I was dead, shot in the head by Contessa.

I did not begrudge her that decision, it had to be done. The monster I was becoming, it had to be put down. I wanted to believe that it was mostly to protect everyone else, but I knew that she wouldn't have had any problem containing me.

It was mercy. She saved me from the insanity that was slowly but surely clawing at my mind, making me lose one after the other all the things that made me human.

But now all those changes didn't matter one bit, all that I lost in my desperate bid to kill Scion was back. No, it would be more accurate that the influence of the passenger on my mind was gone. My mind felt lighter than ever. The feeling was difficult to describe, as if my death brought such finality to my journey that there was no place to have any regrets. In fact, it was a bit unsettling when I thought about it. Shouldn't I feel some things towards my life? Regret for my actions, worry for my friends? I left them behind me, there was no point thinking about it.

I told those feelings to fuck off.

My instincts were telling me to relax, I had no psychological baggage here, but my learned experience told me that was nonsense. I may have felt like everything was alright and that there was no point fretting about the past, but I knew what Strangers were capable of. Protocols I learned by heart and exercised many times went through my mind.

I forced myself to be on edge. In some aspects Strangers were the hardest enemies to deal with, everything had to be put back into question. You couldn't even trust yourself. In fact, even when trying I had a hard time bringing myself to care about what was my life. That was fine, fighting the effect head on was pointless most of the time, it was better to direct yourself into a state of mind unrelated to the effect in order to circumvent it and accomplish your objective. What I was feeling at the moment was wariness and defiance.

In fact, was I even really dead? I knew I was dead and currently in the afterlife but what did that even mean? I knew that before I even looked around or bothered thinking about it.

I finally looked at my surroundings.

It was white. No walls, no ceiling, no floors. Under me, a great number of butterflies were flying upwards.. But I wasn't alone. There were queues of hundreds of peoples, with more appearing from nowhere to put themselves in line, apparently waiting their turn for something.

They were wearing plain Japanese robes. In fact I was wearing the same thing. And my arm was back. Whatever was behind this had me healed.

Maybe I could talk to one of the others.

"Excuse me, do you know where we are?" The man I talked to was quite tall by asian standards. He looked at me slightly confused.

"Uh...the afterlife. No?"

What the fuck? I could tell he was speaking a foreign language, probably Japanese, and I understood him. I didn't know the first thing about this language and despite that I could tell what he was saying. No, I wasn't actually deciphering what he was saying, instead I implicitly understood the meaning of his words. No language barrier then. It was very subtle, someone that wasn't already looking for such anomalies wouldn't even notice they were speaking different languages. In fact my interlocutor didn't even flinch at my use of English.

Speaking of.

He was starting to stare at me. Looked like I spent too long just thinking to myself. So I continued talking.

"But how do you know that?"

The poor man looked more and more confused as time went on.

"I...don't know." I was completely lost now and panic was starting to set in.

"It IS the afterlife" This voice spoke with complete assurance. A woman had approached us while we were talking. She must have heard what we were saying. I simply raised an inquisitive eyebrow. She explained. "I didn't come here immediately after I died, I've been a ghost for several days, the Shinigami told me that I stayed due to my attachments or something."

"Shinigami?" The name felt weird. I could tell the literal translation was "God of Death", but it was just that: literal. There was a weight behind it. It felt like calling it by any other term than Shinigami was simply incorrect.

"Yeah. He gave more details situation and said that he was bringing me to the afterlife. Then he did some weird thing with his sword and Poof here I am." I had no reason to doubt her words, as ludicrous as they seemed. A ghost of all things, and it seemed it happened before she met thet Shinigami.

"Well in any case, I'm going in this line. Not that there's something better to do anyway. You coming big guy?" The man gave a nod and the two of them went at the back of one of the dozen lines of people.

Now that I was alone, my mind was churning with doubts and apprehension.

In my few years as a parahuman I met all kind of extraordinary phenomenons, but at least I had the explanation that they were due to the fragments of an eldritch god-like alien being, nothing outright mystical. Breaking the laws of physics was one thing, claiming that ghosts were a thing and that there was an afterlife was another.

Whatever, no sense staying here. There literally was nothing here to do besides getting in the line and see what happened. I joined one of the files at random. It was long, there were at minimum a hundred people before me, but at least it advanced reasonably fast.

Soon enough I arrived near the end and I could see what was going on. There was a man in a very concealing white robe at the end, his face completely masked by a black fabric held by a small weird hat. He talked a bit to the man at the front of the line and handed him some sort of ticket. He disappeared in a small white flash.

I doubted that he was dead, what would have been the point to bring us here? Maybe some kind of teleportation. My immediate goals didn't change much. I had to reach the masked man, and then I'd chose my course of action.

Finally it was my turn.

"Welcome to Soul Society, departed soul. I shall guide you to your new existence in this world." The man spoke with a horribly bored voice. It was obvious that he had to endlessly repeat the same phrase to everyone, I wasn't going to blame his lack of passion in this kind of job. But his lack of morale could wait, I had questions.

"Excuse me, but I hoped you could tell me where we are?"

"My apologies but it is not my role to inform you. Please take this Soul Pass." He didn't want to waste time on me, as there were literally hundreds of other people waiting for their own Pass. Understandable. But I never was known to be reasonable.

"I won't take the Soul Pass until my questions are answered. At the very least give me the bare bones. What is this place and where is the Soul Pass going to bring me?" The man mulled it over for two seconds before sighing in annoyance. By his tone I guessed I was hardly the first to waste his time.

"Fine. You currently are currently in Hengoku, a transient place between the living world and Soul Society. The Soul Pass will bring you somewhere in there depending on your time and place of death. Now will you take the damn Pass? I have other souls to guide." So the whole purpose of the place was to spread us around this Soul Society. I briefly considered knocking him out to go search for an exit, but I squashed the idea. What would I do if there were no physical exit to the place and you instead had to teleport to leave. And that's not taking into account his colleagues or potential guards, I was unarmed.

No, the only thing I could do was to take the damn Pass.

The thing was completely white and smooth, but as soon as I took it in my hand writings began to appear. It was written in some foreign characters, I think those were called kanji. Like with earlier, I never learned how to read Japanese but I still understood what it meant.

And as light started to envelop me, I did my best to commit the name of my destination to memory.

North Rukongai 80th district : Zaraki.

A.N.

So, yeah, a new story. Taylor in Rukongai. Why not Taylor as hollow? Well I noticed that the vast majority of fics dealing with crossover characters in Bleach or simply OCs tended to go towards the hollow route, not that there's anything wrong with that, hollows as a concept are incredibly cool, but I didn't want to do a rehash of my favorite stories so here we are.

I just hope I will be more dilligent than with my last story.