Characters: Aizen
Summary: All the others wander blind, but Sousuke can see clearly.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: no spoilers
Timeline: pre-manga
Author's Note: Kind of scary to listen to Aizen justify all his actions, isn't it?
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
As a young man newly dead, Aizen Sousuke can see the cracks in the system immediately. His eyes are clear, and jaded—all the shadowy tint of idealism is off them with the quick and brutal death of the woman who sleeps in a pallet next to his in the tenancy house—and they see the truth of the world.
This is not heaven. Soul Society is not heaven, only, maybe, an alternate realm of Hell, or at least a place where the imperfect rule, men and women who follow their own ambitions at the expense of everyone else. This is not heaven. This is a morass of squalid misery, the denizens with their shoulders so bowed that their noses brush the ground.
Sousuke can see it. It only amazes him that he's the only one who can see it—Sousuke would have thought that this sorry truth was obvious to the world at large, but instead he seems to have been the only one able to throw the veil from his eyes. Everyone else is wandering blind, and Sousuke…
Sousuke sees the light, or rather, the darkness thrown on Soul Society.
He becomes a Shinigami for the express purpose of change. As a Shinigami, he'll have the power to change things.
And he's better than the rest, able to advance more quickly, because he can see where all the others stumble around in the dark. Sousuke's rise through the ranks is so meteoric that it catches the attention of every captain in the Gotei Thirteen.
Only his own seems to think that there's anything wrong with that.
Hirako-taicho watches him like a hawk, eyes narrowed and suspicious. He too is blind but somehow he has guessed, just a little bit, at what's hiding beneath Sousuke's mild exterior.
Oh, well. Sousuke will take care of him in good time.
He'll take care of anyone who gets in his way. Because Sousuke knows he's the only one who take charge of things around here, the only one good enough and clear-eyes enough to do anything at all.
It's not like he wants to change things. It's not like Sousuke wants to make Soul Society into a better place, because Soul Society is irrevocably damned and no one can lift that stain, no one.
Instead, all Sousuke wants to do is take charge, so that he can raze Soul Society to the ground. Eradicate it from existence. Wipe it from memory. Make it as though Soul Society never existed at all.
Because this place is a stain on all existence.
And Sousuke has grown beyond this petty, insignificant realm. He wants no trace of what he once was, before the veil was thrown from his eyes, left to remain as a testament that even Gods have to start as insects.