Characters: Gin, Rangiku
Pairing: GinRan
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Chapter 412. My advice, don't read this until you've read the chapter.
Timeline: Chapter 412.
Author's Note: What the hell. Just a little, spur-of-the-moment drabble.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

Her chest was heaving in panic and a new, searing pain in her throat as she laid inert and gasping on the ground, face bathed in a sheen of sweat. After a shocked moment, wide, light blue eyes focused on him, leaning over her as he was. "You…bastard."

Gin decided not to comment that Rangiku should have been expecting for him to draw his blade, or at the very least she should have tried to fall back when he started towards her. Rangiku had always been too trusting, but he had never found a reason to be annoyed by that until today.

She should have known better. She had drawn her sword too late.

"Funny, Rangiku, I thought you had more common sense than this, but I guess I was wrong." There was deep, black blood spilling all over Rangiku's ivory throat and the exposed skin of her chest. Gin had been careful to make the cut clean and brief, but he hadn't expected for there to be so much blood.

Lying on the stone roof of the building they were on, Rangiku's answer to this was to snarl in a decidedly contrary fashion and toss her head as she tried to get up and failed, her arms shaking under the weight of her body and slipping in her own blood, as she fell back onto the roof with a small cry, the desperate gasps of breath coming in short, pained spurts now.

A sigh issued out of Gin's mouth and reverberated in the otherwise eerily silent air, as he watched her fruitless struggles to rise. A strange emotion lingered in his throat, cloying and thick as cough syrup. After a moment he connected it to pity. He could not savor a moment like this. Rangiku was taking an exercise—several exercises—in futility.

"Absolutely no common sense at all," Gin muttered. He started to climb to his feet, not willing to watch the spectacle in front of him any longer. "Right then, Rangiku. If you're not interested in talking, then I'll just be—"

His words were effectively cut off with a hand's weak grip on his wrist. In the state she was in, Rangiku couldn't even make her fingers form a strong grip, and Gin had no idea why she still chose to fight, as badly wounded as she was.

Her expression was caught between hate, pain and a question that Rangiku soon chose to put to the air. "Why?" she gasped, blood bubbling up from her lips, face growing more and more waxen with each passing moment.

Gin decided he could spare a few more moments before going back to Aizen.

Truthfully, Gin didn't particularly want Rangiku to die, which was why he had pulled her away from Aizen in the first place. But she kept forcing his hand so recklessly, that she was going to end up dead soon if she didn't watch her back. Maybe now she would choose to display a little more rationality, though secretly, Gin wasn't too optimistic.

As Gin leaned back down besides Rangiku, he gently extricated her fingers from his bony wrist and laid her arm across her stomach. She was starting to lose consciousness, icy blue eyes starting to droop shut, though a lick of anger still curled up from her lashes.

"Listen well, Rangiku." He pressed his fingers lightly against the skin near the cut to her throat, careful not to put enough pressure that a spurt of blood would come up from the wound. Rangiku reacted to the feel of fingers against her skin, struggling to keep her eyes open. There was now more confusion than anything else staining the crystalline surface of her eyes. "The cut is long, but not very deep. The only reason it's bleeding so much is because of a nicked artery." He could feel her pulse now, almost as though he held her heartbeat in the palm of his hand, fast and shallow.

Though she was behaving as though she could no longer comprehend what he was saying, Gin knew that on some level, Rangiku could still understand him.

"You've got two choices now, Rangiku. If you try to get up and follow me again, you're just going to aggravate the wound further, and we don't want that now, do we?" She was still conscious enough to scowl at the catty smile on Gin's face. "Or, if you're smart, you'll just lie back, and wait for someone to find you. If you do that, you might just survive all this."

Rangiku's weak frown was genuinely uncomprehending this time. And this time, though she didn't speak, Gin could tell that she was asking why he had let her live.

Gin removed his hand from her throat and lightly probed her immobile hand with his bloodstained fingertips. "I'd rather you didn't follow me this time, Rangiku."

Her bruised eyelids finally coated her blue eyes entirely, as Rangiku drifted off into unconsciousness, pale gold hair spilling over her face. Gin knew it was time to go.

He was taking that old saying about killing the one you love a little too seriously, but Rangiku should have known better. And Gin had only incapacitated her anyway.

There was the hope lingering in the back of Gin's mind, that he wouldn't be hearing lightweight footsteps behind him, and that when he turned around, he wouldn't see wheat gold hair and angry blue eyes.

But eventually, he would. Rangiku was like that: she never knew how to take a hint when it really mattered.

As Gin leapt away from the building, he realized that he had never answered Rangiku's questions.

And that he didn't particularly want to.