Characters: Gin, with mentions of Kira, Rangiku, Ulquiorra and Aizen.
Pairings: none
Warnings/Spoilers: My guess is, from reading this over, that it's so vague in places that you'd have to look hard to see the most recent spoilers.
Timeline: No time in particular, just after the events of the Soul Society arc.
Author's Note: I wonder if anyone's ever expanded on Gin's life while he was still alive.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

As he had died for the first time, his mother had leaned over him as he was dying, and crooned over his face, a strange, gyrating funeral song that he couldn't make out and just could not understand. He remembered looking up at his mother's face, into her eyes, which were dark, just like the rest of the village's and unlike his own pale turquoise eyes.

And just before the deep plunge, a soft gust of air came, alerting he and his mother both that the door to their home had been opened. His father came in, but never had the chance to look him in the eye before his own eyes closed, and did not open again.

After all that time, after all the muddled reality that had been sickness and death soon afterwards, Gin could not remember his parents' names.

But he did remember the colors that had adorned the small home he and his parents had shared, and the village beyond, where the people Gin had known as a living child existed, eking out a living.

Red in its shade of scarlet was the color of the younger fishermen (for it was a fishing village that Gin was born into), still strong and vital. Gin remembered their talk, their tall tales and their stories about the fish they had caught. He remembered when one had died, gored accidentally by one of his own comrades. The scarlet had washed out and lapped at the feet of all nearby like the sea that beckoned onwards.

Red in shades of crimson was the older fishermen, the ones who could no longer ply their trade and sat on the shore and drank sake while their wives begged them to come home and they simply didn't care; they were just too anxious to watch the ships grow smaller and smaller in the distance until they seemed small enough to fit in the palms of their hands. Gin would sit, not by them but near them, and wonder if they were still alive or if they were just decaying early.

Yellow had been the dry midsummer, the heat and humidity and buzzing crickets. Not a warm, vibrant gold yellow, but a pale, light flaxen, barren and dry. The grass, Gin remembered, had grown brittle and pale yellow, and when the wind moved through it, the grass bent, cracked and whistled. It was the same yellow as Kira and Rangiku's hair, and to Gin, Kira had become the dryness from lack of rain, and Rangiku the blazing heat. Gin remembered the one yellow spot of summer in the encroaching autumn, the first day he met Rangiku as a tiny girl dying for a second time, so soon after coming to Rukongai, at his feet, and he had caught glimpses of pale wheat gold hiding beneath the grime coating her hair.

Blue, deep indigo blue, had been the color of the dye Gin's mother worked with. When it had coated her hands, her fingernails had always looked strange, as though they were stained with the night sky. Pale, silver blue was the color of the sky just after a rain shower in that time between winter and spring, when sunlight caught on the strained silver clouds. Storm blue was the color of the sea during a storm, the only time in which Gin had ever been afraid. Midnight blue was Ulquiorra, something so close to black that it could pass as such at times, but still maintaining a slight influence of light, that shone through at the most inconvenient of times. Ulquiorra had always been unaware that he was blue and not black.

Purple was the little purple flowers that grew on the outer edges of the turf and rocks, small and fragile yet hardy enough to survive at the barren outermost reaches before hitting sand instead of earthen soil. Purple, Gin knew, was Aizen as well. Charismatic and compelling, the color of a king…and a God. Purple, in all its rich, vibrant glory, was strangely seductive yet utterly remote, keeping all around it at arm's length, like an enthralling star shining from far off in the distance. It unearthed long-buried desires yet cooled them as soon as they burned.

White had been the winter, the cold snow falling through the night, the still, silent chill. White had been everything that was different. White had been Gin's life in the village, down to his pale, colorless hair. When all others were dark-haired and dark-eyed with weather-beaten skin, Gin had been pale and noticeable, the strange child that no one else particularly wanted to be near. So white had been set apart from everything else, something with an enigmatic, slightly intimidating smile, that moved through life and the hereafter like a ghostly, ethereal dream.

Gray was the ash that lingered on in the hearth long after the fire had died out at night. When Gin had been small enough to still be easily held in his father's arms, his father had taken him down to the shore one night, and as all the fishermen congregated and talked, in their low, mesmerizing voices, Gin had rested his head against the crook of his father's arm and watched as the burning embers became gray and cold. Gray was Ulquiorra, too, what he had became in the end. Just a pile of ash. Gray was the dying period, while there was still some life left but not enough to bring it back into emerald green light.

Black was darkness and death, far more than the white death or the gray death. Black was the malignant sickness that stole children away from life while still in their beds. Black was the deep inky darkness of the sky of Hueco Mundo. Black was Gin's last memory as a living child, seeing it swirling like an angry cloud of locusts in his mother's dark eyes.

The colors had shimmered all around, swirling through Gin's vision like a living kaleidoscope, stretching tentative feelers towards him as he laid prostrate on the straw mat. It had been a complex, woven tapestry of fate, life and death, and it had seemed so beautiful at the time…

…Before black reasserted dominance, and swallowed Gin whole.