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Rangiku sits alone on the rooftop. It’s cold, but she’s pleasantly buzzed – not as much as she would like, but tomorrow is a work day. That had never stopped her, but her captain’s concerned gaze had already been following her, and tonight she isn’t in the mood to play tug of war over the next jug of sake.
So she leans back against the roof tiles and stares into the sky. It’s a dreary and gloomy thing; there isn’t a star in sight. Rangiku pretends she doesn’t sense Toshiro’s approach, nor the little jolt of reiatsu he politely offers so that she’s not caught off guard by his disturbance.
“The guest of honor shouldn’t be sitting out here alone.”
Rangiku easily pictures the same line delivered in a more mocking, cynical tone. By a different silver-haired man.
(Rangiku.)
“Matsumoto.” Toshiro’s face appears in her vision. She blinks. Despite the sternness of his voice, the wrinkle in his brow reveals a hint of concern.
“Taichou, if you keep worrying about people like that, you’ll be a geezer before you know it. Oh, but your hair is already white~”
“Shut it,” Toshiro huffs, folding his arms.
Rangiku offers him a wry smile. She doesn’t blame him for being concerned – she had been a terrible mess last year – indiscriminately taking out her anguish on whoever and whatever stood between her and the path of destroying herself. It had been so horrible that Toshiro hadn’t even made her write apology letters; they had an unspoken agreement that it was better not to bring it up again. Rangiku still remembers the shock on his face. Sometimes she forgets that he’s so much younger than her.
He’s never lost someone like that. Hinamori’s face pops into her mind first; Hinamori, who he would really have killed had she not turned back in time—
Really, memories of Gin are nothing but a chronic pain.
“Let’s go in,” Toshiro says, cutting through her thoughts. “It’s freezing out here.”
Any other time Rangiku might have made a joke about how the user of an ice-type zanpakuto could possibly complain about the cold of all things, but she doesn’t feel like herself right now. There is the tell-tale burn in her eyes, the blurring of her vision that accompanies thoughts carrying even the faintest trace of Gin.
It’s okay, isn’t it? If it’s only once a year.
Rangiku doesn’t make any move to leave and Toshiro doesn’t, either.
It is under a similar moonless starless cheerless sky that Rangiku receives her first birthday present from Gin.
Under the cover of the clouds, there is no hesitation as Gin reaches for her hand, fingers cool against the back of her palm. Rangiku is used to flirtatious touches coming from men – a bold hand snaking around her waist, a shy and sweaty hand brushing against her own – but Gin’s touch is nothing like that. He doesn’t squeeze like he’s desperate nor is his grip weak like he’s unsure. It’s simple, casual, like when they were still living in Rukongai and the concept of birthday gifts hadn’t yet existed because Gin regularly brought treats back home for her.
With his free hand, Gin reaches into his shihakusho, brings out a small bag, and presses it into her palm. The fruit in the bag smells like persimmons, but they look different from the ones Rangiku’s used to seeing.
“It’s from the human world,” Gin says. “They’re good, but they go bad quickly. You should eat them soon.”
And that’s so like him. It figures that the first time he presents her a gift, it’s something perishable. “You never told me you were dispatched to the human world,” Rangiku murmurs.
Gin lets go of her hand. This is not unexpected either.
“Why fruit? Shouldn’t you get something like a hairpin for a girl?” she complains more loudly, and hopes that her voice doesn’t betray the undercurrent of sadness. After all this time, she’s still so reliant on him.
But of course, Gin being Gin, he catches everything she doesn’t want him to see and ignores everything that she does.
It’s not that she’s unappreciative of gifts of food. It’s just, what she’s really asking for is something permanent.
Gin merely reaches out, tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear. He is still smiling. “Food is more practical, Rangiku.”
And with those parting words, he leaves.
Once upon a time, it had been natural for them to face each other.
“You’re late,” Rangiku complains, as Gin lands lightly beside her. She eyes his shihakusho, black as death. They had drifted apart after he graduated from the academy first, and Rangiku was surprised when a hell butterfly came to her. Gin never contacts her first.
“It’s freezing out here! How long were you planning to make me wait?” she demands.
She had also been wondering if he really wouldn’t come at all, if something came up. If he forgot the date.
Like he knows what she’s thinking, Gin’s ever-present smile softens into what could almost be considered fond.
Rangiku is not amused. She frowns. “I have to wake up early for classes tomorrow—” She breaks off as Gin reaches for her hands.
He takes both of her hands in his, holds them together like a prayer.
Rangiku freezes.
Gin had never been one for dramatics. She knows that he cares but it’s always a bad sign when he openly expresses it. It means that he’s about to do something drastic again. Last time it had been to enroll in the shinigami academy; this time feels like another goodbye, like he’s going somewhere far away again without telling her. She feels his gaze on her and why does it feel like she’s about to lose a piece of him forever when he’s right here? He’s looking right at her.
Gin exhales on their joined hands, warm breath on her numb fingers.
This gesture is not for her, but for him.
“What–” Rangiku bites her lip. What are you doing? Where are you going? When are you coming back? She starts to blink rapidly. The wind howls. “When…?”
His smile wavers before it drops. Maybe the wind that is drowning her voice also blows away Gin’s usual smugness and mockery. Pretense gone, it exposes something regretful. A moment of weakness where his mask slips before Gin gathers himself into composure that’s still softened by their shared time in childhood. She gets the back of the knife instead of the sharp edge.
“Don’t cry, Rangiku,” Gin says, words kind, tone unyielding.
That’s not an answer.
Rangiku tries not to cry anyway, because she knows Gin will go when she does. It is both cruel and Gin’s kindness. His presence turns her weak, her feelings raw. In front of him she’ll want to sob and sob like a child, beg for an explanation that he never gives because he can only leave her behind so many times before she breaks. She suffers when she sees him. Out of sight, out of mind.
Eventually Rangiku loses the battle with herself. Teardrops fall, Gin releases her hands. He vanishes while she’s wiping the tears away.
The next day, Gin is promoted to third seat. Coincidentally, the previous one is found dead.
For as long as they’ve known each other, Rangiku has always been the one chasing after Gin.
She follows the footprints in the snow because she wants to believe.
In him, not in his goodness. Gin is not a good person; Rangiku doesn’t pretend not to see the blood splattered on his cheek, the shinigami’s stolen shihakusho remorselessly draped over his shoulders.
He gave her dried persimmons when she was starving. He could have just walked by. But he didn’t.
“—so that you never have to cry, Rangiku.”
But he’s walking away now. Doesn’t he know that it hurts the most when he disappears on her?
The night Gin declares his intentions of becoming a shinigami, Rangiku chooses to believe.
He is cruel so she can be airheaded. He kills so she can be comfortable.
It’s partly her personality and partly a show, an appeal to him. She’s frivolous-minded. Playful. Lazy with her paperwork. She’s living a comfortable life. As if to say, look, I’m energetic! I’m doing well!
She’s rowdy. She makes lots of friends. She parties a lot. She smiles and laughs a lot, loudly.
So that you never have to cry, Rangiku.
That’s the last thing he said before he ended their childhood and forced them to grow up. Rangiku holds those words close because nowadays there is nothing real about him. Gin’s mask is an impenetrable thing so Rangiku doesn’t bother searching his expression anymore.
Instead, she reaches out to him. For any passersby interested enough to watch, a woman’s drunken advances can bridge the gap between a captain of the Gotei 13 and an unseated officer. She hugs him close, because with the way they are recently she’ll never know the last opportunity she has to feel the warmth of his skin, his beating heart, an unwavering pulse, to sink into the reality that her childhood friend is physically here; he hasn’t disappeared off somewhere where she can’t reach him. Rangiku breathes. The scent of iron lingers on his person. The time they spent together in a cramped hut padded with straw seems so distant that maybe it never happened.
Gin’s mind is miles away.
Rangiku doesn’t understand what he’s trying to do, but if it’s for her sake, then all she ever needed was for him to stick around. She doesn’t need Gin to do whatever it is he’s doing, not if it means he has to skulk around behind her back.
After all, if there’s one good thing that came out of becoming shinigami, it’s that they don’t have to worry about food anymore. She’s put on meat in all the right places. Gin, on the other hand, is still the same as ever. They eat a lot better now, but he remains as lean as he used to be.
Gin humors her for a few precious seconds before his hands settle over her shoulders. He’s not hugging back, but preparing to push her away.
Rangiku lets go first.
With those pale, bony fingers that now know blood, Gin holds onto her to keep her at arm’s length.
Here they are, dodging the main issue again. But it’s alright, isn’t it? He’s giving her this, after all. He’s standing here right now, even if he’s going to disappear to god-knows-where to do god-knows-what anytime now.
Gin’s smile seems vaguely apologetic when he finally turns his back on her, but maybe that’s just her imagination.
“I hate you.”
“I know,” Gin says, smiling.
Even as she says it, she knows it is a lie. He knows it too – that it’s a lie and that she’s not trying to hurt him with it, either. She isn’t capable of hurting Gin anyway. Not physically, and not emotionally either.
If she had really wanted to try, she’d stand a better chance of hurting him by saying I love you instead. Not because it was the truth or a lie, or because Gin would have to reject those words, but because Gin would have been able to tell. The meaning has changed from when they were little; those words no longer carry the same pure and uncomplicated adoration.
Love has many shapes but this wretched emotion that Rangiku feels barely qualifies as love.
Because no matter what form it takes, love can’t be an emotion that’s synonymous with anguish, can it?
On her way back to the barracks, she runs into him.
The only indication that Gin still feels anything for her is how his perpetual smile fades for a moment before it returns.
In a flash of shunpo, he’s standing in her space. “You should get checked out at the 4th.”
It’s a long but shallow cut, running from her wrist to elbow. Worse than it looks, really. Rangiku knows for a fact that he wouldn’t be peering at her wound like this with a slight crease in his eyebrow, had anyone else been in the vicinity.
I thought you didn’t care about me anymore, Rangiku is tempted to say. The captain of the seventh shouldn’t be fussing over the tenth seat from a different division.
“I don’t want to wake them,” she murmurs instead. As it is, they rarely see each other. There’s no point in trying to pick a fight now.
Gin hums. “That’s their job.”
An oppressive silence falls over them. Rangiku looks away first. Cradling her wounded arm, she brushes past, fully intending to end their little exchange there.
But like a fever dream, Gin follows.
His reiatsu is suppressed the whole way back. He doesn’t pause as he steps into her quarters. Rangiku sits on her bed. There is no redundant movement as Gin fetches the first-aid box. Fifty years ago and now. Rangiku automatically holds out her injured arm.
The only difference is that Gin is taking out a roll of bandage from the box instead of tearing strips of fabric from his sleeves. He wraps it around her arm with practiced efficiency, taking care to use no more force than necessary.
“Why?”
“Ain’t a guy allowed to worry about a childhood friend? Besides, you an’ I both know you’re rubbish with bandages.” Gin ties the two ends together. “Is that too tight?”
Rangiku shakes her head. No, it was never too tight. If anything, Gin had always tied the makeshift bandages too loosely. She stares at the neat work. The cut will heal with time. But soon there will be no evidence that Gin was once here, tending to her wounds, as if it pained him to see red on her.
After replacing the contents of the box, Gin wordlessly offers her some painkillers.
She doesn’t hesitate to accept them, because her arm still stings under the pristine white bandages, because she’s on morning duty tomorrow and she needs sleep, because Gin going out of his way for her is like a bad omen of what’s to come and she can’t– she doesn’t want him to occupy her thoughts until morning.
She’s tired of it all.
But as Rangiku drifts off, she thinks she’ll regret falling asleep, not trying to scrutinize Gin, not trying to parse out his intentions – not that she had ever been successful – while he was still there.
Rangiku can’t pull Gin into a bar for drinks, but she can take fellow vice-captain Kira.
Kira is sweet-tempered and will listen to her complain about Gin the entire night. He gets drunk quickly and forgets most of what they talk about. Most importantly, he respects Captain Ichimaru Gin so Rangiku knows that even if he does remember by any chance, none of what she says will make it to anyone else’s ears.
“Would appreciate it if ya didn’t get my lieutenant drunk all the time,” says a voice sliding past her. Gin sounds amused rather than irritated. That’s his default reaction to her antics nowadays. Gin briefly glances in her direction but their eyes don’t meet.
“Izuru.”
Kira shoots upright, eyes widening. He looks confused and then horrified. “Um– wha– eh? I-Ichimaru Taichou—”
“I need your help,” Gin begins, body angled towards the bar entrance, and Kira is tripping over his feet in his haste to leave.
And just like that, she’s out of sight. Gin is looking further ahead again, into far-off distances where she cannot follow.
There was a time when Rangiku liked that Gin was never physically interested in her, the way he seemed devoid of the baser desires that drew the gazes of men when she wandered the streets. He never looked at her in that way. Gin never looked at appearances. That part of him hasn’t changed, even after they grew up and apart.
He stopped for the starving girl lying by the roadside because he saw something worth protecting back then. As for the red-cheeked woman slumped over a table littered with empty bottles of sake?
Gin doesn’t spare her a second glance.
With narrowed eyes, Gin stares into another’s and what’s beyond. He peers into a person’s soul and values its secrets; he learns what they want to hear, what they don’t want others to see, their insecurities, and these become his toys, to use and break if desired at his whims.
Hinamori is down and Toshiro is livid; Hyorinmaru’s reiatsu lashes out, Shinso’s thrums under Gin’s skin.
Gin walks away when she tells him, in no uncertain terms, to stand down or else.
There is no reason for her to believe that he’ll do as she says; she’s just a vice-captain from another squad whose captain he’s fighting. She’s not his lover or his family. She doesn’t even know whether they’re friends anymore; friendly , maybe – in the sense that she never feared for her life under the pressure of his reiatsu. Even now. She’s worried about her captain and Hinamori but not herself.
Haineko is left cracked but not broken.
Does that mean she was right to trust him? Doesn’t it? She’s alive and unhurt and the damage done to Haineko in her Shikai form will naturally fix itself.
Rangiku doesn’t know if she’s allowed to be comforted by that thought.
It’s a familiar reiatsu.
She’s had a little too much to drink. Everyone else has gone home already. It’s fine, Rangiku supposes, just once in a while.
It’s that familiar reiatsu.
Gin.
“Gin,” her voice breaks over his name. She’s missed him. She thinks she’s always missed him, but it only chooses to rear its ugly head now. On her birthday, on the anniversary of the day they met; when she’s drunk, the first time he showed up while she was thinking of him.
Gin stops right in front of her. Rangiku doesn’t know how much of this is real.
“Go home, Rangiku,” he tells her blandly, and oh, this must be true because he never uses that tone with her in her dreams.
But when she’s awake, he randomly shows up, comes close enough to touch, and then pushes her away. To safety, while he runs off to do god-knows-what.
Go home.
Home, she thinks, is where he used to be. Maybe it still is. That never changed. She was never able to change that.
So that you never have to cry, Rangiku.
What a joke. Doesn’t he know that she cries over him more than anything else?
Gin lets out a quiet sigh when she does not move. “Let’s get you home,” he repeats, now deliberately coaxing and gentle and Rangiku thinks that she’s going to shatter into pieces, right here in this crowded bar that she likes to frequent. It wouldn’t be a pretty sight.
“I don’t needa escort…” she mumbles.
Above all, she hates being coddled by Gin. She hates that he’s treating her like a child who doesn’t understand anything; as someone who needs protecting. She hates being a burden. Even in her drunken state, she could easily fend off anyone who gets too close. The world is swaying a little, but she’s not seeing double yet.
Gin turns to the direction of the tenth’s barracks. A stubborn part of Rangiku wants to refuse, to walk away from him. He can’t just come and show concern for her whenever it’s convenient for him, and assume that she’ll just go with him each time.
And yet…
In this moment, he’s prioritizing her over whatever schemes he’s in the middle of. Right now, Gin is walking at a pace that she can follow. It’s an invitation for her to follow.
And god, she is so weak to anything that keeps him within sight.
Gin’s footsteps stop. He looks over his shoulder, waiting. Rangiku’s resolve crumbles. She starts to move and so does he.
At some point, they’re walking side-by-side. Another step closer, and maybe she would be close enough to feel the warmth he emanates – proof that he’s still Gin and the boy who saved her, smelling like autumn instead of blood, hiding persimmons instead of a blade in his sleeves.
Neither of them takes that one step. Gin doesn’t reach for her hand like when they were kids. Rangiku doesn’t try to link arms like she used to love doing.
Those days, where they had talked about all the unimportant things, are long gone.
(When is your birthday, Rangiku?)
What she’s left with is a birthday, distorted childhood memories, a cryptic apology made when he was the enemy of Seireitei.
(I’m sorry.)
There is no grave for her to make an offering at, so Rangiku opens the bag of persimmons she bought at the provisions shop.
“Eat,” the boy with silver hair and a silver name to match presses something sweet-smelling to her mouth. “If you can get hungry enough to collapse, you must have it too.”
Rangiku isn’t sure she knows what ‘it’ means, but she knows hunger and he’s offering food. He’s smiling in a way that’s not friendly or unfriendly; he’s thinner than her, with a lanky figure that looks as though he could be blown away by the wind.
He doesn’t seem like a threat.
Later, she realizes that she’s comfortable with him because he never once looked at her in that way. Gin had always been mysterious and Rangiku could never tell what he was up to, but his gaze wasn’t unsettling. It never made her skin prickle unlike so many others before him.
Rangiku liked that; the way Gin was cunning and strong but the chilly hands that cupped her cheeks in early winter carried the fragrance of dried fruit and no intentions other than to hear her complain about the cold and to get her to boil hot water for them to warm themselves up.
In Rukongai where the adults towered over her with hungry eyes, Gin represented safety.
Gin was special.
The nature of her soul was both a blessing that led him to take an interest in her, and a curse that took him away.
She doesn’t know if she loves him more because her soul was priceless in his eyes, or if she hates him because he lied and deceived her and distanced himself for so many years over such a silly fixation – she would have gladly traded that piece of her soul for him to stay close by.
Rangiku doesn’t regret not having the opportunity to tell him, though, because surely he had already known too.
It’s just that Gin had always been a selfish man, even right till the end.
And maybe Rangiku had loved him for his flaws anyway.
Once a year, she allows her thoughts to chase him.
(Then, the day we met is your birthday.
How about that, Rangiku?)
In her soul lies a gaping hole; and in her heart, a silver boy who wore the fragrance of persimmons and a sly but harmless smile in the first frost of the year.