Tarrying in Mulberry Shade
Title: Tarrying in Mulberry Shade
Author: foxflare
Pairing(s): Gin/Kira; slight Kira/Momo and Gin/Ran.
Rating: R
Word Count: ~4000
Disclaimer: I own no part of Cl2(aq) + H2O(l) ↔ 2H+(aq) + Cl-(aq) + ClO-(aq). Kubo Tite-sama whitens and brightens all.
Prompt: For visualcomplex over at bleachedblackk's BITE SIZED FIC CHALLENGE, who wanted Gin/Kira with a little red riding hood & the big bad wolf theme.
Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth and tall,
And finds his trusty Thisbe's mantle slain.
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.
And Thisbe, tarrying in mulberry shade,
His dagger drew, and died. For all the rest,
Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain
At large discourse, while here they do remain.
--William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
All the better to hear you with. . .
He dreams in shades of red: the bright hakama of her student uniform blown tight against her slender legs during shunpo practice; the flush of her cheeks, glowing with physical exertion as she moves through kendo forms; her small mouth stained with cherry blood in summer, white teeth snapping through dark skin, taking off half the flesh so that she can pick out the stone instead of spitting; her pale skin lit by a crimson orb of shakkahou almost as perfect as his own.
Kira Izuru is young. He is talented, his future is promising, and his heart grows stronger every day when it beats double-time in the presence of Hinamori Momo.
He wants so much. They all do. Success, respect, and eventually, captaincy, although they speak of this last thing only in soft voices on noisy nights, when enough sake has raised the volume of their peers and lowered their own inhibitions, aware as they are of how steeply the odds are stacked against them in the reaching of that goal. Only a handful of Shinigami in a generation actually possess that kind of power; most will be lucky to achieve shikai. They publicly acknowledge that their being in the advanced class means as little as the various districts from which they hail, but each secretly nurses an augmented sense of hope that they are in some way special -- better. The can feel the future in their bones: it hollows them out with pockets of promise and potential, like bird bones, and they think it must mean that someday, someday, they will fly.
Hinamori-kun's hands flit in mimicry of the theory as she toys with a brush of Abarai-kun's violently vermilion hair. Kira thinks he really ought to be jealous of even this small attention, but for the moment no green can exist in his world. The three of them lay together in the grass, head-to-head, each stretched out in a different direction. It feels right like this, this meeting of brains, brawn and heart, and Abarai-kun's hair a cardinal making its way across the true-blue sky that encompasses their fields of vision.
It isn't until their ginger friend begins to snore that Kira sits up and finds the forest. Blushing, he takes Hinamori-kun's hand in his own.
"Come on," he whispers, and leads her toward the trees.
They do nothing but walk, of course, screened off as they are from one another by shyness like a heat haze, a blanket of humidity that makes their movements slow and keeps them from touching too readily, fearful of causing some clammy disfavor. When they find a bed of bright wildflowers, he beheads them with the nails of his thumb and forefinger, leaving only enough of a stem so that they'll stay put when he tucks them behind her ears and into the cords securing the two tails of her hair. Her skin against the backs of his knuckles is soft as rose petals. Playfully he feeds her from a fruiting mulberry tree, staining her tongue and his fingers scarlet with juice. An errant drop spills down her chin, and he catches it on a fingertip before it can fall and stain the pristine fabric of her kosode.
Her face heats when he lifts that finger to his lips, and her eyes grow heaven-wide and dark as acorns with the knowledge that, although they do not kiss, he knows now what she tastes like.
All the better to see you with. . .
Her eyes, while still dark, are blue within a year -- not literally, he suspects, but cannot himself tell the difference. In the aftermath of their first battle, she has cloaked herself with an indigo shadow that dusts her uniform an earthy brown, and turns the sweet apples of her cheeks into plums.
It is for the best, Kira tells himself. When she finds Tobiume's name, he thinks it must be the result of the rich soil in which she has found a place to grow. She nests now in a bed of crumpled up and discarded letters, their proclamations embarrassingly ardent, their calligraphy too coarse. She announces her intention to thank her savior through actions in place of words. When she gesticulates her decision, Kira is certain he can see a row of pinfeathers fledging along the outer edges of her skinny forearms.
Her color has changed, but that of his dreams has not. He attempts, for a time, the transference of his predilections to their trinity's other third, but in the wake of Rukia's adoption, the thousand red threads of fate which the strands of Abarai-kun's hair so resemble will be served to only one purpose: the lashing of their master to a pair of moldered trees. Occasionally Kira picks at the knots as a crow might a shiny length of chain, or a child at a scab, hunting in vain for smooth, raw heat where only the halfway cold and coarse cinders of ambition now smolder.
He tracks himself in autumn, lone, retraces his steps, gathering wool, and finds again the grove in which he and his unripe berry crush had lingered. The maples there are rusting now, and it is he who has become the greenest thing in the forest. He feels bald and cold in the crisp evening air, newly born against the scent of decaying leaves, not fresh, but cowled by a sticky membrane of naiveté from which he can't quite peel himself free.
All the better to grab you with. . .
It is ripped away by what he witnesses in the wildflower bed only a fortnight later.
He recognizes her for what she is -- a Shinigami of unknown rank -- by the black top of her shihakushou, still bound together, but only just, by the loosened obi at her slender waist. Her back is strong, her breasts large: they sway heavily as she moves, pink nipples pert with cold and arousal. Her well-muscled thighs flare around a narrower set of hips, their lean lines flexing firm as she undulates like a golden spider above her prostrate and lax companion.
Her lover, Kira recognizes for who he is: the silver second of that infamous night, the one whose sword and smile seem to grow proportional to each other. Fifth Division fukutaichou Ichimaru Gin's mouth curls even now, as if the upward-crooking corners of his lips are only things by which his slackened jaw remains in some way hinged.
The discovery more than startles him, but Kira's reflexes are good, and he catches his reactive gasp in his hand. He should leave, he knows he should leave. This is very obviously a private moment, and yet his first instinct is neither to fly or to fight, but to freeze. He cannot move. He is rooted to his spot, and he cannot even avert his gaze.
The anonymous woman spasms with a sudden cry that pushes her head back and her body down. In silhouette, she could be howling at the moon. Ichimaru-fukutaichou's body lifts in an answering arch. His eyes flutter open, and they glow in the semi-dark like the reflective eyes of a starlit animal, like rubies the size of marbles, and Kira's magpie mind is consumed.
When the quick, tight twitches of her hips begin to slow, Ichimaru-fukutaichou hooks a wiry arm around her back and twists, reversing their positions. Kira sees that his body is pale and thin, all long, angular limbs economically corded with sharp, spartan strength. His back is spotted with damp maple leaves and stained with the dye of wilted red blossoms, and the knobs of his spine stand out in stark relief against the lines of his ribs. His breathing is harsh, hissed between bared teeth, and when he bows his head to his lover's neck Kira's heart stutters at the thought that he intends to tear out her throat.
He must leave.
Luck or lust has thawed his legs, and he launches into an unsteady shunpo to another corner of the forest. He manages only three steps, but his breath comes as thick and fast as if he'd taken three hundred. His skin is on fire. His heartbeat is howling in his ears.
He presses a hand to the pulsing heat between his legs, ashamed but unable to stop himself. The ache is too much, too intense to ignore. His fingers shake and jerk as he picks apart the knots of his obi, his hakama. He doesn't even bother with the removal of his fundoshi; only shoves the cumbersome fabric aside.
The head of his cock is already bare of its fleshy cowl, its slit pearling fluid, bright in the moonlight. It doesn't take much -- a loose grip and swift, light strokes that taper into firmness against the edge of the sensitive crown; it doesn't take long before his legs are shaking and the familiar shudders of impending release are skittering their way down his spine.
"Ikorose, Shinsou."
The tip of the blade bites into Kira's belly -- not deeply, but plenty enough to bleed.
The shock of it does not work quickly enough. Kira's fist tightens involuntarily around his cock and he is helpless to keep from coming, his eyes rolling in ecstasy and terror as his bucking hips sharpen the sting of the sword needling his flesh a mere handspan above the focal point of his pleasure. He hears the gentle patter of his ejaculate against dead leaves, and wonders, fleetingly, how the bare feet of the man standing some meters away from him made no such sound as he approached.
Ichimaru Gin's hakama hang hazardously low on his bony hips. His kosode is open, and the verticle strip of pale skin it reveals still bears the marks of the strange woman's hands and mouth. His eyes are ruby slivers behind silver lashes, and they are fixed upon Kira's wet and wilting arousal.
"Enjoy the show?" he asks. His tone of voice and smile are casual, as if he does not hold a length of steel twenty nodes of bamboo long to another man's gut -- or perhaps because he does.
Kira feels his knees begin to buckle under the weight of his fear and disgrace. His denial is automatic, as is the sense of foolish despair that follows in its wake, aware as he is of the evidence still clasped in his red right hand. He wants badly to bow, to fall to the ground and beg for forgiveness, but the press of the sword point keeps all but his tongue from moving.
"I-Ichimaru-fukutaichou, my deepest apologies, I. . .i-it was not my intention to, to see--"
Ichimaru-fukutaichou's lips twitch, as though he's trying not to laugh. "Ah, but you did," he murmurs, and takes a step forward. Kira tenses, but Shinsou shortens with its master's approach, appearing to be reabsorbed into its blade collar and serpentine hilt guard. "You did see, Kira Izuru-kun."
"You. . .you know who I am?"
"Since you were in your mama's womb," he quips, and then chuckles quietly to himself, as if sharing a private joke with an invisible friend, or a ghost. "Come now, Kira-kun, who could forget a sweet face like yours?"
He is near enough now that his sword again seems to be nothing more than an ordinary wakizashi. This close, Kira can see that his cheeks still wear the ruddy stain of recent coitus, and that the tips of his shaggy silver hair are colored a dark charcoal with perspiration. He smells purely animalic, a heady combination of cooling sweat and double musk, something masculine and feminine and strangely bestial all at once. Something wild, Kira thinks.
Something rabid.
"Of course," Ichimaru continues, twisting his wrist, turning his blade until the sharp edge no longer faces the forest floor, but the tree tops, the sky, "you were screaming, the last time we met. I wonder what it would take" -- He drags Shinsou up Kira's stomach, stopping just below his ribs, like some simulation of seppuku -- "to make you scream like that again?"
"P-please," Kira chokes. He can feel the blood beading along the path the zanpakutou has scratched in his abdomen.
Ichimaru-fukutaichou allows the cloak he has dragged over his reiatsu to fall, and the pressure of it hits Kira like a granite slab. He fights to remain standing, lest he tumble forward and impale himself, or sink down and offer the blade his heart to eat, his throat to rip out.
"Please what?" Ichimaru asks, head tilting like a curious vulture's. "Please yes? Or please no?"
Kira's mouth works, but his voice does not. Ichimaru-fukutaichou's reiatsu congests his lungs and burns his eyes like smoke. It claws its way into his pores and fills his nose with the scent of musk and metal, black powder, singed fur and something vaguely herbal. It piles into his stomach like stones. His ears crackle and pop against the pressure like wet wood in a fire. He can't breathe. He's being buried alive in the open air. He is going to die here, with his hand on his cock the closest he's ever come to spreading his wings.
Bitterness and regret, remorse, incredulity and horror vie amongst themselves like rats on a sinking ship competing for the crow's nest, fighting to be the last thing he feels.
The last thing he sees is far simpler: a single color in two parts, each of them an outer mirror to his inner flames -- or the match, he thinks, that might have ignited them.
He awakes to indigo pinpricked with white light, and the feel of something warm and moist and oddly textured dredging the sore flesh of his abdomen.
Puzzled, groggy, he gropes with one hand for the cause of his disturbed slumber, and his first absurd notion is that Abarai-kun has brought home some stray, snuffling puppy that he will ask Kira to care for in his absence during his additional kidou classes.
"Dogs aren't allowed in the dorms," he mumbles, and the puppy barks -- no. . .
It chuckles.
"Good," it says, in a languid Kyoto drawl. "You know your handbook."
The words have all the effect of a bucket of ice water on his sleep-induced amnesia, and Kira jolts fully awake, fully aware. He raises his head.
Ichimaru Gin takes another long, lazy lick of the shallow wound streaking Kira's stomach. His tongue sports a vivid carmine stripe down its center, as if he's been sucking on hard apple candy.
"Fuku. . .taichou. . ." Kira trails off, at a rare and utter loss for words. He is not dead. The air is cool and light in his lungs, light against his skin, and clean but for a lingering, raspy scent of something weedy and vaguely herbal. He is not dead, but he can't help but wonder if Ichimaru-fukutaichou thought he was, nestled as he is between Kira's legs (and, gods, what is he doing there?), scavenging Kira's blood like it's some ambrosial liqueur.
He is still, he notices, naked from the waist down, and that Ichimaru-fukutaichou's gluttonous mouth has not left his body unaffected. Reflexively he draws his knees up in shame, but they are pushed back into place by strong, bony fingers.
Kira feels his face heat and swallows dryly, dreadfully -- not again, oh, please, not again. . .is this to be his punishment, the forced reproduction of his humiliation? How many times will he be made to endure it? Was once not enough for such a solitary -- if not entirely innocent -- infraction?
No, this is too much. He is a student of Shinou Academy, and he ought to be court-martialed, or at least challenged to a proper duel, impossible though he knows it would be for him to win -- he could lose no more thoroughly than he already has.
He casts his eyes around for something, anything that might in some way be of help in this most desperate of situations, but there is only darkness and dead leaves, and. . .and a wakizashi with a serpentine hilt guard, sheathed in its scabbard, only a few paces away.
Ichimaru-fukutaichou is unarmed.
Kira realizes that he does not need to be, but that he isn't. . .
His gaze falls again down the length of his torso, and he sees red. Ichimaru-fukutaichou is staring at him with narrowed, calculative -- but not contemptuous -- eyes.
"Done yet?" he asks.
Kira bites his lip, and nervously catches the corner of his mouth on a canine tooth. He cannot feel the blood welling, but he can taste it, weighty with iron and the dull echo of a memory like a bell. Ichimaru studies it with avid interest, his eyelids growing just a fraction heavier, his crimson smile widening. The stones still sitting in Kira's stomach combust.
"Good," Ichimaru-fukutaichou nods. "Lesson one, Kira Izuru-kun: never bare your belly to a beast, unless you intend to make one with two backs. . ."
All the better to hug you with. . .
He is flying.
Skating on a surface of spiritons, the numbered districts of Rukongai appear to him as little more than dank grids, the map of a sucking marshland, as he and his comrades-in-arms circle the skies like carrion birds awaiting the freshly dead -- in this case, a handful of defectors from a squad even dearer to Fifth Division fourth seat Kira Izuru than his own; a squad that, one day, will be his own, when enough time has passed that jeers of favoritism can no longer dog his advancement.
It's all nonsense, Kira knows, even if he can objectively see how unfairly convenient it would look to outside eyes if Third Division taichou Ichimaru Gin's newly appointed beta just happened to also be his occasional lover of the past three decades; but then, not many know Ichimaru-taichou well enough, as Kira does, to realize that he values his own hide much too highly to surrender the guarding of his back to someone who is too preoccupied with mooning over it to provide it with an adequate defense. He even had Kira spend a tour in the Fourth, to ensure that he would be well-versed in combat medicine, should the need ever arise before the estimated arrival time of Unohana-taichou's field operatives.
Kira will be promoted because he is better -- because he has been trained by the best.
He exchanges a glance and a nod with third seat Hinamori, who will soon undergo the same ceremony. Times between lieutenants tend to mimic times between captains, and the Gotei Thirteen has not been playing with full mobility in well over half a century. (Eighth Division fifth seat Matsumoto was Tenth Division fukutaichou Matsumoto for a full three years before Kira could look her in the eye. He doesn't know it, but the only thing that confused her about that time was that neither could he look her in the breasts.)
Soon, however, things will be mended. Soon the stitches will come out, and the scars licked smooth.
Kira's left hand idly strays to his midsection, where beneath the black folds of his shihakushou lies a thin silver gash, scarcely visible, and known only to himself and one other. The hot stones beneath it have been disciplined into symmetrical rows and transformed into muscle. He has learned how to breathe smoke, and when Wabisuke speaks to him, it is with the security that he can remain standing even when yoked with the heaviest of burdens.
Even Abarai-kun, true to his fighting nature, has figured out how to beat his wings, although he still beds down on the brittle branches of his former and future conquests. One day, Kira feels, they will break beneath the weight of their own years, and he prays that Abarai-kun will have sense enough not to simply fall with them when they do.
He won't, of course, but that is why it is a prayer -- it certainly can't be a bet.
Kira's nostalgia nips like a puppy, a cub, at his heels. He craves maple and mulberries, and the scent of some wildflowers that can also be classed as weeds. He decides that, after the traitors have been captured, he will visit again that most sacred place, and kill all three birds at once.
He wonders if he will meet anyone interesting on his way who might be inclined to join him.
All the better to eat you with.
He dreams in shades of red: the color of her life pooling on a frozen floor; the snapping of her mind like cherry skin between the perfect white teeth of the person she loved (loves?) most in this world, and the next, and the next; a nectarous droplet gemming on his finger before it is fouled by his mouth and falls, clinking, against the fruit stones in his stomach, against a bed of burnt-out embers and a pile of marbles cut to resemble rubies.
He opens his eyes, and the color does not fade.
Unohana-taichou rests a condoling hand on his shoulder in passing, and her small, pale palm seems to press down upon him with all the weight of a falling sky.
His bones feel like Hollows, riddled with empty pockets of broken promises and lost opportunities. His mind refuses to function, Abarai-kun's strength has failed twice over, and their heart lies slashed to ribbons in a hospital bed. Hinamori-kun's small, cracked lips are stained in places with dark blood like crushed berry juice, and he thinks that, although he does not kiss her, he still knows what she tastes like.
Third Division fukutaichou Kira Izuru is brimming with cold fury, a roiling concoction of bitterness and regret, remorse, incredulity, and horror. He feels old in a way he never has before, as though he stands with one foot in a grave that is not his own. He is the walking dead. He's been wandering gutted for decades.
Their army has been cleaved of three fingers on its sword hand. In Kira's Inner World, Wabisuke wails beneath the sanguine light of a blood moon, giving voice to a sense of deep and abiding bereavement his master has only just begun to comprehend. Grief picks at his entrails. It gulps down his sadness as though it's some ambrosial ichor. Perhaps, when it has eaten and drunk its fill, it will have devoured so much sorrow that its only recourse will be to condense and collapse in on itself like a black hole in his belly, and then he, too, will be an enemy, as much a turncoat as the turnskin the thought of whom now taints and taunts him like a tangled length of chain he never noticed was attached to a set of duller shackles.
And now what is he to do, gnaw his wings off at the wrists? And why not, when he has never truly flown, anyway? It's only been that his cage was tossed a few times into the air. He can lose no more thoroughly than he already has.
Feather-breath'd, Kira clenches his fists. He can feel the blood welling where his nails, his talons, his claws bite into his flesh.
He will not, he decides, be going down alone. After the traitors have been captured, he will visit again that most desecrated place, hallow the ground with mulberry wine and make a burial mound of a wildflower bed. He will mount a silver head on a maple pike and ground it at the apex of a body mummified from its torn throat down by a golden spider's silk. It is the only way to make things better; Kira knows this, because he has learned from the best.
"Lesson two, Kira Izuru-kun: wolves always mate for life."
And they hate in the hereafter.
Author: foxflare
Pairing(s): Gin/Kira; slight Kira/Momo and Gin/Ran.
Rating: R
Word Count: ~4000
Disclaimer: I own no part of Cl2(aq) + H2O(l) ↔ 2H+(aq) + Cl-(aq) + ClO-(aq). Kubo Tite-sama whitens and brightens all.
Prompt: For visualcomplex over at bleachedblackk's BITE SIZED FIC CHALLENGE, who wanted Gin/Kira with a little red riding hood & the big bad wolf theme.
Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth and tall,
And finds his trusty Thisbe's mantle slain.
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.
And Thisbe, tarrying in mulberry shade,
His dagger drew, and died. For all the rest,
Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain
At large discourse, while here they do remain.
--William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
All the better to hear you with. . .
He dreams in shades of red: the bright hakama of her student uniform blown tight against her slender legs during shunpo practice; the flush of her cheeks, glowing with physical exertion as she moves through kendo forms; her small mouth stained with cherry blood in summer, white teeth snapping through dark skin, taking off half the flesh so that she can pick out the stone instead of spitting; her pale skin lit by a crimson orb of shakkahou almost as perfect as his own.
Kira Izuru is young. He is talented, his future is promising, and his heart grows stronger every day when it beats double-time in the presence of Hinamori Momo.
He wants so much. They all do. Success, respect, and eventually, captaincy, although they speak of this last thing only in soft voices on noisy nights, when enough sake has raised the volume of their peers and lowered their own inhibitions, aware as they are of how steeply the odds are stacked against them in the reaching of that goal. Only a handful of Shinigami in a generation actually possess that kind of power; most will be lucky to achieve shikai. They publicly acknowledge that their being in the advanced class means as little as the various districts from which they hail, but each secretly nurses an augmented sense of hope that they are in some way special -- better. The can feel the future in their bones: it hollows them out with pockets of promise and potential, like bird bones, and they think it must mean that someday, someday, they will fly.
Hinamori-kun's hands flit in mimicry of the theory as she toys with a brush of Abarai-kun's violently vermilion hair. Kira thinks he really ought to be jealous of even this small attention, but for the moment no green can exist in his world. The three of them lay together in the grass, head-to-head, each stretched out in a different direction. It feels right like this, this meeting of brains, brawn and heart, and Abarai-kun's hair a cardinal making its way across the true-blue sky that encompasses their fields of vision.
It isn't until their ginger friend begins to snore that Kira sits up and finds the forest. Blushing, he takes Hinamori-kun's hand in his own.
"Come on," he whispers, and leads her toward the trees.
They do nothing but walk, of course, screened off as they are from one another by shyness like a heat haze, a blanket of humidity that makes their movements slow and keeps them from touching too readily, fearful of causing some clammy disfavor. When they find a bed of bright wildflowers, he beheads them with the nails of his thumb and forefinger, leaving only enough of a stem so that they'll stay put when he tucks them behind her ears and into the cords securing the two tails of her hair. Her skin against the backs of his knuckles is soft as rose petals. Playfully he feeds her from a fruiting mulberry tree, staining her tongue and his fingers scarlet with juice. An errant drop spills down her chin, and he catches it on a fingertip before it can fall and stain the pristine fabric of her kosode.
Her face heats when he lifts that finger to his lips, and her eyes grow heaven-wide and dark as acorns with the knowledge that, although they do not kiss, he knows now what she tastes like.
All the better to see you with. . .
Her eyes, while still dark, are blue within a year -- not literally, he suspects, but cannot himself tell the difference. In the aftermath of their first battle, she has cloaked herself with an indigo shadow that dusts her uniform an earthy brown, and turns the sweet apples of her cheeks into plums.
It is for the best, Kira tells himself. When she finds Tobiume's name, he thinks it must be the result of the rich soil in which she has found a place to grow. She nests now in a bed of crumpled up and discarded letters, their proclamations embarrassingly ardent, their calligraphy too coarse. She announces her intention to thank her savior through actions in place of words. When she gesticulates her decision, Kira is certain he can see a row of pinfeathers fledging along the outer edges of her skinny forearms.
Her color has changed, but that of his dreams has not. He attempts, for a time, the transference of his predilections to their trinity's other third, but in the wake of Rukia's adoption, the thousand red threads of fate which the strands of Abarai-kun's hair so resemble will be served to only one purpose: the lashing of their master to a pair of moldered trees. Occasionally Kira picks at the knots as a crow might a shiny length of chain, or a child at a scab, hunting in vain for smooth, raw heat where only the halfway cold and coarse cinders of ambition now smolder.
He tracks himself in autumn, lone, retraces his steps, gathering wool, and finds again the grove in which he and his unripe berry crush had lingered. The maples there are rusting now, and it is he who has become the greenest thing in the forest. He feels bald and cold in the crisp evening air, newly born against the scent of decaying leaves, not fresh, but cowled by a sticky membrane of naiveté from which he can't quite peel himself free.
All the better to grab you with. . .
It is ripped away by what he witnesses in the wildflower bed only a fortnight later.
He recognizes her for what she is -- a Shinigami of unknown rank -- by the black top of her shihakushou, still bound together, but only just, by the loosened obi at her slender waist. Her back is strong, her breasts large: they sway heavily as she moves, pink nipples pert with cold and arousal. Her well-muscled thighs flare around a narrower set of hips, their lean lines flexing firm as she undulates like a golden spider above her prostrate and lax companion.
Her lover, Kira recognizes for who he is: the silver second of that infamous night, the one whose sword and smile seem to grow proportional to each other. Fifth Division fukutaichou Ichimaru Gin's mouth curls even now, as if the upward-crooking corners of his lips are only things by which his slackened jaw remains in some way hinged.
The discovery more than startles him, but Kira's reflexes are good, and he catches his reactive gasp in his hand. He should leave, he knows he should leave. This is very obviously a private moment, and yet his first instinct is neither to fly or to fight, but to freeze. He cannot move. He is rooted to his spot, and he cannot even avert his gaze.
The anonymous woman spasms with a sudden cry that pushes her head back and her body down. In silhouette, she could be howling at the moon. Ichimaru-fukutaichou's body lifts in an answering arch. His eyes flutter open, and they glow in the semi-dark like the reflective eyes of a starlit animal, like rubies the size of marbles, and Kira's magpie mind is consumed.
When the quick, tight twitches of her hips begin to slow, Ichimaru-fukutaichou hooks a wiry arm around her back and twists, reversing their positions. Kira sees that his body is pale and thin, all long, angular limbs economically corded with sharp, spartan strength. His back is spotted with damp maple leaves and stained with the dye of wilted red blossoms, and the knobs of his spine stand out in stark relief against the lines of his ribs. His breathing is harsh, hissed between bared teeth, and when he bows his head to his lover's neck Kira's heart stutters at the thought that he intends to tear out her throat.
He must leave.
Luck or lust has thawed his legs, and he launches into an unsteady shunpo to another corner of the forest. He manages only three steps, but his breath comes as thick and fast as if he'd taken three hundred. His skin is on fire. His heartbeat is howling in his ears.
He presses a hand to the pulsing heat between his legs, ashamed but unable to stop himself. The ache is too much, too intense to ignore. His fingers shake and jerk as he picks apart the knots of his obi, his hakama. He doesn't even bother with the removal of his fundoshi; only shoves the cumbersome fabric aside.
The head of his cock is already bare of its fleshy cowl, its slit pearling fluid, bright in the moonlight. It doesn't take much -- a loose grip and swift, light strokes that taper into firmness against the edge of the sensitive crown; it doesn't take long before his legs are shaking and the familiar shudders of impending release are skittering their way down his spine.
"Ikorose, Shinsou."
The tip of the blade bites into Kira's belly -- not deeply, but plenty enough to bleed.
The shock of it does not work quickly enough. Kira's fist tightens involuntarily around his cock and he is helpless to keep from coming, his eyes rolling in ecstasy and terror as his bucking hips sharpen the sting of the sword needling his flesh a mere handspan above the focal point of his pleasure. He hears the gentle patter of his ejaculate against dead leaves, and wonders, fleetingly, how the bare feet of the man standing some meters away from him made no such sound as he approached.
Ichimaru Gin's hakama hang hazardously low on his bony hips. His kosode is open, and the verticle strip of pale skin it reveals still bears the marks of the strange woman's hands and mouth. His eyes are ruby slivers behind silver lashes, and they are fixed upon Kira's wet and wilting arousal.
"Enjoy the show?" he asks. His tone of voice and smile are casual, as if he does not hold a length of steel twenty nodes of bamboo long to another man's gut -- or perhaps because he does.
Kira feels his knees begin to buckle under the weight of his fear and disgrace. His denial is automatic, as is the sense of foolish despair that follows in its wake, aware as he is of the evidence still clasped in his red right hand. He wants badly to bow, to fall to the ground and beg for forgiveness, but the press of the sword point keeps all but his tongue from moving.
"I-Ichimaru-fukutaichou, my deepest apologies, I. . .i-it was not my intention to, to see--"
Ichimaru-fukutaichou's lips twitch, as though he's trying not to laugh. "Ah, but you did," he murmurs, and takes a step forward. Kira tenses, but Shinsou shortens with its master's approach, appearing to be reabsorbed into its blade collar and serpentine hilt guard. "You did see, Kira Izuru-kun."
"You. . .you know who I am?"
"Since you were in your mama's womb," he quips, and then chuckles quietly to himself, as if sharing a private joke with an invisible friend, or a ghost. "Come now, Kira-kun, who could forget a sweet face like yours?"
He is near enough now that his sword again seems to be nothing more than an ordinary wakizashi. This close, Kira can see that his cheeks still wear the ruddy stain of recent coitus, and that the tips of his shaggy silver hair are colored a dark charcoal with perspiration. He smells purely animalic, a heady combination of cooling sweat and double musk, something masculine and feminine and strangely bestial all at once. Something wild, Kira thinks.
Something rabid.
"Of course," Ichimaru continues, twisting his wrist, turning his blade until the sharp edge no longer faces the forest floor, but the tree tops, the sky, "you were screaming, the last time we met. I wonder what it would take" -- He drags Shinsou up Kira's stomach, stopping just below his ribs, like some simulation of seppuku -- "to make you scream like that again?"
"P-please," Kira chokes. He can feel the blood beading along the path the zanpakutou has scratched in his abdomen.
Ichimaru-fukutaichou allows the cloak he has dragged over his reiatsu to fall, and the pressure of it hits Kira like a granite slab. He fights to remain standing, lest he tumble forward and impale himself, or sink down and offer the blade his heart to eat, his throat to rip out.
"Please what?" Ichimaru asks, head tilting like a curious vulture's. "Please yes? Or please no?"
Kira's mouth works, but his voice does not. Ichimaru-fukutaichou's reiatsu congests his lungs and burns his eyes like smoke. It claws its way into his pores and fills his nose with the scent of musk and metal, black powder, singed fur and something vaguely herbal. It piles into his stomach like stones. His ears crackle and pop against the pressure like wet wood in a fire. He can't breathe. He's being buried alive in the open air. He is going to die here, with his hand on his cock the closest he's ever come to spreading his wings.
Bitterness and regret, remorse, incredulity and horror vie amongst themselves like rats on a sinking ship competing for the crow's nest, fighting to be the last thing he feels.
The last thing he sees is far simpler: a single color in two parts, each of them an outer mirror to his inner flames -- or the match, he thinks, that might have ignited them.
He awakes to indigo pinpricked with white light, and the feel of something warm and moist and oddly textured dredging the sore flesh of his abdomen.
Puzzled, groggy, he gropes with one hand for the cause of his disturbed slumber, and his first absurd notion is that Abarai-kun has brought home some stray, snuffling puppy that he will ask Kira to care for in his absence during his additional kidou classes.
"Dogs aren't allowed in the dorms," he mumbles, and the puppy barks -- no. . .
It chuckles.
"Good," it says, in a languid Kyoto drawl. "You know your handbook."
The words have all the effect of a bucket of ice water on his sleep-induced amnesia, and Kira jolts fully awake, fully aware. He raises his head.
Ichimaru Gin takes another long, lazy lick of the shallow wound streaking Kira's stomach. His tongue sports a vivid carmine stripe down its center, as if he's been sucking on hard apple candy.
"Fuku. . .taichou. . ." Kira trails off, at a rare and utter loss for words. He is not dead. The air is cool and light in his lungs, light against his skin, and clean but for a lingering, raspy scent of something weedy and vaguely herbal. He is not dead, but he can't help but wonder if Ichimaru-fukutaichou thought he was, nestled as he is between Kira's legs (and, gods, what is he doing there?), scavenging Kira's blood like it's some ambrosial liqueur.
He is still, he notices, naked from the waist down, and that Ichimaru-fukutaichou's gluttonous mouth has not left his body unaffected. Reflexively he draws his knees up in shame, but they are pushed back into place by strong, bony fingers.
Kira feels his face heat and swallows dryly, dreadfully -- not again, oh, please, not again. . .is this to be his punishment, the forced reproduction of his humiliation? How many times will he be made to endure it? Was once not enough for such a solitary -- if not entirely innocent -- infraction?
No, this is too much. He is a student of Shinou Academy, and he ought to be court-martialed, or at least challenged to a proper duel, impossible though he knows it would be for him to win -- he could lose no more thoroughly than he already has.
He casts his eyes around for something, anything that might in some way be of help in this most desperate of situations, but there is only darkness and dead leaves, and. . .and a wakizashi with a serpentine hilt guard, sheathed in its scabbard, only a few paces away.
Ichimaru-fukutaichou is unarmed.
Kira realizes that he does not need to be, but that he isn't. . .
His gaze falls again down the length of his torso, and he sees red. Ichimaru-fukutaichou is staring at him with narrowed, calculative -- but not contemptuous -- eyes.
"Done yet?" he asks.
Kira bites his lip, and nervously catches the corner of his mouth on a canine tooth. He cannot feel the blood welling, but he can taste it, weighty with iron and the dull echo of a memory like a bell. Ichimaru studies it with avid interest, his eyelids growing just a fraction heavier, his crimson smile widening. The stones still sitting in Kira's stomach combust.
"Good," Ichimaru-fukutaichou nods. "Lesson one, Kira Izuru-kun: never bare your belly to a beast, unless you intend to make one with two backs. . ."
All the better to hug you with. . .
He is flying.
Skating on a surface of spiritons, the numbered districts of Rukongai appear to him as little more than dank grids, the map of a sucking marshland, as he and his comrades-in-arms circle the skies like carrion birds awaiting the freshly dead -- in this case, a handful of defectors from a squad even dearer to Fifth Division fourth seat Kira Izuru than his own; a squad that, one day, will be his own, when enough time has passed that jeers of favoritism can no longer dog his advancement.
It's all nonsense, Kira knows, even if he can objectively see how unfairly convenient it would look to outside eyes if Third Division taichou Ichimaru Gin's newly appointed beta just happened to also be his occasional lover of the past three decades; but then, not many know Ichimaru-taichou well enough, as Kira does, to realize that he values his own hide much too highly to surrender the guarding of his back to someone who is too preoccupied with mooning over it to provide it with an adequate defense. He even had Kira spend a tour in the Fourth, to ensure that he would be well-versed in combat medicine, should the need ever arise before the estimated arrival time of Unohana-taichou's field operatives.
Kira will be promoted because he is better -- because he has been trained by the best.
He exchanges a glance and a nod with third seat Hinamori, who will soon undergo the same ceremony. Times between lieutenants tend to mimic times between captains, and the Gotei Thirteen has not been playing with full mobility in well over half a century. (Eighth Division fifth seat Matsumoto was Tenth Division fukutaichou Matsumoto for a full three years before Kira could look her in the eye. He doesn't know it, but the only thing that confused her about that time was that neither could he look her in the breasts.)
Soon, however, things will be mended. Soon the stitches will come out, and the scars licked smooth.
Kira's left hand idly strays to his midsection, where beneath the black folds of his shihakushou lies a thin silver gash, scarcely visible, and known only to himself and one other. The hot stones beneath it have been disciplined into symmetrical rows and transformed into muscle. He has learned how to breathe smoke, and when Wabisuke speaks to him, it is with the security that he can remain standing even when yoked with the heaviest of burdens.
Even Abarai-kun, true to his fighting nature, has figured out how to beat his wings, although he still beds down on the brittle branches of his former and future conquests. One day, Kira feels, they will break beneath the weight of their own years, and he prays that Abarai-kun will have sense enough not to simply fall with them when they do.
He won't, of course, but that is why it is a prayer -- it certainly can't be a bet.
Kira's nostalgia nips like a puppy, a cub, at his heels. He craves maple and mulberries, and the scent of some wildflowers that can also be classed as weeds. He decides that, after the traitors have been captured, he will visit again that most sacred place, and kill all three birds at once.
He wonders if he will meet anyone interesting on his way who might be inclined to join him.
All the better to eat you with.
He dreams in shades of red: the color of her life pooling on a frozen floor; the snapping of her mind like cherry skin between the perfect white teeth of the person she loved (loves?) most in this world, and the next, and the next; a nectarous droplet gemming on his finger before it is fouled by his mouth and falls, clinking, against the fruit stones in his stomach, against a bed of burnt-out embers and a pile of marbles cut to resemble rubies.
He opens his eyes, and the color does not fade.
Unohana-taichou rests a condoling hand on his shoulder in passing, and her small, pale palm seems to press down upon him with all the weight of a falling sky.
His bones feel like Hollows, riddled with empty pockets of broken promises and lost opportunities. His mind refuses to function, Abarai-kun's strength has failed twice over, and their heart lies slashed to ribbons in a hospital bed. Hinamori-kun's small, cracked lips are stained in places with dark blood like crushed berry juice, and he thinks that, although he does not kiss her, he still knows what she tastes like.
Third Division fukutaichou Kira Izuru is brimming with cold fury, a roiling concoction of bitterness and regret, remorse, incredulity, and horror. He feels old in a way he never has before, as though he stands with one foot in a grave that is not his own. He is the walking dead. He's been wandering gutted for decades.
Their army has been cleaved of three fingers on its sword hand. In Kira's Inner World, Wabisuke wails beneath the sanguine light of a blood moon, giving voice to a sense of deep and abiding bereavement his master has only just begun to comprehend. Grief picks at his entrails. It gulps down his sadness as though it's some ambrosial ichor. Perhaps, when it has eaten and drunk its fill, it will have devoured so much sorrow that its only recourse will be to condense and collapse in on itself like a black hole in his belly, and then he, too, will be an enemy, as much a turncoat as the turnskin the thought of whom now taints and taunts him like a tangled length of chain he never noticed was attached to a set of duller shackles.
And now what is he to do, gnaw his wings off at the wrists? And why not, when he has never truly flown, anyway? It's only been that his cage was tossed a few times into the air. He can lose no more thoroughly than he already has.
Feather-breath'd, Kira clenches his fists. He can feel the blood welling where his nails, his talons, his claws bite into his flesh.
He will not, he decides, be going down alone. After the traitors have been captured, he will visit again that most desecrated place, hallow the ground with mulberry wine and make a burial mound of a wildflower bed. He will mount a silver head on a maple pike and ground it at the apex of a body mummified from its torn throat down by a golden spider's silk. It is the only way to make things better; Kira knows this, because he has learned from the best.
"Lesson two, Kira Izuru-kun: wolves always mate for life."
And they hate in the hereafter.