Skin & Ashes

We're born into this world knowing we're not alive. But then, what are we, how can we be dead? We exist in Soul Society, begotten like most other beings, grow and change like any other thing you could call living. And we can die. We can be killed, we can fade away.

And some of us hunger. I may have had a mother in this world, I may have died as a child in the World of the Living, I can't say and I've never really cared beyond an absent wondering. What I do remember, more than the dust and the filth and the apathy of my beginning, is the hunger. It's the first thing I can recall, since before I could even move on my own. A sucking void within me. Hunger, and ashes. Before I had even seen a fire, they were there. On my tongue, in my nose, clawing grit behind my eyes. Water could never wash it away, what scraps of food I could scavenge would be coated in the taste, making whatever small relief the nourishment brought almost not worth it. Even when the elders in the community would shoo me away from the fires, it didn't seem to help. Always, they were there, like a film over my body, under my skin, coating my innards.

I remember so clearly the first time I actually tasted food. It was the first day, though by no means the last, I truly thought I was going to die.

And then he came. Of all the things I try to remember, and forget, about him, this one comes up the most. Lying in the dirt, drained and fading under the heat. Looking up into those hooded eyes, even then guarded against showing anything of his true self, and that first actual taste…

"Eat up. If you can collapse due to hunger, you must spiritual power."

"You… too..?"

"Yup, me too. Ichimaru Gin, nice ta meet you."

"Gin… That's a weird name."

"What's your name?"

"… Rangiku."

That was the first time I felt another's spiritual pressure. Even then, his reiatsu was so very strong, so much stronger than the Soul Reapers who would soon come to murder us. It wrapped around me, pushed something down in me I hadn't even known existed. He handed me a dried persimmon. The flavor exploded on my tongue, my mouth flooding with saliva. My throat was parched, yet swallowing was easier than it had ever been. I almost wept from the sheer wonder of these sensations, and the idea began to grow in me that there could be such a thing as satisfaction. A space for contentment.

When he reached down to take my hand, I became utterly distracted with the texture of his skin. Smooth and cool, river water over flesh, and my own hand felt smooth in his. I didn't want to let it go, even after he had helped me stand. For the first time, there was a chance that every day could be more than just surviving the days that had come before.

He began telling me about this reiryoku "power" inside me while walking me back to his small hut, how it was seeping out from me and probably making me uncomfortable. These things no doubt mattered, and I should have been listening closer, but all that I cared about was the cold, delicious sensation of his hand in mine. I walked away from the lodge where I had lived with so many others without a second thought.

Hedonistic, from the start. And ever since then, I've loved the taste of persimmon.

I remember wanting to stay with him, asking if I could in that direct way we somehow lose as we get older. He smiled at me, offered me a sip of what I swear was my first taste of clean and sweet water, and that was that. I didn't even stop to wonder how a child like him merited a dwelling all his own. Children living alone, on the outskirts of yet another ramshackle community in Rukongai. But I felt as pampered as a princess.

"Hey, when is your birthday, Rangiku?"

"I don't know. I never really counted the days, until I met you."

He taught me to control the flow of my reiryoku, utilizing it as reiatsu, somehow banishing the ash and grit which had wrapped around me till then. When adults would come, I would watch the chameleonic shifts of his smile. That smile, like a weapon, sometimes I was truly surprised it didn't leave physical wounds behind. And it filled me with naïve joy that he would let the smile slip around me. His true face was for me and me alone. We would fall asleep together, fingers and hands entwined, and I would feel as if there was some great invisible serpent coiled around me, securing me from the world. Never in my life, before or since, have slept better than when next to him.

All too soon, the Shinigami came, and slaughtered those of us living on the outskirts of that ratty, nameless village. We never found out why, pleas for mercy falling on deaf ears as they cut through us, moving with some foreign purpose. It was one of the few times I wasn't with Gin, making some effort to mingle with our community. They were doing… something to us. When they got to me, I felt an enormous, sucking pressure. It made the ghost of my former hunger seem delightful, and left a hollow pain in my center where I had just begun to feel the pulse of my reiryoku, the shining center of my soul. What happened after that, to my body, was an almost trivial violation.

Somehow I survived, tossed aside and forgotten. I was crying, from the pain and absent minded cruelty, the unfairness of our lives pressing down on me. I think it was the first time I had truly wept, until a welcome oblivion came over me. The poor and helpless have little recourse to justice when the powerful make a point of looking away.

But he came, firewood still clutched in his arms as he found me, and the look he had as he tended my wounds was one I've never been able to understand. As soon as his hands were on me, tears began to flow again, but not from pain, or even shame. There was a flicker inside me, maybe no more than a fluttering candle. But it was still there, not all the power within me had been extinguished. Stolen. Though never again would the ashes dance up so strong they would seep out of me. He started leading me away, being so careful to guide me around the site of the slaughter, all while nonchalantly trying to shield my gaze from the fields of blood and gore. Even so many years later, I've never found a way to tell him that he need not have bothered. All I cared about in the world was still safe, he was still with me.

"Then, the day you met me is your birthday. How about that, Rangiku?"

And why shouldn't it be? Soul or not, dead or not, the day I met him is the very first day I truly felt alive.