Sorry I haven't been around for a while. College work has finally caught up with me, and my sanity has not.
The entire day, he spent watching the boy move back and forth hurridly across the room, sweeping, cleaning, filing papers, writing new ones, wondering to himself if this was making everything worse or if it just did nothing. Because it certainly wasn't making anything better. He could hardly believe that he'd actually told Izuru the actual reason he chose him for a Lieutenant, summed up the whole plot that Aizen had been planning for 100 years in about a minute. Well, it was at least the reason that he chose one of the four of them as Lieutenant, the four young, impressionable students, all with different colored hair. As for why he chose Izuru specifically out of the four of them . . . well, Aizen had explained the reason quite well. He had a thing for blonds.
And Izuru had dismissed the whole thing as a joke, and not even a funny one at that. He was genuinely annoyed by his Captain's happy-go-lucky demeanor, his tendency to make jokes at everything, even when it wasn't appropriate – especially when it wasn't appropriate. He couldn't imagine what would have happened had Izuru actually believed him; he could imagine the look of shock and horror on his face, pressing for more details, asking in his nervous, high-pitched voice why, why, why? What he couldn't imagine was his own counter-reaction: would he actually answer the questions in full and honestly, or would he deflect it all and say that it was a joke after all?
Another thing he could imagine was a conversation with Aizen, had Izuru believed him. Oh, wouldn't it be a pleasant one, too. He could almost physically feel the anger bubbling inside his former Captain, see the veins ready to burst in his forehead.
"You told him?!" Aizen would mutter with dangerously suppressed anger.
"It slipped," Gin would say, shrugging his shoulders innocently. "But now we gotta take him along."
"No," Aizen would reply, and draw his sword. "Now we 'gotta' kill him."
Gin suppressed a shudder. Oh, yes. That's how it would most likely end. Someone's death. It was always going to end with someone's death, at least one someone, but he would really rather it not be Izuru's. Aizen was right, he had become attached . . . in a way. Didn't like the idea of leaving, the idea of leaving him behind. He had known that the end was coming for how many years, now, and yet he spent it more immersed in Seiretei and the people here than he knew he should have.
It was like death, in a way. The ever-looming end we all know is coming. Spend twenty, fifty, one hundred years, knowing that it's just around the corner, and hope that it's going to happen later than sooner so that you can enjoy whatever life has to give you. And when it's approaching you don't want to prepare, still hanging on to that hope. But he was looking forward to the death . . . just didn't want it to come so soon.
So, fine. Aizen was right. He rubbed his forehead, trying to look like he was getting a headache from reading. Izuru wasn't an idiot, but he was too shy to say anything, so Gin continued his façade. Fine. Fine. Aizen was right, he was right, he was always so fricking observant . . . but him being right didn't change anything. It didn't help anything. He hadn't said the best way to rectify this unforeseen problem . . .he hadn't said any way to rectify this.
"You'd better figure this out, Gin," was all he had said. It was almost like he himself, the great Sosuke Aizen, had no idea how to deal with something like this. Lima Syndrome, he believed it was called. He had seen it ages ago when doing the research on Stockholm Syndrome, the exact opposite. He couldn't recall there being a name for an instance when both things occurred. Perhaps that was why Aizen couldn't figure it out. It was quite rare, indeed.
So how to best go about undoing this? Distancing himself from the boy was the first thing that came to mind. Little by little, spend less and less time with him, be less intimate, be less of a lover, more of just a Captain. But hadn't he proved it himself, that it would have just the opposite effect he was looking for? "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." You make something the norm, you take it away, the psyche seeks homeostasis and needs to get back to normal. His own strategies were now playing against him. Urgh. It was mind-bending.
And Izuru wasn't an idiot. He was actually quite clever, clever enough to be in the honors class, clever enough to see through him if he was distant. He was clever enough now to see that Gin was not actually reading one of his (Izuru's) dumb romance novels. Clever enough to notice that Gin wasn't feeling quite as cheerful as he normally did. He would notice if something off was going on, he would feel the difference if Gin was trying to be distant. Clever, yes. Intelligent, yes. Observant, perhaps not. Confident, certainly not. If I simply left him, Gin thought. He would only blame himself. But to do so would be tasteless. Not to mention, it didn't solve anything, didn't solve the attachment for either of them. It was like some stupid plot in a soap opera . . or one of these books, Gin thought, skimming through the chapters of Philophobia.
Yes, to simply leave would leave for something to be desired. There would be no climax in that, no poetry at all. But he couldn't think of anything else and neither, so it seemed, could Aizen. He wondered, then, if Aizen had wanted Gin to simply leave and never come back. It would catch Izuru off-guard, and there would be no suspicion. No time for him to be stopped. It would leave the boy heartbroken, moody, and angry -- well, more than usual. And though he wasn't sure on what Aizen intended, he was positive that Aizen would not care in what state he left this place, or any of its inhabitants.
Had he really dug himself into such a deep hole that there was no hope of climbing out unscathed?
Unscathed . . . that was the issue he didn't want to address, not even to himself and especially not to Aizen. Gin put a hand to his head with an actual headache and buried his face deeper into the book to hide his bothered expression. He knew how Izuru would feel if he left now, as they were, without putting any emotional distance between them. But . . . how would he himself fare? Yes, he would be able to get through it, he was sure nothing was too bad to bare. But what exactly was he going to feel?
Pain? Suffering? Longing? These were words he did not readily associate with himself, nor did anyone else who knew him. He hadn't truly felt any of those things in a long time; life was just a joke, and so there was nothing to hurt about, nothing to be sad about. But if he left now, would there be something to be sad about? A feeling of loss, that something is missing? They described it well in these trashy books, which was probably why Izuru liked them. He could relate to them. And that was probably why Gin despised them so much. He didn't want to relate to them.
No Gin corrected himself. I just don't relate to them.
But some of Aizen's words from yesterday's conversation came swimming to the surface of his mind at these thoughts.
"That was not helpful."
Gin only realized then what strange language he had used. "Not helpful." Why not use "useless" or "pathetic"? Those words were more his style, yet he had stuck to "not helpful." Did it imply something? Something he was expecting to happen because of the attachment to Izuru?
A fleeting vision passed before his eyes of himself, and Aizen, and Tousen, engaged in a final battle with Seiretei. Except that it was only the other two who were doing the fighting; Gin was just standing there, staring straight ahead, a look of devistation on his face. Being "not helpful."
Gin shut the book and stood up suddenly. That was never going to happen – that couldn't be what Aizen really believed. That he would be so pained by being apart from his Lieutenant that he would not be able to function? Laughable. It was just paranoia. On both of their parts.
Izuru noticed his Captain's movement, glancing briefly at him and then back to the work that he was accomplishing without distraction. Gin looked at him for a moment, then walked quickly out the door, in need of a distraction of his own.