I really hate that I can't use strike throughs on this website :(
The first thing Sōsuke Aizen has memory of is hunger. A dull ache in his stomach that grows to pain the longer it goes usated.
(He will learn, decades later, that only those with high reiryoku are able to feel hunger)
He doesn't remember, he's never known, if he was born in Soul Society or if he'd merely died young. He doesn't recall if he had parents at some point, or if he'd been a hollow once. It doesn't matter, for he doubts very much that he will ever know the answer to these things. There are some things that are simply impossible to find the answers to.
All he knows for certain is the hunger that he had become aware of.
Then the dust on his skin. Grit in his eyes. Dead grass beneath his hands.
The trees that stand as witness to his beginning are bare of greenery. They are nothing more than skeletons and dead wood, pressed in close and strangling each others roots.
There are no other humans around, only empty clothes laying on the earth around him.
He doesn't know his name. He doesn't know where he is or what's happening.
Hunger gets his legs up under him.
Hunger drives him, stumbling and new, into the dull light.
It's barely a town where he spends the next two decades. It's all adult men and women covered in bruises or scars that grip knives with white knuckles. He is the only child among them, and he keeps that title with bloodied fists and teeth.
His ribs hurt and his stomach aches fiercely. Food is in scarce supply, whether people feel the same hunger as he does or not. What little there is is jealously guarded, and nothing is taken without a price paid for it. Gold and silver are worth nothing here. Only steel and bone make a difference.
There is something inside of him that tells him he could be stronger.
It's a whisper in the night, a breeze on a pond in his dreams.
Grow, says the moon in the water. Grow stronger. Grow smarter. Grow.
It's something in the way he walks. To tall, too confident.
The men find him when the moon is gone from the sky and can't float on the water any longer.
"You think you're better than us, just because you've got a little bit of reiryoku?" he reeks of sake and years gone unwashed. He's flanked by three others, all of them red faced and unstable.
That doesn't stop the hits from hurting.
"You're no better than we are!"
"You're just a brat no one wanted, that's why you're here."
"Where'd your whore mother leave you anyway huh? In the woods? Fucking bush runt."
When he lifts his head to spit on one of them he's slammed down again so hard he sees stars. Blood roars in his ears and pours down his face with the tears and snot. His lips split. He screams.
It's over.
When he looks up there's only clothes on the ground, and he learns how to keep his head bowed and mild. Even still, people start avoiding him. Fear leads to isolation.
He is only just an adolescent when people begin to vanish. They leave blood stains on the ground and screams in the night. There have been other children in the years. None of them last long. Even the ones that he tries to protect can't take as many hits as he can, or go as long without. The latest dies not a month after he meets them. Adults have stopped speaking to him entirely. He is too smart, to vicious, to strong.
It takes four months for the shinigami to arrive.
One woman faints at the sight of them, the pressure of their souls so intense she can't take it. He scoffs quietly. He is just as strong, and they don't drop to their knees for him.
He watches them with solemn eyes. They wander like sparrows, with no direction and hardly any drive. Merely being in their village is a chore for these people, never mind the dead.
They are only people in the outer districts, he hears them whisper. Unmanageable and unwashed. They don't even have shoes.
Sosuke bites his lip so hard it bleeds. That is not enough for him. He will no be contented to this life and fade away or be torn apart by monsters, those with and those without masks.
He walks up to one shinigami and points him to the hunting ground. The place by the river, where everyone must go eventually. That's where they will find the monster that they barely bothered to look for.
Someone calls him clever. Someone else notes his energy levels.
None of them look back when they leave again.
He looks at the stick and stone huts that make up his village for a long time before he follows their foot prints. He is worth more than dirt and dead grass and bloody teeth. Regardless of what they tell him. He will find people who recognize that he is a person, that he deserves to be seen, that he deserves to eat and wash and live.
The first time he sets sight on the seireitei the only thing that over rides his anger is his hunger.
He wants it. He wants that place. He wants his place in its wall and all that it entails. Shoes, soap, food.
He wants all of it. And he hates these people for hoarding it. He'd worked his way through the rukongai, and he'd made his way to the first districts with calloused hands and a mild smile. He'd seen people throw food away. He'd seen them discard perfectly good clothes and tools simply because they were old.
All of this waste, and yet he'd gone hungry for so long. For what reason?
He'd learned to read in return for months of hard labor, and he'd gotten himself accepted into the academy on work alone.
By then he was still young for the academy, but not the youngest. He had learned to be mild and polite. He'd learned to hide the blood in his teeth and wear his sleeves long enough to hide calloused palms and scarred knuckles.
He'd even started to wear glasses, to give the impression that he was smarter than people thought. And he was. Smarter. Smart enough and savvy enough that he lost his accent and polished his edges so swiftly that anyone who didn't know before hand where he'd come from never would. Kido came to him as easy as breathing. All of his classes did. It just made sense, like fitting together pieces of puzzles. History and law, mathematics and management.
Poetry especially became a passion of his. It was elegant and beautiful, it opened a window to the soul of the writer.
The stroke of the brush and the stroke of the sword was the same. Once made it could never be undone. There the true intentions were laid bare to the world.
He chose a poetic name for himself. One that was just as unassuming at his smile and his eyes.
Sosuke Aizen. 'Clever' and 'mediator', and 'love' and 'peace'. Something that he was and something that he wasn't. Truth and lies.
He had barely graduated when the moon finally spoke to him a name on the water.
Kyoka Suigetsu.
" You have grown, my Sosuke."
She is lovely and insubstantial. She ripples at the edges and her long white hair flows like water around them. Her blue eyes are so dark they're nearly black, and her kimono swims with black and white koi.
She is like him, everything seemingly dripped in finery and hiding the callouses beneath. She is as beautiful as the truth is ugly. Sosuke loves her, suddenly and fiercely. He always has. She is the changing moon that has always watched over him.
She is alone in that.
Even in the academy, surrounded by others, he realizes quickly that he is cut from a different cloth.
He is smarter, stronger, he adapts faster. It leaves him standing above students, a pedestal they cannot reach, but below shinigami who are even weaker than he by the simple merrit of he has not yet graduated.
He asks one of those shinigami one day, when they are visiting to scout new recruits for their squads, why no one has ever tried to make things better for the outer districts.
(why no one ever tried to make it better for him)
They laughed at him, and the notion that anyone would care for mere rukongai trash. Someone all the way from Akaiha was worth less than the dirt on the shoes of someone like a Kuchiki. One person from Junrinan was worth more than eighty people from the eightieth districts. Why bother with people like that?
If they really hated it there so much they should have worked harder to get out.
If their lives were so terrible they should just hurry up and die and move on.
Another answer comes, years later. It's given to him by Shinji Hirako, his new captain, but the words aren't really aimed at him. They stand on a balcony above the graduation class after him. He's a fourth seat, fresh himself, and prepared to claw his way higher with grace and smiles.
The difference between the people below them is stark. The rukon seeds, the nobility, and the mercantile. It's in the slope of shoulders, the set of jaws, and the dark eyes. Even their uniforms bear the marks of their origins. Some are new, even in the last days of class. Others are threadbare, grown out of and patched messily in places.
"It's the same every year," Hirako says to Rose. The two blonds are shoulder to shoulder, flanked by their underlings. Hirako has no lieutenant, so his entourage is larger.
"A shame," Rose's usual smile is faded into a pensive frown.
"Don't look like that. There's nothing you can do and you know it. They keep the rukon full so when the Soul King needs to lighten the weight no one with any power does anything about it. That's how it's always been."
"I know that." Rose's frown deepens. "That doesn't mean I like it."
"No. None of us do."
Sosuke thinks of cruel smiles and sabotages. Finery hides the sickest hearts. He's not sure that Hirako is right. Plenty of people like the system just fine. All the ones with power do. The nobility does nothing because it keeps them safe and it keeps them living in luxury. They like living above the common riff raff.
Sosuke starts looking more into history. There have been attempts at change in the past. Rebellions and insurgencies, all crushed. Each time things got worse for the citizens of the Rukongai. More resources were taken, trade was restricted, business taxes increased until the squalor of the outer districts encroached until it reached all the way to the fifty first. The nobles owned the Central 46, who all Shinigami would obey without question. They cut down citizens they should have protected.
After that it stopped. Fear held them in place. They were no more than sheep.
Sosuke would not be a sheep. He refused.
Isolation was a deadly thing.
To be alone, even when surrounded by other people, was the worst sort of torture. He may not have shown it, but he struggled to resign himself to the world as it was. Why should he? He had been born strong. He hadn't realized it at the time, but the empty clothes around where he woke up were people crushed by his mere presence. He had learned, quickly, to hide himself inside his own skin.
No one saw him. No one saw what he saw. A king that never knew his subjects, a ruling class that revelled in the suffering of those beneath them. There was a king with no face, no name, no influence. No king at all.
The throne in the sky was empty and Sousuke still knew the hunger. It still clawed at his chest and stomach.
Hirako was suspicious of him. He'd never done anything to warrant it, but the captain watched him like he was waiting for an explosion.
He was the last of his graduating class to be sent to the human world. The senkaimon was acting strangely, and they were going to put it off a few more months, but the head captain insisted, over Hirako's protests. He said Sosuke needed to get his feet wet.
So he went.
He stepped out of the gate and onto a beach, where western troops marched in the dying red light.
This was not right. It wasn't right at all.
Where were the thick wooden walls and tiled roofs of Kyoto? Surely it couldn't have changed so much since the last paintings were brought back from the human world! There really must have been something wrong with the Senkaimon. It dropped him somewhere he was certainly not meant to be.
There was something weird here too. The air was dense, like the atmosphere had suddenly compressed without room to expand. And the soldiers. Most of them weren't just in identical uniforms. Some of them had the same face!
They were all alive, that much he could tell, and none of them paid any mind to him.
He touched the hilt of his zanpakutou, a curl of worry and a thrill of excitement coursing through him before he brushed them underneath reasoning and logic.
Is it an illusion?
He knows she is the best when it comes to such things. No one else could compare, and once he has someone snared there's nothing else. The game is over and he has won.
She thrums under his fingers a small denial.
No. It's real. Everything is real, but everything is also...
Wrong. He can feel it. There's something very, very wrong in the air. A thickness, a blanket over the land. The edges of the horizon somehow seem more like a cage than an invitation to find where they lead. As if they lead nowhere.
What is this?!
Sosuke forces himself to calm down. He's never understood people who let their anger cloud their judgement, or fear decide their actions. Nothing good ever comes of that.
He needs information.
He tries, first, to open the senkaimon again, but to no avail. He stabs the air at least five times before he gives up on that option. Panic thrums under his skin. He sets it aside yet.
An investigation begins.
He follows troops and listens to orders. People are fighting, a war between Americans and the clan Connacht.
Soldiers for it march to a prison, where a high profile captive it being held under a general. Seeking information he follows after.
Inside, he finds a tragedy and a miracle all in one.
A human who can see him. A man who travels through time in a desperate attempt to save the world he lives in. A boy who has no power on his own but can empower into other people.
He's an interest ( amazing ) human.
At first glance he's just a moody teenager. All scowls and harsh edges. Sosuke gets to watch them soften around his people. Mash, a girl of tremendous resilience and knowledge. Cu Cullain, a magician who is two people at once, gentle and fierce in equal turns. Medusa is a vicious contender, with sharp teeth and serpents in her hair. The only smiles she has are reserved for pretty girls, and Ichigo himself.
It's not his intention, but Sosuke starts to get attached.
It's not his intention, but Sosuke starts to trust them.
Ichigo feels like his first and final chance. He sees the same injustices, he encourages Sosuke's anger.
He tells him to change the world.
For the first time in his life Sosuke blossoms. He doesn't need to hold himself back, or pretend to be anything other than what he is. Ichigo sees through his facade anyways. Ichigo keeps up with the twisting paths and whip quick leaps Sosuke's mind makes. He's a match for him. Never has Sosuke felt anything like what he felt when Ichigo placed his hand on his shoulder and shoved his very soul inside his skin.
Fire and moonlight, an ocean of power rushing into Sosuke's swollen lake of reiryoku.
For the first time in his life Sosuke begs. When Ichigo tells him that he'll forget him, forget them, he tells him secrets. He lets him touch Kyoka Suigetsu and offers him only truth. He will never be able to hide from Ichigo again, and he will give up every mask and tempered smile he has if it means Ichigo will restore him to how he is in America.
Free.
The empty throne in the sky doesn't exist anymore. There are only stars and the sun.
It's a war. Bloody and desperate. Every hollow in hueco mundo has brought themselves to the feast, or to run from the end of their home.
It's still precious to him. Ichigo's roughness manages to sand away his edges and hard corners, in the best ways.
It can't stay. He clings to Ichigo when the battles are over and the light starts to shimmer around him. If he could he would follow him all the way to Chaldeas, no matter the consequences. If he could.
He can't.
He loses everything, and he can't even mourn it.
He stepped out of the gate and onto a beach, where western troops marched in the dying red light.
He stepped out of the gate and onto a beach, where western troops marched-
He stepped out of the gate and onto a beach, where-
Onto a beach-
Onto a beach-
Onto a-
Into carefully planned out streets lined with high wooden walls and roofs tiled in blue. Souls wander, forlorn and clinking with the chains of fate. Somewhere off to the east there's a hollow hunting for dinner. The living are just as down trod as the dead, trudging through their daily toil.
Sosuke stumbles forwards. He blinks several times. He had just been reaching for something, hadn't he? He'd been trying to hold something in his hands…
Something in his hands.
He looks down at his clenched fist. There is something cool and powerful held in his hand.
The one constant in Sosuke Aizen's life is hunger.