Characters: Rukia, Aizen
Summary: Dance to someone else's beat until your feet bleed.
Pairings: Aizen x Rukia
Warnings/Spoilers: This is AU
Timeline: AU timeline
Author's Note: Yeah, yeah, weird, I know. Reviews are like chocolate, though flames are more along the line of black licorice, which will be thrown, unceremoniously, into the garbage can. Also, please take note of the AU labels put down in noticeable areas.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

The sky burns in Rukia's dreams, the fire eerie, bright and blue, flames licking hungrily at her flesh, consuming but never burning. This is how it's written, blue threads of ink tangling as it spells out the words engraved on her soul.

Captive… Hostage… Willing accomplice…

And she is only dimly amazed at how thoroughly she has damned herself. Strong emotion won't come to her anymore.

Rukia isn't sure how she fell into the sieve, how she became entangled in the spider web set up by clever men to catch all of Soul Society. She's not sure she cares anymore, for how does it matter, to know when she swam too far beneath the waves to see the surface anymore?

It starts out simply. The calm, serene Aizen-taicho begins to pay her more attention than what would normally be considered habitual for a captain of a division not her own. Rukia is more than a little perturbed but his soothing, hypnotic voice puts her at total ease.

She sees him as a man half in shadow. He stands next to a window in a dark hallway. Half of him is illuminated by a golden shaft of light, exposing any and every possible weakness and finding none. All of his weaknesses, his vices, his dark stains, have instead fled to the shadowed half, where the darkness swallows him up whole and provides a ready, convenient veil for faults. Light glimmers off of his glasses.

Before she knows it, Rukia is plunged by this man into the dark waters, hands and legs entangled in thread, dancing to a beat she doesn't recognize. Aizen-taicho tells her where to walk, how to put her feet down to the rhythm of the wailing flute and the humming violin; there's not thought on her part.

The day Aizen tells her of the malignance that has been deposited in her soul, to hibernate and fester in the damp corners is the day the world finally goes dark in Rukia's eyes, and she only sees the dark night, only sees exactly what Aizen wants her to see.

Of course when she learns of the parasite that has been left in her to feed and weaken and drain her—When? How? When did anyone ever have the opportunity to do something so invasive, and how were they able to accomplish it without Rukia noticing? Shouldn't there have been a disturbance, a scar, even a momentary weakness?—Rukia's blood runs cold. In the sort of abject way she had never thought herself capable of, weak, degrading, she finds her mouth forming words to be him to remove it, before her mind even conceives the thought.

His kind smile is like ice in the deepest, darkest days of winter.

"Of course, Rukia-chan. I am not a cruel man. I just need you to do something for me first."

In her heart, Rukia begins to understand why others like Hinamori can be so helplessly devoted to this man. He draws others in, reels them close like a fisher of men at work, and doesn't let them go, plunging them into shadow-water so they become creatures of the dark just as he is. He makes them dance, stringing them along like puppets, doing his bidding without even really knowing why.

He has enthralled her, just as surely as he could enthrall anyone he so wanted.

The dance grows faster now, more intense, more passionate, less mindful. Rukia's feet begin to ache.

She becomes more familiar with the man than she ever wanted to be, but she can't regret any of this. All of this plotting, scheming is growing a garden of snow in her heart, dull, leaden, washing out any and all emotions that might have been there before, washing away anything and everything but her devotion to Aizen-taicho. Nothing is too much for Rukia now, nothing too high or too low or too degrading. She's ceased to understand what the words mean.

Only half-remembering why she is so enslaved to him, but remembering in the sort of way that puts a dread chill over her, one of the few emotions she still understands, Rukia waits to be set free, set free from the parasite that she is sure is growing within her, like a child within the womb except this one will tear her apart looking for a way out. She doesn't think she will ever be free from Aizen.

No one who has ever known him can ever truly be free from Aizen.

Those who notice the change in her, stark and impossible not to notice, as Rukia becomes hollow-eyed, waxen, listless and nearly silent, pull away, their own eyes growing wary and bewildered and even a little frightened. A disconnected scream reverberates through her—"Don't do this to me!"—before it falls silent, and merely pushes her closer and closer to Aizen.

As if she wasn't already completely enveloped by him any way. He's become the only thing with color in her life—all else is washed out to white and black and dull, drab shades of gray.

Her night, her day, her moon, her sun, has become a man half in shadow, cast in gold and sooty gray.

No one else matters anymore. Rukia is not sure that anyone else ever mattered at all. Those faces and names that linger on the edge of her mind are just words; they carry little weight, if any at all.

The dance has made her feet crack open. Raddled with viscous, tangled skeins of crimson, Rukia splatters blood all over the polished oaken floor as she continues to dance. It doesn't hurt. Much.

She starts to get a bad feeling.

The storm winds are brewing over Seireitei. Her Aizen-taicho is growing darker and darker as his plans come nearer, and the light in his eyes as he gazes on her is distinctly predatory.

Maybe, maybe he doesn't want to relieve Rukia of the tumor in her soul after all, or maybe he knows something she doesn't. She gets the feeling that all of them—Aizen, the blind man and the man with daggers in his smiles—know more than they tell her.

Rukia is a creature kept in the dark, waiting to be taken from her kennel, but when this happens she doesn't know where she'll be taken.

But she doesn't care.

Her emotions are tangled in the web, just as she is.

And Aizen-taicho never gives back what he has taken. He won't give her up, she knows.