Flowing Like Water, Frozen Like Ice

This is dedicated to Paku Romi, Hitsugaya Toushirou's voice actress. She has done so many male voices from Edward Elric to Shaman King's Tao Ren. I wondered what it must feel like for her voice, so I wrote this.

On that note, I don't own Bleach, but I wish I did. (I'll settle for just Renji, please, please? I'll play nice!)

Please enjoy.

Culture side note- In Japan, the word for month is written with the symbol for moon, day uses sun. The days of the week are as follows: Monday-Moon, Tuesday-Fire, Wednesday-Water, Thursday-Wood, Friday-Gold, Saturday-Earth, and Sunday-Sun. I decided to directly translate these in Hitsugaya's journal entries as opposed to writing a standard date, because in most translated historical Japanese texts, that's what they do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tenth Moon, Third Sun, Sixth Year (Fire)

It's sunny. The sun shines far too brightly for Matsumoto to focus on the immense piles of work in the office. The Tenth Division, the home of the anal bureaucrats, save Matsumoto, who, for some reason, can

A) Find some weather related excuse for not filing her paperwork

and

B) Usually gets away with doing so.

I don't understand this woman one bit. She's a towering tree with a double harvest of ripe fruit, for a lack of a tasteful word. She's smart, funny, amiable, and, in her own way, respectful of everyone, regardless of the circumstances. Except when she towers over my own desk while I sit fidgeting, writing this for a brief lapse from my own duties. Her eyes are like a hawk, and she knows me unable to write difficult characters small, often leaving me with no choice but to write large enough to have my notes glued on a billboard, or end up with a paper containing nothing but pools of ink. I choose the former.

Yet this gives her a prime opportunity to glance at my writing, as well as lean forward so that my head fits in a perfectly designed nook between her…

God, I hate her. I'm not interested, so why would she torture me like this? After her initial lean, she hugs me just at my mid-chest and gives a strong wink. Every. Single. Time. There are enough high ranking officials she can extort, do, or drink with, yet she always bothers me at the most inopportune moments. I have a feeling she'll try within the next two minutes.

Usually the five or ten I take between tasks is to write my own thoughts, in lieu of banally filling out an endless stream of forms. Yet, I'd rather take paperwork than the horrors of the Twelfth laboratories, or the endless stream of useless, unconditioned violence of the Eleventh. I will fight, but only if I must, and I spar daily, but not to the point of pain.

She's looking at me again. The sun, streaming in form the open shoji screen door will momentarily be eclipsed by a double full moon.

Tenth Moon, Third Sun, Sixth Year (Fire)

At Night

I hate her. She saw naught of my writings, yet…

She knows me. All those times, all those minute tortures bothered me because she could be what I could not be. I coughed terribly on the way back to my house again. Honey syrup couldn't cure my dying voice forever. I thanked whomever that I had a glorious day off to not speak in the deepened harsh tones I used the rest of the week.

And, besides, I needed a haircut. This evening, after I had stood naked before myself yet again in shame, scrubbing harder and harder with an abused bar of soap, scrubbing even harder to peel the layers of glue out of my hair. My roots must scream every week for this terrible ritual; the day of Water is my only day off, so the night before I scrub a week's worth of hair gel out of my system. My hair always hangs limp after the tenth shampoo, as if to protest, and even an entire jar of conditioner couldn't save much of it.

I stand before myself in the mirror after I emerge, holding strands of white-silver protein before my face. I can hardly see, so for the evening when nobody observes, I put on my glasses. My hair is long enough to brush, it falls down my petite shoulders and hangs wet at the nape of my neck every week I cleanse it. You wouldn't know how frail I was under the layers of kimono and official jacket, but I was small, in both size a stature- and even state of mind.

Matsumoto's earlier words rang in my head. She knew me. She pierced me.

"If you're going to be a man, be a man. If not, then don't. Hiding behind a wall of paperwork," she commanded, and took a grand sweep of the room with her hand, "or a block of ice, just doesn't suit you. You'd be ten times cuter and far more attractive with you hair down and a smile."

I shook the final drops of excess water out of my hair, feeling the weight on my chest move, not pushed into me, but with me in its own rhythm. I as small and frail and strong all at the same time, and as I parted my hair down and a little off to one side I thought of her, how she was so free and true to herself, as much as I was not.

I thought of how even my name was fake. Toushirou. Lord of Winter. What kind of frigid name did I choose when I enlisted myself? My name was Aki, autumn. Chilly, but not quite ice, and cold but still warm enough to be a pleasure.

I had frozen myself to just about all, and they all fell for it. Save her.

I looked up at my true reflection and saw a glimmering smile. Maybe the next time I would have to cut my hair I'd get Matsumoto to do it, since she'd figured me out. But then I'd have the presence of a big sister yanking me to every mall dress shop or makeup store in this world and the living.

I usually decide to sing a bit before writing this. At first, my notes were terrible, retaining the harsh quality of the falseness I displayed at work. With each refrain of my old song, the tones melted to the light airy soprano I was. I don't sing well, by any means, but it had a peculiar capability to soothe me before I wrote my evening notes with a glass of herbal tea, looking down on a loose pile of white bandage tape that had been unwound from my weighted chest before my shower.