Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach of Fade to Black.
Title: The Last Quincy
The woman, the world's last living quincy, watched through her empty eyes as the world around her grew fuzzier. They were saying something about how this shouldn't have happened, how she's too healthy for that. Those midwives. Not like they'd understand what she went through. Physically, she appeared as if her health had only begun to decline when she birthed this child, but the world, for her, had been charred to the darkest shade of ebony black for a very long time.
Her foggy vision begun to clear and she saw many images that she had not seen in a very long time. In most of those, she and the other children her age, all of whom were her dear cousins, stood in an isolated forest clearing, blissfully firing their arrows from the spirit bows. She sure had everything a child could ask for. That goofy pack of cousins who were also her best friends, parents who were busy but always found time to indulge their only child, and an entire clan's worth of adults who helped to raise her. Those good old days. Sure, they were at war with the shinigami, but it didn't matter as long as they laughed together so blissfully. That's because quincies lived for each other.
For each other. That part of the quincy's code, though, was now null with the numbers down to one, and soon, zero, with the last one rather impatient to join everyone she's ever known and loved. The joyful memories seemed faded, as if she was seeing it through someone else's eyes.
Life it seems will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters, no one else
I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
There is nothing more for me
Need the end to set me free
In her mind's eye, she kept seeing the same cousin, a boy with curly, caramel colored hair, in every memory until he was eighteen and she was twelve. The children of their massive clan had just finished killing some Hollows and drew twigs to decide who should go and get some water and food from the nearest town. And so her oldest cousin left when he got the shortest twig. Then, after awhile, his spiritual pressure suddenly disappeared. Since things like that did not usually happen on routine, harmless tasks, they left to search.
She panted as she dashed at top speed through the woods in the direction that they saw their friend go off in and the group split in several different direction when they reached the town, taking every possible path he could have taken. A few minutes later, one of her friends gave a signal in the form of an arrow shot straight up into the air. She gave a shrill shriek when she arrived on the scene. Her cousin laid there, just a few blocks from the well, his body cold and his skull cracked. Even more, there was no sign of his spirit anywhere.
Tears streamed down her face as she thought, no, no, no!! He was one of them, one of the invincible Quincy kids who killed Hollows regularly! Sure, members of their clan died regularly, both from Hollows and from Soul Reapers, but it never happened to her and her best friends! He was too smart and strong to die, especially from the smashing power of horses' hooves. Outwardly, she pretended to be strong and helped to build a stretcher to put his body on while she mentally collapsed into a sobbing, inconsolable heap.
In time, she was promoted from trainee to full-fledged adult Quincy and sent into the usual battles that came with the role. It was hard to turn her head slightly and not see his bow raised just a few inches above hers. Life, as she progressed through it, seemed just empty.
Things not what they used to be
Missing one inside of me
Deathly lost, this can't be real
Cannot stand this hell I feel
Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony
Growing darkness taking dawn
I was me but now she's gone
The flurry of memories flashed by.
She remembered pleading with her elders to negotiate an end to the war with the Soul Reapers and being told in a proud voice that the leader was not going to yield an inch and that this persistence alone would carry the Quincies to their victory in this war. A few seconds later, she was escorted out of her room and reminded that she was not an elder.
Then there was that fateful battle against the Soul Reapers when she saw the face of her lost cousin. Many of the clan faltered when they saw him and she screamed in shock when she saw his response. The man took advantage of the moment to step forward and impale one of their dearest cousins. He then proceeded to take down several more. The man wore the same face that she always knew so well, but the similarities ended at the neck. Instead of wearing the usual whites, he was dressed like a Soul Reaper. No, he was a Soul Reaper.
Unable to stare at the figure any longer, she jolted away and never took a single glance back at their castle. How she hated herself, for doing nothing except for running away as she felt her people die. First were Grandfather and the other elders. Then her wise mother, from whom she inherited all of that talent. Then the clan clown and the cook.
The next thing she remembered, she was with the ordinary humans from her father's side of the family, married to a normal human as clan traditions demanded, and reading letter after letter from her uncle. One died by witch hunts. One died by drowning. The letters streamed in like bullets through the stomach until she and her uncle were the last survivors.
"Rewrite the codes. Don't let the Reapers catch your children, or grandchildren. As for me…" She would have cried if she had been alone, for the letter went on to detail how her traitorous cousin brought shame upon the last survivors and how the old man planned on hanging himself. The current code of honor, as well as the orders of her new husband, restricted her from traveling and stopping the man. But the nightmares of the day she ran away didn't leave her until she acted in some way.
The pictures flashed again, first to the late nights when she wrote the new rulebook, and then to that fight. The one where she learned that the brother figure she once loved carried almost no memories of his former life save a few subconscious ones of their combat and strategy training. The fit of rage that ensued next resulted in the downfall of her opponent, followed by her own collapse from injuries in slow motion. Damn him for combining Quincy and Shinigami powers after death. Damn her rare abilities and complete masteries of every skill known to her people.
More ties to life, cut.
"The bleeding won't stop!" The shout brought the Quincy back to the present.
She smiled. There were so many similarities between then and the present. Soaked in blood, consciousness wavering, and asking to leave her body and with it, her life. The only difference was that her last tie to life had left her body and probably better off without her and the attention that she might attract from the Soul Society.
No one but me can save myself
But it's too late
Now I can't think
Think why I should even try
"The fever's getting worse! We gotta stop it before it kills her!" she faintly heart one of the midwives. If only they knew, she thought. That was actually her ability to manipulate reishi getting out of control, burning her body with spiritual energy. In the absence of other Quincies, which was why her clan required for women to return to the castle as soon as they became pregnant, it took a tremendous amount of willpower to keep the surrounding reishi stable. She could hardly remember the last time a woman returned to the clan to safely deliver a child.
Yesterday seems as though
It never existed
Death greets me warm
Now I will just say goodbye
Goodbye.
She closed her eyes and imagined her forefather, Wilhelm Quincy, in his early days, seven hundred years ago.
Her vision dimmed.
Back when he first discovered that he was different. Must not have been easy, serving as a knight by day, killing Hollows afterwards, and hiding those powers from the very people he lived to protect for the fear of being burned. Writing a new code to follow, having no one who understood them, damn, they were so much alike. She had to commend him for his courage and will to live.
Goodbye.
The world felt so hot before, but now, there was nothing, no feeling at all.
The coward, the girl who ran away from battle, cried for the young woman to cling to life, telling her that the boy still needed her.
She tried to move, but those nerves were too far gone.
Right, like he needed her to attract shinigami and be killed as soon as they found him with her. No, he needed her dead. That way, her husband would have to take the boy with him to Asia for the upcoming business trip and thereby completely remove him from the sight of any shinigami that might come to inspect her body.
Air. She needed air, but there was none.
The blackness engulfed her vision for good, forever blocking her from seeing how her revised code caused for her descendants to scatter, to never again act in unison as a clan, and to almost never again draw attention from the Soul Society.
Goodbye.