Anatomy in Ice V.2

Disclaimer: Standard D's apply.

Summary: Sometimes I give myself the creeps, so declares Sousuke Aizen. Aizen's POV. One shot. Quite on the dark side and pretty sick too.

Note: summary is taken from one of Greenday's hit singles in the 90s, Basket Case, from the album Nimrod. Don't sue me for plagiarism. I've just always loved that line.

You may or may not find several allusions to Goethe's Faust, leave aside that this resounds a little of Poe. As this is, it's inspired by both writers, style-wise. Again, don't even think of suing me for using some other person's intellectual property because I'm poor.

You think you know where you're coming from, but you only know half of it. You never, ever can tell right away, not even when you face the mirror on the brightest of days, your head at its clearest. Gaze at me but for an instant and you paint a picture of an otherwise pure, pallid creature whose softness went beyond simplicity itself. He couldn't have had harmed a fly while he was living. He wouldn't have drawn blood if his life was on the line. That's the sum of all they could say about me. The truth is, I couldn't. Literally.

Gentleness comes with a price: once a suspicion, a fact finally. The year was 1856. While men my age caught the tail end of the hysteria of civil wars, I struggled to plant both feet on the ground. I was weak, unthinkably so, and the entirety of my days as a human being was spent in a bed that reeked of medicinal fluids. Confinement pretty much spelled the routine of my waking hours, added of course with excessive amount of fussing over my health and attempting to woo more color into my face. Crude surgery as those days offered only sustained me for a time. If they helped to prolong that pitiable excuse for a life, they only invariably caused me a great deal of regret. I would cough blood soon as the following week set in. I would feel nausea, vertigo and something else I couldn't name which hurt the most. What was it? What pained me to the extent that I'd lost all desire to unclasp myself from unconsciousness? I would screech and twitch in pain as the faces of the people I remember calling my family would fall, ever so desperate. The village doctor shook his head, admitting defeat and impotence. Standing up, he muttered grimly, "I can't cure what the patient himself doesn't want to be cured."

My illness was a twin. Longer than anyone else who cared for me, it was there alongside my existence, always close, always present. It kept me company for so long as there still was anything to be sucked out of me. The night it would eat me whole, as my body crumbled, slipped away from the world and reached its limits, I would come to know such freedom the soul could only dream of. I cheated it. We were no longer one, the twin and I. For once, I had the victory. I made a pact with the Unspeakable using the last ounce of my breath. I embraced it and it embraced me back. You see now the beauty of this wager? I was one pathetic thing, and then all of a sudden another--a great, powerful being, the closest thing you could ever have to a god.

The Devil is a mysterious thing. For such an infamous entity, it knows fair trade better than those bastards who insisted to be treated as human beings and yet couldn't help swindling their own kind. For the price of my soul, I was to gain knowledge beyond the little sphere these ignorant humans tread in. Among such bits of benefits, as you already know, is the ability to infuse Hollows into souls and souls into Hollows. This enabled me to form my own army, to rule, to gain dominion over the vast territory of Las Noches. Afterlife, in this light, more than just delivered me to success. I died, lived, and prospered in that order. Like I said, the closest thing to a god. What does the revolting, constantly fluxing world of humans have to offer me now aside from the dirty business of dying? What greater state than this? What glory, what…

But the devil stares at me right in the eye, and its teeth glisten in the dark, sharp, thirsting for blood.

"The time for retribution is near." it says. Its smile widens. "Soon, you shall leave this grandeur."

I smirk. The Devil was once a human after all, a cheating bastard like everyone else.

"You're forgetting, my friend, the terms of our agreement. I will stay here for three centuries and you shall do whatever you want with my soul afterward. I believe I have yet to serve half my sentence, another 150 years in the Julian calendar, that is." The contract, yes, that was. This glory, and after that, an eternity in hell. Nothing lasts forever applies in the underworld too.

"It seems that you are the one who's forgetting, mortal. We made no such truce. We only broached the subject of rules and possibilities in a wide variety of similar cases, which included the mention of the 300-year contract, which you subsequently lay claim on. Surely, you've deduced that it only affects those who died under circumstances beyond their control? Accidents, murder, diseases--"

"And the likes. Otherwise, the duration of the contract is halved. I am intimately familiar with the rules, Devil, thank you very much." I finish the explanation for him. I know the ins and outs of the laws, know the loopholes and the strengths by heart; if need arises, I am always prepared to use them to my advantage. But for now this imp needs to be refreshed on a few basic things, "Might I remind you that you were there upon my deathbed? Modern science would inform you that pulmonary affliction coupled with hypertension and extended exposure to high-altitude oxygen took my life. Unless you were imagining it was someone else, the disease and no other killed me."

The Devil cracks, its laughter hitting an uncomfortable pitch. "The disease was anything but clinical, Sousuke Aizen. I fancy you were imagining all along that you were a victim of an outside, natural force. A pity, I'm sure." it pauses. I furrow my brows. "But let's attempt this anyway. At a conference among a hundred other agents, the higher-ups and the Lord of Darkness himself as audience, a re-examination of the matter regarding your death was duly presented and discussed. Of course, an intensive investigation preceded, so don't feel all too cheated about this. However, what we ruled--unanimously--is contrary to the initial report that you collaborated."

"And what, pray tell, is the final result of your deliberation?"

"You committed suicide."

"Preposterous!" I find myself shaking in earnest protest, casting over whatever pretense to calmness that I had before so carefully slid into. "You yourself had seen! The very last of my breaths! How could you see it as something else altogether? This…"

"It is true that you indeed suffered from multiple diseases. But that disease was, let's just say, a little too contrived. Induced, is how they termed it at the agency. It started with consumption, I believe, which in those days, due to significant industrial development, was already very easy to treat. Instead of getting better you got worse by the day until this otherwise minor illness evolved into something fatal, a medley of sicknesses that you made no effort to prevent. You facilitated, mobilized, or in any case orchestrated your own death, Sousuke Aizen. And any detail in contradiction is too weak to win our judgment to your favor." The accusing Devil hisses.

"That is ridiculous." I falter. Inside me, a keen and surging desire to slash through its freak of a body swells, only it leaves me wondering if it's capable of bleeding. But being at the moment at its mercy, I know better than to trouble myself with such an act. "Get your facts straight, Devil, before I'm forced to--"

"Suicide doesn't make it less worth the name if it was done gradually. Clearly, to me and my colleagues, this is a case of nature versus nurture." It declares in a voice that rings of finality and dismissal. It starts to disembark, sure to vanish in thin air as it always had before. "You think your life over, Sousuke Aizen. There is always penance to be done." There is no irony in its voice even as I strain my ears to find it. Truly, this is a curious little affair we have. In a blink, it is gone.

I scan the darkness around me. I muse amidst a silence that I'd grown accustomed to these past century and a half, finding it a hostile stranger. At times I wonder if this love for solitude has a direct connection to the fact that I never lived in silence back in the day. Always coughing, always moaning in pain, always wishing for it. Suicide. I was a violated corpse waiting to happen. Wasn't I?

Suddenly, it comes: Memories, thoughts, images from long ago zooming sideways before my eyes and racing past these scenes in the shadows, gathering color. The doctor stood up again, spoke as though his heart would break, "I can't cure what the patient himself doesn't want to be cured." And I lay guiltless on the sheets, thinking I was on my way to the precious hereafter. Look harder, and you'd see me smile. Did they know? How much did they know? Surely, they couldn't have.

And now everything is lucid. What everyone never bothered to know about the man who was once Sousuke Aizen is his sheer contempt for the human race, notwithstanding that he was once counted among them. He hated the body, viewed it as nothing more than a constant embarrassment to his personhood, and dreaded the very burden it poses to the soul. The lack of sympathy he felt for it was so enormous that somewhere along the line he forgot that they--his body and his soul--were supposed to be one. A healthy soul trapped in a frail, dying body, that's what I was.

"Why am I alive?" No matter where my thoughts wandered, the question slithered its way to me.

And because nobody bothered to look past my physical invalidity, they failed to account for the darker side of the human emotion. Did they know? How much did they know? Surely, not a lot: not the series of self-inflicted abuse; not the fact that the medicines they paid an arm and a leg for were secretly vomited into the sink soon as they left me alone; not the fact that I would bleed myself from the slanting, fresh wounds of surgery within minutes of operation; not even the fact that I sought (and endlessly wished to feast on) poisonous herbs in the far woods during my supposed to be bed-ridden nights, or that I did so in very little garment so as to invite fever. The following morning, my body would react in ways that would send my family to utters of horrid, startled cries.

Somewhere, perhaps, the Devil laughs not only at me but at a hundred others who'd misunderstood their end of the bargain. It goes on laughing in delight, hopping around the mischievous circle of fire it kindled for itself, never ending, the period in the ultimate sentence. The Alpha and the Omega.

Suicide, indeed! Murder in the guise of Enlightenment! An abrupt punctuation in the thread of life! The first blood I drew was mine. Mine, alas! Having negotiated my way to freedom, having plumbed the depths of happiness, this is what I ultimately amount to; I fall, fall back to where I began. Ah, what an unsatisfactory tale all this makes! I shall be disintegrating, with neither soul nor body to cling to, into the pits of the otherworldly Hell. A shabby place in Hell I shall be occupying! And all 150 years sooner than I expected! It has been decreed; it shall end in no other way.

I close my eyes even as I did within the cage of my sick, sick body, there in a place I once called home, years and years ago. I feel no pain nor see blood spilling out, but I might as well have. Or maybe I wish I do, one last time. If only I could feel what it's like to be human again.

But redemption is only too far out for a soul cannot commit suicide.

END