I was absolutely destroyed.

I’d done far better than I had expected, but I hadn’t run anywhere in so many years that I couldn’t even fathom how long it had truly been. The sudden addition of cardio to my exercise diet was shocking, to say the least.

My body was shaking from the effort of simply standing now, quivering uncontrollably against the weight of gravity.

The day had taken possibly the oddest turn it could have. From attending a job interview, to accusations of being an interdimensional interloper, to pumping iron with a very buff 6’6, almost 6’7 guy, who is now effectively my personal trainer.

I was blown away by just how quick things had moved. I had almost been killed by this Urahara guy, and now I was being trained by Tessai? It was just baffling. All the while I was dwelling in my confusion, I heard a car pull up hard, the door opening and rushing footsteps towards me.

I admit, I panicked a bit. It had been a long day. I threw my arms and practically cowered. There was silence.

“Grayson?” I heard Suzumi’s voice. It’s warm tones with just that tiny hint of a Japanese accent warmed and soothed me in a way that I’m not sure that I had since… well, a while. Then suddenly, a spike of anxiety hit me. I had just drunk that potion that made me able to understand and differentiate between Japanese and English. I actually needed to be careful to not speak in Japanese. I paused to make sure I was thinking in English.

“Oh, Suzumi. Sorry I called you out here so late.” I said hesitantly, returning to a more neutral stance towards her, but she wasn’t having it.

“Grayson, what the hell happened?” She exclaimed, coming closer and touching me gently on the arm, moving close to me.

“Oh, you know. Nothing that interesting.” She growled in a half intimidating, half cute way.

“Grayson, you look like you’ve seen a ghost and ran a marathon to get away from it!” She slapped me gently on the arm in admonishment.

“I mean... yeah, kinda?” There was a pause of possibly just befuddlement.

“What do you even mean ‘kinda’? You saw a ghost? You ran a marathon?” She was getting genuinely angry, in a ‘I’m worried for you’ kind of way.

“A marathon, mostly.” I got the distinct impression that her eyebrows were severely scrunched.

“Why would you have run a marathon, Grayson? In a suit of all things?” Incredulousness was practically leaking from her words.

“Uh,” my mind blanked, unable to think of any excuse that would remotely explain what had happened today, “I was just told to, alright? I don’t think I really had a choice in it. Part of the job description, I think.” Even her ribbon looked incredulous now. She was preparing to speak again when I simply put my hands on her shoulders and looked into vaguely where her eyes were.

“I understand that its weird and that it sounds really bad. It really might be that way in the end. But if I let you talk yourself into a fit, you are going to walk in there and demand answers, and I just don’t want it. Not now.” I pleaded.

Her words stopped, stuck in her throat. She was almost growling with the exertion that it took for her to resist barging right into the shop that sat behind me and trying to suplex Urahara, but she did hold back.

I just sighed, exhausted.

“I’ll tell you more about it soon, I swear. But right now, I need to just go home and have a shower and stop standing up. Please?” There was a soulful moment between us, an unspoken conversation had simply by existing near each other, reassuring her that I was fine, but just didn’t want to deal with it right at this moment.

Promptly after the silent conversation, she slipped herself under my arm, allowing me to lean on her ever so slightly, making it easier for me to walk to her little car. Once inside, the car ride home was almost silent. More out of necessity of me being wiped than either of us brooding.

The drive home felt long, maybe forty minutes of driving. Far too long for Suzumi to do every morning, especially if she is going to have a shift as a flight attendant again. I have to figure out a way to easily get to Urahara’s shop. I wonder if Urahara’s shop is on my maps app.

When we arrived home, I suddenly realised that there were steps up to Suzumi’s apartment. Each step was just frustrating, though surprisingly my body held up.

All my cares flew out the window when I walked inside the cool apartment and struggled to make my way towards the shower. I had to sit on the floor of the shower because of just how little I trusted my legs to keep me upright. It took almost 30 minutes to do a rudimentary wash of my body.

I stumbled out of the shower, wearing a set of clothes to just relax in. I flopped down on the couch, face down in the soft cushions, too weak to lift myself and reposition. After a moment, Suzumi walked into the room and sat on the couch next to my laying form.

“So, what are you going to explain?” I almost groaned, but I had promised that I would explain… something. I sighed and forced myself into a sitting position. I took a moment of silence to collect my thoughts.

“A lot of weird stuff happened in there.” I said.

“Well that much is clear. You were made to run a damn marathon, Grayson!” She said, a little outrage leaking into her voice. I nodded.

“I know, but that’s the least weird thing that happened in there. I was told a lot of things. Things I have no idea how to understand or interpret.” The anxiety was starting to get to me now. I had all this crackhead information. If I told her all this, she was basically confirmed to think I was batshit insane. But… it was Suzumi. Maybe, just maybe I could convince her.

“What sort of things?” Doubt clear in her voice. I sighed, resolving to tell her some things that might simply lead to me being thrown out of her apartment.

“I was told about my soul. Urahara told me about this thing he was making, had been making for years, decades even. He told me that there had always been interference. He told me that letter we sent, and it came within the same room of the device it exploded.” I was exasperated beyond belief. How had this become my life? This stupid, fantastical sentence summed up the reason why I now know that the ribbons I see are reiraku and, according to Tessai telling me afterwards, are visual manifestations of someone’s spiritual aura, if not their soul.

“What kind of device would blow up when a letter gets into the same room as it?” She was frustrated with me, a random man from another country who was suddenly spouting near nonsense at her. And she was well within every right to simply throw me out right then, but she simply balled her fists and stared at me so hard I could feel the burning gaze.

“A ‘soul sensitive machine’ made by the same man that made me able to speak fluent Japanese with tea!” I didn’t quite yell, but the frustration in my voice reached a peak that I wasn’t quite comfortable with, the frustration bleeding through into the latter half of the sentence where I had spoken in Japanese. I quelled the frustration but was only left with anxiety and fear. I felt liquid touch my lips and realised that tears were streaming down my face, leaving hot, wet scars in my face as if the frustration and anxiety was being pushed into the salty liquid itself. I sobbed uncontrollably once, before I clamped my throat shut and furiously wiped my tears away with the sleeve of my shirt.

There was stunned silence from her, lasting one minute, then the next. Each minute that passed worried me more and more, preparing for words that I simply don’t know if I could handle at this moment. If I couldn’t hear her light breathing beside me, I’d almost have believed she had disappeared right then and there and be done with the crazy talking foreigner.

“You… can speak Japanese now?” She said in Japanese, still baffled by that discovery.

“Yeah. I have no idea how he did it. But I drank this foul tasting liquid and it felt like my ears were going to burst, then I could talk with Urahara in Japanese. It was terrifying.” I shook at the memory of the experience. The feeling of pressure in my ears wasn’t that bad, but the conversation with Urahara was easily the most terrifying singular moment in my life.

“But how? I know that your Japanese was terrible. You couldn’t have faked being as bad as you were, not with how fluent you are now. This is insanity!” I heard a shift of cloth against the cushions of the couch as Suzumi moved closer to me, hugging my arm into herself and moving close into my ear.

“I don’t know, Suzumi. I just drank this stuff and I could. I can’t understand what the hell he did exactly, I just thought it was a terrible traditional tea or something.” Despite myself I laughed at the past stupidity and just in a self-deprecating way. Suzumi held my arm tighter.

“Well, okay. I mean, it’s really hard to believe, but the effect is absolutely undeniable. You speak in perfect Japanese with a perfect Japanese accent. I’ve even been using old, obscure Japanese words to speak without loan words, and you can still follow along. How did this even happen?” She said, the doubt still in her voice, but the worry began to subsume it. I had thought myself capable of not telling her the whole truth, but here I was, ready to spill out everything. I just sighed in resignation.

“I think I almost died today, Suzumi.” There was a sudden shock, her arms clamping around my arm heavily.

“Remember when I told you about the soul sensitive device thing?” She nodded in response.

“Well, it turns out that Urahara was making that device because he was worried about someone threatening the ‘Human World’.”

“The Human World?” Suzumi said, slightly baffled. I shrugged.

“That’s what he called it. The reason he made it was to detect souls that were powerful, and just act as a warning system. I’d been showing up on this sensor thing basically since I was born, Suzumi. Decades.”

“What does that mean?” Suzumi said, still baffled but a slight realisation dawning.

“He thought I was the intruder into the Human World. When I didn’t have the information he wanted about ‘who’ I was and ‘what I was doing here’, I felt this… pressure. It was terrible, like someone increased gravity on me by ten times. I felt crushed by an invisible hand. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was really going to die, Suzumi.” I realised I was crying again.

“Tessai saved me. A barrier, I think. Tessai stopped him from doing anything else, just that he called on a name, Kurosaki, and told him off about it. He stopped and told Tessai to manage me and train me. That’s why I ran a marathon.” I was still sobbing, unable to hold the weight of my emotions anymore, strong enough only to curl up in a ball and brace myself against my emotions.

Suzumi didn’t ask any questions after that, but I got the distinct impression that she believed me. It was intensely relieving to be believed with a story that I felt so obviously false. It made me feel trusted, even though I wasn’t sure that I trusted myself to truly understand what had happened today.

For the rest of the night I sat there quietly, Suzumi leaning against me, acting as a vital support pillar. Hour after hour passed, the night slowly overtaking day, the TV only paltry background noise to the trauma racing through my mind, the seemingly unending tears.

I don’t know why Suzumi was treating me so well, like family. We only met a day ago, but already we had shared so much, and conveyed more than I had with very few others in my life, certainly among those that still lived. We had been physically intimate, hugging and even going so far as kissing her on the forehead, but there was nothing in it that made me uncomfortable, that made me wonder what I was doing, questioning my own sanity. Only an overwhelming sense of closeness, a connection I desperately needed.

After night came in, the rest of those waking hours were spent in a delirium of sadness, an overwhelming, rushing tide of emotion that I had no way to constructively handle, only to desperately brace myself and pray that the next day I wasn’t going to feel the same way.

At some point I remember being supported and walking, then being laid down on a mattress. The cool sheets and pillow enclosed my body in a solitary fortress against my whirling mind, not a cure, but a soothing agent to sting of the wound.

It was moments later that I fell asleep, unbeknownst of the beast that I had awakened inside of Suzumi.