Urahara Kiseki didn’t know what had happened.

He had found Karakura in one piece, protected by an Ichigo Kurosaki who had never learned the Final Getsuga Tensho. At first, he had been so confused as to why but the questions would only come later. Ichigo and his entire entourage of fellow humans and shinigami were all collectively looking out into the distance. His arrival didn’t even break their gaze.

They were all staring in petrified horror, some mumbling under their breath, one person was openly on his knees and praying. Urahara had to shake Ichigo in order to break him of his trance.

“What’s happened?” he asked. Where was Aizen? Why wasn’t Ichigo in his Final Getsuga Tensho form? When had the storm clouds rolled in?

“She disappeared,” Ichigo said, his eyes wide and full of incomprehension, “I could feel Aizen all the way up but she disappeared.”

“Who?”

“The sun was swallowed,” muttered a human girl, “Like Apophis. The world came to an end.”

“Ichigo, who went to fight Aizen?!” Urahara demanded because time was of the essence.

Ichigo managed to focus long enough to look at Urahara. He said, “Agito-Oba-san. She went to fight Aizen. They … both kept getting stronger. And then she disappeared. Aizen didn't stand a chance.”

Urahara heard what he needed to know and shunpo-ed at his very fastest to where the horizon lay. Where the humans starred was the source of the thunder, beyond the horizon where the final fight was brought to an end.

He could see how the fight had forever changed the landscape. Brand new open wounds of the earth lashed out in random arches, entire mountains cleaved in half. His mind immediately puzzled out the details, concluding that a lot of the fight was aerial battle before crashing back down to earth.

And then he made it to the plain.

He could feel the lingering stink of rotten reiatsu. Nothing would be able to grow here for centuries if not a millenium. It was difficult for him to find what remained with the rain beating down and not a whisper of presence to relay any survivors. Urahara hoped that they’re both not dead.

His eyes raked the flat land, looking for any abnormalities. It was just by a luck of shadow did he see them.

He shunpo-ed over, ready to deal with Aizen now that he was weak enough to be imprisoned and-

He stopped.

Standing there was Agito, blood stained and soaked in the rain. Her head was turned up, eyes closed and nearly rapturous. Before her lay Aizen’s dead body. His arms and legs were broken and pulped, chest shattered and caved. The most horrible thing about it though was the gruesome tear of his throat, a still bleeding wound, an ugly gaping thing of missing flesh.

“Diabolos-san,” Urahara called.

Agito turned and Kiseki shuttered in shock and horror. From her nose down to her chest was wet with fresh blood.

“Kiseki,” she called back. Her teeth were stained red.

“What did you do?” he asked because something surely horrible had happened here.

She didn’t answer right away, letting the rain and the scene fall into comprehension.

“I have-,” she paused to swallow, the action making his stomach roll, “Unfinished business.”

“Still?” he asked. Agito pressed a hand to her ribs.

“Yeah.”

“What do you need to do?”

“Hueco Mundo.”

“Are you running away?” Urahara had to ask. Agito was still a criminal. Her actions today may shed some sympathetic light but not enough for a full pardon. If anything, she may still suffer more because of her actions today. Gin could be seen as an accomplice to Aizen’s scheme but Agito was an active member who planned out entire battles. She fought and nearly killed her sister, fought and incapacitated the Soutaichou, and only a few people had witnessed her double-crossing.

What was the word of a Shinigami-Substitute? What was the word of a humble shop-keeping mad scientist? What was the word of a few shinigami who have always been compromised? What were they in the court of Seireitei law?

Nothing.

“No,” Agito said.

“If you run to Hueco Mundo,” he said, “I won’t tell them where you’ve gone.”

“I’m not running,” she said, her soul weary and weak, “There’s nothing to run from.”

“So you believe.”

“There is no running when there is no fear,” she said, “I’ve stood beside a madman for a century. What could you possibly offer that I should fear?”

“You could die.”

Agito laughed bitterly.

“If you think death is something to fear,” she said, “Then you haven’t been paying attention. Can you open a garganta for me?”

“And what of your dimension tearing zanpakuto?” he questioned.

“... I don’t have him anymore.”

“What?”

She still a blank slate, too drained to emote anything. She said, “You said that the Final Getsuga Tenshou would have been the end to Ichigo Kurosaki shinigami abilities. I did something similar.”

“But,” he said, running through the mental calculations, “You’re a shinigami. If you had lost your power you would have died.”

“I’m not going to explain everything to you,” she said, “Now, do you have the means to open a garganta?”

Urahara was silent, trying to figure this woman out without having to ask anymore questions. She was like a rubix cube with the thousand rows and columns of pixelated colors and a hundred sides. He decided to put the puzzle to the side for now, there were other matters at hand to contemplate.

“With Aizen out of the way, yes,” he said, “The disruption the Shinigami R&D division had been facing is now void. Shinigami forces have already pulled out. What are you going to do there if not run?”

“Now that would be telling,” she offered a weak smile to her little tease, hoping that the joke wouldn’t pull too hard on her energy.

Urahara went through his robe and pulled out a black bracelet with two buttons. He said, “Coincidentally enough, I have what you need right here. Green button opens a senkaimon. Red button opens a garganta.”

He snapped the bracelet over her wrist, taking the time to see up close and personal the blood running from her mouth down her chest.

“Agito-san,” he said, “Your reiatsu-”

“I know,” she said before clicking the red button. What Urahara didn’t tell her that the bracelet would open a gate to another world, but not a convenient gate. She fell through a hole and didn’t even have enough time to scream.

…

Agito had no power, no weapon, and could barely walk on her own two feet.

Going to Hueco Mundo should have been suicide. Hollows everywhere would have been trying to take a bite out of her soul but battles were still too fresh in the air to come out of hiding. She was safe to move through the castle of Las Noches, as long as she kept out of sight.

She kept a hand pressed onto her ribs, feeling the desperate flutter of two foreign souls. The longer she kept them without any reiatsu, the more likely the two soul pieces would either die completely or latch onto her. If that were to happen, Agito would then have to fight for her soul, seeing as how both Ulquiorra and Stark were originally Hollow and more powerful than her.

She needed to get rid of them and there was only one place for her to do so.

She made her way further into Las Noches, going through hallways never stepped through unless driven to do so. The East Wing was … bad territory. This part of Las Noches was built on a series of tunnels and though Hollows would usually love caves and tunnels, these specific ones were not so good. Aizen had once theorized that the tunnels weren’t built or naturally made, but were the last remains of something truly horrific in the past of Hueco Mundo.

The East Wing was used for jail cells, torture, and the place Agito was heading to. It was hidden a bit. A nondescript door with nothing to draw anybody’s eye. In fact, someone would have to actually be looking for the specific door in order to find it. Which she was.

She went passed the door and walked down the many flights of stair still deeper into the tunnels. There was no light besides the rare crop of glowing quartz crystals growing out of the stone. By the time she made it to the bottom, she was ready to fall down and never get up, she was that tired.

Agito looked around the bottom floor, intaking the lights of more quartz crystals, the scientific machinery, and lab equipment that was left to rot here because it was “too dangerous” to leave around in lab upstairs.

Off to the side were vats of uncovered, undisturbed liquid. The vats were big enough to fit Yammy if he were to sit and crouch. The vats were embedded into the floor, sunk in like a pool. Agito made her way over to the first one, eyeing the green liquid.

“Get up,” she said.

The vat remained undisturbed. She contemplated on kicking it but then a tiny shiver went through the water before a body jumped out, completely naked and soaked in whatever green liquid the vat was filled with.

“Even when I’m dead someone comes to wake me!” Szayel-aporro shouted, “What is it now?!”

“You have work to do.”

Szayal’s head did a double-take so fast that his neck cracked, looking at la Reina up and down before saying, “Is that right?”

“You’ve prepared what I’ve requested?” Agito said, “Let’s get this over with.”

“Why should I do anything for you anymore?” he asked, a sleazy smile spreading across his face, “You’re here in my territory with no weapon and no power. You can’t tell me what to do anymore.”

The law of Hueco Mundo was ‘survival of the fittest’. Only the strong could command the weak. Agito was weak. Szayel gave a dramatic sniff of the air, “I might not be a lowly Adjuchas anymore but you smell delectable…”

She was silent for a moment, weighing her options and deciding what next to say because she was nothing more than a soul and before her was a reborn Espada-class Arrancar.

“I have two pieces of hollow souls inside me,” she said, “If you do not do what I have asked, they will soon merge with my own. A bit of Stark, the primera Espada, and a bit of Ulquiorra, the Cuatro Espada. You really wanna bet which soul is going to be stronger in the end?”

She bared her teeth, gleaming white with a little bit of a red stain in between. The image drew Szayel’s eyes to Agito as a whole, eyeing the drying old blood from her mouth, staining the front of her beaten uniform. He knew the answer. Agito would be corrupted by hollow power and would herself become a hollow. Ulquiorra’s soul would immediately bow to his Diosa’s soul and Coyote Starrk may put up a fight for supremacy but compared to Agito, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

The thought of a hollow Agito Diabolos was frightening.

“Yes,” he said, finally agreeing to work with the less powerful soul, “Everything is prepared. Please, to the examination table.”

Off to the side was a plain examination table, except maybe it was a torture instrument once-upon-a-time. Agito got up on the table and laid herself down, allowing Szayel to strap her arms in. He pressed two seperate lines of wire into her wrists that went down into two seperate vats of green liquid.

“Now, what I need from you is to relax,” Szayel said, “And to not scream.”

A switch was flipped and a stream of electricity zapped through Agito, making her grit her teeth from the pain. All of her muscles locked up and her soul trembled under the strain of power. But the two pieces of souls inside her polarized and went in two seperate directions, one down her right and the other her left arm.

Cruelly, Szayel left the electricity going for a little while more before he flipped the switch off.

“I’m rather impressed,” he said. He made his way back to the examination table to release Agito of her restraints. Somewhere between going to the switchboard and coming back, he had tied a white robe around himself. “You didn’t scream.”

“Small mercies,” she said before turning to look at the two seperate vats, “Explain the science to me.”

“See the liquid as a sort of plasm,” he said, rechecking his numbers and readings from a computer screen, “Rather ingenious ideas you have given me, Diabolos-san. The plasma is a perfect cradle for flecks of soul pieces. By running a current of weak hollow reishi through the plasma, the soul will begin to feed. The soul itself is imprinted with its own DNA and will regenerate as themselves. You have reconstruction the idea of test tube babies to fit a hollow’s biology.”

“And you won’t be experimenting on them?” Agito tested.

“If I were to change a single thing about them,” he said, “They would surely kill me. I rather like my head where it’s at.”

“Then my business here is close to finished,” she said, “I want all you know about the surviving Espada. I know Grimmjow isn’t dead. And so isn’t Harribel’s fraccion. And where is- What’s wrong?”

Agito interrupted herself because Szayel had completely frozen, his face turning nearly grey like a corpse.

Suddenly he began to laugh.

“What?” Agito demanded testily, ready to pick up something to throw at him.

“So Aizen still wins!” he shouted, “Diabolos-san! Congratulations! You’re a mother! You’re going to be the mother of Sousuke Aizen Junior!”

She didn’t know how take take his words. She understood all of those words separately but thrown together seemed as if Szayel was speaking a different language.

“But I didn’t-” Szayel only laughed harder. Annoyed, Agito got up off the examination table, storming over to where the computer still spilled their readouts.

There were alot of numbers and readings she didn’t care for. Smack in the middle of the report, she had a drawing of a humanoid body in anatomical position. Three spots were marked at the heart. Two were shown to have polarized and moved down her arms. The last piece by her heart had remained hibernating. Exactly as she had planned.

But there was another spot. It was lower, down at her hips. A single foreign spot. It was shown to have been at her right hip before polarizing down to her center.

Agito’s hand went up to touch the spot and with a flash of memory she knew.

Aizen had done something to her.

He put a mark on her body.

A snake entering two suns.

No.

Now she knew.

It was him becoming one with her.

He used the same knowledge she had done to save Ulquiorra and Stark in order to save herself.

Out of her body, Aizen was to be reborn.

Even after death, he won.

...

Agito Diabolos gave a most agonizing wail.

~~~

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