Characters: Rangiku, Gin
Pairing: GinRan
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for chapter 412.
Timeline: Chapter 412.
Author's Note: This is a companion for Catch and Release. Ughh. My only hope left for GinRan is that he was trying to incapacitate and not kill her with that wound.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

It was her blood, bubbling in her mouth, that she felt, noxious and coppery, making her bile rise on an empty stomach.

This, Rangiku supposed, was the folly of complacency, her punishment for assuming that no, Gin would never draw his blade on her.

"You can barely stand. Why are you here?"

Rangiku barely knew, and it wasn't just blood that was leaving a bitter taste in her mouth anymore. This, she should have expected of Gin. But no, she assumed that the past would stay his hand, despite everything that he had done and all the lines that he had already crossed.

Suddenly, Rangiku discovered that she had been even more of a fool that day than when she had sat with Kira and wondered why he had left.

"Is it really Izuru, whose faith in me was betrayed?"

Gin always had the habit of cutting to the chase, digging the knife in deeper, rubbing salt in already festering wounds, and this would never change. He had dug particularly deep under Rangiku's skin with that inquiry, and they both knew why.

He was far too close, far too fast. A bony hand with fingers like spiders' legs resting against her neck, pressing gold links into her skin and fingering a shallow cut on her neck. Hot breath brushing against her hair, as he spoke. Gin never did have any concept of personal boundaries.

"Listen, Rangiku."

A flash of metal, quicksilver in the pale sunlight, made Rangiku's narrowed eyes widen. She reached for her sword, but too late.

"You're in the way."

There was no time to react as the blade shot forward. Rangiku's skin broke and split, a clean incision on the side of her lower neck, as a spurt of ebony blood gushed from the wound, and she fell back.

Betrayed again. Abandoned and tossed aside, again.

Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice…

Rangiku's eyes narrowed as he began to fall into nothingness. Damn it.

It was taking her forever to fall, like her body was spiraling and twisting in midair but gravity was deciding not to apply. The metallic clatter was her sword falling to the ground, a discarded and useless tool.

The arms looping around her back were slowing her fall. Gin, letting her down gently. Cradled like someone's newborn baby, like she was made of glass, as he laid her down on the flat stone roof. Rangiku struggled to breathe through the blood in her mouth.

"Tell me, Rangiku." Gin's voice seemed far away as he leaned close over her face, to the point that she could feel breath on her mouth, and the smile was growing more hollow with each passing moment. "Why did you say "Kira", when you meant yourself?"

It was a rhetorical question, and Rangiku could feel her lip curl, almost of its own accord. "You…bastard," she gasped, breath quick and shallow, as he knelt beside her and observed with a maddening detachment which she knew was just the mask for something much deeper.

Everything else was a blur, the only prominent memories being a voice drifting in and out of her hearing and the sensation of a hand on her neck and briefly twining with her fingers, before all was black, and Rangiku was left alone again.

"I didn't ask how you got here. I asked why you came when you can barely stand."

Unconscious, Rangiku's blood pouring out from the wound Gin had left on her body, it made much more sense. She could actually see why now, now that there was blackness poured over her eyes.

She had come because of him.

And Gin knew it too.