Work Text:
Gin knows nothing outside the obsidian descent of this world’s underbelly.
Dark, dingy and dangerous has taught him alertness and the ability to walk among the shadows with ease, with the scent of blood and prey as guidance. The ruins give him a hideout for necessary rest, the thick forests at night perfect to steal food and disable enemies. He knew from the start that he was different than all the other miserable souls roaming around- he craved and slithered around to feed and devour, moved by his dragging hungry belly and the coldness of death in his wide maw.
There was never reason to question anything about such a simple principle; kill of be killed. The one natural law that compelled Gin to survive.
Until another frozen day, when he spots that daring spark, soft like daylight that obliviously flickers life in the colorless landscape.
The first thing that catches his eyes is how effortlessly this girl’s hair preciously stands out. Pure silky gold in which no scum escapes their muddy reflection. It bounces off and leaves a spectrum of colors he’s only seen after the rain in the sky. It’s entrancing, dangerous and he’s walking towards it with eager, naked feet on the snow to dig it out.
Her eyes too, are like the rare clear winter sky. In the middle of winter he doesn’t feel so cold.
Gin moves.
“If you can collapse from hunger it means you have spiritual pressure,” he says in a perky tone. He gives the girl of the persimmons he’d stolen from the vendor before he can think over the damning act of generosity.
Like a bouncing ray, she sits up and takes it with an awed, dawned expression. Their fingers brush and he feels the warm kindle tease along his frozen fingertips.
Her name is Rangiku, she crowds on until he says it, grins in triumph after. Conniving girl, using his fever to get what she wants. He’s never gotten sick before, but his pale, translucent face is reflected rosy even she can tell. Her touch is warmer.
She slows him down a lot but she stubbornly pushes through all of his flighty tendencies.
He walks faster, until he loses sight of her. Relief washes coolly over him, to be finally away from what can become of him. Only then does he feel his temperature back to normal. It’s better for him, to continue as he were.
He grows cold and for the first time it bothers him. Gin returns to where he left her.
“Gin! You’re back! Where were you?” Rangiku lights up with a wide smile. Each time, glad and confrontational, yet loyal to stay.
“Out…” he shrugs dismissively, “I brought food!” Each time, Gin becomes a little more malleable to be shaped with her words and her hands and her demands. To cling like putty wax.
Just staying near her and hearing her speak lights the tips of is ears and his entire face disturbingly uncontrollably. He gives her the food he collects and the lets his hands distantly warm on the happy lullabies sang around bonfire.
His instincts, slithered deep and forked tongue perceiving, beg him to stay still, neither shying away nor fully embracing the rare embers’ never ending beauty. For their purity repels him as much as it beckons the filth lurking in their world. Yet he stands next to her, two poor reiatsu gifted runts navigating a world with slimmer chances than most.
Every light is eventually snuffed out and Rangiku won’t be the exception. Until then, Gin can selfishly bite off what he can from her until nothing’s left for the others.
During the cold winter days, Gin would usually curl under a stolen rug, dressed clothes belonging to the dead in whatever cave or in this case, the ruined house and just sleep it off in deep, self-sustaining sleep.
It’s enough for one person because one person was all he had to consider. Now, everything has changed. The first heavy snowstorm arrives and razes everything into absolute stillness. Nothing in the world moves, all the animals have gotten to the similar sleep they may never wake up from he’d be crawling as well.
But he finds himself enveloped by a strange, budding fever that weakens his knees and slows his mind. Snuggling behind him, she wraps the thick, tattered rug around them and locks her arms around his waist so that his back is pressed to her chest and her chin rested on his shoulder. Rangiku’s laughter poisons his every inhale with sweet lullabies, enough to hallucinate the picture in front of them as pretty and comfortable.
“Here!” he feels her proud into his ear as she nuzzles deeper into him. Minutes ago, she was the last shivering leaf, the chattering of her teeth easing to give way to the howling wind rattling the rotten wood pillars holding the roof up, “Now we’ll both fit! I’m a genius, right?” Her hair, more out of place and time now than ever before, steals all the leftover sunrays from everyone else and shares them solely with him with her brilliant smile and resonating laughter.
Gin’s skin turns scarlet where it’s touched, he coils tighter around himself, to which Rangiku reads otherwise and responds with misplaced worry. She hugs him tighter and rest her chin to his shoulder and rubs his belly and hands, letting out awed exclamations to the tiny snowflakes that slip inside and meld with his hair. Her fingers card through the tangled strands and she combs them to burnt silk.
His entire soul smolders.
It hurts.
For the first time in his life, a noise between a trill and a whimper threatens to burst out his fanged smile.
Surrounded by the destructive, tender firestorm of her embrace, his heart keeps beating frantically, a rattle so powerful in his chest that all rattlesnakes would quiet in front of. From this damning proximity, Rangiku must hear it louder than the furious wind outside.
As she wanted, Gin is warm. Tongue and limbs swollen, shutting down his mind with the fierce sensations that start send all sorts of messages to his body.
Every breath is excruciating, heart-stopping. He keeps still but he’s vibrating from the over-pressure his pumping blood spreads the melted petals through his veins. If she wasn’t keeping him grounded, Gin would have flown away in the sky. Then again, none of this would have happen if she didn’t cling so much, his airy, cutting words only fanning her determination.
Each of her words deteriorate him, “What’s wrong? You look sick.” Guilt fuels her undesired worry, her dainty palm on his forehead. His skin is naturally cooler than most and so whatever fever her touch brings, Gin can keep to himself.
“’m fine, Ran-chan.” he lies, “didn’t get sick anywhere.” He tells her truthfully.
“Really?”
Gin nods, bobs his head up and down once and feels how heavy it is, how his vision starts to grow spotty and slowly everything comes to a restless, obligatory and imposing peace as tiredness takes over and he loses consciousness, asleep in Rangiku’s arms and feeling nothing but warmth.
In those last moments, he feels her move him ever so slightly, the stiffness of his nape and shoulders lessen, “Hey, Gin,” he hears her speak, melts the ice from his lashes, “Take me with you next time, alright?”
He’s felt unpleasant before, exposed; when under the mid-summer sun for hours scouring for food. His instincts tell him to flinch but he’s become surrounded and the only thing he can do is let her start to consume him with what he never thought capable of possessing.
Raging hellfire sears through his veins, fast and devastating, set on the directionless, all encompassing path of destruction.
Unrelenting pain swallows Gin whole.
Eyes unable to see anything past the silhouettes dancing in the flashpoint heat, their scents obscured by the putrid, deathly breath of the pyre while he hisses through his teeth.
Never before could he understand the wrathful, desperate efforts of his kills; not the last twitch of their limbs to swing a clumsy sword, not the screams of agony and not the will to avenge, to take him down.
Never until this enlightening moment .
His hands twitch with the urge to move and drench his aflame skin with their blood, seek to soothe the lingering ugliness with Rangiku’s beautiful smile and teasing laughter, like he’s seen the purring cats do when they coil around each other.
But what’s become ashes can never return. Rangiku will the bloom into everlasting, hypnotizing beauty but the ashes will pollute her clear petals from the ground she was revived from, deprived of an important part of her core.
She will be lonely because Gin could never be, would never be what she may need – care, warmth, sincerity- by her side to be happy. Gin has nothing more to offer than the misery and ruin brought on by his true, insidious nature of greedy hunger.
In the blaze of ruthless emotion, he brands a vow to his soul, enough to give up his frozen heart and replace it with the blind will to keep moving through until everything that caused her pain incinerates into nothingness.
No nightmares will haunt her, even the most bloodthirsty snarling animals would back away facing white inferno, her shouts of his name suppressed by the mad cackling.
It’s his fault, for being such an eager kindling, to catch on her naivete and kindness, for not protecting her from the hellish world they live in. With her, he had blissfully forgotten, warmed by her presence like a snake absorbing the sunlight to survive, drawn in by the soft golden silk and clear perfect sky, the sole flash of colors in his dull gray world.
He shuts the door of their previous life, those precious years to her face to escape the burning building, so that she can have a life she deserves, without the burn blister.
For his sake too; lest he crumbles in her arms with the first touch and she bring the smell of sunny petrichor back to his life.
The white snow melts under his feet, a dead man’s shinigami robe is used to contain the blaze enough to keep on his human skin. In the howling, enabling wind, the echoes of Rangiku’s screams chase fast behind him.
Her tears have, at last, evaporated. Good.
In the darkest, void nights, even the slightest match can bring attention. Years later, the quiet cinders bring him to his enemy.
To Aizen Sousuke, he shows the image of a cold-hearted killer showered in blood, dark red to hide the rashes the burns have left that will only continue to fester stepping closer for the first spark to leap on his prestigious uniform, slow and methodical until it reaches skin, muscle and bone.
Decades later, Gin just stepped into simmering decay, sticking back together the pieces of him that have fallen over, once resembling flesh. A poorly made scale armor that hides inside a slowly exhuming carcass underneath.
Just as he learnt how to stand on fire-bitten bones and breathe in the poison scent of smoke until his lungs fill and exhale burning frost, she appears like a hallucination to a troglodyte and a delirious dream of the past.
He wasn’t aware that Rangiku would be stupid enough follow after him and his burning promise all the way to the feigned peace of the Seireitei. But then again, she was always persistent in the catlike, stubborn way she could get her kindness across.
Years later, after graduating the academy and rising to the role of Captain, in control of his own pawns and weaver of his own schemes, he comes across her radiant grin, celebrating her appointment as third-seat with a bunch of strangers.
The years have changed them. Neither of them are children anymore. Gin has been passing through the academy and seeding his usefulness to conflicting forces of the Seireitei and Aizen. Rangiku has grown to be prettier, if that were possible, the pride and joy of every garden and her beauty gossiped at her every passing.
Still brilliant as the summer sun that urges everything to be joyful, open and bolder to disarm even the toughest mules. His eyes never leave her, one of the many gazes he mulishly discovers, observes the way they all look at her, drawn in like moths. Picks up their body temperature with practiced ease and boiling blood.
From her, he always stays away, lurking in the faraway shadows as is his rightful place. Even so, her gaze never fails to finds him, a stake at his back, burning holes through his flimsy disguise. Whispers of the past and the mind to turn back like small hands that used to hunt for his hand to hold.
It’s alluring, especially as he picks up random moments over the course of decades, where she is grinning and laughing and has hordes of men hanging from her every word.
And in spite of them, she still stumbles to follow him out of the bar, her plush lips wrap around the sound of his name oh so familiarly. All she needs is to smile, face flushed and bound to forget and he reaches a hand out to dance with the flames.
He’s feverish in the slow, clandestine walk back to her home. Her body, stronger, heftier than the skinny girl he met so long ago, emanates the same heat on his sensitive skin that never left. Her scent, floral with a hidden hint of ash, replaces all the oxygen, overwrites his senses with nothing but her.
Desolate years of smoldering, he reignites.
“Gin…” she mumbles when laid on he bed, opens her arms as she used to do and invite him in; a dangerous, leftover habit. “Stay? Please…” She begs sweetly, her expression desperate, eyelashes batting seductively, her uniform a perfect mix of showing her bountiful chest and the full silhouette of her hips. She’s flushed pink as she grabs his hand and interlaces their fingers together, an involuntary sigh of relief as she nuzzles it.
Just as easily as ever, she turns his world upside down, introduces him to depraved sensations and emotions that he never thought himself capable of feeling.
Arousal, desire, anguish.
His facade is melting. All those years of painfully stalking his vengeance will go in vain if he’s found out, now that they are approaching the endgame.
The last pain peels off him when he yanks his hand away, her confused, hurt expression slips under his skin.
Intense and real as a twist of the knife after staying lodged in for more than he could count. Pain is proof that he’s alive.
“Sweet dreams Ran-chan.”
With the same touch she causes it, she takes it all away. Awake, he dreams.
He doesn’t turn around when she calls after him again.
During the slow burn of his decay, there are moments of revival.
“Or else…” a scornful, determined gaze zeroed solely on him, a blade steady against his “You’ll have to deal with me.”
Resentment that pours fuel to the fire, salt to his wounded heart. Despair and elation negate each other.
That’s my girl, he grins, hate me with all you’ve got. It would only serve her better in cauterizing their ties of their old lives at once and for good, Gin will take it all to his path of retribution. She has build a good life for herself, a place of belonging that won’t abandon her. As warm as she is.
This is the natural turn of events; eventually she would grow out of sentimentality and realize the snake’s true nature. Words of love and devotion don’t fit to be spoken through long fangs and lipless, gaping mouth that only knows how to devour. Touch is not meant for a creature that only knows to slither away and cower.
Still, that urge to continue pretending to be human, stuck in these halcyon years of transitional peace where he blazed silently and held her hesitant gaze. High on his own blaze, the flames depicting her figure among the steam. Always there but far away.
Eventually, the flames settle and the destruction becomes clear to the world.
In the end of the world as they know it, she holds his hand. Her blade unyielding but still damning kind at his throat. Physically feeble, but he is imprisoned by her nonetheless.
How many years have been? So many, it’d be more fitting to refer it as a different lifetime, where he was at the peak of his rage and she still worried over him with her small hands on his smaller cheeks, her skin cracked, her eyes hollower, her smile forced. For his sake, she hid her pain. For her sake, he hid his anger.
Rangiku looks lively in a life detached from him, immune to the inferno that has claimed and consumed Gin to the point of no return.
Her grip is searing in its lightness. A thin bracelet branded upon his ashen skin in the shape of her calloused, delicate fingers, a phantom among his usually monochrome dreams.
As the negación is about to fall upon them he has to let go.
For a long time, he marched forward on a warpath without heeding her calls.
Now, she stays silent but he chooses to turn around, towards the soothing warmth so powerful it revealed his glassy, fragile self and magnified into a firestorm.
She deserves to move on by herself and not trace his steps and be haunted by someone who was never worth her attention. Before he loses sight of her forever and slips away in a fit of smoke, he departs not the words he most wanted to say to her, but those she deserves to hear from him to finally shut him out of her life.
“I’m sorry.”
It never becomes any easier, walking away from your heart.
Ashes settle.
All is purged.
Sheer white skin cracked like glass bursting out with lava, expression permanently melted into a deformed smile.
His blood pours over upon exiting his wounds, evaporates upon interacting with the atmosphere. All saliva and tears have long become steams as well, tongue dry sandpaper and crumbling into dust and must have tasted bitter.
No more words are left to say and no regret can leak from his eyes. Each and every muscle has shriveled and torn apart to pathetic, barely held together strings of carbon. All he can do is simmer and fall apart, hateful devoted eyes never leaving his enemy. No injuries from touching him remain, neither poison nor burn lingers to the godly, untouchable form he pounced upon.
Nothing indicates that he fulfilled his promise.
There is still so much of him him left. Whatever part of him remains he will use it be it bone, toxin or his destructive touch.
“Gin!”
His heart spits one last flashover before it loses all heat, asphyxiates into an obsidian solid of carbon.
It cracks open in two asymmetrical halves. Then those halves totally shatter in pieces until nothing but dust remains.
In agony she calls for him, the salt of her tears absorbed by his greedy, parched skin. Precious raindrops slip between the cracks of scorched earth.
He had promised. He had failed. He had hurt her.
He never proved his worth in her eyes.
Yet Rangiku cries passionately for Gin – open your eyes, don’t leave me again, don’t you dare!- the glow of her kido flickering in a futile attempt to heal him.
Her begging eventually drowns into the void and all sound ceases to exist.
Gin’s incapable of anything but slow blink at her, eyelids heavier with the second. Rangiku speaks brokenly through her cries but nothing reaches him. Only the curtain of sunshine that pours over his face.
Is it cruel to be content in a moment like this? Knowing he has done nothing but cause her pain yet she still gives him care?
Even if it is, he’s sheltered in familiar, soft golden silk that he’s never been able to shake off.
For the moments he’s left, he’ll hold on and continue to keep everything to himself until he fades into obsolescence, given space and time to be replaced and scattered like specks of ash.
Through his numb gaze, he can’t help but take her in one last time. Rangiku has truly grown to be beautiful, independent and fierce, like he knew she could be basking in freedom.
Overly sensitive too, unfortunately, to recklessly dive into danger for a pitiful, worthless snake’s sake.
All thought starts to slip out and his body grow blessedly cold and his heart slows down to sluggish thumps despite Rangiku’s heart-skipping presence, he realizes none of it matters anymore.
He apologized. A departing gift from her, the destruction of the bond shackling her to him snuffed out along with his entire existence.
For that, he’s happy...
He’s glad...
...he can’t feel anything anymore.