I was little disposed to care. In fact I could perhaps smother him beneath this fist and make him swallow the dusts I had been made to eat back there in Hueco Mundo… or just forget it, which would only be cool if I was messing around and not when I was actually trying to make things happen… this dude was Ichimaru Gin. The other dude in the area was Aizen Sousuke aka God of the Underworld, biggest among all them bastards, as he was kind enough to hint. But out of all the ruins laid out before my eyes, including Aizen's new diva hairdo and the evening gown he was wearing, the sight that struck me hardest was Gin, dying. Really dying and nothing short of it. I could smell Aizen's part in this, and that which could not be extricated from him, treachery. Out of simple karmic fairness, Gin probably had done GOU some serious offense, otherwise he would've gotten away with it, all smiles. But something else was loosing hell on me. Rangiku was drifting towards us and as she did so, GOU's grin began to shed all its subtleties, which probably was just as bad as the near fact that this chick was a dead on arrival case, or worse. Come on, just what the fuck was she doing here?

She was sobbing, for a start, like something had gone irretrievably bad or someone she loved deeply had gone over to the afterlife. I half hoped it was the former as I really would crap my pants if she was, at this point in time, still in love with that bastard of a fox. But whether her business here mattered depended largely on how near she intended to get to us. If she was brewing on finishing Aizen's job and slitting Gin's throat all the way, that would be good news for me, along with the caution that she'd keep her distance from the grander bastard. God, who knew what sort of cheap tricks he had to wack us with?

But why the hell was she crying like she was all set up to drown the city under?

And then it happened. With her light feet she landed beside her old friend, who was half a corpse right about this time by the way, knelt down beside him, continued to sob like crazy… and cradled him in her arms. I couldn't tell what shocked me more; her inconsolable grief or the fact that Gin's hand, the one that wasn't missing, stretched out to touch her face to try to wipe away her tears. It was a touching spectacle, true, only that certainly NOTHING of it was right.

Dire and sudden, it occurred to me that which was obvious, or hidden. On account of my wits, I was being wiser than I had ever been, what with all the things I could actually read from what I was seeing. She had loved him all the while, and surprisingly it wasn't unrequited. Jesus.

"Don't die, please." She begged in between fits of sobs.

"I'm sorry."

This was when I started to care. He couldn't die here, or else she would follow him down, which was something like maybe three people on the premises could easily speculate if they watched her long enough. And here I was, thinking and believing that every little thing I knew of this man had been either a mistake or a big fat lie. I didn't know how I came up with the idea, nor was I confident of my knowledge of everything I had been witnessing all the while, but I was sure he wasn't the man I thought he was. In my effort to shove my attention to where it belonged, I came to realize that he had loved her too, protected her all these years, and longed to give her back everything she had lost before-after all those years, after more than one hundred fucking years, right smack under Aizen's nose. Yep, that was how it went, that or Aizen wasn't a bastard, and a drag. To save her from the pains of the world, that was Gin's promise? That was hard to reconcile, I know, after the attempted murder he pulled on Toushiro a few months back. Geez.

And really now, something like this could only be truly amazing under the right circumstances. Yes, I must be going out of my mind.

No, Ichimaru Gin must not die here. Not now, at least.

"Come, Aizen." I heard myself say.

END