Written for 5 Prompts on LJ.
Table: 25
Prompt: #2 - I'm not deserving of your trust
Trust
It wasn't supposed to end like this.
He had always been ready for death. Being a shinigami for heaven-knows-how-long moulded him into an individual without fear of falling, fear of dying. The thought sprouted from the reasoning that shinigami were the ones who escorted the wandering souls to Soul Society, that shinigami were in charge of all things concerning death... Shinigami had absolute power over death.
That, in its own right, was sacrilegious to the core.
Now, as he lay dying amidst the rubble, Gin realized that he had never been ready for death. He had always been surrounded by it, skeletal hands in the form of tortured shinigami and twisted hollows, but never had he come so much as a step close to it. He was elusive, but he knew that all things living had to experience it sooner or later.
He tasted dust on his tongue, a cruel reminder as to what was going to become of his body. From ashes man and shinigami form, and to ashes they would return. Despite the difference in supremacy – humans being powerless save for the matters of the flesh, and shinigami having control over wandering souls and possessed of strength to purify hollows – they were one and the same.
As much as he wanted to laugh at the thought, he couldn't; his throat was dry, bordering on splitting into two, and blood clotted, thick and bitter, in his mouth. There was no more strength left in him. Everything he had, every thin shred of tactics and strategy he had weaved from the very start, had all been for nothing. All of it was washed down the drain the moment he reached out to grab the Hogyoku.
He had been the crafty spider, weaving his intricate cobweb, only to watch as it was hacked away in one blow.
It had been a fool's choice, and, as an all-too-familiar voice drifted across the wind to reach his ears, screaming his name, Gin couldn't help but feel a small smile tug at the corners of his lips. It was a smile of self-contempt, of strange regret, that he had never thought to surface amid his features.
The woman's face came into view, and though blurry, she shone through like a flickering candle of life, burning its way through the death that surrounded Gin to lead him back to the past, returning him to the words he had uttered to her all those centuries earlier when they were still young, when she was oblivious to the secret workings of the world around them.
And, as Gin let his head fall back to finally succumb to death, he forced himself to lace his words of regret into what he knew would be his last breath.
"I...betrayed your trust... Sorry, Rangiku..."
But, even as he felt the world grow cold around him, as her face, wet with tears, leaned down towards him, Gin knew that she had always trusted him in spite of what he had done to her, and that small amount of comfort was what gave him courage to face death.