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Yoruichi looked at Kisuke with resignation. He knew that she wouldn’t judge him for making this decision, that she wouldn’t leave his side. After all, the grim, realistic picture was that there was no easy way for them to keep tabs on Aizen from exile. Yoruichi was brilliant at reconnaissance, but Aizen was a class of his own.
Realistically, getting back in the good graces of the Gotei 13 made sense, if their group of exiles was going to live long term. And Kisuke intended to make sure they all lived long lives.
Still, the look Yoruichi pinned him with as he explained his plan, it wasn’t pity, not quite. Maybe some mix of that and grief. Like she knew he was in the process of sacrificing himself.
Like he’d already lost everything.
Again.
“They’re not going to like this,” she said.
Head canted forward to hide his eyes, he said, with full confidence, with an indignant bite, “They’ll understand the necessity.”
“Will he?” she pressed.
Unable to answer, Kisuke stood up and left the room.
—
“Captain Ukitake said that he spoke with Head Captain Yamamoto, that this will ease the target off our backs.” Kisuke pressed, intensity slipping into his carefully calm delivery. “We won't need to hide.”
“Who gives a fuck what they think!” Hiyori, predictably, reacted first. “It’s been almost forty years, and they haven’t been able to track us down. We don’t need their fucking good graces! In case you forgot, dumbass, they planned to execute us. They severed your—”
“Hiyori, stop.”
She shut up abruptly, with an indignant grunt rolling forward from where Shinji had kicked her in the back, and with the end of her tirade, Kisuke was forced to face the one person who’s reaction he’d been dreading.
He could trust in Yoruichi’s practicality the same way he could trust Tessai’s loyalty and Hiyori’s rage. He could predict the responses of almost everyone in their group. Except for one.
Or maybe Kisuke just didn’t want to acknowledge what he knew.
Hiyori was angry enough to be turning an impressive shade of red, whirling on Shinji and launching into what Kisuke’s registered distantly as a fairly impressive litany of curses.
But Shinji. Shinji, who looked as beautiful in the low oil lantern light wearing a ratty button down and chin-length hair as he did shining golden and long haired in bright sunshine of the Seireitei. Shinji, who was the one person Kisuke wasn’t sure he could do this without.
Who was looking at him with eyes fractured in anger and denial.
In grief.
In betrayal.
Oh, Kisuke realized, in the moment he met Shinji’s gaze, he’s going to leave me for this.
He’d almost forgotten, in this handful of picture-perfect years with Shinji in exile, how heartbreak felt.
In the moment Kisuke lost everything, no, threw everything away, he realized that he’d actually been happy. Free from so many impossible expectations and restrictions that he had broken himself over and over again to meet. Shattered himself and bound together the pieces of his soul to be better, for the people who threw him away without a second thought.
He’d been happy and free, building something almost like a family, with the Visoreds, Yoruichi and Tessai, with Shinji, in a world that none of them had a place in anymore. It bound them together, and only now did Kisuke see the tethers binding them while he sheared through the last thread of those bonds with the scissors in his hands.
Red thread, red blood, all over him, falling at his feet.
Hiyori’s rage waned fast, leaving behind a gaping wound of silence as the group gathered around the table processed the implications of what Kisuke was agreeing to. Or at least, it seemed quiet to Kisuke, arguments and accusations fading to a dull roar as Kisuke became hyper-aware of the cracks breaking apart their family.
And Shinji watching him.
He was right there, only a few feet away, but Kisuke couldn't imagine anything he could say or do to reach out, not when Shinji was looking at him with such raw, resigned betrayal. Not when Kisuke knew that expression on Shinji’s face too well, from the first years of their exile. When Shinji hated the world, and Aizen, but most of all himself, for letting himself be duped in the first place.
“They’re making this deal because it’s easier to leash you than to kill you. You realize that, right,” Shinji said.
Not a question, really. Not at all, when he knew the answer.
His voice echoed, the faintest tremble that Kisuke knew no one else could have caught.
“There’s no reason to make an enemy of the Gotei 13 if we do not need to,” Kisuke reasoned. And oh, his voice was cracking, splintering and tearing down the middle, his desperation for them, for Shinji, to understand breaking every part of himself apart.
“They made us the enemy first,” Shinji said, louder, harsher, leaning forward.
His fingers were in a white-knuckled fist on the table, and Kisuke remembered with a sort of visceral, masochistic clarity what those fingers felt like trailing across his skin, gripping his hair. It’d only been a few hours ago that Shinji had reached out that hand in a lazy, beckoning gesture to pull KIsuke back to bed and back to his arms.
Realizing he would never have that again, Kisuke felt his chest constrict, lungs withering up useless in his chest because the pain of clarity was tearing its way through him and something had to give, and—
Shinji was still wearing Kisuke's green haori.
Because it smells like you, Shinji had said.
“There’s no reason not to cooperate,” Kisuke argued, leaning forward, his own hands stretched out and frozen, caught between reaching out to grab Shinji and tear through his own throat.
Shinji laughed a cruel, harsh sound, lurching to his feet, like he felt so much that the emotion tried to tear free and carried his body forward as an afterthought. The part of Kisuke that only knew his own vulnerability as something to weaponize, stood as well to keep himself level with Shinji.
“Cooperate? Really? They’re offering you fuckin’ crumbs, askin’ you to give up everythin’ for those awful, ungrateful bastards all over again, just because killin’ ya would be a waste of resources. They’re using you!”
“So what! I'm used to that. It's what I'm good for!” Kisuke shouted, anger breaking through.
Shinji reeled back on his heels like Kisuke had struck him, and Kisuke lurched forward. To comfort him, hold him, lock him away or strike the final blow, he didn’t know.
Why couldn’t they just understand? This was the best decision they could make for the long term. What did grudges, what did feelings, have to do with anything when it was about them getting to survive to see another day? To have a better chance at taking down Aizen once and for all?
How could they not see that this was the only path they could take if they ever wanted to get their old lives back?
Kisuke couldn't stop, couldn’t reel back in his emotions or stop yelling. “What does it matter if they use me? Who cares? This is the best chance we have to—”
“You stupid, fuckin’ martyr,” Shinji growled, voice echoing like his Hollow was close to the surface as he grabbed Kisuke by the front of his shirt and dragged him close until their faces were inches apart.
With Shinji that close, where his rage and pain were all Kisuke could see, where all the anguish Kisuke had wrought in the person he cared for the most, fucking loved more than anything, looked at him like he just shoved a dagger in chest and called it a gift.
“I care,” Shinji continued. “I care that they do nothin’ but tear you apart. We would’ve been fine without them. We would have been great without you sellin’ yourself back to them.”
“We still can be!” Kisuke shouted. Cried. Begged.
But it was too late, wasn’t it?
He’d made his decision, and as he glanced around the room, where none of the Visoreds, his fucking family, would meet his eyes, he realized they’d made their decision, too.
Just like that.
“No, Kisuke, we can’t. We won’t scrape our way by on the Gotei’s crumbs. And I won’t watch you tear yourself up for them. I can’t.”
Shinji’s voice broke, Kisuke’s heart with it. The anger had drained away, and in its withdrawal, only grief.
Shinji stepped away, and Kisuke tilted his head so his hat cast his expression in shadow.
He'd made his decision. Now, he just had to find some way to live with it.