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“May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.”
From the Oath of Maimonides
Even the air in Hueco Mundo is different — heavier and thicker than in Seireitei — dense with ambient reishi. It reminds Isane of the kidō chambers at the General Emergency Relief Station in which wounded shinigami sometimes convalescence. A place like this, brimming with spiritual particles, would be ideal for healing if the world itself wasn’t so hostile. So unforgiving. Although, at the moment it’s hard to tell what is just the natural atmospheric reishi and what is overflow from the vicious battle nearby.
The air is alive with power and laced with the smell of blood as Captain Zaraki and his opponent clash over and over and over — only tens of metres away from where she stands. It’s difficult to locate injured combatants when a battle like this still rages on. But Isane has been trained for this. Harsh and disorienting field conditions are nothing new for her. She guides her senses away from the overbearing presence of Zaraki, away from the suffocating black tar of the Espada. Isane closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and reduces the strong energies to an idle humming in her head. Allowing herself to focus on what is around them, to seek out any weakened spiritual signatures.
Unsurprisingly, the first thing she picks up is Kurosaki Ichigo. As she opens her eyes, Isane sees a golden shield surrounding the boy. Underneath his wounds are reversing at an unnatural speed — unnatural even by their standards. Kurosaki is clearly not in need of her expertise, so she allows her senses to move past him. She is sure there are more wounded beings among the sands. And suddenly she feels it. A desperate, galvanic flare. It’s gone almost instantly, but Isane is already moving towards the source. There’s another flare and another. Dying throes beckoning her where she needs to be.
One final shunpo and Isane reaches her destination. The white sand is red and dark. Wet like mud on a beach, saturated with blood. It’s still seeping into the gravel, flowing from an arrancar curled into a foetal position. The man is still alive but just barely. Isane is careful in her approach. It’s not uncommon for the injured to lash out when in the delirious equidistant of life and death. Of existence and oblivion. But there’s no aggression, no frantic final attack. Only a wet gurgle and desperate gasping. He is too far gone to sense her presence even as she stands right next to him.
Isane lowers herself to the damp ground. She is on her knees and her palm sinks into the bloody sand as she supports her weight on it. With hesitation, she places a hand on the shoulder of the arrancar. Her eyes trail the back of his body and below the tattered jacket, she sees a number. Six. It’s tattooed on his iron skin, just next to the gaping hole at the small of his back. Isane grips his shoulder harder and briefly wonders if the Espada will disintegrate under her hands. Wonders if she is too late. But he doesn’t and she isn’t. His limp body is solid and heavy as she pulls him onto his back.
A string of curses escapes the lips of the arrancar and when she hears the growls, Isane can’t help but feel the smallest amount of relief. The way she forcefully moved his body must have hurt and the pain jolted him back into reality. Because now the Espada struggles against her in his altered state of consciousness. He keens and threshes, pushing back against her when he really ought to be still. He should preserve his energy.
“Stop moving, please.” Isane masks a command into a request. Her voice is quiet and calm, but unwavering and unyielding. There is steel behind her polite demeanour as she holds him down. The arrancar is in such a weakened state that it takes no effort from her part to keep him on the ground. It’s easy, even with one hand.
“The fuck are you?” The arrancar’s raspy question is barely audible. Laboriously enunciated between bloody coughs that sound like they are tearing at his throat. She watches his bright blue eyes as they desperately try to focus on something. The Espada squints and for a moment his stare is almost lucid.
“Kotetsu Isane, Squad Four Lieutenant,” she answers as her gaze travels across his body. Carefully noting every line and shape. Every wound and scrape. There’s a cut below his left eye, it’s shallow but bleeds heavily like head-wounds often do. A slash across his chest, cut through the pectoral muscle and a vertical gash along the right side of his torso. All pale in comparison to the major trauma around his left shoulder. That wound is fatal, it’s a miracle the arrancar is still alive and Isane knows that time is of the essence.
If the wounded soldier before her was a shinigami, Isane would lay her healing hands straight onto his soul. Join with the very core of his being in order to use their most effective methods. But when Captain Unohana healed the first arrancar they encountered, she instructed Isane that they should be careful when tending to hollows. To refrain from using their most powerful techniques. If the order had come from anyone else, Isane would have thought it bias. But Unohana is a woman of principle. The captain would never order her to neglect the treatment of a fellow creature in pain. She trusts her captain explicitly and follows the instructions.
So Isane doesn’t connect with the Espada, she doesn’t push her reiatsu into him to gauge internal damage. Instead, she relies on her visual assessment and moves her hand towards the deathly injury that had nearly decapitated him. It’s a crevasse carved of flesh and bone. The blade used made quick work of soft tissue. It cut clean through the clavicle, severed both the subclavian artery and vein, shattered the second rib and pierced his left lung. A nagging doubt settles into Isane’s mind. The arrancar might be beyond her help if she limits herself as her captain ordered. Still, she gathers reiatsu to her hand. A green light radiates from it as she hovers over the wound and focuses all her attention to it.
“Kurosaki — “ a weak mumble sounds from the Espada’s dry lips as the kaidō begins to take effect. It surprises her, the question. Because that is what it is, a question of Kurosaki Ichigo’s whereabouts. Isane doesn’t know if it stems of concern or spite. If the arrancar wishes that the human boy is safe or if he would rather part this world seeing Kurosaki’s dead body next to his. Isane doesn’t know and it’s not her place to ask.
“Kurosaki Ichigo is currently being treated by Inoue Orihime,” she informs him with as much neutral kindness as she can manage. The frown on the arrancar’s brow relaxes and the tightness of his jaw eases. This is clearly the right answer to give. The one to soothe him, to make him more receptive to treatment. Isane doesn’t linger on what it means. Instead, she concentrates on her work, on the wound at her fingertips. She wills it together, piece by piece.
The bleeding stops and fragments of shattered bone pull out of where they stuck to the collapsed lung. Isane is working from the outside in and it feels unnatural. Clumsy. She hasn’t worked this slow since her early days in the 4th. If she were able to work through him — pushing her reiatsu to every corner of his body — she would feel the injuries with absolute clarity. She could coax them to regenerate, she could guide the flow of his reiatsu and replenish his reiryoku with her own, stabilising his being. It would be faster and safer than what she does now.
Isane feels him fade and knows with absolute certainty that at this rate the man will die before she is done. She looks into his blue eyes, glazed over and delirious. His face is contorted into a tired expression of pain and desperation and fear. The Espada doesn’t look like an abomination, like an enemy. At this moment he looks just as every other soul she has seen in the precipice of life and death. And Isane decides she will stand between him and oblivion — like she has sworn to do.
She places her palms on his chest where the flesh mangled by Kurosaki’s sword still radiates torrent heat. Isane closes her eyes and begins a chant in her head. One by one she weaves the spells that draw ambient reishi from the environment to her body, allowing her to combine it with her power and eventually channel it straight into the arrancar. She takes a deep breath bracing herself for the unknown before connecting with him. There’s no resistance from the Espada. He is wounded and weak and barely conscious, so when Isane taps into his soul — his very core of being — he allows it. Probably not even realising what is happening.
It becomes instantly clear why the Captain advised against this.
Pain and rage and desperation fill every part of her. She chokes on it, is paralysed by it. A bridge leads to both banks. This is part of the natural bleed of feeling, she reasons. Isane has healed countless souls. She has healed the good and gentle, the evil and ruthless. Scared souls, tired souls. Young and old. Powerful and weak. But never has the connection hit her with this kind of intensity before. She forces herself to remain calm, ignores the things he pushes into her and concentrates on pouring her reiatsu into him.
Isane attempts to shift through the noise and the swirling encompassing her senses. She tries to separate the physical wounds from what tortures the heart. It’s through sheer force of will she gains back control. As she adjusts — becomes more accustomed to the way he feels — Isane realises something is gravely wrong with the man. There’s a gaping abyss under all the pain and the obsession and the white-hot rage.
The void scares her. It feels monstrous and she doesn’t know if she can fix it. But it’s the thing that is draining him — and her — the most. So, Isane steels herself and does what she is trained to do. She inundates the arrancar’s core with her power, willing the broken thing back together. But it doesn’t feel like a normal wound. Instead of allowing her reiatsu to flow through it to parse the edges shut, it seems to devour everything Isane channels into the man. It feels like an entity of its own, gripping and pulling her reiatsu inwards. Countless voices scream in her head like there are more than two souls connected.
And she is hungry, she is so hungry.
It’s hard to concentrate, but Isane opens her eyes anyway to see if she has made any progress. The wounds look the same. Frustrated she happens to glance at the abdomen of the arrancar. She sees a flicker near his hollow hole. A small patch of skin is encroaching just a millimetre past the rim, trying to grow to bridge the vast opening. Her entire body shakes as she realises that it’s not an injury from battle she is healing. She immediately pulls back, stops feeding the abyss and the voices dwindle.
It dawns on her that she needs to direct the flow of power differently within an arrancar. She can’t run the veins of energy through the core of his soul because he is not whole. If she tries that, the howling abyss — the metaphysical ground zero left behind by his imploding heart — will consume everything. And she cannot give enough to sate the need that is there, no sacrifice great enough to fill that void. So she isolates it. Works around it and soon the wounds start healing, the technique finally working as it should.
Isane doesn’t speak as she works and the arrancar is silent as well. She is able to stop his bleeding, to mend his broken form. Enough of her power flows through him now that he will not fade out of existence. But she doesn’t have enough to fully replenish his reiatsu, not after the mistakes she made. “I’ve managed to stop the worst of your bleeding, but that was all I could do.” She mutters in an apologetic voice. She doesn’t explain to him why she couldn’t do more. She won’t talk about her wasted power and the Espada doesn’t ask. Her words are met with silence.
“Please don’t move, you’ll heal faster on your own if you stay still.” Isane pleads standing up. Her legs are wobbly, she feels drained and shaky. It reminds her of the first time she used these methods. She takes a few moments to collect herself and tries not to think about the feel of an arrancar’s soul. The amalgamation of pain and want and fear.
Isane can’t help but wonder if it would have been a kindness to let him pass. Would it have been mercy if her Itegumo finished what others had begun? Cleansing the hollow and allowing the man to move on. To let him become whole again through the cycle of rebirth. The woman takes one final look at him before she kicks off the ground to return to her comrades. Soft blue hair falls to his blood-stained face and his mangled body barely holds its shape. Maybe one day they will meet again on another battlefield and she can ask then. Allow him the choice she took from him today.