A/N: I just needed to get this little dabble out of my system. Nothing serious.
A/N 2: I've decided to make this into a little series. I have so many little ideas for this pair I just need a place to keep them all!
A Life in Monochrome
Gin couldn't see much, the corners of his vision growing progressively darker and fuzzier with each passing second, but what little he could see was dominated by the color gray. There was something - his hair, maybe - scattered just inside his otherwise black vision that seemed to make his entire world glow with the drab color. It was something familiar to him, at least... the color had defined much of his life. His hair, his name, his loyalties...
His loyalties. When he was young he had once heard someone say that people just couldn't be defined by black or white. Nothing was so simple and no one so pure as to merit those colors, they said. The blackest of black souls were merely very dark gray, they had told him firmly, eyes flashing with conviction. It was all a spectrum of grays. He had known what they meant, of course - he was a clever child, after all - but he never thought much of it until this instant.
He could see it now, though. As clearly as he could see his own gray hair, he could see his entire life played out in the simple spectrum of colorlessness.
It wasn't all gray, though. The slums had been as black as pitch to him... and the eyes of the traitor had been too.
He was more aware of the implications of his decisions than people knew, or at least more than they wanted to realize. He knew Aizen was as black as the street scum he grew up in... he was more familiar with the color than most, after all. He recognized it in the beloved captain before anyone else, in fact.
It wasn't that he didn't know evil when he saw it, it was that he just didn't care. He didn't have any twisted morals or deluded power trips to hide behind, either. He knew what it was... what he was.
Gin's reasons for the betrayal were as gray as he was, though. He didn't intend to ever explain them to anyone either. They didn't need to know.
Rangiku would be so mad at him, he thought with a bland smile that cracked his injured face painfully. She always wanted to know what he was doing and why he was doing it... she wanted it all wrapped up in a neat little package with no questions and no grays. Alcohol did that for her, he had always thought, and that was why she loved it so much.
He could give her food when was hungry, he could give her a home when she was alone in the world, he could give her most everything he had with a little grin plastered on his face... but he couldn't give her simplicity.
He was gray in every sense of the word, complicated and unclear and entirely beyond wrapping into a neat little package. It was his most basic nature - his essence to the core of his being - that he would never be able to give her what she needed. He wouldn't - couldn't - give her the answers she needed or a pretty little bow.
He couldn't give her white.
And as strange and as gray as it seemed to him... as he lay there dying, shrouded in the blackness he had surrounded himself with, he regretted only that.