyouraku.)

Of course, that hadn't meant they couldn't still be lovers. Just that Lisa had had to be carefully detached, oh so carefully. Let anything slip and the whole charade went to pieces. She should've felt guilty, but the pleasure she'd gotten out of the whole thing had overriden that. If her life was headed to hell in a handbasket, Lisa had decided she was going to have a little fun along the way.

That'd all ended when she'd started getting really sick. Now she has to be even more careful, without any gratification. The circular scar that's grown red and raw has to be covered by a sarashi or sheets if Kyouraku starts to look too suspicious about her abandonment of her habit of sleeping naked. Nanao has to be bribed to put up Lisa's hair for her—anyone could do it, but only Nanao's hands are small enough that Lisa can suppress the idea that her assistant is trying to strangle her. And if Kyouraku sees through of any of it (and he has to) he doesn't let on (doesn't want to see it.)

Simple steps. Orderly. Easy for a muddled mind to follow to maintain the facade. Just how Lisa likes it.

(It's a shame that she has to die the way she knows she will. It'll be so untidy.)

If you've wandered in here by accident, this is a companion to my series Masks Hiding Masks and its sequel A Fool's Dance. Hope you enjoyed anyway.