|| @shinkakuka | from this
There were layers to the young man’s words: ways in which he may be interpreted or perhaps even misconstrued. Things that maybe even he himself did not quite realise he was belying with talk of loneliness and isolation; of making do with company that he might not have chosen otherwise. Isolation was a familiar fellow to the fallen God; standing aside from all others had become his norm, so it was easy to hear such strands in the things people did, and did not, say.
“Hmmm.”
After a moment of quiet reflection on the words that were uttered and their meaning, he tilts his head toward Ichigo, “Is that so? And to which home and what monsters do you refer – the house that is your soul? Your Inner World and the spectres that creep through it? Or, your reality and the masked monsters whom regard you with both trepidation and smiles when they see you?”
After a brief pause the fettered one smirks, “Or… do you mean the monsters that are the pressures of a modern degree?” he might as well make light of the seed he had planted in the young man’s mind; no doubt the sheer weight of his power weighed heavily upon Ichigo’s shoulders and mind – Soul Society would never fully embrace him, not while they feared his potential should he ever turn his teeth on them.
The thankless paradox of being a loving God – those the divine strives to protect will always fear his omnipotence for the possibility that it might be turned on them. That was why he himself had never strove to be a merciful God; let there be no illusions as to where the acolytes stood in relation to him.
“In any event… monsters are not necessarily good or bad, merely different.”
He wonders if talking about their fight is a sore subject. For all their conversation, they’ve managed to steer clear of that topic with ease. But he can’t explain what he was actually referring to without at least mentioning it. It’s the lead in for everything that came after.
“After we fought, I lost my spiritual powers.” That might not be all that surprising. Aizen tends to catch subtleties Ichigo would miss, even if Ichigo went through things multiple times over. “I...”
He struggles for the next words, because even now, his mind tries to shy away from those months. They’re a yawning, negative space in his memory. It’s hard to explain how he’d been haunted by everything he knew was there outside of what he could see and hear and affect. Blind and mute, he’d been forced to relearn how to see the world. How to live in it. He’d had to be protected from dangers he couldn’t even see as if he were a child. His closest friends forming together with secrets and barriers to keep him out. Guarding him against things he’d been deemed too fragile to know.
It’s obvious why. He gets it. He’d been doing the same thing in his own way. Trying to protect them by keeping what he was going through to himself.
He orders his words a different direction, because he doesn’t dare dip into any of that.
“It made this wall. I don’t know, I think it hurt them to look at me. I jumped at anything that might fix me.” He snorts, but doesn’t look up. “I probably came really close to getting an adjoining cell down here.”
And all of that is very possibly why he comes.
“I think we make a lot of our own monsters. That’s what I was getting at.”
