Bleach; Habitual
Title: Habitual
Fandom: Bleach
Rating: G - PG
Pairing: There's a bit of Gin/Kira there, just a little.
Characters: Mostly Gin. A little Kira.
Word Count: 352
Summary: A fic on Gin's thoughts of his past and of Kira in Hueco Mundo.
Fifty years is not a long time in a shinigami unlife. What matters takes longer than fifty years - the long climb to power (sinking picks, axes, swords against any opposition), the slow fruition of plans. Fifty years is temporal and what only takes forty, fifty years must be temporal - meeting a successful vice-captain candidate, saying, seeing the name 'Kira Izuru' for the first time.
Gin thinks this as he looks at the black sky of Hueco Mundo, white crescent moon. Hollows kill and feed in the never changing sands of the desert. All is savagery and all of it is unveiled and exposed in this hollow world. He feels at ease. Here is permanence, here is something that he might call truth. He had hated the base struggling of Rukongai, meaningless. He finds that there is something pure in the fighting of Hollows, a single resolve for more that is not contaminated (thick Rukongai dust, wet Rukongai mud) by petty emotions. Yes, he likes it here.
But Gin is a creature of habit. The accent, a reminder of his inferior birth, that he could never lose. He had tried once, when he was young, when those living in innermost Rukongai had laughed when he said 'I'm goin' to be a shin'gami". Yet years later when meeting with the shinigami of the Gotei 13 he had introduced himself with the same accent, for he had learnt other habits during that interval. Habits that showed themselves in the way he rested his hands on his zanpakutou, deceptively limp; his eyes, almost never opening; his smile, never faltering.
So he thinks that it is because of habit that he wonders that since fifty years is temporal, perhaps permanence can be formed in sixty years - walking past the Academy as a vice-captain, meeting the glance of a blond student. And that it is only because of habit that he remembers how it feels to say "Good morning, Izuru" every day, never faltering, for fifty years, remembers "What do you mean to do, Ichimaru-taichou?", and "Don't leave, taichou - I will follow...I will follow."