Do you think Ukitake would've approved Kyoraku's decision to involve Aizen in the battle against the Quincy? I think he would've but I'd love to know your opinion on it.
Kyouraku is already halfway to his destination, despite having set a leisurely and conversational pace. This is his always pace. It does not matter whether the world is on fire or well past the brink of war. He has lived too long to be too moved by sudden punctuations.
He remembers that feeling, the day Aizen’s plans stopped being written for the drawer and ended up hanging from the Seireitei’s walls. The inability to panic, age more like a bay than a mere anchor, experience having eroded any notion of immediacy under the crush of wave after annual wave. It’s a valued trait, and often a useful one. Sometimes, it’s even called wisdom. Today it means that Kyouraku feels no panic, coming to Aizen now.
But he and you have talked about this. You always talk about this. You have spent millennia at each other’s sides. It is possible you are no longer discrete objects. In the same way that shinigami learn to find pieces of themselves in a sword and then externalize still others in the form of bankai, you found each other as young men; and now, as old ones, there are pieces of you that can only be found in each other.
It’s romantic, which is a word Kyouraku uses often and one you rarely did. But in a practical sense, what all your time together means is Kyouraku always agrees with you, and you with him. The second is immediate, and the ayes have it before the question has even been asked. The agreement comes before and irrespective of any personal contemplations.
For example: Kyouraku agreed to let you die. If this was your will, then it was his. There was no other option.
But that’s the part of him that exists in you talking.
The rest of him—the him that exists in him—would never agree to lose you like that.
"You have to disagree! It’s easier to keep you mind when you’re being contrary!" Kyouraku chuckles, eyes crinkling with sly fondness at no one. "Otherwise all you are is me."
You wouldn’t have stopped him here, had you still hands to hold him back. In the same way that he did not stop you.
It’s unwise to rush ghosts, but Kyouraku traces the unbroken expanse of the prison walls as he marches downward, ever closer. If you want to object, you will have to do it quickly.
"You disagree," he repeats, restarting the conversation, replaying the scene.
"You know, I’d love to make you hate me for this," he continues.
If you hated him, the you that was in him would cease to be enough. The you in you would have to come back to hold the feeling. The you in you would need to be cut from bamboo, brought new into this world. You would be young, then, Ukitake. You would be young, and Aizen would scare you.
But Kyouraku arrives at Muken’s gates old, mind as calm as an inlet’s waters, and you are not there to stop him.
"You disagree," Kyouraku repeats, for the third and final time. If you don’t, then there’s no reason for you to be there at all. Not in any practical sense. But he wants you.
He buries the key in his heart.
