[3rd/10th] Week 335: The Fields of Penance

[Time Lady Katie]

Yoshinaga Gotou and Adelaide Pierce

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She fell to the ground. She didn’t know what this was, or why she was here, but she wasn’t dead. Tired, sure, but not dead. Not even injured. She had welcomed the end of this, the end of life and the weariness she had been feeling. Now, on her knees in another miserable field, the spellsword wept. Openly wept.

She reached out with her mind to her Captain; if Adelaide was alive, so too might she be, but Adelaide didn’t count on it. Hao’s kanji was gone. Unless Lilith had also collected kanji, no one would hear her. For that matter, if Lilith was alive somewhere, Adelaide had to assume that she would’ve contacted her by now. No, Adelaide was alone. With her own failings and madness. She was on her knees, weeping in a field beyond control or semblance of sanity. She didn’t even know why she was here, what complete lunacy kept her alive, but she wanted no more part in it.

Adelaide was so empty now, in every meaningful way. She had burned out like her own flames and was left a broken shell, cast off on some grassy knoll. All that made sense was her tears. Their heat rolling down her face, their numbers so vastly greater than her own; she may have been defeated by the armor of a Templar, she may have been unable to even significantly harm him, she may have been too weak to keep her team alive, but now she had truly been defeated.

Now, nothing seemed to matter anymore.

Adelaide was worthless, truly and completely, and was somehow expected to command the entire force of the Mystics. Even as one of them rang words into her mind, she felt nothing for the girl. How could someone who couldn’t stand up to a single man in a suit of armor be expected to command her division? How could someone who killed and died and killed some more be expected to be a center of moral certitude. Could Adelaide, the greatest expression of a failure the Gotei ever produced, be able to keep even a single Mystic alive?

No. She could not. The Mystics were as good as dead.
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367 Words
367 Total​

 

[Doc]

It seemed like an eternity had passed since Gorou had left the girl’s corpse in that field and began his trek, expecting the field to end at any moment. As he walked it only seemed to go on, although the pain in his leg and shoulder had dulled a little. The fact that bloodloss had made the areas numb was the last thing on his mind, however, as a familiar reiatsu signature slowly came into being nearby. In most cases he’d have been happy to run into an acquaintance, but the nameless woman’s blood still covered his uniform and blade.

He was consumed by the fresh scent of the girl’s blood, and the look in her eyes as life had slowly seeped out. He wanted to see it again – to feel his will overpower another and to see his blade doing what it was meant to do: kill.

“Pierce-dono,” he said once he’d come close, “what are you doing in this place?” Curiosity wasn’t what brought about the samurai’s question, so much as the demand to know why she stood still when there was a war to be fought. Even though he could recognize her turmoil there was no capacity in his mind to sit and discuss one’s feelings. If he was to fight and kill, then every other soldier in the Gotei ought to be doing the same.

229[229]​

 

[Time Lady Katie]

Adelaide had killed two people before being, herself, killed. Her scythe sat penitently in the field in front of her, not brought immediately to bear as she would’ve expected from herself in her current state. The black outer coat of her shihakushou was left behind in her previous field, but the white inner lining was surprisingly clean considering she had just been slaughtered. And then she heard a voice. The voice she had expected to strike out at but had, for some reason, contained herself.

“Captain Maikeru is dead.” She had to gather her wits now; she wasn’t alone any longer. She spoke pretty clearly, considering she still was sobbing rather openly, “So was I, until about a minute ago. And so are two people who met their end at the point of my scythe.” Not that she had the kanji to prove it anymore. She struggled to stand, and found her legs to still be too weak. So, with resolve trumping emotional damage, Adelaide ran a sleeve across her reddened eyes to dry them, took her scythe in her right hand, and use it’s pole as a cane, to help herself stand.

Her entire body ached, clearly psychosomatically considering the gaping wounds she had sustained were gone, as were the burns over most of her body. Still, the level of despair she felt was crippling, to say nothing of the psychological effects of being butchered and then finding yourself kneeling in a field somewhere. She was in all sorts of pain; emotional, physical, spiritual. And she was so tired. She wanted so badly to just give up.

Fate had it’s hand to play. With or without Adelaide at the helm, no Mystic would survive. But that wasn’t an excuse. “I suppose, all things considered,” Adelaide’s voice trembled, pain weighing on it, “my psychological turmoil will have to wait until the Tenth has a proper Captain again. For now, it’ll have to make do with me, and I certainly am not in a state for that to be the case.”

340 Words
697 Total​

 

[Doc]

Nothing in Gorou’s mind so much as flinched at the news, or rather, not enough of it flinched to make any impact on his thought process. What did resonate was what Adelaide said next. As soon as the Mystic revealed that she too had killed, his heart skipped a beat. It had been so long since he’d been around proven killers. That the scythe-wielding officer was filled with anguish proved his initial impression incorrect, and instantly brought about a barely-restrained anger. He position himself with his weight placed heavily on his unharmed leg. One hand rested on his zanpakutou’s hilt, and the other had balled up into a fist at his side.

“We’re at war, Pierce-dono! People will die, friend and foe, no matter how hard we fight,” he spat the words out in a coarser manner than he’d intended, “but they have no place in our hearts so long as we can fight, not while they can do nothing but lay face-down in the dirt. A soldier pushes forward, because petty things such as death and pain aren’t enough to stop one!

“And we can’t afford to be weak. Just because Captain Maikeru died – just because you died is no excuse to buckle your knees and let yourself roll over and give up. You're stronger than that. I've seen it, Pierce-dono,” more words than he’d ever uttered at once had left his lips. Just hours ago, the enraged samurai wouldn’t have even thought to speak that way. The words simply wouldn’t have been in his vocabulary.

When he saw a fellow soldier cowering and sobbing in the middle of what he thought to be a war, however, he was incapable of holding his words back. To make matters worse, the battle was still fresh in his eyes and it seemed that with each passing second he was remembering more and more of what it felt like to be on the battlefield. He desperately wanted to feel that adrenaline rush again, and he didn’t have any intention of fighting alongside somebody whose conviction was any weaker than his own.

“I am moving forward, because I must, and because war will not wait for us to gather ourselves. You can join me, or you can stay here,” his voice was still rough and callous. Allies were important, but he was more interested in finding another fight than trying to get a posse together.

Without another word he began limping once again, this time past his former superior with the intention of stepping outside the room's boundaries. Whatever awaited him elsewhere, if the field could ever possibly end, had to offer him more of the violence he had come to crave.

449[678]​

 

[Time Lady Katie]

“This is not the grand arena, Gorou.” Adelaide forced a calm into her voice hoping it would bring calm to the rest of her. “This is a misdirection designed to turn us against ourselves, against our interests. And it works.” Clearly it did. She had become every bit as awful as Loviator in a very short window of time. And like Loviator, she hadn’t the strength to back it up.

“The war is against Fukushin, how does having to fight against our own comrades serve to advance our cause in this war?” she shook her head. Could she bring herself to take another’s life, just to gather their kanji? Doubtful. It seemed like such a clear-cut ethical question to her. “The others here are no more our enemies than I am or you are; they simply have elected to play the game. If their lives must end for ours to ontinue, so be it, but to think of this battleground of smoke and mirrors as the center of a warzone simply is not the case.”

Then the ethical case got harder. She wasn’t just fighting for herself now, she had to fight for all of the Tenth. She was their commanding officer now. “However; the man who sees fit to use the lives of my Mystics to his own amusement? The man who killed my Captain and aims to end the lives of my team? I would like a word with him.” Her grip on her scythe solidified at this point, and a new sort of resolve filled her spirit. It was an unquestionable moral wrong to take someone’s kanji, but Adelaide so hoped someone else would force her to do so. Because she needed to open that door, wherever it was now, and find the man in white.

299 Words
996 Total​

 

[Doc]

As soon as Adelaide began speaking, Gorou stopped dead in his tracks to listen. A more reasonable man would have considered that they weren’t in the middle of a war-torn battlefield, or even acknowledged that there was more to their situation than the need to kill anything that stood in their way.

“I know who we are meant to fight, but war is never waged against one man,” he spoke without turning to face the apparent acting-captain, “it is against all those that would stand in our way. It is against those that would dare attempt to pit their wills against ours.” Towards the end he had begun to grit his teeth, working himself up at the thought of meeting another opponent. It was exciting, and just the thought filled his mind with the same battle-borne rage.

“I have met men like Raifuku, filled with machinations and fantastic plans and attempts to fight strength with cunning. And they are all dead,” he turned to face her. The old man’s eyes were again animated with a wild-eyed furor.

“I don’t know anything about cheap tricks. I know how to kill. After so many years, I have remembered that feeling and I won’t let it escape my grasp again. One the way to Raifuku, anybody that tries to stop me will die, because that is how I will wage this war against this man. I will find every single one of his pawns and kill them like dogs.

“We see this place differently, Pierce-dono, but we seek the same end,” throughout the violent diatribe his eyes had only intensified. Thoughts of puzzles and ethical quandaries couldn’t have been further from his mind. For years he’d fought wars by hunting down each soldier that stood against him, and the familiar feeling of seeking his prey only made him more excited to put his blade to another neck.

314[992]​

 

[Time Lady Katie]

Adelaide looked at the intensity in Gorou’s eyes and met it with a serene sense of understanding. So, this is how I was? She blamed Zakeriah a little less for killing her; though all things considered forgiveness was simply not an option. Still, seeing it from the outside, it helped Adelaide find the calm within herself. Perhaps it was a temporary sanctuary, but it was a sanctuary nonetheless. She spoke slowly, with deliberate words and a relaxing sweetness to her voice she normally employed in bars and not in battlefields. “So, this is Yoshinaga Gorou?”

She smiled, thinly and critically, at the samurai, “This is the man who would not raise his sword against his Fourth Seat even in training? The man who fought with his zanpakutou sheathed to spare the lives of the Russians in Kaliningrad?” She shook her head, knowing full well now why he was so averse to ending life. For Adelaide, the aversion was moral; she could hardly live with herself knowing what she had done. For Gorou, it was practical; he could hardly stop himself from doing it again. When this was over, they both were going to need far more time to recover than they would to heal.

Still, in this moment, there wasn’t much else to do. She was, for all intents and purposes, the Acting Captain of the Tenth Division; prepared or not for the task, she needed to carry out the duty to protect the lives of the Mystics. And Gorou was far more ready to do that than she was. “As much as my moral objections do exist, Yoshinaga, my duty now as Captain Maikeru’s successor is more important. I’ll venture with you. I have always been your better at kidou, which doubtless will be useful particularly if you insist on killing that which might be unlucky enough to move with you nearby.” She grinned at the former divisionmate and motioned for him to take the lead. She was going to fight Fulushin, but she was also going to fight for the Gotei’s spirit in the maelstrom of death and fear around her.

The maelstrom which she, herself, was struggling against.

361 Words
1357 FINAL​

 

[Doc]

“No, this is not a man who spares lives and fears the sight of his zanpakutou,” Gorou spoke carefully as he turned and again began to leave.

“I had a different name, once. One that fit a man whose only desire was to see his enemies fall before him,” his eyes intensified as he remembered the sound of the old nickname. It had once seemed so childish, but it was fitting for a man going to war with such a pointed desire.

“They called me Aka no Gorou, Pierce-dono,” a grim smirk overcame the killer’s mouth after mentioning the moniker. Taking up the name once again felt good. Not for a moment had he thought that he’d have awoken his old habits during his tenure in the Gotei Thirteen. Being wrong had never felt so viscerally good.

137[1129] FINAL​