Get Backers belong to Rando Ayamine and Yuya Aoki.
Author's note: Just a little Ban character study. I love reviews, but I won't beg. :) Thanks for visiting!
Midou Ban is damaged.
It isn't Bellevue damage – you wouldn't know, just looking at him. Astonishingly blue eyes, eyes brilliant with genius and sharp with cynicism, they don't reveal his secrets. Windows to the soul, they're called – but not his. Whether that is because he's too clever to let slip his mysteries, or because the spirit behind his dazzling eyes is ruined beyond recognition, who could say?
He wears his scars well away from those piercing blue orbs, and you only learn to see them when you learn to see him, apart from the blustering and the bad temper and the scowling. For all his brilliance, he is a self-destructive creature, a masochist, who surrounds himself with people who are better than he, whose lives are worth more than his, people who are wiser, more innocent, more honorable. Purer.
He keeps his secrets from his betters and lets them fester. They are injuries that might heal, most of them, if they were aired out, bandaged by gentle hands, and pitied by gentler hearts. And many of those who know him would, for diverse reasons and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, tend his battered heart. But covering the scars and the scabs and the still-bleeding wounds is old habit now, and he guards his suffering with jealousy. It remains, when people turn and walk away; to his maimed soul, the mutilations themselves are the only constants, the only things that can be relied on never to change.
You can see it, if you watch him closely, just where the damage lies. Because though he is intelligent enough to know beyond doubt that, excepting the scars, nothing is stable, he clings to stability. He seldom alters his image, and never for long; one tiny bit of control he has in the vastness of the universe: his sea-urchin hair, his sun-glasses. His Marlboros – another twisted bit of self-abuse, a way to keep Yamato Kudo and what he meant, and what Ban was when he was with him.
He never roams far from the café where his father's friend is, because it's the closest thing there is to a home, because Paul is the closest thing he has to a father, even if the other man is only fifteen years older. The Ladybug, with her long history, with their many shared adventures, allows him to retain an air of freedom, further disguising his scars. More importantly, though, she binds him to the Get Backers.
And the Get Backers bind him to Ginji.
So he remains always spiky-headed and bespectacled, breathing his toxic fumes, running up his tab at the Honky Tonk and loosing his cool over his precious car. He is as protective of it these things as he is of his secrets and his scars, because he desperately desires that, like his disfigured soul, the Get Backers and Ginji should be constants, and the hair and the glasses and the cigarettes and Paul and the café and the Ladybug are all part of what the Get Backers are.
It cannot always be so. There is a logical, rational part of Midou Ban that knows Ginji is chaos incarnate, and he himself is cursed, and there is not a breath of a chance that they will endure in this idyll forever.
But still he keeps his secrets and his scars, to remain forever that Midou Ban who Amano Ginji chose to befriend and to love, desperate that nothing should upset the peculiar balance in the universe that has granted him such friendship.
Midou Ban does not – cannot – change. And therein lays the damage.