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Giyuu wanted to die on his knees.
Contact with the ground beneath him, the soil that stood guard to every trek, to every sigh, to every splatter of crimson on its constant support.
He craved it, the temptation to be devoid of movement, thought, feeling. To kneel, connected to the basis of this eternity. To bleed out, and watch everything shutter dark.
And yet he stood, dragging exhausted feet. The soiled corners of his world tinged in the emotions of blue hues and massacres of red.
What was he but an excuse of a soul? What purpose did he serve, at his core?
Giyuu wasn’t a Hashira. He was barely a man.
An echo of those he lost.
Memories and the resounding waves of inferiority and isolation, sunken under motionless waters.
There, drowned within the seas, fell the hatred he felt only for himself, swirling in with every shattered piece of sorrow from the past he served ill. He let emotions give way to the expanse of silence. To the seas held imprisoned within him.
With the layers of loneliness cloaked with indifference, it left an exterior as ruthlessly cold as the deep ends of the ocean. Everything below the surface was left to gnaw at his heart, leaving a brittle shell that ached to stop its rhythm.
He kept the seas impossibly still, for the fear that his disease would spill over the walls he had constructed. He had the pain muted under his vigilant quiet. Suppressed beneath currents.
Giyuu would rather be poisoned by the things he submerged, up until his blessed demise, than willingly letting them overflow towards another soul. For in what twisted universe would there be an outcome of practicality if he permitted a person to view the tatters of his heart?
Inevitably, he’d fail them again. Inevitably, he couldn’t fathom the day he wouldn’t be a curse to whoever was victim to his care.
He was a leech. He couldn’t bear to watch another person he loved die because of him. Affection made him soft; made him so, so, infinitely weak.
Nobody liked him, he’d been told, and Giyuu only gathered that it was deserved. No matter how desperately he yearned for the solace of friendship, it was a single goal well met.
Who was he to warrant any semblance of warmth? He would never be enough. A fraud at his only craft.
He could only look at the other Hashira, where he lived an imposter among their ranks. He was wrong to grace them, a shadow of what is thought of his ability.
The Water Hashira. An embarrassment to the corps as a whole. Again, it made him wonder if he were better resorted to lay under dirt and stone.
Guilt only curdles viciously at the hope of being liked anyway.
He had crafted himself to be menial. His life would never bend under the weight of meaning if there was nothing to sculpt to begin with.
Silent. Alone. He’d be vengeful, until the day he were to fade away. A slaughterer to the evil, and a shower of rain to what seemed a limitless flame to extinguish.
He studied the likes of Shinazugawa, fierce as thunder, as loud as howling winds. A force of brutality. Raised, ugly scars crossing pale, ragged skin.
A person who was filled with life, although fury and hatred, it was life nonetheless.
So when Shinazugawa channeled spiteful words and churning insults, Giyuu faced him with a blankness. For what could he say to somebody like him? Somebody who was leagues ahead of him, in every aspect?
Was he to blame for yearning for a friendship with such a man?
Brash. Destructive. Threatening. And somewhere buried far beneath, something Giyuu could sense but never hope to witness, Shinazugawa was kind.
He’d be a fool to imagine gaining anything but animosity.
So Giyuu was passive in the face of anger. He received a ragged, typhoon of hatred, and tried his best not to let it pierce his heart. Why would Shinazugawa give empathy to the likes of him?
The Wind Hashira was his opposite. Offensive where Giyuu played defense, relentless; rather than awaiting the moment to strike.
Where Giyuu was aloof, Shinazugawa spewed words of spite, as if the expression was embedded in his nature. Yet no man is born so enraged. Wrath is a sin, not a trait.
He treaded as a ghost, pale and melancholy azure, where Shinazawa was a destructive whirlwind of emerald and sharp, lavender irises. They made a hurricane; dead calm waters centered at the eye, and merciless tempests tearing around their ruinous radius.
The contrast between them that strangled Giyuu, though, leaving him breathless with an agony that devoured his battered heart, was Genya Shinazugawa.
A sibling that the wind-blown man had not failed. While Giyuu stirred in regret, in guilt, and in feelings that ran too deep, Shinazugawa continued on in the same reality as his brother.
Giyuu was rotten with memories that plagued the recesses of his consciousness. The stench of demon, the creak of blood-soaked hardwood.
The day, with his sister dreaming of a future, ribbons in her hair and donned in a white gown.
The screams, as Giyuu huddled in a closet.
The expression on her face, once adorned in a layer of makeup that had her twirling, radiant, had been so lifeless— so hollow— makeup melted off and splattered in her own blood.
He loved her. Let himself be cradled. Look how much came out of it.
It had been all red. A violent, abhorrent shade that haunted him. Made him flinch at every sighting. Every woman, dead before their lives could begin.
It’s a shade that never seems to release its victims. A hue that refuses to escape the back of his eyelids. A color that left him thread-bare and aching until the day he will finally be released.
It accompanied the vicious nightmares of peach hair, painted a boy in scarlet-tinted colors he should not have ever worn.
The second time he had allowed himself to grow to love, and he had let himself be shielded once again. Allowed himself adoration at the cost of dependence.
It was supposed to be Giyuu, gutted on wood panelling. It was supposed to be him, mauled on that mountain. And it wasn’t. Captive in agony, he still walked as a failure– as a pitiful hoax of strength.
‘A pillar’ they called him. He would never deserve such a title, let alone stand to embody it.
Giyuu could only assume his death will be painted in red. Red, that would pour out of his feeble body; red, that would be in every corner of failing, hazy vision.
He’d never be as great as Shinazugawa, or any of the others. Yet, at the very least he could exterminate the vermin labeled demons, with the thought of Sabito and Tsutako, curling around his blade.
And wishfully, within the whispers of his mind, he hopes he meets his end on his knees, his drowned regrets pouring out in crimson.