Yoruichi x Soi Fon

Tested

I would never pull the trigger, but I've cried wolf a thousand times
I wish you could feel as bad as I do, I have lost my mind
It's all your fault, you called me beautiful
You turned me out, and now I can't turn back
I hold my breath because you were perfect, but I'm running out of air,
And it's not fair
- P!nk

Not many people really know Soi Fon, and that is her choice and her prerogative. She's not the kind of character that reacts well to people, or the kind of person that has a need for close friends. Or any friends at all, for that matter. There is no one that could be considered her confidant, because she is simply does not feel the need to confide in anyone. She upholds the belief, now if not in her youth, that giving pieces of yourself away only makes you weaker.

There are some things that people do know, though. She's hard. She's cold. She does not accept failure, and she hates her old captain.

They're the kind of things she wants everyone to know, though. She's yelled it where every person can hear, whether they want to or not, and she's held those things out on her sleeve like a shield from the real truths, from the real character. She wants to kill her old captain. Fact, not fiction. Truth, not presumption. She wants to defeat her, to see her shamed for her betrayal, she wants her beaten and weak and defeated at her feet, at the feet of her old second chair.

She wants her begging for forgiveness and mercy, wants to see the shock in her eyes when she realises that the child she patronised and who held her in awe has grown, has grown better than her, stronger, faster, braver. Harder and colder. She wants her writhing in the ice that burns through her eyes, overriding every other emotion that used to be but can no longer exist.

These are accredited facts that people know, and it only builds her reputation as a heartless bitch.

What people don't really know, is that that reputation, that image, that shield- that is not her at all.

Not that she'd ever admit it, even to herself, of course.

So when she lay in the darkness of an overcast night on the only day that was ever marked on her calendar, the ice in her eyes held less conviction, but that didn't matter, because there was no one there to see them. No one to see what they looked like with a smile in them, no one to stare into them and realise just how pretty they could be when they were not scowling, and actually held compassion.

The night was unremarkable, but the date was not, at least to her. Just another cool spring day, the air damp from the inconsistent rain showers and sense of new growth in the land. Strange memories came unbidden to her mind. Memories about closing her eyes on a warm summer night a long time ago, a smile on her face, counting aloud, knowing that when she looked again she would have crept in, that smile on her face and that danger in her eyes.

Almost subconsciously, she closed her eyes again and counted to ten, softly, out loud. When she opened them she quickly covered all of the corners of the room to ensure there was no shadow unnoticed. There was nothing there, except the soft lights of the Sereitei that cast shadows over the floor. She watched them idly as she tried hard not to think about what she knew she should be able to see, about what had happened on this night years and years and years of bitterness and longing ago.

She tried hard not to think about supple dark skin and knowing smiles and shining eyes. She tried to cast all thoughts of soft hair and urging nails out of her head. She would not let herself think about the smooth curves of hips or quiet laugher or pressing hands. She could not allow reminders of insistent lips to cut her apart tonight.

She failed.

She always did.

The clouds passed by overhead, unconscious of the grief below them, just as they always were. They did not register the shadows moving against the walls or the flicker of an unreadable emotion in guarded eyes as they passed by, quickly, stealthily.

Soi Fon closed her eyes again, and this time counted to fifty, her face furrowed in a frown as she squeezed her eyelids shut in concentration. She opened them cautiously, as though she might startle a shadow. There was no one there. There never was, and there never would be again. That was the way it had to be from now on, but she could not fully accept that yet. Hope still lingered, deep in the bitterness. She found herself on the verge of uncharacteristic tears.

She had always been there before.

She had promised that.

She had knelt before her, wiped the tears away from her second chair's face and kissed a smile in its place, and promised that all she had to do was count down, and she would be there, ready to make it all better again.

She had promised.

The biggest betrayal wasn't that she had quit the Soul Society. It wasn't that she had left behind her home and her friends and her whole life. Soi Fon didn't really have too much of an issue with that. It wasn't that she had abandoned her division or turned her back on her title and noble family. Soi Fon could have dismissed that from her mind. It wasn't even that she had left Soi Fon herself behind, not thinking her worthy to take her second chair along with her, that she wasn't deemed useful enough to help her captain, although that was a cross and a question that she would always have to bear, and would always hurt with a deep, relentless ache.

The biggest betrayal was that she had lied.

She had said she would always be there.

She had promised.

And she was not. She had not been there for a long, long time.

Soi Fon wiped the tears that had crept down her cheeks away with an angry palm and rolled over to face the window.

She sat up with a jolt when she saw the shadowed figure knelt on the windowsill.

Their rietsu was compressed so perfectly that Soi Fon had not even noticed the person arrive. Acting with the instinct of a captain she leapt to her feet, starting towards the figure. With a subconscious blink, the figure disappeared, if it had even been there to begin with.

Soi Fon stopped dead in her tracks. Had they vanished, or were they hiding? With their rietsu like that she could not tell. A worrying thought occurred to her. Was it simply a hallucination? It could be her imagination, after relentless nights of little sleep. She found it hard to rest whenever the date came up, her mind plagued with doubts and queries and hurt. It had happened before; fragments of her dreams appearing as if they were a part of reality.

She sat back down slowly, her body tense, watching the windowsill. Eventually she lay down, pulling the covers over herself again, and closed her eyes.

The remains of sentences, broken words. Her mouth opening and closing with only gasps coming out until she finally fell to her knees and uttered a guttural scream, almost predatorily animalistic in pain and anger.

Her eyes opened again.

It was useless, the memories would not pass her by tonight.

A voice made her sit up again, a foolish mirror of her earlier actions that would have made an onlooker roll their eyes. The voice was cool and low, playful but quiet.

"Hey."

She looked around the room. No one. She checked the window, and yet again it was empty.

"It's been a long time."

Soi Fon swallowed. She knew that voice, although still could not tell where it was coming from. She was staring out of the window and as much as she willed her body to turn around, it would not let her. She remained frozen in the voice that took her back in time to a place where everything was better.

"You've changed."

She felt the tears fall again and spoke around them.

"Where the hell are you, bitch?"

Laughter.

"You've not changed that much."

Soi Fon found herself screaming at the darkness outside of her window, words barely comprehensible through the emotion.

"Where the fuck have you been?"

The response was laughing, amused.

"God, I've missed you."

"Don't laugh at me! You have no right to laugh at me! You have no right to be here anymore!" Her voice cracked, and she sank to her knees, propping herself up on the windowsill. When she spoke again it was nearly a whisper, hoarse and choked. "You have no right. No right."

There was a long silence, and she felt a hand settle on her shoulder.

"What are you doing here?"

"The date."

"You've never come before."

The silence transmitted something to her that Soi Fon could not understand. The reply was quiet, almost a little sad.

"I know."

"Are you not even going to apologise?"

She didn't wait for a reply to her own question, she turned and flung herself against the woman behind her, resting her head on the curve of a warm neck that still felt so familiar to her.

She still smelled the same, and the way she pulled her closer with arms around her waist was the same too, and that hurt.

"There is nothing to say now, but I am."

"What do you mean?"

"We have been robbed of time, and that is my fault, but we cannot turn it back. We must look to the future, because that is all we have left."

"That's the worst apology I have ever heard."

"You should know me well enough to know that is as close as I can get to one. I am, you know I am."

"I know."

She looked up into dark, smiling eyes. They made her hurt and heal, just with one glance.

"Hey, why are you still crying? You know you shouldn't cry."

Soi Fon struggled to stop herself smiling as she felt the tears being wiped from her face with a gentleness reserved only for her. Joy was welling up inside her but she tried hard to suppress it, knowing that there was an underlying feeling of consistently terrifying inevitability about this meeting, about being with her in general, a nagging premonition that Soi Fon simply was not good enough, and that this would never, could never, last. She swallowed, and Yoruichi felt the movement of her neck against her shoulder.

"Don't cry."

"I'm not crying."

A spark of humour, a gentle laugh.

"Sure you're not. And you haven't missed me, either."

"Shut up."

Yoruichi took a step back, and looked down at her old lieutenant, at her sharp cheekbones and slightly mussed hair, at her teeth and the way they were worrying her bottom lip, at the way her red eyes never left Yoruichi, as if scared that she would disappear again.

"Soi Fon…"

Yoruichi never finished her sentence, because she leant in and kissed her instead. Soi Fon, just for a moment, stood there motionless as her former captain's lips pressed against her own, unsure of what to do, but within seconds her arms fell around the other and she returned the kiss that they had been waiting centuries for. They found some kind of salvation, of redemption, in that kiss, something that almost made up for the endurance and pain of their distance.

"God, I've missed you…"

It didn't matter which one of them uttered it, because both felt it, deep and achingly.

They fell back onto the bed, hands desperately trying to find meaning, find resolution, find understanding. Soi Fon's eyes wouldn't stay closed, for she had to keep checking that Yoruichi was still there. Yoruichi found herself almost moved to uncharacteristic tears at the sight of her former lover, former lieutenant, blushing and gasping underneath her, and hid her eyes in the pale groove of her neck, kissing the skin that had not got any less soft with time. Yoruichi smiled to herself, because her former lover still smelled the same, of clean skin and determination and exertion, of the fresh fabric of her uniform and the flowers that grew in abundance around the training area of the division headquarters. She still tasted like her lover, still acted like her, still loved like her, in her hesitant, cautious, reverent way that was so beautiful, so right.

They lay back when they were done, and Soi Fon stared at the ceiling, waiting for her heartbeat to stop beating so hard so she could hear herself think.

She sat up.

"I still need to know why."

Soi Fon was testing her, Yoruichi knew, and that was fair enough. Soi Fon relied on tests to find out the worth- she had always struggled in simply seeing it, but needed it to prove itself. She considered sometimes, with a slight smile, how painfully hard it must be to earn respect in Soi Fon's division. She glanced down at the other woman, whose determined gaze still watched her, still needing both her and an answer that she could not give her. It was too complicated, and had less of an explanation and more of a duty involved, and she knew that this was something that Soi Fon would not accept.

Soi Fon felt the pain, a sharp, insistent pain that had not relented as the years had gone by. It still had not abetted, because she still did not know why.

Yoruichi sighed, rubbing a hand through her hair, letting it trial down the curve of her neck, where it rested. Her companion watched as her fingers tapped the dark skin in rhythm with her pulse, echoing the beat of her body. Soi Fon felt like she could be breaking, watching such an obvious display of the fact that they lived to a different cadence now.

Yoruichi watched her in return, and saw the hurt in her eyes before she turned away to study the sky.

Yoruichi sighed again, heavier this time, and decided that it was time to break the silence of the centuries.

"Hey."

She paused, on reflection not actually sure what she was supposed to be saying. Some things seemed so hard to convey with words, but she decided to try, and spoke again.

"You know you said that you loved me more that I would ever be able to understand?"

"Yes?"

"And you know I said that I'd see your heart, and I'd raise you mine?"

"What about it?"

"All that never changed. It never could do. You're the only one that has been this precious to me, and you are always going to be the only one that will be. Perhaps I cannot give you what you need to hear, but for everything else, for what it is worth, I am here."

Yoruichi smiled, and Soi Fon suddenly realised that these last years, alone, had been the test of both her and her relationship. She called to mind suddenly her own personal philosophy: 'to see the value of something, one must first put it in a perilous situation'. Now, she could see the strength of her own character, the merit of her endurance, and the worth of a relationship that could survive, without fading, for separation of not only time and distance and sudden separation but also their inability to talk and understand their love for each other.

And she'd always known that at some point, ten or twenty or a hundred or a thousand years along the line, her captain and lover would come back.

For the first time in a great many years, Soi Fon found herself smiling.

"I'll see your heart, and I'll raise you mine." is the title of an amazing song by Bell X1, which I was listening to as I finished this story.