Pale Blue Eyes

"If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see,
I'd put you in the mirror,
I put in front of me."

~Velvet Underground, Pale Blue Eyes

VII. White Whale

It was the stuff of legend.

Old Hazama had been sitting out on his porch, resting his weary bones in a rocking chair as he looked over the fields and the men who worked it. He would have been right out there with them, the kinder versions went, but old joints and bones made that impossible. He settled for a hum on his lips and a sense of satisfaction at the fields that had produced for years.

Anyone who had known Hazama would have laughed at how terribly far from the truth it was.

The man showed up in the early afternoon, decked out in telltale blacks and a wooden patch strapped to his left arm. He wore his hair as deathly white as his skin. No one could say for sure what color his eyes had been. He never opened them. Perhaps he was making up for his closed eyes with the overdone smile, threatening to split his cheeks.

He drew the short sword at his side, unusually small for a Soul Reaper.

And then it wasn't small anymore, but monstrously long and white-hot, clearing the distance between the two in a flash. The pale man carved a hole in Hazama's chest. He had been aiming for the heart, but the motion of the blade made it look less like a stabbing and more like someone coring the Adam's apple out of a man's throat.

He did it with a flick of his wrist and the flourish of a studied showman. He had done this before.

The pale Reaper wiped his blade on a long leaf. He had no desire to let anything of that man's body touch his. Then he sheathed his sword, turned on his heel, and started walking right back the way he came.

Years would pass and the legend continued to circulate. Who was that strange, awful Soul Reaper and why had he killed Hazama (better yet, why so brutally)? Only Gin Ichimaru knew, and he wasn't telling.

V. Master of Puppets

Sosuke Aizen was a piece of work. Gin had to give him that.

No matter what happened, the Lieutenant would emerge with an intensely loyal third seat at his beck and call. If the man won the fight, Aizen could all-too-easily paint the picture of two men caught unawares by the tragedy of a gifted young student snapping under the strain of his own genius. On the other hand, Gin's victory would replace a barely adequate officer with a supremely talented one, one bound to him by blood and secrets. He'd seen that sort of thing before.

Some of the Rukongai gangs forced newcomers to take a life for the loyalty it bread. They coined their membership in blood and tears. Who was it who kept the secret and gave you a warm bed to sleep the night after you held a man under? Your pals. Who could turn you in if you stepped out of line? Same answer. (The mistake those young fools made, of course, was thinking that their so-called friends wouldn't go down with them when they explained the details of the crime.)

That had never been Gin's way. He took lives and clothes and the all-too-rare scraps of food for no one but himself. You couldn't pull the wool over his eyes.

Not even Sosuke Aizen could make that claim, no matter how hard he tried to build himself up as a father figure in the eyes of some poor little Rukongai orphan. Gin had seen that one before, too.

I. The Devil You Know

The boys and girls went into the fields not long after sunrise, sometimes sooner if the big man was impatient. They worked themselves to the bone under threat of the lash for the better part of the day. The one break they had was usually split between a hole in the ground for waste or a meager meal, enough to subsist and never thrive. If, by some chance, the children couldn't squeeze in both during that lean time, then it was too bad for them. They would have to wait until they dragged their broken, beaten little bodies back to the house, an unlucky few having to walk from one side of the fields to the other.

It was a stroke of diabolical genius. There were just too many children in the slums. For every loving couple looking to adopt, to fill that gaping void, there were four children looking for a couple. They gravitated toward the big houses and the big smiles.

You caught more bees with honey than vinegar.

It was a lesson the surly men on Father's payroll scarred into his flesh. He still had a few scars, leftovers of the days they had been particularly liberal with the punishment. Maybe they were hungover. Maybe they hadn't had the chance to make it with the drunk girl at the bar the night before. Whatever the case, a small, squalling thing made a wonderful venting tool.

After so many weeks-months-years of this, Gin decided he had suffered enough indignities for one lifetime. He didn't know much, but he knew it was wrong to send children to bed with fresh wounds and empty stomach. He knew it wasn't his lot in life. So it was only a matter of time before the feelings bubbled to the surface with that strange, tingly feeling he had been getting in his dreams.

At first, he assumed it was some sort of injury. When he finally exploded in resentment far beyond his years, he knew better. It was his first kill. Blue light. A sound like sizzling sky after a thunderbolt. Light-headedness. A man falling dead with third degree burns over the greater part of his body.

Years later, he would learn that was his first brush with spiritual power, a shapeless mass of soul-stuff that might have passed for kido if he had bothered with the verbal soup.

At the time, he knew far less. He knew it was something that could never be undone, something that would send him fleeing into the night with the few other children who had witnessed the scene and feared Hazama more than the big, untamed world.

III. Tainted Love

He loved Rangiku. He loved her for the fact that she was the perfect accomplice.

After so many short changes and rip offs, Gin developed an eye for the smooth criminals of the world. He had a taste for it after dealing with that miserable old slave driver, Hazama, but only after slogging through the scummier parts of Rukongai did he learn to appreciate the art of the scam.

Ironically, the people who would take everything had the most to give.

It was simply a trick of beating them at their own game. That was much more easily said than done but it became a cake walk (literally, in a few cases) once he learned how to bait the hook and loot the inevitable corpse. There was always someone out for the clothes on his back or the food in his mouth, but the most forward tended to be the types looking for an underage love slave to call their own.

Gin had run into enough of those. He was scrawny and strange, but some people liked that. Plenty enjoyed his pale skin and even whiter hair. One man had gone so far as to call him "my little snow fairy." (The snow had gone red that night.)

But Rangiku really drew them in. Long before half of the officers in the Thirteen Court Guard Squads looked up to her as their private Aphrodite, all sensuous and curves, she had drawn a much different crowd, one that coveted flat chests and slim hips and cherubic little faces. By the time he reached the Academy, Gin had become a master of the bait and switch, enough to put any magician to shame.

They did an admirable job of trying to separate Rangiku from her little protector. They pawned him off on a neighbor or sibling who didn't realize (or care) that someone so close to them was so horrid. Other times, they distracted him with treats and games. There had been at least one occasion where the bastard had tried to poison him, but Gin knew the score.

It was only too easy to pocket the food and the games, or worm his way past his supposed caretaker. He slid through doors and over windowsills, whatever lay between himself and Rangiku. He came with a present, a rusty old knife he'd picked out of the trash in the early days and Shinsou when he got to know his fine friend a bit later in life.

Gin hand long since lost count of the number of throats he had slit in front of Rangiku.

IV. Dead on Time

The job was simple enough.

Kill a man. He'd done that plenty of times before. He had that down. It didn't matter if it was some stuck-up seated officer with Soul Reaper powers. He had those, too.

Gin Ichimaru was a lot of things (an opportunist, a manipulator, and a thief, among other things) but he wasn't a food by any means. He made it a rule never to bite off more than he could chew. Even in those rough, Rukongai days, he kept his head down and kept moving when a fish came along who was just a little too big to fry. Of course, that part of life was little more than a distant memory, with the Spiritual Arts Academy under his belt and enough shattered records to his name to let him rest on his laurels for the next decade.

He didn't have plans of the sort. Sitting still grated on him like nothing else. He had to be doing something, but it was interesting to know that doing nothing was always an option.

II. Happiness is a Warm Gun

The days at the German couple's house accounted for some of his fondest and ugliest memories.

It started so well. Gin and his rag-tag crew of rebels had run screaming and crying into the night. Somewhere along the way, after losing half their number, the survivors came across a recently deceased husband and wife who had found each other in this life. They were eager to pick up right where they had left off, right down to talking about and ultimately adopting a litter of needy things.

Gin had been suspect at first. He kept waiting for the day when the husband, Klaus, would come rumbling into their communal bedroom at some ungodly hour to harass them awake in the name of a despicable errand. It never happened. A lot of things didn't happen at the German house and it could have kept on not happening as far as Gin was concerned.

Then a terrible something happened. The little brat they had spawned in the human world wound up on their doorstop by some amazing coincidence. Suddenly, Gin and his merry little band weren't so special anymore. Klaus and Anna didn't have the spine to throw them out, but Gin saw the writing on the wall.

What use did they have for replacements now that the real deal had wandered back into their lives?

He had said as much to Jotaro, who vehemently insisted that he couldn't talk like that. They owed Klaus and Anna everything, Jo said. Gin slapped him for saying as much. He'd met too many children who said the same about Hazama, who wormed his way into trusting hearts with the father routine so he could exploit them to Hell and back.

Jo just looked at him stunned, teary but not yet crying.

Gin couldn't stand it. He hadn't settled for Hazama and he wouldn't settle for secondhand love—tolerance, really. That burst of spiritual power set him apart, made him different, special. He wasn't going to cling to this husk of affection.

Gin ran away that night.

VIII. The Story

Gin had a harder time learning to let go than he did learning how to kill. Death was finality. Oh, sure, there was the endless cycle between this world and the next, but if he killed someone in the Rukongai, he wouldn't have to worry about seeing their sorry soul again any time soon. He washed his hands of everything he killed (in a rain of sweet, sweet blood).

Leaving something behind or putting it aside? That wasn't final it all. It was a noose without a neck, a blade without a warm belly or a soft throat. Something you put aside could pick itself up and find its way back to you if it really tried hard enough.

He hoarded. He kept clothes for as long as he could, never knowing when a cold snap might roll over him. Shirts bulged at odd angles with food for famines and water skins for droughts. Even pointless little knick-knacks gathered on his person, in case he ever needed to pawn something in a hurry and didn't have the time to rob what he needed.

He never had much, not out in the Rukongai, but he kept his slim treasures close. They were like a part of him, so of course it hurt to let them go.

Perhaps that was why he had such a hard time letting go of Rangiku.

When the time came to run off to Hueco Mundo, Rangiku had been with him longer than anyone.

XI. Weapon of Choice

Gin came up with the idea of tattooing the Arrancar. Aizen smiled at that, ostensibly for efficiency but secretly (and chiefly) for the reason that it was the kind of thing he would have come up with. It was control, domination. It wasn't simply a designation, but a brand to mark them as Aizen, Gin, and Tousen's children for all eternity.

It also made for fantastic entertainment. Gin quickly decided that Nnoitra Jiruga was perhaps his favorite, for how he agonized over the numbers and what he thought they meant, as if they meant anything. People—correction, Hollows like Nnoitra and Grimmjaw and Barragan never seemed to realize the game they played at their own expense. They hemmed and hawed over numbers, locking horns with their alleged comrades whenever possible, always miraculously failing to see they danced to their masters' tune even then.

And for what purpose? Their infinite amusement.

That wasn't quite correct. Tousen abhorred Grimmjaw and Nnoitra. Gin thought they were hilarious.

Then again, Gin had always thought Tousen was a stick in the mud.

IX. Killer Queen

Rangiku loved Gin because she was selfish. However much she cried and stamped her feet and told Gin she hated him (usually after his latest murder), she could never stay angry with him. He was a girlish fantasy fulfilled, however darkly.

No matter how much he stank of death, no matter how deep the stains in his clothes, he would always be her savior. He was a knight in tarnished armor, a destroying savior. She would be the first to admit he had done unspeakable things. He did them with the best of intentions, she would say. He did it to save me, to serve his Captain, and later, when he had a Captaincy of his own, for his Division.

He was a selfless sinner, a saint in everything but deed, she might say. Once, when Aizen broached what he knew to be a sensitive subject (one of his favorite pastimes, a way of both learning something of someone's character and testing their loyalty), he remarked that Rangiku was just like Momo Hinamori.

"She loves you because she fails to understand you."

VII. Green-Eyed Monster

It bothered him more than he would care to admit that she spent so much time talking about her prodigy. "Her" prodigy, in the sense that she found the ice boy and she persuaded him to attend the Academy. Why, he would be her Captain one day! She could feel it in her bones. It was fate.

Gin rarely bothered with more than a derisive snort at first. But then she continued harping on him like some sort of personal Messiah, her own little frosty savior. She kept track of his progress through the Academy, boasting about him like a mother. It was cute, seeing her so motherly.

Then she told Gin that he would be a heartbreaker one day and it wasn't cute at all.

He had reason to detest Toshiro Hitsugaya. The boy broke records he had set, records that the old men rumbled about, saying they would stand the test of time. Test of time, huh? They were being broken to bits in his own lifetime and it was all thanks to Rangiku.

He didn't care at first, about others. They were pawns to be discarded. But Rangiku…he started muttering when she brought the brat up. Then he would argue the point with her, usually falling back on the old idea that test scores didn't translate to performance in the field.

She kept at him about it, so he finally did what he should have done in the first place.

He took her virginity.

XII. The Hardest Button to Button

The new attire he dons at Las Noches makes him feel like he's been born again. It's all white and clean and new, like a newborn. This place is a fresh start, even when it isn't.

The three of them have Soul Society out for blood and it's hardly the first time he's set foot in Aizen's fortress. But this time, it's different. He will never go back to his Reaper's robes. Rangiku will never hold him again.

It is more painful than he cares to admit, but that is true of all births.

VI. Honky Tonk Woman

Aizen shared his theories with Gin more often than not. Gin decided to take that as a compliment. Even the third wheel of their triumvirate wasn't privy to as much information as Aizen's former Lieutenant. (Then again, Aizen only went out of his way to bring the blind Captain aboard for his immunity to his shikai and that lovely bankai he possessed, so comparing himself to that pawn wasn't saying much.)

He suspected that Rangiku dressed the way she did because she was looking for Gin in another man's eyes.

She attracted men like moths to a flame. She wasn't as devious as Gin but she had learned enough from watching the master in the act. The men flocked to her and every time she hoped to see something of Gin's affection behind the haze of lust. She never had, of course, which was why she had been going out of her way to make him jealous with all this Hitsugaya talk, Aizen said. She still wanted to belong to Gin, despite all that had come between them, so she was crying out for Gin to take her in the one way he hadn't.

X. Lovefool

"Does that mean you love me?" Gin posed the question as guilelessly as possible, casually dropping the question like a conversation about the weather.

Aizen's lenses had gone blank at that, catching the light in such a way as to make his eyes unreadable. Gin had come to suspect they were trick lenses, which allowed him to perform that parlor trick whenever he pleased. Whatever the case, it was a useful tool in maintaining his poker face.

He had underestimated Gin. His Lieutenant saw just enough roundness in the man's lips and tension around his eyes to know he had struck a nerve somewhere deep beneath sweet, lovable Captain Aizen's marshmallow exterior. He counted it as a victory.

After some time, Aizen responded.

"I know you, Gin."

That was good enough for him. How could he love Gin when he knew what he was? It was an unspoken agreement that Aizen would stop trying to father him. Gin had never fallen for it and he found it quite insulting that Aizen continued trying to take that path with him.

Throwing it Aizen's face may have not been the high point of the Aizen-Ichimaru partnership, but Aizen deserved to see that illusion broken for bringing up Rangiku like that in the first place.