9 Memories of Never

Suzumi and I sat, our new and strange energy barrier surrounding us. Urahara still stood a distance away, mumbling to himself about things that I couldn't even properly understand.

I looked towards Suzumi, who was still panting even after the weight had dissipated from her shoulders.

"Are you alright now?" I asked, my voice soft as I reached out and clasped her hand. There were a few more moments of her panting before she managed to suck in a breath that allowed her to breathe easily again.

"Yes, I think so. I was doing pretty well I thought, but the weight kept getting heavier. I managed to slice through the weight a bit, and then I felt you touch me…" She trailed off, thinking back to the moment. I did as well, remembering that supremely odd sensation. I had shared with her the form that my energy had moulded itself into, and seeded it within her own energy, as if the slight connection had taught her of the structure it should take.

I knew little and understood even less about what happened only moments ago, but the thing that truly does stand out in my mind is the fact that I remembered that structure from somewhere. It was like the muscle memory of a sport you had done years ago, and when you picked it back up again, everything seemed to fall back into place rudimentarily as you started to go through the motions.

There were no memories that came along with the action itself, just a feeling of almost getting it right, but not being good enough yet to do it properly. A feeling of primal frustration, maybe. An instinctual understanding that I could do it better, that I should be able to do it better.

The structure clung to my skin even still, an action that took no thought, just as simple as breathing or standing. It quietly shifted from form to form across my skin, bizarrely feeling like nothing, but also being prominently there to my mind.

"I'm assuming you haven't been taught any of this?" Urahara spoke at me intensely, breaking me from my rapture. I shook my head and he grunted out an affirmation and continued to mumble to himself. I felt Suzumi's thumb slowly stroke the back of my hand in an inquisitive way.

"Are you alright now?" She asked. Maybe she had realised that I'd been under a larger weight than she was, or maybe she was just borderline telepathic, but I answered her nonetheless.

"Honestly? I feel somewhere between amazing and frustrated." I sighed, not sure if I was able to get the emotion across in words, but I begun to feel her grip on my hand weaken.

"Suzumi?" I asked, worry making an appearance despite my best efforts.

"Sorry, I think I might be a little tired. I might just pass out…" She trailed off, her sentence half forming but becoming a jumbled grunt when making it out of her mouth.

"Urahra! Suzumi is passing out." I called out, clasping Suzumi's limp hand in mine and trying to lie her flat on the stone, moving to pick up her legs to keep her blood moving, but Urahara's voice appeared right next to my ear, making me jump.

He snatched her hand from mine and felt for something a few seconds before he spoke, "Ah, perfect! I needed to talk to you anyways. She is simply exhausted, give it a few hours and she'll be just fine. Tessai!" The man yelled, rapid fire in his pace and his voice booming across the league of manufactured rocky landscape. It wasn't that he had strained his voice or that it was spoken with any more intensity than normal, but that the word travelled much, much further, even managing to bounce back and reach my ears a time or two.

Moments later I heard a strange ripping sound in the air itself, feeling a wave of air being displaced.

"Ah, you have completed your training with Mister Carter today? It hasn't been an hour, Urahara." Tessai spoke harshly, a warning perhaps.

Urahara scoffed lightly, "Don't you worry your head about it, Tessai. I am merely calling you to take care of Miss Hamase. I am going to… inquire about a few things with Mister Carter over here." Urahara spoke secretively, and the air tensed between the two men. A slight amount of that same pressure Suzumi and I had been battling against snaked forwards, eyeing each other up before Tessai audibly changed his attention to Suzumi, who was still lying in front of me.

"Mister Carter, I commend you in the extraordinary use of your own spiritual energy to shield yourself from spiritual pressure. Do not let Urahara convince you it is anything but that." Urahara huffed but didn't bother to comment on his employee's warning.

There was another sudden displacement of air as I saw Tessai's ribbon flash from right in front of me to hundreds of meters away. Suffice to say that my mind was sufficiently boggled. The magic, or spiritual pressure, was one thing to comprehend but moving with a speed that was clearly not possible according to physics, or at least not immediately obvious it'd be possible, was something else entirely.

Urahara didn't let me think too hard about it, "Let's move ourselves then, shall we?" My arm was roughly grabbed and with a strange whizz of air around me, like I was suddenly in my own personal tornado. Suddenly, we were no longer in a warm and dry climate, but the very same climate of the room I had first met Urahara in. I sat back, shocked, pulling away from the arm that Urahara had grabbed.

"God damn, give a man some warning?" I said, scandalized, as I felt my world spin around me for a moment, my brain desperately trying to come to terms with just how fast I had just been moving. We had somehow travelled all the way from the study room, all the way to the steps, up them, down a corridor and through a door. By this quick calculation, my mind was sufficiently boggled and I just let the dizziness run its course.

"People find it even more jarring when they prepare for it, in my experience." Urahara said, thumping down to the floor in a sitting position while I haphazardly make my way to the other side of the table, trying to wipe the unpleasant feeling from my mind. He let me sit and recollect myself, before deeming me to be fit enough to answer his myriad questions.

"So, tell me how you came up with the spiritual shielding that you used." For some reason, as he spoke, I couldn't help but see him as an excitable child, begging to be told the answer to a question he had asked his annoyed parent. I snorted at my own mental thought and tried to come up with a 'how' for this strange shield that had popped into my head.

"If I'm honest, Urahara. I just seemed to remember it. It just popped into my head one moment, and the next after I was able to use it. I wasn't thinking about anything when it happened, or well, nothing important anyway." I heard the man rub the stubble on his face while he hummed in thought. Urahara was the kind of person that you could tell was smart just by being around him. You didn't need to be told, it was just something about the way he held himself, the sort of aura he emitted. Disregarding my obvious distaste for the man, I couldn't help but be somewhat in awe of his presence, even as he chewed on the new information I'd just supplied him with.

"A racial trait maybe?" He pondered aloud and I lifted an eyebrow in response.

"I'm half Japanese and half random assortment of European ethnicities. Do you think that it'd make that much of a difference?" I asked, and even his ribbon shrugged. I had realised the ribbons were becoming more expressive as of late.

"Well, I can't say I know much about that. Information on 'afterlives' or spiritual organisations in other countries are… well-guarded, as is the information about the Japanese and Eastern Soul Society. We all live parallel to each other, rarely intertwining."

Confused, I asked, "Uh, Soul Society?"

"Oh, right. You haven't had any of that explained to you properly yet?" I shook my head, "Well, I guess you are in the fold now, and Tessai and I being mysterious about it wouldn't be helping anyone." He cleared his throat and I resigned myself to listen to some information that was surely going to change my view of the world as I know it.

It was then that the door to the side of us opened, "Urahara, Mister Carter. Miss Hamase is currently resting in one of the spare rooms. Can I offer you tea?" I flared with an instinctive frustration, being so close to this information that had been trickle fed to me over the past day. Urahara perked up, taking a green tea from Tessai, and I simply took a water. Urahara cleared his throat again after taking a long, noisy slurp of the tea. It was probably on purpose to frustrate me.

"Alright, back to business," I heard the cup of tea being placed on the table, and I did the same with my glass of water, "Soul Society is simply an afterlife. Other countries and places may call their Soul Societies by a different name, but either way it represents the same thing. All of Japan's dead, and a lot of mostly eastern countries that manage to make their way to us, live in Soul Society amongst other souls of the departed in the Rukongai." I could hear the man tapping on the table, thinking about his words carefully. I mulled over the information, trying to consolidate the information to keep up.

"Essentially, Soul Society—with their army of Soul Reapers—largely act in the interest of those departed souls, delivering them to Soul Society, protecting them from what amount to corrupted souls called Hollows, and protecting the cycle of reincarnation and therefore the balance of all the different realms." I cringed at how dense that single sentence was in the sheer amount of branching questions that just opened up. I heard a chuckle come from across the table.

"Lots to take in, and just as much information is yet to make it to your hands." The tapping of his finger on the table returned, signalling more thinking. He sighed thoughtfully, maybe it was difficult to know just how much information was even useful to me at this point, or what would cross the line and just be confusing or just downright scary.

"I guess what is most important to you is just why I believed you to be, and still believe you to be, an invader of sorts." There was a swish of cloth, signalling the raising of his hand, before I could respond, the air in the room cooled with the heaviness of the topic. This was obviously a lecture, the sort of lecture that was best experienced in an unbroken format where my questions were left to the end.

"Not so long ago, only a few decades in fact," I raised my eyebrow, only a few decades? He coughed dryly and I let him off. "A few decades ago now, there was a massive world extinction level event. Apocalyptic, perhaps. It was something that only a few even saw whispers of coming, and the sort of event that the precursor for only became obvious in retrospect. Not knowing more and acting on flawed or limited information is my largest and most crushing regret. We left the survival of the worlds down to what even you would consider a group of children, when we should have been prepared for something of this scale long before it ever happened." Despite Urahara's voice being as calm as ever, his ribbon was slowly coiling, tightening against itself. It seems Urahara was a hell of a lot more riled up about this than he was outwardly displaying.

"Regardless of all that, I've been working very hard to uncover hidden threats to at least our Soul Society. That you showed up in any of those tests just goes to show how dangerous of an unknown you are. Even though you clearly are half of a western ethnicity and half Japanese, your actual origin is unknown, your powers are unlike anything I have ever witnessed before, and a highly advanced spiritual shielding technique simply popped into your head." There was a distinct wariness seeping into his voice at that point, making the hairs on my arms stand on their ends. After the short pause, he continued again with the room remaining in silence.

"A spiritual shielding technique that let someone with fairly minimal spiritual energy sustain against someone with qualitatively and quantitatively superior spiritual energy. This is all unheard of." Urahara's voice was dangerous and low, but in contrast his ribbon swayed from side to side, like a cat's tail as it eyed its new toy. I didn't like either option.

"This isn't about if you remember, or what you know. This is about the fact that someone with a new origin of power suddenly appears, with no knowledge of the spiritual arts at all. Yet, when he is pushed to his limits, out of nowhere you are supplied with a totally original spiritual shielding technique on a level of complexity that matches some of the most powerful people I have ever met." The room was dead silent, and I could see Urahara's eyes once again, cutting through the fog of my vision like it was nothing. Two grey, glowing discs stared at me with an intensity that made my back prickle with sweat.

"What will you remember next, Grayson Carter?"