Characters: Soi Fong
Summary: A hornet with broken wings can't fly, until it does.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers
Timeline: Pre-manga
Author's Note: I kind of like Soi Fong. She's a bit of a bitch, but she can be cool when she wants to be.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
She runs against the ground, feet broken and bleeding, iron mixing with salt and pooling on the callous earth but never absorbing in, for the soil is cracked and broken and too hard-packed to accept this sustenance.
Soi Fong always runs, towards something or away from something. Towards extinction, towards the night, away from the past, away from the truth and the bright sun that she lost and doesn't want back. Blood is drip, drip, dripping in her shoes, gathering in the soles and soaking through her once-pristine white socks.
To drain away her blood and her hurts would be to admit that there is something wrong, so she doesn't. To say that she doesn't fly because her delicate, translucent veined wings are broken would be to admit that she is hurt.
So she runs instead of flies, and ignores the knives of pain screaming up her legs with each bracing step. There will be no weakness shown from the captain of the Second Division.
Eventually, when the sun goes down behind her, she hides in the sparse trees on the cliff like some overgrown bird, wings draped about her, bent, cracked, stuck out at awkward angles and providing no grace for the usually adroit Shinigami. There, Soi Fong will wait out the night and wait for the morning sun to start running again.
Always speeding headlong towards her own death.
A hornet with broken wings can't fly, until it does, and in the morning, with the faintest hint of red light on the edge of the sea-horizon, Soi Fong stretches out her wings. The agony is intense, but the papery wings will spread, unfold, unbend.
She can fly, and she does.
All the better to speed towards oblivion, again.