Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach. All characters and settings used belong to Kubo Tite.
Summary: For her, he would steal all the stars in the sky. -GinRan
A/N: I may or may not have gotten some facts mixed up. But I loved this idea too much to alter it.

stars

They are young, and they are innocent.

The night air is heavy in their lungs; it is the peak of summer, and even the darkest hours of the day are moist and humid and so warm that they can do little else but flop into the cool grass and hope for a gust of fresh cool air. The area is quiet, the small shops and houses on the other side of the hill are all dark windows and grey walls and broken roofs. The only lights left are the stars.

The two of them lie spread-eagled and, like they always do, side by side. Unlike the times they huddle together for heat during cold winter nights (share the body warmth, hope that they will survive the cold to brave another day), they are spaced apart, stretching to link their hands across the distance between their bodies. It has been a long day, full of pickpocketing and running and laughing when nobody catches them, and they are tired.

They do very little. Gin is playing with pieces of dry grass with his free hand, and Rangiku is looking up, staring into the infinite night sky. He watches her, sees inky darkness reflected in her glassy blue eyes, and flips onto his front, moving closer to her in the process. His hand disengages from the grass to play with choppy strands of red-gold hair. She turns her head to look up at him.

"Gin?" she whispers, eyes closing slowly.

"Yeah?"

"If shinigami can jump through the sky, does that mean they can touch the stars?" It's a careless statement grown from drowsiness and sleep, but Gin wants to answer anyways.

"I dunno." he whispers back, lips hovering close to her ear.

"They're pretty," she says, half-asleep.

"The stars?"

"Mm."

"Yeah."

They fall asleep.

Gin sees Rangiku lying on the ground, collapsed from fatigue and hunger and something else that he can't place yet (but he knows it has to do with that brown-haired man that he saw leaving just moments before), and breaks into a sprint. The coins in his pocket thump painfully against his bony hip and his feet are sore beyond belief, but those are of no importance - he needs to know that Ran is alright, even though something already tells him that she's not.

He scoops her into his arms as soon as he reaches her side, and hears her mumble incoherently into his chest - "bright, Gin, it was too bright and ripping into my chest, stop, stop, what is this whatareyoudoingtome-!" before he manages to calm her down. She is shivering in his arms, and suddenly it hits him: she feels so much less substantial than before.

"Shhh, Ran, it's okay, shhhh..."

Gin will kill this man, for whatever he has done to her.

Nights in the Academy are always too noisy.

The boys that Gin shares his room with are always so loud and obnoxious, bragging about kills they've tallied and girls they've gotten. There is always sake (how they get supplied, Gin will never know), and just one hour into the night, he is tired of it. So he flash-steps out of the room, jumping across the rooftops of the Academy dorms towards the "secret hideout" that he shares with Ran.

She is already there, and smiles when he flashes beside her.

"Hey, Gin."

"Yer here already, Ran?"

"Yup!" she laughs happily, and her laughter feels like diamonds in his ears, small and bright and infinitely precious.

They settle into a comfortable silence, sitting back against each other. He watches her as she stargazes, just like the old days.

"I think," she says suddenly, "that the distance between Seireitei and the sky is smaller than the distance between the Earth and the sky."

"But that's not possible," he argues. "We're in different dimensions."

She turns her head and glares half-heartedly at him before looking up again. "Whatever. I still think they look closer."

They fall silent again, before Gin starts wondering out loud. "Why d'ya like stars so much, anyways?"

It only takes her a few moments to come up with an answer. "They're pretty, first of all," she giggles. Gin rolls his eyes, but she ignores him and keeps speaking. "And they're bright, and so hopelessly unreachable, and I dunno, I just think it's poetic."

He thinks that, instead of the stars, she's just described herself.

The moment he meets him, Gin knows that Aizen was the man who stole part of Ran's soul.

It's not a guess. He knows.

Which is why he works so hard to make his way up to Aizen's level, mastering shikai before he finishes the academy, and bankai a mere four years after. Once inducted into the Gotei Thirteen, he kills this way and that, moving up the ranks at a speed previously unheard of. For a while, even the captains are slightly concerned about how fast he moves, until they realize that Gin is just a boy with power and talent and a desire to find a place that fits.

(And a bloodthirsty drive to kill the man he hates most, but of course nobody knows that.)

In title, he is captain of the Third Division. But to her, he is just Gin, a boy she's known for centuries, a man who likes persimmons and autumn leaves and who is currently dangling something shiny in front of her face.

"What's this?"

"I dunno, Ran. Why don'tcha check it out for yerself?"

She reaches up to grab at a sparkly silver chain, and after a few moments of tangled hands and twisted chains, she finally manages to figure out what the necklace is supposed to look like. It's a thin chain connected in the middle by a thin silver ring, which has a smaller, separate chain with a tiny pendant dangling off of it.

"You shouldn't have, Gin!" she squeals, but she's smiling all the same.

"I know ya like it." he drawls, and hugs her. "Look closer."

She does, and she finds the names Gin & Rangiku carved into the inside of the silver ring.

"Oh. Is this what I think it is?"

He shrugs. "Only if ya want it to be. But just in case..." he trails off, reaching for the small teardrop pendant and popping it open with a click, "...here."

Ran looks down to find a diamond shining up into her eye.

"Yer own star," he murmurs. "Since ya like them so much.

She doesn't answer.

So bright and beautiful, and hopelessly unreachable...

Gin hates the Hogyoku, because it stole a part of Ran's soul. Every time Aizen draws it out for more experimentation, he has to do his best to keep his fists from clenching, his mouth from frowning. The shimmering cube flashes briefly whenever it consumes another soul, and those flashes drive Gin insane, because they are proof that he is still weak and cowardly and unable to save innocents.

(And Ran. Especially Ran.)

But when he finally gets his chance, when he finally reveals his true powers and his true allegiances, when he has literally stabbed Aizen in the back...the prize is his for the taking.

It shines purple-white in the center of Aizen's chest, pulsing and flickering, so full of power that it could send Gin to his knees. He is strong, however, and overcomes these trivial matters of strenght, because he has a purpose.

No matter how much he dislikes associating Ran's favorite things with it, the Hogyoku looks like a star.

This is for Ran, he thinks, and reaches out to grab it.

She is drinking the night away again, sake and tears her only companions. Izuru has been carried away by either Renji or Hisagi, and her captain is not around to yell at her, because he is too busy visiting Hinamori. The sake bottle wobbles on the table when she sets it down.

Her eyes are clouded over, but she still sees tiny pinpricks of light when she looks out of the window. Another starry night, and her heart breaks, because they always remind her of him and the times they spent together, of evenings on grass hills and school nights on rooftops and secret rendezvous in the alley between her apartment and the walls of Seireitei...

She reaches up, to catch herself a star. A real one, to remember him by.

Higher and higher...and she doesn't touch a thing.

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