Title: Touch
Rating: PG-13 / T
Word Count: 395
Warnings: blood, serious injury, character death, SPOILERS FOR RECENT MANGA CHAPTERS
Characters: Soifon, Tousen, Aizen, Shinji, hint of Yoruichi
Pairings: Soifon/Tousen, implied past Soifon/Yoruichi
Notes: This is for archbishop9 over on livejournal.
The Espada are dead.
The fight however, is not over. Perhaps now is when it really begins.
Most eyes are on Aizen and the strange man that dares defy him. Aizen is the leader of their enemy, the mastermind, the one they fear the most. Who is this man that defies him, many wonder, the first one to draw his blood? (Some, the younger ones, had wondered in half formed thoughts if he even bled, if crimson red could ever stain his composure.)
She is one of the few who remembers him from one hundred years ago, even though he looks much different. Her job, after all, is to remember, even if one hundred years feels like another lifetime.
This profession, the peculiar nature of her vision, should also require that she watch this battle, her eyes flickering, taking in every movement that both make. She should be assessing, memorizing, analyzing.
However, her eyes are drawn, by something deeper than duty, to another battle. She can not hear their words; she is too far away. So she just watches him, sees the elegant grace with which he moves (has always moved, has always drawn her eyes).
She is cradling her still bleeding arm against her chest. She knows that her sacrifice was necessary. The creep of Death on her flesh, crawling steadily up her arm, is seared into her mind's eye, and always will be. Yet, she knows she should be angry, fearful. There is a good chance she will lose her arm. They are almost no healers on the field. She is a fighter, and assassin… she fights with hand to hand combat more than many others.
And yet…
And yet…
They say the members of her squad have the touch of death. If you are their enemy, if you cross them… once you are in their grasp, you will never escape.
She wonders, as she watches his form twist and expand, and his reiatsu explodes and changes, why it is that even those she touches with love, not hate, leave her too.
When shortly after, she sees the blood from even a distance away, and she feels the reiatsu fade away into nothing, her eyes go unfocused. She can feel the blood from what was left of her hand soaking into the cloth covering her chest.
Dead, dead, dead.
The touch of death.