To Love a Monster

by Coolio101

"How many lives would you sacrifice for someone you love?" It's a question she was once asked in an ethics class, in another lifetime. Now, decades later, as she stares at the boy sleeping peacefully next to her, she finds that she still doesn't know the answer. In which an SI/OC has the dubious pleasure of being reincarnated as the twin of Aizen Sousuke. Rated M to be safe.

1. The Beginning of the End

When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it. - Caitlyn Siehl.

It starts and ends like this:

Hands around your throat, squeezing with bruising force as you panic because this shouldn't be happening and you're only twenty and although you've heard of things like this happening to people, in the news and the whispered warnings not to walk alone after dark, it was always supposed to happen to someone else. Not to you, not here behind your campus library where it was supposed to be safe—you were supposed to do things with your life, you wanted to travel the world and maybe study medicine someday, you weren't supposed to end up as another statistic. You claw at the iron-strong grip cutting off your airflow, drawing blood with your fingernails, but it's not enough, never enough and you feel so weak, as helpless as a worm speared on a hook. There's adrenaline driving your motions and desperation clouding your mind and a sort of awful, all-consuming despair spreading through you as your vision begins to cloud over, as you feel your struggles start to weaken and your body go limp and you can't breathe but you try anyway because you don't want to die yet, not when you still have so much to live for—

–only there's something squeezing your head and there's crushing pressure (not just against your throat, but your entire body now), and you're surrounded by warm wetness, and everything is dark. But then the constricting heat vanishes and when air finally, finally hits your lungs, the relief is so great that you immediately begin crying. Only there's something wrong—your vision still hasn't returned and your mind is a jumbled mess and you can't move your arms and legs and as you feel yourself being easily lifted up, it hits you that you're far too small.

The shrill cry of a baby pierces your thoughts like a jackhammer to the head, loud and strident and utterly impossible to ignore. There's a woman murmuring soothing words to you in Japanese—only three words reach you, though. After a while, they start blurring into one.

Sayuri and Sousuke. Two names, always together, so tightly intertwined the individual words are near inseparable. SayuriandSousuke.

You don't know it yet, but the rest of your life would be defined by those words.

A/N: ...I actually have no idea where I'm taking this.