okay but talk to us about the aftermath of gin bisecting hiyori! does she have nightmares? does she have pain her lower extremities from having her spine severed? how close did she come to dying? how extensive is the scarring since the angle looks like it went through her midsection---? does she have issues with breathing or her energy? how much PTSD does she have from it? i'm sorry aina i goTTA KNOW
Hiyori doesn’t actually have nightmares about being hurt or dying. In fact being injured does not create any trauma like that for her. She enlisted as a shinigami very early on. She is aware of injuries and has become older and stronger to know that these injuries heal. At least- physically. But what she does have nightmares about is the psychological aspects that hollowfication has taken. The one complaint against Aizen was not the betrayal- but the fact that he used her to hurt her friends. Hiyori had been trying to fight her own hollowfication for a long, long time as Shinji warded off Mashiro and Kensei’s attack with the other visored. She had been struggling to tell Shinji to drop her and run. She had also told him to leave her. She gave him several warnings until she couldn’t control herself any more and the hollow took hold of her actions. I think she must have been struggling for a long time, trying to fight the virulent nature of the hollow and to not hurt her friends.
Eventually, she succumbs and the recurring nightmare she has is if it happens again. What now?
It’s why she is always on edge. She’s always sure to reel in her violent hollow so she will not lose that control again.
As for the aftermath of Gin bisecting Hiyori, here are a few of my headcanons from an injury like that:
She has a thin, surgical scar across her entire midsection around her waist. It has healed into a silvery-white colour and quite noticeable.
Whilst her breathing and energy is undamaged. there are occasions that she suffers loss of sensation and lower leg weakness. In those moments, she has to take a break until she can regulate her reiatsu and regain sensation in her lower limbs again. In the immediate aftermath, Hiyori had to learn to sit and walk again with extensive rehabilitation. She spent a long portion of her time not knowing if she could ever fight again. It was a very dark part of her life.
She compiled a list of reasons for herself to walk again (e.g., to dance on Aizen’s grave, so she could dropkick Kisuke whenever she felt like it, so Shinji wouldn’t look like he would cry…).
She has internal scarring in all her organs. All healed, but she needs yearly check ups at the fourth division to monitor inflammatory markers.
She cannot become pregnant due to the trauma her body has sustained. Her body will not carry a child. Whilst Hiyori did not want a child… she is also quite heartbroken that the choice was taken from her and it’s just one other thing she can’t provide her partner.
Due to the nature of the injury, Shinso’s reiatsu (Gin’s zanpakuto) lingers around that area. It’s very subtle and woven into her own reiatsu by now, but it is still there.
She has just small amounts of PTSD- but often covers it up with some dark humour. None of the visored finds her jokes about ‘not being half bad‘ funny at all. They are probably the ones with more trauma having to watch her die to be honest.
Also- the big crux of this is- Hiyori only survived in that universe. I always think Hiyori, for all reasons, was most likely going to die from that injury. She was cleaved in two. The damage to her spine, her liver, her kidneys and gut would have been too extensive to save- even for a hollow with regenerative capabilities. But she survived in that one universe.
I like the plot that every time she does die, she wakes up a few days prior to the fake karakura town arc and has to find a way to prevent her death (a la edge of tomorrow, or groundhog day). I just have to pick the annoying music she hears every time she comes back to life.
@keikakudori