Unohana smiles, gentle and saccharine and red, and Soifon wants nothing more than to watch her face fade in two swift cuts. When she kills her, she thinks, there will be no squelch of blood on the blade. Her face will shatter and crowd with black and white and black and white, twisting and turning and curling with venom.
Just shunpo and all has been dismantled; her soul is scattered, her mind in shards, her heart is --
"What is it you that you fear, Soifon-taichou?" Her words are sweet and poison, like her loving lies. The healer picks at the mangled, dirty cloth covering what used to be Soifon's legs. Torn ligaments, broken bones, red that dripdripdrips. There is no reaction when hands glow and slide against the decay, Onmitsukidou show no pain. When Unohana does all she can, her palm presses against the cream, warming it, learning it, but never knowing it. Soifon can feel her seeking entrance, but the wound she wishes to know lies behind her breast. Soifon thinks that even if she could expose her heart and show the wound she would not. No one ever will deserve that again.
Without difficulty, she lets her eyes slide down and to her side, steel biting and breaking, "I fear nothing."
She remembers chartereuse and the taste of iron and vanilla and musk, the rattling in her chest. And she can remember the night beneath the moon, a caramel hand sliding against the pallor of her own, and then into her--
"What is it that you run from, Soifon-taichou?" The words are as soft as butterflies, and they melt her to the core.
She notices, with a small flash of something purple and gold and bitter, that lips are sliding over the thin skin pressed over her eyes, down and inward, fire lapping, tearing at her throat, burning and charring every sound until all she can do is gasp and relearn to breathe as she writhes and arches under those flawless, skilled fingers--
"I run from nothing." They are ashes pristine of her love and resentment, the thread of fate swings her back and forth, love and hate, front and back, and she wonders if the day that she can no longer tell one from the other has come. They taste sour as they mingle and are consumed. In her, there is a wound that cannot be mended.
Across her years, there is a bloody corrupt edge, and it marks the boundaries between when I was a child and now I am this.
"What have you become, Soifon-taichou?" Behind her ribs grows a desert, and she is desiccated, dry fingers of air fight in and out and in and out, her ears filled with the sound of her barren desert heart pumping sand until her veins are grit and chalk. Soifon can feel her lips curl into a jagged twist sharp like the phantom blade cleaved in her chest, rough like the hands still clenched around the fragile, atrophied muscle that lay dormant beneath the white press of her skin.
"Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answers?" Soifon responds, watching the light play innocence on the still kneeling healer, and wonders briefly if that was where all of hers had gone. She stands, ignoring the bite of pressure, Onmitsukidou feel no pain, and whatever the woman in front of her has deigned to reply. Her words already have run dry; she is gnawed clean, can no longer speak, except for a name and that name she will not voice until its owner returns, if ever.
She flashes away.
And she can see her now, so close that her shadow falls onto her, into her, and she thinks that maybe, just maybe, it might have been enough. And when she finds her, she thinks she will--
Disclaimer: Kubo Tite, yadda yadda yadda.