Pleasure, Pain

As the summary says, I wrote this before we got our pre-series flashback. So it is full of inaccuracies. But it's also full of porn. And porn is good, right? Right!

Although labeled BDSM, S&M definitely steals the stage. This fic is all about sadism, really; in all its forms.

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He was still very small when he learned he liked to cause pain.

They say you always start with animals, that you have to work your way up to hurting people, desensitize yourself to it, and maybe for some that was true -- but in his case it had been more a matter of convenience. A boy living all by himself and miles from the nearest village had little opportunity to be cruel to other people, and young as he'd been, Gin had recognized early on that a charming smile and nice manners sometimes got him free food from the few adults that did pass by. He wasn't stupid, so of course he hadn't started with them.

He'd started with a butterfly.

The exact details of that day were no longer clear and sharp in his mind; decades tend to do that to childhood memories. But he remembered working in the field, his hands raw from picking past the saw-edged grasses and nettles to get at the more edible things, and he remembered seeing the shadow, raising his head. He remembered holding his hand out, curiously, and the strangely trusting way the butterfly had landed on the heel of his palm.

He remembered cupping his hands around it protectively and watching for quite a while, admiring the colors and delicate movement, before deciding to rip off one of its pretty painted wings.

They say you only lash out because you were a victim first, that you burn the ants and drown the puppies because you were molested or otherwise abused by someone else, and maybe for most that was true, too. Gin didn't think anything so dramatic had been a factor for him, and he knew he hadn't been especially distressed at the time. He had very calmly wondered whether the tiny creature would still be able to fly with just the one wing, and just as calmly torn it off to find out. He had done these things because the butterfly had trusted him enough to let him. He'd done them because he could.

And then he had watched with wide eyes while its broken body writhed in his hands, trying desperately to escape and still failing when once it would have slipped through his fingers and soared away so effortlessly.

The word sadist would never have occurred to him, not at that age, but he knew his breath had quickened a little, and he knew he'd liked it. He knew he would do it again, and worse, if he ever found another butterfly to let him.

It would be almost a decade before he learned he liked to feel the pain, too.

He wasn't quite so small anymore, and he had done many more terrible things, all of them rather carelessly. He had stolen food and blamed another boy and watched as he was beaten to the edge of second death. He had cut an animal open, just to see what they were like on the inside. He had saved the life of a little girl, nearly killed her twice while she lay sleeping, and then just as easily (almost as easily) abandoned her to the elements.

He had even enrolled in the Academy the way you were supposed to if you had spirit power, and really he was doing very well there, but every night he still thought about dropping out before graduation or maybe ending his career more spectacularly by murdering his entire squad on their first visit to the living world.

He knew that kind of slaughter would have had had messy, nasty consequences, and once that would have been motivation enough all on its own to keep his head down and his nose relatively clean, but the skittish little boy was all grown up now, and even the most awful death he could imagine was not quite enough to make him forget the taste of blood in his mouth.

All in all, Gin wasn't sure what would have become of him, if they hadn't met. He knew he had been teetering, on the edge of the precipice, and he might have regained his balance on his own, might have stepped back safely, but when you want the wind in your hair badly enough, sometimes you also want that glorious fall.

No, he hadn't wanted to die, but he hadn't been afraid of it either -- fearing death was for those attached to their lives, those who wanted more from this existence than a full belly and wetwarmred on their hands.

He'd felt his control slipping, and worse, he'd started to find that he really didn't care.

If he hadn't met someone capable of taking all his darkest desires firmly in hand -- someone who could show him how to be constructive in his destruction -- Gin wasn't sure what would have happened to him. Something awful, probably.

Just another reason to be grateful for (and appreciative of, oh yes, so appreciative of) Captain Aizen Sousuke.

His first glimpse of the man had been from thousands of feet back at a demonstration of shikai, meant ostensibly to encourage new students by showing them what they would someday be capable of, but it would be years more before they really met. Of course he'd heard the name often enough; everyone in his year had, almost incessantly. Apparently Captain Aizen taught a special course there at the Academy, despite his myriad other duties, and his students were easy to spot in the hallways -- they were the ones who did all their work ahead of time, giggled and beamed at one another as though extra credit projects were terribly romantic, and generally fell all over themselves to sing the praises of their wonderful, wonderful teacher.

With some amusement, Gin remembered how he had felt almost sorry for the faceless Captain Aizen, how he had thought that any class taught by a guy like that would always be brimming with giddy girls and star-struck boys who would've signed up just as eagerly to hear him read the school's directory for two hours every day. How he had wondered, with idle curiosity, what a guy like that would teach anyway.

Just another of his careless decisions, but one of only two (maybe three) that had ever changed his life so completely.

The class itself was deadly dull. What good would calligraphy ever do any of them on the field of battle? You couldn't stab someone with a line of pretty ink, and the way it flowed on paper was nothing like blood. Hardly thrilling -- it was just another of the electives for bored sixth-year students with nothing better to do. Perfectly innocuous. He wouldn't have even bothered sitting through the first hour, if Captain Aizen hadn't moved to the front of the room and welcomed them all with a horribly genial smile that made his breath quicken.

Years and years of practice, slowly spent learning how to hurt other people without risk. Learning that people also had wings, whether they saw them or not, and that if you could get a good enough grip on the roots you could rip those wings away, leave them twisting and helpless like that poor crippled butterfly. Learning that if you did it very quickly and never stopped smiling, they would be much too disoriented and uncertain to retaliate. He had felt very clever, had taken (almost) every opportunity to practice on his fellow students, had thought himself so good at causing pain.

Yet all he had ever managed was to veil his intentions. His smile was disarming, but only a paper-thin mask, and he knew the people he hurt could tell. His classmates might not have been sure enough to attack him, but they were sure enough to avoid him afterwards, spare him only nervous glances whenever they passed him in the halls, and sit far away when they could. They did not become his friends. They did not like him. They did not let him hurt them again.

And before that instant in the classroom, he would have thought of course they didn't. People could be stupid about a lot of things, but even animals knew better than to walk back into the fire that had burned them. He would have thought no amount of pleasant smiling could change that.

His captain had proved otherwise.

The genial smile was more than disarming. It was genuine. He could feel his classmates responding to the warmth and kindness and infinite understanding that flowed from it, to its perfect smooth serenity. If he hadn't seen the same lie in every mirror his whole life through, Gin knew he never would have recognized the blended edges of the older man's mask.

When Captain Aizen hurt people, he didn't frighten them. He could have seized a girl abruptly from the front row and cut her to pieces right then and there, and even the girl might have loved him still, might have died gratefully because her teacher had let her be of some small service to him.

This man's cruelty did not sting. It shone like a beam of light, drew their eyes and caught their breath. They walked into its fire willingly, and if somehow he broke them in the process, if the sheer power of his hand on their fragile shoulders was enough to sever their wings, this man would kiss the cracks, whisper kind words to the fissures and seal them up again, almost good as new, so that they could fly away and come back for more again and again.

They never quite made eye contact, but he knew Captain Aizen had noticed him. One wolf passing another in the flock can't help but pick up on the familiar scent. He wondered if he had looked very different from the others in his class, or if the flush in his cheeks and throat had made him seem every bit as innocently excited as the rest of them, but at the time he hadn't really cared. All he had wanted, from that moment on, was to be there when their beloved captain started ripping off their wings.

At first, he hadn't thought much of it. Hadn't he always been proud of the games he played? Wasn't it only natural to respect someone else who could play them better? Was there really so much difference in wanting to hurt people yourself, and wanting to watch a master at work? It was still sadism.

So when Captain Aizen asked him to stay after class that day and politely inquired after which divisions he planned to apply for, light refracting off those glasses in just such a way that you couldn't see anything but that genial smile, Gin had matched it and told him sweetly: "Only the Fifth Division would be good enough, Sir."

And something very subtle had changed in the other man's smile, like the tide retreating ever so slowly to expose jagged rocks. "How flattering to hear you say so, Ichimaru-kun. You'll have to work hard, I'm afraid it's a popular choice this year and the competition will be intense."

By which of course he had really meant, I'll see you in the spring.

It was all very proper, exactly the conversation any captain might have had with a student, but he left the room feeling warm and almost dizzy, his palms slick and his breathing ragged. They both knew what Aizen would have done to him if he had answered badly, and he should have been terrified. He should have fled the Academy in the night, left Seireitei behind and hoped to god this man wouldn't come looking for him. When he felt the hand on his shoulder, that same light touch that could so easily have severed his wings, he should have reacted... any other way at all, really.

Any reaction would have been better than the slow twist of heat in his belly, the sudden rush of blood that had made him so hard, so fast, so easily. The breathless eagerness he'd feel later whenever Aizen would pause by his seat to reach out and place a broad hand on his shoulder, every inch the gentle teacher except for the thumb that wandered, stroked the line of his throat and made him intensely aware of how easily he could have shifted, even an inch, and snapped his neck.

Fingers caressing the roots of his wings, wings he hadn't even known he had, and all he could think was, If this is how it makes them feel, no wonder they love him so.

It really, really wasn't sadism anymore.

He hadn't known his captain well enough yet, and so Gin remembered thinking he was doing a very good job of hiding this reaction, that the older man's lingering touch and occasional barely-veiled threat were just... his way. That the walks they took late at night, far beyond school grounds, following the deathstone wall, him so much closer to it, weren't meant to make his skin sing with all the things their wonderful Captain Aizen could have done to him away from prying eyes. That his mouth wasn't supposed to go dry at the thought of what it would feel like to be shoved hard against the stone, held there while it burned his skin and ripped the reiatsu right out of him, held there while his captain watched with that look in his eyes.

The look he had never actually seen, but wanted to so badly.

Masochist was the word then. He was old enough for it that time, and should have thought it, should have known, but the whole thing was very artfully done, and he couldn't think clearly enough to label any of it anymore. All he knew was that by the time he joined the Fifth Division -- and that part wasn't easy, just as Aizen had so-sincerely warned him -- he was burning for it. The heat so intense he thought it might consume him, and the need so powerful that he almost didn't care.

He was nearly ashes when the moth came to tell him that his presence was requested, tonight, just after sunset if possible, and this incident Gin remembered vividly. The long walk through the halls of his new division, the uncertainty he'd pushed away again and again. After months of scarcely looking at him, suddenly Captain Aizen had called him here, not to his office but to his own private rooms, and they would be alone. It had the same feel to it as their late-night walks, and despite himself he was holding his breath when he found the right door.

Captain Aizen had been very pleasant at first, very much the mask he wore for the rest of the world, and he had done his best to respond in kind, cheerful, never once so much as insinuating that perhaps this man owed him some form of explanation, but then the door had slid shut behind him, and the rest of the world had been neatly locked outside, and in the silence that fell between them then, everything had changed abruptly.

"You came," his captain said to him, simple and light but somehow so significant. It meant more than just responding to the moth's summons, and that was reassuring in a way. Proof that he hadn't forgotten their first conversation.

"You called," Gin remembered answering, in as close to the same tone as he could get when his heart was beating hard and fast and he felt warm with a rush of blood that had gone all sorts of inappropriate places.

Aizen did not immediately reply, gazing at him instead for several seconds; watching, analyzing, maybe staring through his skin at the way the blood pulsed in his body. Finally he murmured, "Is that the only reason?"

Being honest was stupid, for people like them, in a moment like this. He did it anyway. "No." He hitched his smile up another notch, and tried not to think about the way just that soft intensity had made him throb.

Another man would have pried, wouldn't have been willing to let something so noncommittal stand, but his captain only smiled back at him and got slowly to his feet, turning to lead him deeper into his chambers. The words hung between them, unspoken but as real as what he hadn't said in the classroom months before.

That's enough for now. I'll ask you again later, and you'll say it then.

And already he knew he would.

They had to go down several hallways and through more than one concealed door before Aizen stopped in front of him and he knew they had arrived. Then the lights came on, all at once, a hundred candles flaring to life, and it could not be real, none of it could be real, especially not the twisted body strung from the ceiling in the middle of a room that was much too big for personal quarters among the Shinigami. He couldn't quite make out her face at first, still blinded by the sudden glare, but then he realized with a start that the woman hanging naked there, her body crisscrossed and bleeding, was Lieutenant Nagasaki.

Hinamori-chan had been very like her, really; a younger version, not as pretty or as curvy, but every bit as loyal and devoted and blind. He remembered being disappointed with this one. At the time, he'd expected better from the adjutant of a man like Aizen.

A man who was suddenly behind him, even though he hadn't seen him move, whispering softly against the shell of his ear and making him go stalk-still. "Do you like it?"

His breath was very warm, stirred the little hairs at the nape of his neck, but the question was what caught his breath, what really made him realize how stupid he'd been to think himself discreet.

"I..." He forced the laugh. It covered well enough for shattered nerves and a thundering heartbeat. "Is she dead?" He wasn't even sure why he had asked, because he really didn't care.

The captain's laugh was better, warm and throaty in a way that made him shiver. "No, of course not. Just... very close to it. I find that death ruins this sort of game, don't you?"

He nodded because he had to do something, and Aizen went on, still that intimate whisper:

"She's only unconscious from the pain."

But the older man didn't stop there, oh no. He kept talking, described the way he'd cut her in excruciating detail, how he had lured her back here first and then bound her arms above her head, spread her legs apart and used kidou to tear her clothes away. How he had cut her, so carefully, in the most tender of places. How he had made her nipples bleed, her thighs, and how lovely it had looked, how loudly she had gasped and cried out and finally begged for more...

The words were very pretty, the mild voice hypnotic, and it took him a while to realize that the one breathing roughly, wantingly, was him. By that point, Captain Aizen had gently, gently taken hold of his wrists and gently, gently urged them behind his back. Gently, gently murmuring the binding spell that would fix them there, and gently, gently releasing him so that he fell awkwardly to his knees.

"You came because you want this," his captain stated, no more whispering; warm and amused, but something else, too. Something else that Gin had hated instinctively. "You want to be cut up into fine ribbons like poor Nagasaki-kun here. You want me to hurt you, like I've hurt her. Isn't that right, Ichimaru-kun?"

Disinterest, he realized. It was disinterest.

He lifted his head to meet the other man's eyes, and smiled. "You make it sound so depraved when you say it like that, Sir, but that's pretty much it. Give or take a few very minor details."

"Oh?"

It was the first time he thought he'd ever managed to surprise Aizen. Maybe the first time anyone really had.

"Yes, Sir. It's still not the only reason I came."

His captain hadn't immediately responded, gazing down at him expressionlessly for ages, but then he reached up and removed his glasses; then he smiled, and it was nothing like the mask. "So good to hear it," he said carelessly.

And in that same instant the binding tightened hard on his arms, cutting into his skin and dragging a strangled cry out of him. Oh god oh fuck, he almost came right there, in his brand-new robes. Just from the twist, just from the pain, just from seeing with unfocused eyes what he was sure had been the look--

"I think," Aizen murmured, sounding very faraway, "we should get you out of those clothes. They're somewhat inconvenient, and will probably interfere with what I'd like to do tonight."

With what you'd like me to do to you tonight.

He wet his lips. "Don't think I'll be much help, Sir, if I can't move my arms."

This time the older man laughed, and reached down to stroke his hair almost indulgently. "So irreverent. I suppose there's little point in asking if you want me to hurt you, is there?" The fingers in his hair went tight until the burn in his scalp made his eyes water, then slipped away. "It seems that would only encourage you."

Kidou tore the kosode from his chest, neat slices appearing in the sleeves and along the seams so that it simply fell apart, and he was just looking down as best he could to admire the quick work his captain had made of it when the same thing happened to his hakama and left him utterly naked, fluttering fabric on the tatami floor all around him. It took his skin longer to split, each cut opening exactly where his clothes had torn like some sort of twisted echo. They were shallow, stinging little things, and the air whistled through his teeth as he struggled to breathe, but if anything he thought he was harder, thick and heavy and aching, the skin of his cock stretched tight with every last paper cut.

"That's very pretty," Aizen told him, soft and low, and he wondered if the other man meant his arousal or his blood. Then long tapered fingers traced his jaw and lifted his chin, helping him to meet that warm amber gaze, and he decided it was both.

His captain could have said more, could have been thoroughly humiliating about it, but why bother? They both knew he was hard, even desperate; they both knew he was already intensely aware of it, and Aizen seemed to prefer catching his gaze and then lowering his eyes, quietly insinuating, to any actual commentary. It would have been enough to make any other man blush.

Neither of them was quite any other man, and he grinned fiercely. "You're so full of compliments, Captain~. It's making me dizzy."

"Something certainly is."

Gin remembered the way those long tapered fingers had stroked down his throat, circled his adam's apple delicately, skimming over his breastbone and the muscles in his belly to stop just short of his erection. He remembered sucking in air, quick and harsh, because the last time anyone else had touched him had been years ago and someone else's fingers were nothing like your own. But more than anything, he remembered Aizen watching him, intent as a scientist, as if fascinated by his excitement. His responses. Maybe even his responsiveness.

The fingers had encircled him, beginning to stroke, and they themselves had been so close, close enough that he could feel the older man's presence on his bare skin, and those smiling lips had been slack, slightly parted, the only sign that his captain might have been enjoying this on a less than purely intellectual level--

He hadn't been able to resist a little kiss.

It slowed the fingers on his cock, and he could have sworn Aizen's pause was something sensible, something he tasted on the man's lips. He could have sworn he felt them curve, the smallest of pleased smiles against his mouth before they parted again and there was a tongue there, stroking at the seam of his own smile to deepen this unexpected kiss. It was almost like a concession, even a victory. And sometimes he thought the rest of the night would have gone very, very differently if he hadn't been so bold.

One hand settled on his thigh, palm flat, and Aizen withdrew very briefly from the kiss to whisper, "Way of Binding, 76: Pin and Needle. First Movement, Second Movement."

He felt it pull his legs apart, curl his spine and cut into his skin, a thousand tiny pricks of pain that burned in his veins like adrenaline. He didn't know the spell, had only once seen a level-seventy sans incantation, but he doubted it was normally used like this, to spread-eagle your opponent and twist him onto his back. Gin tried to look down at himself this time, too, but he couldn't really see and so he let his head fall back, licking his lips. He must have made a pretty picture, his thighs stretched so far open that he could feel the muscles burning, his arms still pinned to his back, totally fucking helpless and panting like an eighty-district whore because every breath he took made the spell cut into him again.

If he hadn't been so achingly turned on, he would have laughed at himself, or maybe whimpered. As it was he held very still while his captain stood and disrobed himself, smooth and controlled and almost, almost indifferent. When they knew each other better, Gin would come to recognize that within that control lay a certain rigidity, a certain anticipation that sometimes made the jugular stand out on his throat or the bones jut from his hands; a part of Aizen that was nearly as eager as his fox for all the things they could do together when the clothes were gone.

"C... Captain..." His voice, only he hadn't known it could sound so completely wanton.

The long tapered fingers found his lips, tapped them once lightly, and Aizen smiled down at him. "Shhh."

There was very little in the way of preparation. He had never been taken by a man before, never felt slick fingers working in and out of him or the dirty spark of pleasure as they found something sweet inside that curled his toes, but it hadn't mattered then. He hadn't needed any preparation. Too hot, too hard, too hungry for the stretching, for the friction, for anything his captain deigned to give him, and he would have spread his own legs if they hadn't been so far apart already. When the first thrust hurt a little, caught his breath a little, well, it really had only encouraged him.

Then his captain began to move, really move, and he couldn't breathe at all without moaning thinly because every slide of flesh dragged a shudder from him, and every shudder tightened the spell, digging deeper into his skin, turning pinpricks into nasty shivering stabs. He thought he heard a dusky chuckle, thought he felt Aizen's mouth brush his throat with something like affection, even as those powerful hands stroked the bones of his hips and held him still for the next thrust, squeezing hard enough to bruise.

Already he felt raw inside, hypersensitive. He strained his back to lift his body, get some kind of leverage so that he could meet the fucking, arch into it, do something instead of just lying there flat on his back and weak as a kitten. Only the binding spell was too well-made, too powerful, and while he thought he might have been able to loosen it a little if he really focused, focusing on anything but the seductive rhythm inside him, that mindless in-and-out, the needy pulse of his own dick, was fast becoming really tricky. It felt -- it felt so good, just lying there with his legs splayed while this captain, this teacher, this gorgeous monster fucked him senseless....

The pleasure, the pure sensation, were almost suffocating. He wasn't going to last, he couldn't, and then Aizen had reached between their sweat-slicked bodies, curling fingers around his cock and dragging a sword-callused thumb over the sensitive tip of it, not just blinding him but making the whole world go fucking white. Utterly, mind-numbingly white.

Gin remembered it all very clearly, because he had never come so hard before, thick jets that struck his lover's belly and made a mess of both of them.

Because his captain had never groaned like that before, soft and through his teeth, breathing heavily and faintly flushed and for once, as his hips jerked and he made those last involuntary little thrusts that spilled his seed somewhere deep inside, not completely in control.

Or maybe because months later when they were lying in Aizen's bed, far from the rooms that couldn't really exist, the older man had reached out once more to stroke his hair -- lazy, warm, that odd indulgence -- and murmur, "You are something else, Gin."

Even drowsy as he had been, sated and sore and on the edge of sleep, something in him had responded, going very still. "Oh yes?" Of course he'd smiled, kept his voice carefully light and unconcerned, even though he had never been just Gin before. "I hope it's something good."

Aizen had only laughed. "As do I. We'll see, won't we?"

So many things that he remembered vividly, decades later. He liked to think they had.

It was all a little different in Hueco Mundo. They weren't in hiding anymore, and he was no longer the only one who ever caught so much as a glimpse of the particular brand of sadism that lurked just beneath his captain's dangerously-genial smile. Just the only one who ever seemed to feel it.

Which, Gin knew, was really rather strange, and more than once he had wondered about that. What it meant, that Lieutenant Nagasaki was dead now but still whole, that he himself had woken up the next morning and every morning after that to find the blood gone, his skin too perfectly undamaged for a simple healing spell, almost as if the whole thing had been nothing but a very kinky dream. What it said about his captain that the man never really cut or tore for his own pleasure, but always seemed to enjoy the show that he made of it. Aizen's sadism was really much too subtle for the games they'd played, too deeply buried in those wonderful smiles, and most of their sessions these days were milder, practically sentimental for people like them.

If it hadn't been for the bruises shaped like long tapered fingers, the bruises that he sometimes discovered all over him even after the mildest of fucks, he might have thought his captain didn't like hurting him at all. Faintly blue and purple on his pale skin, they would have been easy to heal, but he never bothered, and for some reason Aizen had never offered.

Sadism.

Masochism.

Gin really didn't know anymore, but he knew he liked it when the older man touched them, putting gentle pressure on the tender flesh, making him feel naked through his clothes. He knew he liked having that afterimage of their sex, sweet and secret, and how a careful brush of thumb or knuckle could make him feel it all over again, even when the Espada were right there in the room with them giving their little reports. How even alone he could lean against a wall in just the wrong way, for days after, and bask. He knew he liked it, all of it, whatever it was.

Someone would have been very horrified, would have wanted to know what had happened to him, what Captain Aizen had done to him, when he'd started to like things like this. Someone would have remembered a softer kind of sex. He could almost see her stunned face if he shut his eyes completely.

But he didn't have an answer for her. She hadn't understood the butterflies, and for a moment (but only a moment), she'd even made him want to be the kind of person who didn't need that understanding. How could he explain it to her? What could he have done but smiled, tipped his head to the side and confessed that he wasn't so sure anything had happened to him? What if Aizen hadn't changed him so much after all? What if he'd always been like this, just deeper down before? Dark and sweet and secret like the bruises beneath his clothes, the bruises that were there even if the cuts had never been. What if all his captain had done was bring that part to the surface, made it so the blood bloomed beneath his skin and anyone could see?

Except that it was still something only one man could see, something only one man would ever see, and that thought alone was enough to make him hard so fast it turned the world red and hazy.

After all, in the end, it really wasn't about the pain, was it?