Author's Note: sigh the Zaraki one was so hard to surpass. Gomen Nasai Hitsugaya TaichouI didn't do you enough justice. Here is the next one.)
Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach. The historical places and military personnel mentioned in this fiction are real, but the characters and the events are completely fictional.
The Ode to Obituary
By annyenil
Soifon was the most docile girl there could ever be. She obeyed her teachers, she listened to her friends. The only people she disobeyed were her parents.
And yet, somehow, nobody believed her. She hated her parents, especially her mother. Her parents whom begot her, but, in spirit, whose existence she never recognized. To her, they were the Traitors. The abhorrence was perfectly reasonable. She was born with mistrust enveloped around her. No matter how much fresh innocence or pure sincerity she summoned up in her eyes, no matter how true her heart was, she could never be trusted, because she was the child of the Traitor, discarded by the enemy, flouted by the comrades.
The First Sino-Japanese wards had many battles. Most were battles fought for pride; some were fought for life, but only one, only one was fought for entertainment. The one-eyed General Yamaji Motoharu was known to the people of Port Arthur, Lushunkou as the One-Eyed Méphistophélès in local tongue, or simply the Tokyo Devil. The Chinese Beiyang Army fought a long and arduous battle, leaving behind sallow pictures with plains of death and oases of blood in their Motherland. The Beiyang army had few bastions left to guard, and Port Arthur was one of them.
Port Arthur was standing strong because of its leader, General Xiao Fong, whose name meant a raging gust of wind. He was someone who would never, ever bow down to the enemy. His spirits were soaring like the true Chinese Dragon. He howled, he growled, he commanded his armies to contend against the winning 1st Infantry Division of the Japanese Imperial Army. General Motoharu did not earn his alias without being its materialization. The commander of the Jade Division, as the 1st Infantry Division was called, was no man. He was a beast. With an eye-patch over where his eye used to be before he lost it in a battle to a poisonous arrow during the first few battles of Meiji Japan and swallowed his eyeball wholly, General Motoharu was one formidable giant with the stench of blood replacing the smell of perspiration on him. He was one true nefarious man, one of the few in the world. He loved the smell of blood, like a hungry shark trailing sinisterly in the deep dark ocean.
But Port Arthur was obdurate. General Xiao Fong wasn't one to give in. His army fought till the very last breath, guarding their home and their family. For a moment, it seemed as though the Imperial Army might be driven out of Port Arthur and decimated from its borders forever. And then, a Traitor sold them out. The Traitor was the daughter of Xiao Fong.
When the people of Port Arthur awoke for a new day of battle, only thirty-six of them rose. There was nobody left. General Xiao Fong had the family heirloom sword plunged into his chest straight, without a single sign of defense, the blood from his chest shoot up to the sky, like as though it was a tsunami sweeping up all the hatred and darkness of war. The 36 survivors were standing amidst the reincarnation of hell. The world to them was nothing but an abyss of depravity. They were numbed, they were beyond shocked. The massacre of Port Arthur left only thirty-six survivors to uphold the burial of the entire county, dead. Families, lovers, enemies, none of these existed anymore.
Port Arthur was a living hell. Somehow, somewhat, they survived the hell, even if the blood stains were indelible on their hearts, even if the blood stench had contaminated their hands forever. Dead bodies and survivors, only one person in Port Arthur was missing. General Xiao Fong's daughter. She had sold out her Motherland and family, and ran away with a sergeant under the Imperial Army.
When the war was over, the Traitor Woman lived in the suburbs of Nagoya with her man, the one who participated in the massacre of her country people. The people of Port Arthur shunned her existence; the people of Nagoya looked at her with disdain. This was the woman who was too cowardly to stand up to the enemy, and so she murdered her own father and ran away with the family in hope for a better life. She would get no better life.
She soon gave birth to a child, and named her Sui Fong, meaning following the wind. Sui Fong didn't want to be herself. She hated her mother. Despite her nice demeanor, her friends all call her Soifon, meaning the Bee: whoever turned their back on her will be stabbed in the back. The children wouldn't play with her; their parents wouldn't look at her, but chased her away with a broom like dismissing a dirty stray dog.
There was once somebody had his money stolen in class. It wasn't her, but she was inculpated for it, simply because she was the daughter of the Traitor. She was born to betray, she was born to lie, and everything on her face was merely a disguise. Soifon didn't know what to do. She couldn't be nice. She couldn't be mean. So she walked her last open path, she became robotic. She followed orders exactly as given; she made her life completely transparent. Nobody could say a word about her, for there were no arcane facts about her. Whatever one saw, was Soifon in her entirety.
Except at home, where she vent her bottled up emotions on her mother, her worthless mother. Her father never stopped her but only watched from the side. Soifon always ate with silver chopsticks, and so did her father, for the woman who had betrayed her country land could betray her family anytime, anyway. Soifon treated this woman like soil in the pigsty. She wasn't worthy of being called a human, she was worse than General Motoharu. She never gave her the gratitude of bringing her into this world. Soifon blamed her misery on this woman.
What is life like in a disguise?
What is life like when the world thought one was in disguise, but in reality, there was no mask?
Soifon tried so hard to take that mask off her face, but she couldn't. So she gave up and put on another, another, another, another and another……
He was sipping sake before her cold body. Soifon didn't raise an eyebrow. She had too many layers of masks on her face; her emotions were too deeply buried to be revealed. Or perhaps, she had long lost them. She comported herself the way society would want her, an outcast, to behave. Her mother had passed away, lonely, tormented, and contrite for a lifetime.
Soifon was handed a letter, and wondered if to read it. Her heart did not want to allow this woman a step in it, but her obligations told her to give her a chance. She held the letter hesitantly. "Read it. Just read it." Her father said. It was an order. It was easy to obey.
The letter threw her into a debacle. What she had been obeying, what she had been believing in, what she had been doing all her life……were wrong?
The letter merely told her that her mother never betrayed anybody. That she had only ran away with her father, but General Motoharu had already murdered her father at that time. She had no choice but to flee. She, too, had lived her life with masks and masks on her face.
"Is this……true?" Soifon glanced at her father. He nodded his head without a word, for nothing could be said. Soifon dared not move an inch, in fear that she might reveal a strand of emotion.
She wanted to cry. She coveted for those tears to come and wash away the agony and confusion in her heart. She didn't want to regret. But it was all too late. Even when she plunged that poison needle into her wrist, she knew that her masks could never be removed. She was born to obey, she was born to listen.
She was born to betray.
But she wouldn't.
The only order Soifon Taichou of the 2nd Division of the Gotei 13 would not obey is the rule of Fate.