Chapter Text
Being reincarnated was a generally odd experience.
Dying was an inevitability they liked to ignore for the sake of their sanity, but they had known it would come. And it did, just, earlier than expected. And then they woke up…
Sorta.
The memories from when they were in the womb were jumbled and unclear, but they remember being warm and cozy and generally happy. 10/10, would do again. It was probably the calmest and safest they had ever felt, if a bit bored but they slept a lot.
Birth on the other hand, well, the less said the better, and those early days were odd as well. The real kicker was learning they were named Ichigo Kurosaki.
They had not watched or read Bleach in their past life. It was on their to-do list, but they simply didn’t have the attention span to look into it beyond dabbling in the fandom. That’s not to say they didn’t know anything about the series, they knew more than the average person if they had to guess. But their knowledge was either specific to the point of irrelevance or completely vague and incomplete. They didn’t know nearly enough to be reincarnated into the main character, they didn’t even know what half the character’s looked like!
Though, perhaps it was for the best. Their assigned gender at birth had carried over, as had their backstabbing lungs if the wheezing was any indicator. They had no clue whether the anxiety that had ruled their life before had carried over as well.
With their luck, it probably did.
No, it definitely did. They were already panicking about what little they knew and how they were already affecting the story. They were a newborn for fuck’s sake. Couldn’t they catch a break?
Not to mention the weird, whatever it was called, that lingered everywhere. They were sensitive in their past life, to put it nicely, and they were quick to overload. So feeling the reiatsu(?) dance across their skin, which was already hypersensitive due to the fact they were a newborn, was a disconcerting experience.
Their mother’s life-nature-love-martyr-honor-give-sacrifice tingled, a feeling like licking a charger that was plugged in. It was a soft, yet powerful feeling, and was soothing all things considered. Their father’s fire-blood-metal-chemicals-fake-smoke was far less pleasant. It clogged up their nose and throat and made them want to retch.
It was a completely new sense they had to get used to, and it was quite overwhelming.
And all of that was without touching the hungry-jumbled-toomuch-notenough-cramped-break-rebuild-new-old-nothing-all that was their own soul. They assumed the loud nature of their soul was because of the Hollow and Quincy that resided within them. Of course, the memories of their past life probably played a part but they only felt three things inside them.
One was the merged Hollow and Shinigami parts. One was the Quincy part, which also might be a part of Ywach’s soul (did they know what that meant, of course not, they just remembered it because the guy’s name was fucking stupid), they weren’t quite sure. And then there was the human part. They didn’t know if they got rid of the original Ichigo’s soul, or if they merged, but there was only one of them.
(They preferred the idea that they merged with the original instead of killing a fetus, and there was a precedent for it. The Hollow and Shinigami parts merged, it seemed only fair to assume the two human parts had merged in their too cramped, too young body.)
But they managed, they coped, as they had before. It was not pleasant, the way two parts of their mishmashed soul warred and revolted against each other, but that was life. They would find a way to fix it eventually (hopefully) and they’d learn from there.
After all, they knew things weren’t going to be peaceful for them, now that they were Ichigo, and they wanted to survive. So that meant being prepared.
Masaki Kurosaki loved her daughter more than she thought she was capable of loving anything.
She loved the baby’s orange hair and honey gold eyes. She loved her child’s soft skin and the little spots that dotted her nose and cheeks whenever she was in the sun for more than an hour. She loved the odd intelligence and awareness her daughter seemed to have. She loved and loved and loved, delighting in the fact that she had created such a beautiful thing.
And all that love lent itself to lots of worry.
The first year of her daughter's life was odd if the baby books she had read were to be believed. Her child was quiet, never making noise if not prompted, and only turning to try and look when someone was talking to her. Her daughter’s tiny little lungs were wheezy, especially at night. Ryūken said it was asthma.
And then there was the incident with Urahara.
The ex-shinigami had come to check on her daughter at her behest, as the Hollow that had once resided in her had disappeared with her daughter’s birth and she feared what it would do if not contained. The baby’s Reiatsu was already odd against her senses and she feared what it could mean.
Watching her daughter suffocate under the strength of the once captain’s Reiatsu had been the most terrifying thing Misaka had ever witnessed.
Urahara had quickly clamped down on his Reiatsu, even though she knew he was already suppressing it, and finished his look over.
“Your daughter’s fine,” He had said. “I can’t find any trace of Hollow Reiatsu, just Shinigami and Quincy. The only thing of note is that she’s quite spiritually aware. More so than most. It might fade with age, it might not, but it’s something to keep an eye on.”
The man hadn’t visited after that, but Masaki knew her husband still called him and gave him updates of some kind. Probably to make sure nothing went wrong with their baby’s odd makeup.
There didn’t seem to be any incidents after that. Ichigo took the medicine Ryūken prescribed for her asthma with no fussing and they had even started chewing at her fingers like other children Masaki had seen.
But still, she worried. Sometimes her daughter had this dazed look, her eyes glassy and unseeing, as she lay completely still. The first time Masaki had seen her in this state, she had thought Ichigo had died. Ichigo had come back to herself less than a minute later, but Masaki had started to pay more attention. Her daughter had these episodes every once in a blue moon, with seemingly no cause or reason.
And Masaki worried for the daughter she loved so dearly.