Disclaimer: Bleach belongs to Kubo Tite, who's definitely not me.
Warnings: My first attempt at Bleach and spoilers for the end of Soul Society and Ryuken´s identity.
Notes: A short drabblish character-study I began after thinking about how often Ishida and his ´Quincy Pride´ is mentioned/made fun of in the other (much better) stories I read. I started wondering what it means to him exactly and why he's accepted Ryuken´s offer seemingly so easily. Hope you like the outcome. ;)
Pride as a Quincy
I have been called many things in my life.
Vengeful, weak, too soft, strong, accurate, protective, cold, weird, antisocial, silent, strange, recluse, a pansy, gay, freak, a dreamer, heartless, an arrogant wiseass, a drama-queen, reckless, stupid, a bastard,…. Sometimes people even go as far as to tell me that I'm just like my father. That one stung especially, since most of them see nothing but the physical similarity I unfortunately share with him, and mean no bad by telling me it. I always feel like getting hit in the face when they do, though. With a bulldozer.
I am nothing like him.
Unlike him I care about the people around me and see them as more than a way to get money. I'd fight and die for each one of them, even strangers. Not because they meant anything to me, but because I don't want to ever see a repetition of what happened back then to me and my grandfather. Getting killed by a Hollow was gruesome, but watching somebody you cared for getting killed that way and being unable to help… to do anything… That was a pain I never wished to go through again, ever, and which I didn't wish to even the worst of my enemies. That's why I held back and didn't kill Kurotsuchi back then when I had the chance, I guess. If I'd done that, his daughter Nemu would have been alone, would have been like me…
I´m a Quincy. I kill Hollows. I protect people.
This is my pride and my honor. Just because they are dead it doesn't mean that they can feel pain and suffer any less than people who are still alive. My birth-given abilities give me the chance to see and, more importantly, also to help those helpless souls. Shinigamis are often late, too late. I kill the soul behind the Hollow's mask for good, but I do it before it drags another soul under and forces it to feel the same as it does. It's not clean and neither is it heroic. It's just something that needs to be done.
I'm proud as a Quincy because I can do such a thing and I think that my father's more than reckless to waste his talent away by not using it. Of course doctors are needed. But everybody could become a doctor when the person in question had some talent for the job and the will to work hard.
Only our clan could be Quincies.
Grandfather once told me that my high spiritual powers originated from the fact that my family came from a clan with almost all spiritually gifted people in it. Different levels and talents mixed and the outcome was something akin to a family that only produced humans with shinigami-level spiritual powers. The Ishidas. There were probably more than just one family originally, but since the Quincies were all but extinct by the shinigamis, only the Ishida-line remained. I used to compare us to high-bred racing horses when I was still a kid.
I'm going to speak openly. After the death of my grandfather I was bitter and the cold treatment I received from my father didn't help that fact. I rather moved out in a flat of my own as soon as possible than to stand the stifling presence my father pressed upon me any second longer than necessary. And even after that I remained alone. The prospect of finding people that were important to me and witness them die again kept me successfully from trying to gain any sort of a social network or be a part of one. I always feared that another experience like that would finally break me for good.
Then I met Kurosaki Ichigo and Kuchiki Rukia and through them Inoue Orihime, Yatsudora Chado and all the others… All because of Kurosaki Ichigo. He and his shinigami-being and his ridiculous amount of power - it did both, attracted me and appalled me at the same time. Whenever I'm around Ichigo I forget to think about the consequences of my action and just act. I think that's a good thing, even if it left me without powers after that episode with Soul Society.
When I forfeited my powers I thought that really all of them would be gone. That I'd be deaf and blind to the spirits around me, crippled, but still alive. Maybe I'd have followed the example of my father and would also have purchased a career as a doctor in order to help at least the living ones if it had been that way. I was never that wrong in my life before.
My power had left me, but I was still able to hear and to see. I could do all, but I couldn't act anymore. I was banned into the role of the helpless watcher. It hurt so much that I wanted to scream and thought that I'd go crazy from it. I only didn't do it because I didn't want to load the pressure of my own problems onto the others shoulders. I'm sure Ichigo would blame himself. Chad and Orihime were too inexperienced; it was better to keep them out of the more rough stuff in for their own good.
Still, with the things going on, I wished nothing more but to act and help again. I'm not one who can make it watching only for long. I need to act, to interfere, to play a role. That's why I agreed to my father's incredible blackmail of a deal in the end. I'd rather help them in secret than to be another helpless burden and target in the open.
This sort of reasoning is what keeps me going.
Call it stupid Quincy pride. Call it foolishness. Call it stubbornness.
Call it plain stupid.
To me, for a reason it's good enough.
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END
I pray that hasn´t eaten my whole formatting again...