This is a rewrite of the first chapter of my continuation to the story Protecting What's Precious. After I read over all my chapters again recently I decided that they all could use a bit of tweaking.

Thanks for reading and your patience. I know it's been taking me a while to get my chapters out.

Disclaimer: Bleach is not mine!

Chapter 1: Dreams

In two separate worlds, two men sat at their individual desks finishing paperwork into the dead hours of the night. They looked as different as two people could possibly look, but their actions seemed to mirror each other perfectly. They were both bent intently over their desks in the dim lighting of their rooms. Suddenly, both of them stopped writing and looked up as a presence simultaneously impinged on their consciousness. It was a familiar presence – one they had both given up ever sensing a long time ago. They both stood abruptly from their desks and followed that weak pulse to its source in the bedrooms of their charges. They started to raise their hands to open the bedroom doors, but they paused for a moment – almost as if they were afraid of what they might find once they opened it. They finally reached out and opened their respective doors and looked into the rooms just in time to see… nothing.

Pale moonlight shined gently on the faces of the sleeping children in their rooms and everything seemed to be in order. The children’s faces were peaceful and the presence they had felt seemed to have disappeared like smoke in the wind. The two men sighed in disappointment. They were always unsure of what they hoped to see in the children’s rooms, and this was not the first time they had been disturbed by that faint, fleeting presence, but they knew that they had never seen anything no matter how many times they had tried to chase it down. They both thought for a moment that they were going crazy, but a small part of them didn’t really believe that. As they closed the doors behind them a soft light began to glow by the side of the children’s sleeping forms.

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Ten year old Isamu Kurosaki tossed and turned restlessly in his sleep. He could see a hazy figure standing in a field of brilliant white snow in his dream. He couldn’t see the person’s face clearly, but he could see her lips moving silently, desperately trying to tell him something. He listened as hard as he could, but it was almost as if someone was snatching the words out of the air before they could reach him. He tried to wade through the knee deep snow that he stood in to get closer to the person who he needed to hear, but a cold wind blasted against him and blinded him with a flurry of snow.

What do you need to tell me? Isamu tried to shout out to the figure in white as he brought his arm up to protect his face from the stinging wind and snow, but his voice seemed to also be stolen by the raging storm around him. He marveled for a minute that he wasn’t actually freezing to death, but he supposed that since this was a dream it would make sense that regular rules didn’t apply right now.

Then suddenly the wind stopped, and Isamu was engulfed in a silence so deep that he wondered for a moment if he had gone deaf. He lowered his arm and saw that the figure had moved right next to him and if he just reached out his hand he would be able to touch it. He wiped away the flakes clinging to his lashes and clouding his vision so that he could see and realized that the figure was a woman dressed in a gossamer white gown made of snow and ice, but even though she was so close he still could not make out any features on her face. She held a delicate white hand out beseechingly towards him and he reached his hand out to try to grasp her hand in his. He felt that if he could only touch her then everything in this stark white world would suddenly make sense, but as he tried to grasp her hand his hand passed right through her and she disappeared. Her sudden disappearance startled him so much that he leaned forward too much and he started to fall, but instead of hitting the ground he was suddenly falling into a dark cavernous pit that had suddenly opened up beneath him. He screamed as he fell and then bolted straight up in his bed.

Just a dream, it was just a dream. Isamu thought frantically as he tried to calm his breathing and his racing heart, he was drenched in sweat from head to toe. He had been having similar dreams, on and off, for the past few months, but this was the first time he had encountered the dark yawning pit at the end. For some reason falling into that pit had scared him more than anything else he had ever encountered in his life. The pit had been nothing, but empty space, but Isamu couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been falling into certain doom. I’ve got to get it together before…

A soft knock on his bedroom door shocked him out of his fear and prompted him to pull himself together a little quicker. He knew it was his father checking up on him and he didn’t want to give him cause to worry. He managed to wipe his sweat drenched face with his blanket quickly and compose a calmer expression on his face just before his father stepped into his room.

“Are you alright, Isamu?” Ichigo Kurosaki asked as he opened the door to his son’s room. His bright orange hair seemed to glow in the light from the hallway behind him and his brown eyes were filled with concern as he regarded Isamu with a small frown. He was still wearing his white doctor’s coat so it must not be as late as Isamu had thought when he had bolted up from his dream. “I thought I heard you screaming.”

“I’m okay, Dad,” Isamu replied, he didn’t want his father to worry so he tried to sound as nonchalant as possible even though he could still feel his heart trying to beat a hole into his chest. He glanced at the clock on his desk and saw that it was 1:30 in the morning. “Why are you still up, Dad? Don’t you have a meeting tomorrow morning?”

“I do,” Ichigo answered slowly. “But I’m more concerned that you’ve been having quite a few nightmares lately.”

He was obviously aware that Isamu was trying to distract him from his nightmare. He walked all the way into the room and sat next to Isamu on his bed and stared at him squarely in his face.

“Is there anything you wanted to talk about?”

Isamu sighed and ran his fingers through his unruly black hair. Now that his father was here with him in his room, his dream seemed silly and he felt embarrassed at having disturbed him with something so trivial.

“No, Dad, I’m sorry that I bothered you,” he said with a very small smile, he was trying his best to look completely fine. “It was just my imagination running away with me.”

“Why don’t I believe you, Isamu?” Ichigo asked as he stared at him with a completely unconvinced look on his face. Isamu could only shrug in response because he really had no other answer for his father. Ichigo looked as if he was going to say more, but he seemed to think over several things quickly in his mind. He gave his head a little shake and then he reached up and ruffled Isamu’s hair. It was a comforting gesture that his dad had done ever since he was small.

“I’ll let it go for now, Isamu, but remember that I’m always here for you,” he said as he regarded his son’s face carefully. He ruffled Isamu’s raven black hair one more time and then stood up from his bed. “Goodnight, Isamu.”

“Goodnight, Dad.”

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Masumi Kuchiki always felt like she was looking for something in her dreams. Sometimes, she would be in the Seireitei or someplace that looked like the Kuchiki manor where she would wander from corridor to corridor searching for something. She always had no idea what it was that she had lost, but she knew that it was something very important and that she needed to find it soon. At other times she would find herself chasing it and right when she could touch it with her fingers it would vanish into thin air. She would always end up lost in the dark, with no one around her at the end of all of her dreams, but this one was different. Instead of endless streets or corridors she stood in a white field of snow in the middle of a snow storm. She could see the flakes swirl violently around her, but she didn’t feel the biting cold or the sting of the wind whipping around her. It was almost as if she was having a vision of some sort and she was just an observer. In the distance, on a mound not too far from her, she could see a dark haired boy about her age struggling against the wind and the snow. He was struggling towards a figure clad all in white in the far distance. Although Masumi was far away from both of them and she couldn’t make out either of their faces, she felt that she should know they were. Masumi started to move towards them, a feeling of desperate need springing out of nowhere in her heart. She managed to take one step forward, but a sudden wind whirled the snow around her and blinded her for an instant. When it stopped, the two others in the snow were gone and she stood in the brilliant white field all alone.

Masumi’s eyes snapped open in the dark and she muffled an anguished cry with her hand as she felt a stab of loneliness pierce her heart. She felt tears well up in her brown eyes as she sat up slowly in her bed. A single tear traced its way from the inside corner of her eye to the tip of her nose. It hung there for a moment before it fell and landed without a sound on to her futon.

What’s a matter with me? Masumi wondered as she stared at the small damp circle her tear had made on her futon. Why do I feel like I just lost something important to me again?

She rubbed her tears away just in time as she heard the faint rustling of someone coming to check on her. The sliding door to her room opened and her uncle, Byakuya Kuchiki, regard her quietly from the doorway. To anyone else his expression might have seemed aloof and even a bit cold, but Masumi could always read the true feelings beneath his mask and she could see his concern loud and clear. She didn’t know how he did it, but he always seemed to know when she wasn’t sleeping well.

“What is the matter, Masumi?” he asked in a quiet voice as he entered her room. He made his way to her side and sat down on his knees by her futon on the floor. “I heard you get up suddenly.”

“It’s nothing, Oji-sama,” she replied with her usual bright smile plastered on her face. She felt that he sometimes worried about her too much and she didn’t want to give him another reason to. “It was just a silly dream.”

He regarded her again without saying a word, carefully studying her face. Masumi brightened her expression by a couple of notches to try to convince him that everything was fine.

“You seem to be troubled by many of these ‘silly dreams’ lately,” he replied softly as he regarded her with his usual stoic expression, but Masumi could see the increased concern in his eyes. She wondered for a moment if he realized how just how much these dreams bothered her even though she had tried to hide it.

“I’m fine, Oji-sama,” she replied earnestly in an effort to wipe the concern from his eyes. She adored her uncle to no end and the last thing she wanted was to cause him any worry. She forced a small laugh, made a face and placed her small hand on his much larger one. “See, I’m back to my silly self already.”

He closed his eyes and tilted his head down for a moment before he answered her. He clearly seemed to realize that this was an act, but she knew that he wouldn’t push her on it if she kept insisting that she was ok.

“Very well, Masumi, but if anything is troubling you, just let me know.”

Then he stood up silently and walked towards the door. He cast one more parting look over his shoulder before he walked out. Masumi smiled once more and made a shooing gesture with her hands. Then she made a big show about settling herself back into her bed by fluffing out her pillow and taking exaggerated care to make sure that her futon was spread out nicely over her. Once she finished doing that she lay down, turned her back towards her uncle and pretended to fall back asleep. She waited for what felt like an eternity before she heard her door slide close and her uncle’s soft steps move away from her room.

What could that dream have been about? She wondered as she stared sightlessly at her wall. I felt like it was so important that I help that boy although I don’t remember ever seeing him before; and who was the woman standing so far away in the snow? I felt like I knew them both somehow…

Masumi’s thoughts swirled around her head like the snow from her dreams until, sometime near dawn, she finally fell back asleep.

I hope this chapter came out a little better than before.

Thanks for reading and for your reviews! I hope you read the rest of this story.