Tragic Hero
When you hear the term 'tragic hero,' you probably think of Shakespeare. You probably think of Othello, the protagonist driven to murder-suicide by evil external forces, killing the woman he loves only to realise how devastatingly wrong he was. Or maybe you think of Sophocles, and Oedipus who, in the desperate measures he took not to fulfil an awful prophecy and kill his own father, did exactly that. Maybe you see a mother-turned-wife-turned-mother hanging herself, and a son-turned-husband-turned-father blinding himself with needles.
Gin was a tragic hero. Not in the way Othello or Hamlet were, and certainly not the way Oedipus was. There were no evil advisors, bitter relatives, or ironically blind prophets to lead him astray. Gin was a tragic hero in the most contemporary of senses.
In Gin, you'd find a man you could not find. The kind of person who says little but observes everything. The kind who has already solved the puzzle before you can even attempt it.
The kind who has to descend into absolute self-destruction before he can ever let you in.
This was the only man who could ever read her like a book. This was the one person in her world who always understood what she felt, thought, wanted. She could always tell him what was wrong and he never judged her; he'd been through it all with her.
But sometimes, when people are too accustomed to being someone else's shoulder, they can't be anything for themselves. Their own traumas sit on the shelf while they try to fight through yours. And those idle traumas, they sit and fester. They rot. They collect dust while their owner distracts himself from them with your traumas instead; trying to save you instead. A band-aid covering a bullet hole.
Rangiku's tragic hero changed her life, and then effectively took his own.
She wonders what made him do it.
Somewhere along the years, his watermelon smile began to split his face. So gradually, so slightly, that it's only in retrospect she can say I should have known then. That genuine, easy contentedness she had always loved about him, had always taken for granted, was lost somewhere. That impenetrable shell held him solid for years, and she never once saw the cracks beneath the surface that ultimately destroyed him, destroyed them.
She wonders why he did it; why he left her, why he turned his back on her, why she had to find him broken and bleeding on cold concrete. She wonders if it was all those traumas he ignored that sat rotting away on the shelf on his head. The fear and horror of the 64th North Rukongai. The sight of a child not much older than himself dying on a dirt road. Blood on his fathers knuckles and his mother's funeral that he was too young to go to.
She can't imagine it was all for her.
But you can't blame the tragic hero for dying tragically. It's in the name. This is the end of the play; the part where we empathise with him, where we cry a little. "If only," everyone says. And Rangiku knows there are a thousand if-only's.
Someone will say, "If only he hadn't saved the girl."
And someone else will reply, "But if not for her, he wouldn't be a hero."
Someone else will say, "If only he had just let her in."
And the chorus, for once, remain silent.