Pairing: Gin Ichimaru x Ichigo Kurosaki

Music: O Death Remix, by Jen Titus

Word count: ~ 1700

Rating: M

Prompt 44: Turpentine Kisses and Mistaken Blows

Dysfunctional is a good description of their relationship.

Fucked up works pretty well, too.

But Ichigo stopped trying to define what they have around the time it began. There's no comfort in giving it a name, a descriptor, when it's just two people throwing themselves at each other as their lives shatter and break apart around them.

His flat is tiny, dark, set firmly in the very worst part of town, and cheap. Ichigo hates it more than he ever thought it possible to hate anything, back when he was a naïve young doctor moving from the suburbs to the big city. But it's a place to sleep, even if it isn't a home, and he sighs with a little relief as he steps in the door, dropping his coat on the stand in the entrance and toeing off his shoes. He's a surgeon now, but as good at it as he is, he sees so much crime and pain every day that he sometimes wonders if all the talent in the world could make any difference.

The man sitting in his favorite chair coughs politely, but Ichigo doesn't jump. He's gotten far too used to this uninvited guest lately.

"What is it this time?" he asks, lighting the gas lamps. Once, the question would have been sharp. Now even that edge is gone from him, stolen away by the sight of the notorious assassin in his sitting room.

Chuckling a little, Gin offers up a hand dyed scarlet with rivulets of blood. There's a wound near his shoulder, a bullet graze by the looks of it, but not serious. The only worry is the glimpse of whirring clockwork that Ichigo can see underneath the torn edges of skin, the gears of Gin's prosthetic limb showing through.

"You got caught?" Ichigo doesn't wait for an answer, but drags his medical kit off the closet shelf and sets it on the table, sinking down next to Gin as he lays out what he'll need.

"Mah, Ichi, don't worry." Gin's voice is bright and sunny and means absolutely nothing, as good a disguise as any carnival mask. "Just a scratch."

But someday it won't be. Ichigo presses his lips together to keep the words in, because regardless of what Gin says, he doesn't feel the need to mother the entire world. Just Gin, when he does something stupid.

If that is rather often, then it's Gin's fault and no one else's. He brings it upon himself.

The delicate tools are familiar in Ichigo's hands, an extension of his fingers as he cuts away the torn fake skin to get at the clockwork below. Gears and pistons move and hiss in endless motion, and Ichigo pauses for a second to simply watch. They're beautiful. The entire limb is beautiful, a creation that took him months to finish and attach. He knows each cog the way he knows his own face in a mirror, and it's the work of a minute to adjust the gears back to their normal rhythms.

As he tinkers, Gin looks around his rooms with curious eyes, taking in the workbench in the far corner, the diagram of a bird's wing hung on the wall above it. Two more prosthetic limbs made of intricate golden clockwork rest on the table, one half-covered in fake skin, the other bare and gleaming. In the corner, a clockwork cat bats at a ball of yarn, then rolls onto its side and curls up with a grinding purr. A mouse made of copper scurries around it, underneath the feet of a tiny clockwork soldier playing a flute. On the bench itself, a bird with gleaming silver wings hops and flutters, lifting ever so slightly above the wood before it settles again.

Gin smiles to himself, not the sharp grin he hides behind so often but a true smile, full of wonder. Ichigo has always been one of the best inventors, his work intricate and unbelievably detailed in its workings. Lifelike, too, in a time when most prosthetic limbs are ugly and clunky and kill the host body more often than not. Gin is lucky that they met, because a man in his line of work can't afford to be seen as weak, like those with missing limbs usually are. With Ichigo's, even Gin sometimes forgets that his left arm isn't real.

The silver bird hops to the edge of the table, folds its wings, and chirps put the notes of a nightingale's song.

"Wings," Ichigo says suddenly, as though it's an explanation. His eyes are still fixed on his tools, replacing a damaged gear that wasn't turning smoothly. "I'm trying to build wings."

Gin knows. Ichigo has been trying to build wings for years, ever since Gin first met him. It's a dream that Gin can't understand, the urge to throw oneself off a tall building and drift along with nothing underneath to hold one up. But it's Ichigo's dream, and that makes it precious.

He says nothing. Ichigo's dream is to fly, while Gin's is to be able to hold him back and never let him leave the earth.

It doesn't matter. Neither of their dreams will come true any time soon.

The first time they met, the masks that they wore were too thick. Ichigo could only see the eerie assassin, and Gin could only see the angry surgeon. They crossed paths several times, Ichigo usually having to deal with Gin's aftermath, and they often came to blows. But then Gin was injured—deathly so, he had thought at the time. He lost his arm, lost his home and his job, and was left with nothing.

Ichigo took him in and built him an arm out of copper and bronze, silver and gold, and stole his heart in trade.

It was a fair one, he thought, as Gin had his heart, too.

But Aizen still controlled the lower city, and Gin was still his man, no matter how many limbs he lost or how damaged he was. Ichigo was still a surgeon in the middle levels, consumed by his work with gear mechanisms and artificial limbs, and there was nothing between them, really.

Except that there was, and all the protestations or mistaken blows in the world couldn't change that.

Now they exist in an odd sort of limbo, suspended between complete avoidance and a true relationship. Gin comes whenever he's injured, even if it's only slightly, and Ichigo drops everything to see to him. When Gin is patched up, his clockwork limb repaired and everything else in working order, they have an excuse to spend that single day or night together.

It's not a healthy relationship, but they don't think of it when they can it, and that makes it a little better. Instead, they only focus on the future, on when one day this will all be in the past.

It's not a life, but it is a way to live.

"There." Ichigo puts down his tools and reaches for the new patch of fake skin to paste on. "It should work a little better now. I've got a new mixture of grease for you, too." He seals the patch over the old, torn skin and sits back, touching Gin's shoulder lightly. "You're done."

Gin lifts his arm, feeling the familiar hum of the clockwork running, and pulls Ichigo closer—closer, closer, always closer, as though he can keep him here, with Gin, through willpower alone.

"Ichi," he breathes, thanks and grief and apology and mourning for what they can never have, what they can never have together, all mixed up into one.

Ichigo smiles back at him, just slightly, because he wears a frown as a mask instead of a grin, and rests his forehead against Gin's. "Gin," he returns, and it's an acknowledgement of all the things that neither of them can say. Gin wishes that it wasn't, that he could leave Aizen and come back right now and be everything that Ichigo needs him to be, but it's not going to happen soon. It might never happen, but that's something he can't bring himself to think about.

He loves Ichigo, and Ichigo loves him.

But in this dark, dark world, where people have replaced their feeling hearts with clockwork, it's not enough.

Soon, Gin will go back to Las Noches, deep in the city, and give his report to Lord Aizen. Soon, Ichigo will return to his work, bent over tiny gears and pistons and motors as he tries to give humans wings. They will have to part, to take separate paths as they try to live out their lives in the filth and decay and rubble of a society that values clockwork over humanity. Love is good, love is wonderful, but it cannot bridge the gap between what they want and what they are allowed to have.

"Someday," Ichigo whispers, as though he knows Gin's thoughts, and maybe he does. He stands, and Gin stands with him, eyes serious. Ichigo doesn't know if he loves or hates that look on Gin's face, but he kisses it off anyway.

Their first kiss is always like turpentine, stripping away both of their masks and leaving their true selves bare to each other.

Gin takes him to bed, takes him apart with hands and mouth and cock, and then puts him back together again.

He leaves just as dawn begins to break over the city, pale light only highlighting the shadows. Ichigo stands in the doorway, wrapped in a robe, and watches as Gin fades away into the tangled maze of streets. No one can know about what they have together. No one from Gin's world can know about Ichigo, and vice versa. It's too dangerous.

But someday, when Gin is free and Ichigo can fly with clockwork wings, when there are no turpentine kisses and mistaken blows between them, then love will be enough.

Ichigo stands in the doorway, watching the rising sun, and whispers, "Someday."

It's closer now than it was yesterday, and that's what keeps him going.