ARE YOU OKAY? [Makoto, Shishiyuki]

Stop taking pleasure out of it. Stop liking it. It wasn't satisfying. It wasn't pleasant to look at. She wished it wasn't and yet the scene was unlike how it was before in the grove at night, the sound of pleasure while tearing eachother and themselves apart. It made her heart just keep on beating and thumping in her chest; then it was the technique she remembered having explained to her and she took a moment to recentre herself.

"It has."

Her eyes were still closed when Shishiyuki appeared back in an instant but she remembered what she had seen, it wouldn't leave her mind for a long time. Makoto opened her eyes to look at the blood on Shishiyuki and how different she looked.

"Your accessory, Lady Shishiyuki."

The responsibility she had been given was presented back if she wanted it. Makoto wondered why it was significant enough to not want to get bloodied. Was it a gift? A symbol of noble status? She didn't really mind too much in regards to it. It was just a trinket to her after all, there was no more sentiment in her about this object than the man's destroyed body in the distance.

"Why do you hide your true potential?"

There was a bit of hesitation, Makoto didn't think she should be calling her out as a liar or pursuing the reasons why she wanted to withhold all this about herself.

"Ah, thank you."

Taking the headband back, Shishiyuki took a breath to collect herself, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket and wiping off as much of the blood as was really practical. Only after that was finished did she run a hand through her hair once more, sweeping it back before tucking it all neatly beneath her hairband.

"Why? Because it is imprudent to simply let the world know everything about oneself, and because my true potential is not something that those in polite society ought to see. It would be cruel of me, I think, to let others know that a monster such as this walks among them."

She did not speak with much in the way of regret in her tone, but it was such a self-deprecating statement that it was hard not to understand the degree to which Shishiyuki considered that a very true sentiment. She understood that her outlook was wholly unlike that of other people's, that it was abnormal by all possible metrics. That was simply the truth.

"And, admittedly, I think it would be pleasant if I could one day live without thinking of these things. To create a reputation for myself would be antithetical to that idea."

Makoto felt a small relief at releasing herself from the burden of being responsible for Shishiyuki's headband. It was the same as whenever an assignment was finished or work was completed, there was that relief at having the task done and off her shoulders. This one felt particularly heavy and so the release of it felt particularly comforting.

There was something depressing though, Shishiyuki's resignation to accepting the fact she was a monster. It occurred to her that someone of such status and age beyond her had come to terms with such a side of themselves. Did she not want to be rid of it? Could she be rid of it? It was like a knife in her own resolve to make her wonder if she'd ever actually stop feeling the way she did about people or if she would just resign herself to that kind of person.

Yet she wanted to live without the thoughts, which means she didn't necessarily resign to it. Makoto though still had to imagine how long she had gone where that was just a hope.

"I see. Lady Shishiyuki..."

Makoto looked away and stared off a little bit.

"Nevermind. We should continue with the outing, wasting the precious time to give to me is not something that I want to do by unnecessary chit-chat."

Given the circumstance, Shishiyuki found it neither prudent nor necessary to retain the rest of her myriad methods of disguising her true appearance. The hairband was enough for now, and she did not particularly mind her scars or her power being known by her student.The thought did, admittedly, briefly cross her mind that she might one day need to remove Makoto from the equation if these lessons suddenly turned sour, but that thought was quickly removed from her mind. That was not practical thought speaking, it was only her drive for violence. It would achieve nothing, and would be a loss that would be most unpleasant.

"I do not mind speaking with you in these idly moments as we traverse the wastes, Makoto. My reikaku is not so unrefined that I cannot sense another while speaking, and I would imagine that your own is not, either. If you have questions, you may ask them, and if there is something you believe I should hear, you may say it."

Despite her secretive manner, it was also in the nature of the Koizumi to accumulate knowledge, to record and determine what was and was not necessary to be obscured. Shishiyuki was, by nature, a profoundly curious woman, but she would certainly mask that curiosity with simple politeness.

Makoto was silent when she heard the prompt, it was a prompt she thought, one might say it was a suggestion or an offer to be free to speak to her openly but that was a lot of words to say that she was free to speak her mind. Maybe she was overthinking it, that was something she was prone to do, it would not be surprising to her if she complicated things herself by thinking about them too much. Somethings really were coincidences after all.

"It's nothing, I just wanted to say you remind me of someone."

On one hand she wanted to get it off her chest and be able to know for clarity of mind though it was entirely impossible for her to gauge how that might be worked out. Everything was a blur to her except only one moment and she passed out right after it. If she asked her directly then who was to say she wouldn't lie to cover it up or just kill her instead. It was frustrating that there was no clear way for her to try and squeeze out whether she was creating a situation based on obsession or if she was just right on the matter even if instinctually that didn't feel right.

"Is there anything you'd like to discuss?"

The solution she came up with was to let Shishiyuki direct the conversation, it would make it easier she thought to just respond to questions rather than try to think of her own and attempt to passively interrogate her.

"Do I? I must wonder if that is a compliment toward myself, or a slight toward this other person. I might normally consider it the former, but in these circumstances, I would think that the latter is more reasonable."

Shishiyuki wasn't mad at the idea that it was insulting toward this other person, of course, and in fact she didn't even necessarily feel as though Makoto was intending to offend her in any particular way. That would have seemed rather unlike her.

"I ought to ask you as much, I feel. Did you grasp the principles of the techniques I last applied? I would like to hear your estimations of each one, before I elaborate on those I have yet to teach you. It will serve as a suitable metric for your progress."

"It's just an observation. It's not something that occurred to me due to this situation."

There was the feeling of needing to clarify it, she didn't mean it in any specific way. It was entirely neutral though she didn't particularly mind it. She was weird like that, if it were someone else then she would've expected that they take something positive or negative out of it, that queer reception was probably why she felt comfortable enough to say it in the first place to her teacher.

"Hmm. I noticed some similarties to the way you pacified me that day. Your energy is invading and then distorting the body, right? How exactly did you rip the flesh from his shoulder?"

That was probably the one that stood out the most to her. The others she had experienced, had prior knowledge of or in the case of the kneecaps being torn out felt a lot simpler compared to the blow to the shoulder which left only his bone. Overall, those kinds of applications felt extremely distant to her though. She'd only managed to get her energy into Shishiyuki and immediately withdraw it in a controlled manner, like breathing in and out.

Though Shishiyuki would generally have read far more into the comment if spoken by nearly anyone else, there was a certain degree of trust she had in Makoto that she felt it unnecessary. Not, admittedly, on account of any personal attachment to Makoto that led her to have faith in the woman, but rather because she suspected that Makoto simply was not the sort to be so indirect. Even so, she filed it away in the back of her mind. There were few in Soul Society she considered herself particularly similar to, after all.

"The Houtou is one of the most advanced methods of tightening and manipulating the flow of one's energy. It requires that you not only form a significant rotation which extends from the back of your foot, but also that you constrict the flow of energy such that this rotation's velocity is unilaterally impossible to occur naturally in the body. At the moment of impact, this rotation will create a physical shock, and their body will move with their energy, into the rotation you have created."

Her explanation was clinical, removed from the obvious grotesque nature of the technique. Shishiyuki did not allow herself the satisfaction that violence brought, knowing fully that it was a path she should not walk. This was a method of teaching, and of tempering her desires to prevent them from becoming a concern in Soul Society. Nothing more.

What a peculiar thing, Shishiyuki consistently described all these advanced techniques and demonstrated them. Some of these she would never believe existed until she saw them in practice but there was no way Shishiyuki created all them right? Then why hadn't she heard of any of them? All of these high level techniques were just made by Shishiyuki? No way.

"Lady Shishiyuki, did you create all these techniques? I can't say I've ever heard of these techniques in any kind of studies of my own."

Eyes stayed fixed on the horizon to focus with her reikaku, just keep focusing on her reikaku and those techniques in her memory. The way she executed them and acted made Makoto wonder just how deep and vast the skillset of her was.

If she had not invented them, then her ancestors certainly had. It was rarely known that the 108 sects of Ichibyou Senkuka were the source of countless developments in Hakuda across the centuries, and this was of course by design on the part of the Koizumi. Those techniques they deemed unsuitable or insufficient to be recorded as proper applications of their schools were simply deemed to be unremarkable, considered common hakuda and introduced into the greater shinigami populace as if they had always existed. However--

"No, I did not create these techniques. They are simply rarely recorded, on account of both their difficulty and their potential for misuse. They are generally only shared from teacher to student to prevent this."

It was true, in the most literal possible sense, that Shishiyuki had not invented all of these techniques. She had, however, invented the Houtou and the Jitteika. In terms of efficiency, they were certainly remarkable enough to have been worthy of inclusion within Ichibyou Senkuka. But to include such expressions of her own killing intent would be to corrupt the nature of her school. No matter her pride in herself, her pride in her technique, and in her family, would always overrule it.