Bleach Fan Fiction ❯ inside of the iceberg ❯ Neck ( Chapter 3 )

She climbed to the roof quietly, careful even of her breath. Sure enough, he sat there, propped against the pipes and the ventilation system. He looked like a faun, a spirit of this modern age in the land of the living, at home only amongst wires and poles and automatic machines which exchanged metal-packed drinks for round coins of worthless scrap. His white hair ruffled by the wind, he looked over his kingdom and it's many glimmering lights.

The town of Karakura stretched to both sides of eternity it seemed. From the small plain that was the roof of Orihime's apartment, the town went on forever, only occasionally ripped by dark patches representing mountains and the lonely woods on them.

Quiet in this world was never as quiet as the one in their world. At first Matsumoto thought it would be impossible to drown out the cacophony of cars passing, lights buzzing or people talking, always awake. But despite her initial fear of insomnia in this loud place, she was now used to the bustling oxymoronic silence of these living cities. In fact, she came to cherish its relentless vivaciousness.

Matsumoto stood behind her captain, letting thousands of little voices crash over her, carried by the night wind. It was so alive, this town. Nothing like the realm of the spirits, where the night meant calm and darkness and silence and sleep. All was busy, all was bustling with electricity and the humming engines, immortal in their tiny cages of metal and plastic. And Hitsugaya, consuming the life of the night into himself as if it was nourishment and repose itself.

She stood and wondered what his thoughts might be. Surely, the battle to come occupied his mind. The fight for the salvation of balance, order and the cycle of death and birth; the struggle against the chaos threatening both their worlds and this city in particular. Was he, like she was now, imagining the end of the pretty lights on the horizon, the absolute silence, the unnatural calm that didn't even mean death, but simply the lack of creation? Because, surely, if they failed, the town of Karakura along with all its inhabitants will be no more. Not even dead, simply gone.

“What is it, Matsumoto?” He was looking at her now, pupils reflecting the distant twinkle of electric lights all around them. And for a second his youngish face had no human features, but supernatural ones with icy white fur and the gleaming beast-eyes. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, it's nothing. I just couldn't sleep.”

“You were talking to the girl before.”

“Orihime fell asleep a while back,” reflected Matsumoto, walking up to her commander in chief. Avoiding the clothe-lines she came up to the very edge where he was leaning on the pipes, his feet resting nonchalantly on the low concrete wall separating them from the six story drop to the streets. “She has a lot on her mind. This is all very hard on her.”

“You are rather fond of this girl,” Hitsugaya said in a low voice, as if he didn't want to wake Orihime up. His gaze returned to the town spreading before him.

“I am. She is a good kid. All of them are, if you think about it,” said Matsumoto in an equally gentle voice, the kind one would use by the side of a relative's sick-bed. Or at a funeral. Matsumoto shuddered at her own thoughts but pressed on. “They are quite remarkable. Brave. But this is hard on them and I don't think they deserved it.”

“Brave…” mumbled Hitsugaya. “Stubborn, more like.”

“As I remember, sir, there is not much of a difference.”

“There is,” said Hitsugaya, using his captain-tone that, although quiet now, still left no room for doubting. “Bravery is done for the sake of a cause. It is all about thoughtful, resolute men who have something to protect, something they are loyal to. And are willing to sacrifice for it. That is bravery. What they are doing is pure stubbornness. It is foolhardy and dead-set.”

“You think they have no cause? They do this out of spite? Spite for whom? Us?” Matsumoto questioned her captain, her voice sharp and daring. “Without them we would be in an even worse position that we are in now. They have been nothing if not helpful. And resolute. And the more I learn about their lives in this place, the more I understand just how much they have to lose here.”

“It is OUR job,” Hitsugaya stated. “Our job to clean up our own mess. From the very beginning, they came fighting without knowing half the situation. That is why I say they are rash and stubborn. That is not bravery, it is pig-headedness.”

Matsumoto tried to catch her captain's gaze. He was staring into the distance, perhaps reading some message hidden between the lights and the stars. “Like I said, I never knew the two to be different. And I have learned that watching you, Captain.”

He turned to face her, finally, confused and surprised. “When have I been foolhardy?” he asked in an honestly astonished tone.

“Foolhardy or determined, whichever you'd like to call it. But I've seen you take on bigger lumps than you can chew.”

Hitsugaya looked to his feet, stretched over the ledge and hovering above the city. His eyebrows were knit in thought. “I don't remember taking on what I thought I couldn't handle,” he murmured.

“And I don't remember Kurosaki Ichigo biting on something he couldn't swallow either,” smiled Matsumoto wistfully.

Hitsugaya's hardness returned to his azure eyes immediately. “This is simply not their fight to fight. They will only get in the way, they will only get hurt and die. They should just stay out of it and let me-“ he stopped himself before Matsumoto could utter her words of protest. It was obvious enough; even he heard it himself. Jaws clenched tight, he looked to nothing. He seemed old, tired and concerned.

Matsumoto gave him another moment and then said softly, “Like I said, they are great kids. They…grow on you. But the only way we can protect them is to fight by their sides. They are too stubborn not to be brave this time around as well,” she paused and added as a precaution, “And you can't do everything yourself.”

“…it's our mess. It's my mess.”

She knew what he meant. This really was their mess, all of it was. Even the bad guys came from their stock. People she thought her friends. People she loved.

My mess, he said. It was a shared failure but no one could prove it to him. Because, after all, of all the officials in the Thirteen squads of the Holy Courtyards, he was the closest to the truth, the closest to following the right lead. While the rest fought amongst themselves, he broke through the plan, or so it seemed. He hunted Gin down, he shook their timing. He had them on the run. He'd caught them with their hands in the cookie jar.

And he failed.

Never took on something he didn't think he could handle, did he? How about two captains. One a renowned killer, the other miraculously back from the dead. Not rash, is he? With his love's blood already cooling in the stale air, he would have taken on an army with his bare hands.

The fact of the matter is that he was never close. There was nothing, no little detail that would have changed the outcome. It went as they had planned it and couldn't have gone any other way. Would telling him that make it better or worse, she honestly couldn't tell.

“I spoke to Hinamori,” his voice pierced the night. It almost frightened her.

“She's awake? That's excellent,” Matsumoto allowed some joy to take her expression even though her captain did not.

“Yes, excellent,” he said with absolutely nothing excellent about his person. Than a little start and some light grew behind his eyes. “She's getting better, though.”

It sickened he to hear his strained voice. “She is still not herself, is she? Well, it is to be expected, she went through quite a shock,” said Matsumoto, somewhat testily.

Hitsugaya snorted. “I didn't tell you this so you could try and make me feel better. Moron.”

“Of course not. …Captain,” retorted Matsumoto with the same scorn in her own tone.

“And I hate the way you say that.”

“What?”

“Captain.”

“I can say it in many different ways,” Matsumoto defended her cause.

“You say it as if you wanted to call me an asshole.”

“I would never,” snickered Matsumoto.

“…you are just making it worse on yourself,” mumbled Hitsugaya.

“…so why did you tell me?”

He struggled for a moment to regain the thread of their previous conversation. “I thought you'd like to know.”

“That's not it,” shrugged Matsumoto, somewhat daringly.

Hitsugaya threw her a dirty look and, realizing she wasn't trying to annoy him, he looked up at the black sky and mumbled: “I just needed to say it. She is getting better.”

Silence with Hitsugaya was inexplicably calming. It wasn't like some silences, where something was hanging in the air, where a breath was stretched into infinity. With Hitsugaya there were times when words just weren't indispensable for communication. Certainly, Matsumoto enjoyed an occasional racket. At those times she would pick at Hitsugaya's patience, complain about work. She would say how it was too sunny or there was too much custard in the world for her to be in this smelly office doing this dull bureaucratic bull-shit. And then she could sit back and watch the fireworks.

But there were these other times, times she felt were far more intimate than anything her captain ever actually said to her, when they were both feeling the same things, experiencing the same emotions, and didn't feel the need to say them out loud. It was a special bubble unto itself where they could be lost in their respective worlds and still interact. She couldn't explain it, but while most of the people she knew fulfilled her need to be loud and open and accepted, listened to and obliged with attention, Hitsugaya fulfilled her need to stay quiet and locked up in her inner self, but still not alone.

Matsumoto shivered. It was surely because of the sudden rush of wind. This faux body was so much more attuned to external stimuli she had to learn anew how to listen to it. Not just heat or taste, pain or comfort, but fatigue as well. Her body's drowsiness, in turn, took her mind to strange places within it.

And so she found herself, again, drowning slowly into thoughts of him.

She remembered things that happened a long time ago, maybe things she only dreamed or imagined. Long fingers drumming on a wood railing, many, many years ago. Sunlight lashing through pale hair like something ethereal. The tiniest moment in which a hairless chest, almost unnaturally bony in its thinness, came into view and blew from itself a specific scent. The warm scent of chestnuts, coal, cut grass and something fresh and sweet. Like coconuts. Or spring cherries. Or young blood.

Gin, everywhere, but only in whispers. Untouchable in memory and inextricable.

For most people around her, Matsumoto developed a single word or phrase that encompassed them. So Hitsugaya was Reliability. And Kira was Obedience, while Abarai was Wilfulness. Captain Unohana, for example, was Kindness. General Yamamoto was Constancy.

Orihime was Insecurity. And Kurosaki Ichigo was, certainly, Stubbornness.

But she didn't have any one word for Gin. He was Wickedness, and Cruelty, and Hypocrisy. But he was also Humour. Capriciousness. He was Lust.

She perhaps knew him too well to give him only one label. Gin was a part of her from as far as her memory could reach. He was her brother, father and lover in so many ways. He might be too intermingled with her own complex being for her to extract his essence and compress it into a word.

But more likely, she never knew him at all.

Why don't you hate him, she asked herself again. It was now a rather weak cry, worn from a scream to this pitiful moan from sheer repetition.

She ought to despise him with every fibre of her being. Every time she exhaled she ought to curse him. He was a traitor and a coward. He had dishonoured himself in the lowest of ways. He had murdered with glee. And what is more, he had abused her love. He had hurt her purposefully, if he indeed graced her with a single thought. And if he didn't, then so much deeper his betrayal ran.

And even through all that, he said `sorry' and that was enough to reduce all of her scorching spurn to a meaningless sigh.

Sorry. Sorry, he said. SORRY?

What the fuck does that mean, sorry?

And so, now she can't hate him the way she wanted to. And it pissed her off so bad she wanted to rip this physical throat just by screaming his name.

For the second time this evening, Hitsugaya surprised her by talking. “Matsumoto. I need to discuss a matter with you.”

She shook herself from thoughts of Gin. Her mind, sleepy up until a moment ago, was now fresh and alert for her captain again. She made an adequately inquisitive look and waited.

Hitsugaya seemed to be searching for words, something he didn't usually do so obviously. “There have recently been some concerns.”

“Concerns, Captain?” she asked, acutely aware the sentence subject was lacking from that sentence. Also not something Hitsugaya tended to omit.

“Yes.”

“About me?” asked Matsumoto, sharply.

“About you.”

“What concerns, Captain?”

Hitsugaya was staring intently at his feet, floating in midair above the town as they were. “It is debatable whether, if you were to face off with Ichimaru, you would hesitate to kill him.”

Anger and shame first drained her face white, then rushed all the blood back at once with a terrible vengeance. Matsumoto didn't let it show in her voice as she said, slowly and politely: “And who is concerned with this? The council, a particular person? Or you?”

“Nobody has voiced it, if that is what you mean. They wouldn't dare, in any case,” Hitsugaya recited.

“So it is you asking me this?” He already knew she had loved Gin. That time she said that wasn't the problem. The problem was that even now, after everything, she would still kiss his lying face.

“I need to know where I stand, yes,” he replied, completely non-plussed.

“If I had to face off one-on-one with Gin?” she snorted in disgusting mock-laughter. “Well, I don't think you need to be terribly concerned with my allegiances. I would be dead within seconds anyways. ..sir.”

Hitsugaya knit his eyebrows tighter. “I am not asking you this because I am getting a twisted pleasure from it. Like I said, no body has voiced it, but if they ever did, I need to be able to tell them there is no doubt in my mind that you'd slit his throat if you had the chance. Or that you wouldn't.”

She took another calming breath and searched for inspiration behind her eyelids. “Well, would you kill Aizen even if Hinamori begged you not to do it?” It was improper and hurtful, but she couldn't help herself. For a second she thought Hitsugaya hadn't even heard her spiteful growl, but then she opened her eyes to his pale face.

There was no blood there and for a moment she couldn't be sure if he meant to lunge at her and cut her tongue out or fall of the roof this instant. Matsumoto stared at his amazement until slowly it dawned on her. “She did, didn't she?” she mouthed gleefully. Somewhere in the back of her mind she was disgusted at her perverse happiness, but everywhere else her mind screamed revenge. How could you have asked me that in the first place, don't you know, you asshole. Taste it, taste it, taste it, taste what it feels like to be asked this.

Hitsugaya was still wordless.

Matsumoto knew her eyes were twinkling and it was despicable. “Oh, you sure did a lot of thinking. Captain. Kids getting in the way, kids getting hurt. When all the while you should be asking yourself what you would do without them. Are you trying to remove the temptation of letting them kill Aizen? Think about it, you could crawl back to Hinamori and say it wasn't you. And she would cry terribly and, finally, you could put your arms around her like the good little brother you are. Would you fantasize about it later, I wonder.”

She bit her own tongue. That wasn't enough, that was far too much. Hitsugaya stared at her, his eyes so cold that everything around him seemed to physically cool as well. No, it was no illusion. Everything around them did start to glaze over with a thin layer of frozen perspiration. Matsumoto could see her breath and it twisted as a dying serpent. With it, all her spite died as well.

“Forgive me, I…”

“I would,” said Hitsugaya frostily. “I would kill him. I will kill him.”

Matsumoto shuddered as the two pieces of ice bore holes in her chest where her heart was defrosting in its own right. “So would I. Captain.”

He didn't believe her, he couldn't trust her. At the moment he had trouble looking at her and seeing the disgust in his blue-green eyes, Matsumoto's feeble faux body shivered with grief and shame. So she looked down to her knees, for once chastely parallel in penance, and started speaking slowly. “Gin is not my blood, he cannot even be called my lover, certainly not anymore. He was never my friend. Gin loves nothing, cherishes nothing. He can be trusted only to go his own way in the end. He is cruel in a way that it requires no special effort. It is within him, it is innate. He is manipulative. He twists around your head until he snuffs out everything that might have been your own will and replaces it with his own. He is supremely selfish. He has no allegiance. He is ablaze only when he is covered in blood.”

“So how can you love something like that?” said her captain, his voice no longer freezing, but honestly incredulous.

Matsumoto sighed. “Because he said `sorry' at the last moment. Motherfucker,” she bit back a lump of salt water forming in her throat. “Because at the precise moment you reconcile with the fact he is a monster beyond salvation, he does something to make you think he actually loves you. Everything else was a lie, everything else is a charade he plays to protect himself because really, inside, he is a man like everyone else. And you just want to hold him and tell him he doesn't need to pretend with you,” she said while her captain watched one side of her face waiting for tears. “Because he cannot be mastered. And because he inspires you to do things you couldn't even think of.”

“Ichimaru inspires me only to strangle him,” murmured Hitsugaya still incomprehensive.

Matsumoto smiled weekly. “Be grateful he didn't find your admiration useful, Captain. If Gin wanted you to love him, he would make you love him. And all the while, he would make you think it was your idea.”

Hitsugaya looked back to the horizon. It was purple and black and it looked like the abyss. “You had no right saying what you said, Matsumoto.”

“No, I didn't.”

“I had every right asking you what I did.”

“Perhaps. But I want you to know I got mad because you asked it. Not because I have doubts about what needs to be done.”

“Very well then,” he mumbled.

A few seconds passed while Matsumoto grasped for the forgiveness in his voice so she could hold it to her chest, when Hitsugaya spoke again, this time over a great distance. “I don't understand how.” He got up and walked to the very ledge, hands in his jeans pockets. When one didn't see his creased face, he looked exactly his age. “How can you love someone despite them being evil and how can you then kill them, even though you love them? I don't understand.”

“You don't believe me when I say I wouldn't hesitate, sir?” she asked, this time with no sharpness in her voice, only atonement.

“No, I believe you. But I don't understand.”

Matsumoto sighed. “It is my job. More, it is my purpose. And I took an oath to forsake all else. To the last moment I'll keep my hope that he meant it when he said sorry. Or at least that he meant something with it. But this my hope, my personal hope. If it comes down to killing him or disobeying an order or endangering anything precious, he dies.”

Hitsugaya nodded slowly, now that it was put into words he could understand. He turned to his lieutenant with grave eyes, but this time they were not meant to punish or frighten her back into line. “He is a dead mean already, anyways. Even if we don't kill him in action once we begin the raid of Hueco Mundo, he is dead when we take him back to Soul Society.”

“I said I would slit his throat. I didn't say I wouldn't cry for him later,” she said honestly.

Hitsugaya looked back to the town. He had his own special thoughts about crying for traitors, specially if they were still alive, but he wasn't about to bring that up. Matsumoto looked up to him, something she rarely did. For a second she thought about the wonderful new varieties they could have now that he was, in fact, not only slighter, but also weaker than her. She was surprised at herself for thinking about sex after all of this. Could this even be called intimacy? They hurt each other, intentionally or dutifully, which ever. She wondered, is it that this time, at least in terms of bubbles, he came into hers? What did her bubble look like to him? His was reflective, cold and clean; a deep and a firmly outlined circle on the night sky. She could make herself see it if she stopped blinking for a while. Hers must be a sickly green colour, invaded by blotches of black. Those were remnants of Gin's bubble, eating at hers like a virus.

Gin's bubble was a deep, forgetful black. Night time velvet and absolute darkness in which the only light one could see was Gin himself. It was a bubble beyond good and evil, beyond truth and illusion.

No, no more. Enough already with Gin. It didn't do any good, thinking about him. She was in another world. It was beautiful and new. She had made friends here. She started to enjoy coffee here. And now it was in danger and that was all she needed to know. But first she needed to know if it was right between her and this little man in front of her.

“How is she, Captain?”

Hitsugaya looked back at her. His face changed from surprised to reminiscing to grateful, and finally to gentle, all in the space of a breath. “…she is getting better.”

“I am glad.”

“Thank you.”