Rating: M (graphic suicide, self-harm, serial murder, blade injury, war crimes, demonic possession, religious themes)
Disclaimer: Bleach is the property of Tite Kubo. I do not use its characters, settings and/or events for any profitable purpose.
The Chamber
わが宿の いささ群竹 吹く風の 音のかそけき この夕暮かも
wa ga yado no
isasa muratake
fuku kaze no
oto no kasokeki
kono yūhe kamo
Around my house,
through the young bamboo grove,
blows a breath of wind.
I hear it whisper faintly
in the gathering twilight.
Man'yōshū ("Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves") Book 19 No. 4291
by Ōtomo no Yakamochi
~xXx~
It had always fascinated him, how perfectly the open shōjiof his quarters framed the harvest moon. What a shame, that the work of so talented an architect would soon be marred by such an unfortunate scene. He smiled gently to himself and raised his left hand to stroke the dark scars slashing down his once handsome face. His fingers grazed the sunken lid of his eviscerated eye, still plagued by phantom images and sensations.
In his right hand, he held a brush.
Shūhei sat still in the pooled moonlight, the unmounted blade of his sword wound in his white silk obi and laid reverently on the floor by his side. He stared down at the square sheet of mulberry paper before him, the brush poised in midair, studying the verses he'd rendered in his elegant calligraphy. The last character was complete, the strokes properly placed and accurate. All that remained was for him to sign his name.
Fighting tears, arm trembling from strain, he held the brush.
~xXx~
Shūhei knew that things change. It's easy to understand the concept of impermanence, just damn hard to live with it. Less than six months earlier, he'd been the most promising student in the Shinigami Academy. He had accompanied seated officers of the Gotei 13 on several missions to the human world. He was all but guaranteed to be offered a ranked position immediately upon graduation. His performance was so exceptional that his advisers chose him to lead a special exercise entirely unsupervised. Such was the level of trust the Academy had in his abilities.
He had failed.
The blood of nine classmates was on his hands. Although all the underclassmen had escaped unharmed, his assistants and his entire advance squad had been butchered by Hollows. He had hand-picked the most exceptional senior students in the entire Academy; they had trusted and respected him, and he'd gotten them killed. It didn't matter that no one could explain why so many huge Hollows unexpectedly appeared. As the leader of the expedition, he was responsible for the life of every participant.
Silently, he'd borne hateful slander from the other students, shunning and avoidance by the faculty, and threats of reprisal from family members masking their grief as hostility. He remembered how Aoga's little sister, a talented fourth-year, broke down in his arms at the memorial. Aoga had been the girl's only family. He knew how it felt to suddenly find yourself alone in the world, all of your loved ones gone in an instant. But he never imagined the despair of being responsible for so many tragic deaths.
He'd survived. Even if those three underclassmen hadn't come to his aid, he would have survived. He was fast enough to escape, skilled enough to have held the Hollows off until help arrived.
Undeservedly, he kept his life, and lost his eye instead.
The skin of his face was easy to repair. The slashes were almost surgically precise and not very deep. His eye, however, could not be saved. The surgeons assured him that enough structure remained to support a perfectly realistic ocular prosthesis, but he declined. An eye that could not see seemed pointless to him.
He petitioned the Twelfth Division to design a functioning artificial eye for him, and received a prompt and very blunt response — only ranked officers of the Gotei 13 were eligible to be restored with such advanced technology.
With only one eye, Shūhei's depth perception was disrupted to the extent that he could no longer skillfully wield his sword. His strength, reflexes and instincts were intact, but he had lost his ma-ai — the essential understanding of distance between oneself and the opponent. Without ma-ai, he could neither place nor parry an attack. He was no longer safe for other students to spar with, not even with bokken. He voluntarily isolated himself from his workout group, reduced to practicing kata alone.
Less than a week after the extent of his impairment became apparent, he was called to the administrative offices. Numb and speechless, he stood before the advisory committee and was duly informed that while his skills were not in doubt, his injury obligated the Gotei 13 to postpone his assignment review.
But if I received an assignment, he thought bitterly, the Twelfth Division would restore my eye.
Predictably, he took to drowning his sorrows. During one long night in an obscure Rukon dive, he met a gigai scientist from the Twelfth named Akon, who was drunk enough to tell him the real reason he'd been turned down for a new eye. It seemed the current Captain did not have the ability to make fully and accurately functioning neurological components. The previous captain could have given Shūhei perfect vision in a matter of days, but he had committed capital crimes and fled the death penalty, taking his expertise with him. They could maybe find that guy, mused Akon, and get him to fabricate an eye for Shūhei from black market parts, but the sudden, unexplained restoration of his vision would spell certain exile or execution for them both.
So, for Shūhei, everything had changed. He managed to graduate despite multiple failures on his final exams, and accepted a position as an assistant kidō instructor at the Academy. His once effortlessly wielded katana collected dust upon its stand. In his frustration, he found himself regressing to his childhood pastime of throwing stones, using his keen hearing to hone in on a bird or squirrel chittering in a tree and bringing it down with one deadly shot. It was a good trick, and it impressed the girls. But his close-range perception remained unreliable, and his kenjutsu deteriorated for lack of sparring partners. He continued to be ostracized by his Academy peers. No matter how much he drank, he couldn't block out the nightmares and flashbacks, and the horrifying phantom visions. He began to feel that life had become too difficult to live.
After all, what use is a Shinigami unable to wield a Zanpakutō?
~xXx~
Closing his good eye to the witnessing moon, he lowered his hand and let the familiar strokes of his name flow onto the paper. Slowly, deliberately, he placed the brush in the holder and shouldered off his shitagi, letting it drop to the floor behind him. Out in the courtyard the night breeze freshened, rattling the shōji and making him shiver a little. He grasped his sword by the wrapped blade and the tang and laid the point just to the left of his navel.
It went in so easy, the glimmering steel splitting his smooth skin and sliding into his belly inch by inch. The explosion of pain was far greater than he'd imagined, but he did not waver. His head lolled back as he pushed the blade in deeper. It was intensely satisfying, almost pleasurable,relieving one kind of pain by inflicting another. Soon this failed attempt at an afterlife would end and his soul would be free to start over. A soft moan mingled with the whispers of the wind and the blade in his flesh.
Morbidly curious, he opened his eye and looked down at the grim scene before him. The parchment square was blood-splattered but still legible. His hands began to tremble, and his grip was weakening fast. He fought the nausea welling up inside by trying to concentrate on the jisei he'd written, but a sudden, awful realization struck his mind like a bullet. Slumping forward, he yanked the blade sideways and out and laughed derisively as his insides obliterated his words.
Fuck, you fucking idiot, sitting and dreaming, you damn f-fool...w-wrote your own f-fuck...fuckin' name wrong...'s too late now...doesn't matter...anyway...th'fuck...d'zat even mean...wind...w-wind death
"Ka...ze...shi?"
Within his ma-ai, on his blind side, a blade sang. He felt a fleeting impact to the back of his neck, and the moon and the blood and the parchment vanished into darkness.
~xXx~
A/Ns:
jisei - death poem
kata - choreographed movements for practicing techniques
shitagi - under-kimono
shōji - sliding latticework door