Hope You've Guessed My Name. [Yaksha/Rukia]

Yaksh's expression hardened, almost immediately, his hand slapping on the table. Now he spoke in a hard and fast tone, something nearly manic in its intensity; his eyes were wide open, pupils dilated far too much, and one could feel the heat and intensity coming off of him now as he launched into a tirade that seemed never-ending, as he bombarded Rukia with accusations and details. He seemed a different man entirely, from his facial expression to his stance, to his very cadence.

"In a span of a hundred years lasting between the 20th and 21st century humanity saw an unprecedented amount of violence and turmoil as entire civilizations were uprooted time and time again as bad men took power time and time again, World War I, World War II, the Cold War humans have charted and noted ]three distinct periods in that period of time where the power was continually put into the hands of the people and then ripped away as if by fucking fickle chance Mussolini Stalin Hitler Bin Laden Hussain Zedong Pol Pot are any of these names ringing a bell Rukia?"

"Unless I'm mistaken the soul society is still led by a group of 46 individuals representing the interests of the Rukongai consisting of 320 districts that's more than 7 districts a person and how often do they leave their premises to oversee these realms to meet with the citizens of those realms to determine what they need to be comfortable to cut down on the horrific violence people will commit over shoes Rukia over fucking shoes! The shinigami maintain balance between realms and that means that you not only have to make sure hollows don't destroy too many souls but sometimes that the number of citizens in the rukongai don't outpace the human world how many times have you had to round up entire districts and destroy countless lives for the good of everyone Rukia do you understand that if you were to be treated by human standards each and every fucking one of you would be war criminals!"

He turned away, inhaling slowly, deeply, eyes closing as his body twitched and shifted. Quite literally; veins and arteries could be seen shifting and moving beneath the surface like snakes, making his skin crawl as he balled his fists, lips moving silently in contemplation. He finally opened them, staring directly at Rukia.

"The Soul Society is led by a minority. Those who claim to be the chosen people of god. They hoarde resources, allocating them as they see fit. They wage an eternal war against an enemy that at any time could pop out of nowhere and slaughter its citizens in their beds. They label anyone who attempts to threaten their monopoly on military force as threats not only to their citizens but to the very fabric of reality. They have, over the course of thousands of years managed to resist change. Their leadership has changed hands, but never has it gone into the hands of the majority. Do you deny any of these assertions, Rukia? Do you honestly think the minority can ever truly sympathize with the needs of the majority? You would have me lop the heads off of my fellow hollows on your word alone that it's for the greater good. Not only that, that it's for their own good."

Yaksha rose one hand slowly, carefully, palm out. He didn't seem like he'd relaxed much, or that his anger had changed especially much; if anything, it seemed like he was about to launch into another tirade, from the glint in his eyes, and the way his lips moved. But after a few seconds he reached up with his other hand, snapping a single finger back rapidly, and with enough force to leave bone splintering up from beneath the flesh. He didn't scream, nor did he stop; if anything, the faint grunt he gave was no worse than one would expect from a person stubbing their toe. He inhaled slowly, tears standing out in his eyes, as he spoke in the sickly-sweet, coldly patient tones of someone who was very angry and doing their best to avoid yelling.

"I will take your own interests into account at all times. You will always have the right to refuse to offer aid, should you find the nature of my work too noxious. I will do what I think to be right, at all times, and you will not dissuade me from my path. I have no intention of swaying you from the path of what you think to be right, either. But there can be no good result from forcing your notions of morality onto another. The reason I want this alliance is because between the two of us, we just barely make a functioning human being. And that means anything we can agree to be the moral course of action is probably worth going through with."

His finger was already slowly, gruesomely trying to heal over, flesh near the bone rippling and wobbling like water as it tried to push the bone back beneath its surface. His tears grew larger, his body even trembling in the slightest, as he approached her, placing his other hand on the table.

"I will ask you one more time, Rukia. Do I strike you as especially unreasonable? Does anything I've done today give you the impression that I'm going to suddenly force you to kill innocents, or betray those whose trust you hold in high esteem? I'm offering you a choice, Rukia. Nothing more. With my aid, you can have a leg up that even the Onmitsukido would envy. It will have its price, to be negotiated at the time of purchase. And it will always be reasonable. It's not good business to prey upon the desperation of your clients. But in the end...I can't give away what I've worked hard to obtain. It is my solemn and honest opinion that it is never morally objectionable, to present options to others. The true evil is in writing off certain options as impossible from the start, or in trying to obfuscate the true nature of things. You've met me, and you've heard my terms. The choice is yours, now."

"Since you asked so nicely, you may."

Yaksha's hand slipped down in a precise, smooth motion, lopping off the other hand at the wrist; there was no blood or response; the hand simply ended in a rounded-off stump, as if the damage had happened weeks or months ago. His hand had already dissolved into a pile of crumbling snow, approximately the size of a grapefruit. He then reached into his throat, rummaging around as if he were trying to dislodge a stuck piece of food; a moment later, he yanked himself out of the gigai, leaving only a far larger pile of snow in its place. This close up, in the light of the candles, one could make out five small slivers of glass, embedded deep in his head, just between his eyes. It formed a near-perfect circle, and as he moved his head side to side slowly, carefully, one could see their colors gently fluctuating and shifting due to some odd trick of the light.

This time he rose his hand, the same hand in fact, to his mouth, and gnawed through the material covering his arm slowly, in silence. There was nothing to be heard but the faint sounds of teeth cracking bone and severing muscle; it was a horribly intimate, industrial sound, and the look in Yaksha's eyes was one of completely absorbed, completely uncaring certainty. He chewed away at the meat of his wrist for perhaps ten seconds before it finally fell away, onto the surface of the table itself. Blood streaked his maw, and his teeth each dripped gore slightly as a long purplish-black tongue slid out from inside his mouth, lapping away at the damage.

"The Japanese used to have an old ritual. They would call it making the finger fly. When an individual offended his superiors, he was expected to remove the top joint of his pinky finger. The pinky being such a necessary component in sword-wielding, it was meant to symbolize an even greater dependency upon the party they had offended, and a cost commensurate to the shame. I hadn't wished to fling accusations against your employers, but I..." He paused, fingers sliding deep into the mangled flesh surrounding his now-severed hand. He let out another small grunt, and this time when he spoke it was with a breathless quickness, an almost airy sense of ease.

"I am not yet as well-suited to the fine oratory arts as I like to think. It seemed like a good idea at the time and looking back on it I wish I could've choked on my own tongue after about the third word. I'll leave that appendage in your care until you deem our accounts settled."

He then reached out slowly, carefully, with his one remaining hand, and drew five more cards, each one stained with his blood.

"One final hand before you go, Rukia. This time, the price is...misinformation. Don't act so high and mighty, I know you shinigami are perfectly capable of lying when it suits your interests. If I win this hand, you will report to your superiors that you had a very nice, very uneventful dinner with a human who has mastered the art of Chi, by the name of Jyaku Todashka."

Yaksha reached down with his own hands, tapping each of Rukia's cards, one at a time. His expression was...hard to make sense of, something unspeakably alien and inscrutable. It seemed like some odd mixture of pity and ecstasy, something curiously patient, and unsettlingly knowing. He gently flipped each of her cards over, revealing them one at a time; the three of spades, the three of clubs, the three of diamonds, the three of hearts, and the king of hearts.

"You know, pomp and circumstance don't suit you, Rukia. You are of them but you are not from them. You wish to escape the Rukongai, but the Rukongai will never escape you. I can see it all over you; in your tiny movements, in the way your eyes dart about the room, in the way you hesitate ever so slightly when you have to consult your training. Do you really think every noble has to stop and ask themselves what they're supposed to be doing? You're a fighter, Rukia. It's engrained in you. And all those heavy meals and luxurious hot springs can't get rid of that."

"You fight for your life, and you fight for your country, and you fight for your pride. You've fought for every reason a person can imagine, Rukia. And I wonder, just a little bit...if you remember what it's like to be scared in a fight. Combat is an interesting theatre, Rukia. It can inspire so very many emotions in the participants. And I think, Rukia, you've been fighting your holy war so long, you've forgotten that a fight differs in no small manner from a crusade. In a fight, there is...doubt. Despair. Each and every move has the sense of ritual to it. A feeling of...choeography. You know that one misstep can lose you everything. Each and every move you make is colored by it. That defeat begins with a single improperly lead swing, with a single second's hesitation. You've spent so long being a proponent of balance, and order...I think you've forgotten what it's like to steep in the delightful melange of anxiety and hope that one can only find in a fight for your life, and your freedom."

His eyes bored into Rukia's, unblinking, unyielding in the slightest. Every once in a while, they began to twist and rotate ever so slightly, just a little too slowly to be noticed if one was watching slowly and carefully. It was like watching something that slowly, ever so slowly, approached, so slowly it never triggered even a single survival instinct. And slowly, ever so slowly, Yaksha's lips curled up in delight, as he folded his one unmarred hand on the table.

"I admit defeat. The sharpness of your blade is beyond my ken. It seems this final hand is yours by right."

One eye closed, with the hideous, slow finality of an approaching iceberg, as he spoke in those same cool, precise, soothing tones, tones that seemed to imply this entire conversation from start to finish had gone exactly as he could've hoped.

"After all, I only have a measly four ones."

"But of course, Rukia! Shouldn't you be pleased? You won, just as the universe dictates. This is justice. This is fate. The strong tread on the weak, and the strong get their way. Surely you're not insinuating I'm stronger than you?"

And there it was again, that infuriatingly knowing grin. Yaksha rose, walking towards the kitchen and returning with the bottle of wine once more, topping off her glass. His eyes were wide, far too wide to be normal, and there was a hideously triumphant swagger to his walk as he brought the drink closer. Somehow, Yaksha seemed to be giving off the impression that, even in defeat, he'd gotten what he'd wanted out of things. He grabbed the cards, shuffling them all into the deck, and looking up at the ceiling.

"Tell your comrades what you wish. It matters little to me, in the long run. Keep my hand if you like. I'll honor the sacrifice, whether or not you believe me, or even care. This has been a delightful little distraction, and I could hardly live with myself if you went out of this place empty-handed. This is Vegas, after all. And gambling is about hope as much as it is despair. Sometimes, you get lucky. Sometimes, you don't earn your victory in the slightest."

He began to tease and lead cards across the knuckles of his hand, one at a time, still never lowering his gaze towards Rukia. He simply sat there, an oddly ruminative, undeniably smug expression on his face as he waited for the inevitable explosion, the profanities, the accusations. The demands that he stop toying with her, or treating her like she was a child to be pitied or protected. He'd heard it all, every possible variation on this conversation, every possible line in the script. It all felt so simple, and he almost felt bad for how easily this had all turned out to his aid.

A hand and his proxy for a bleeding gash in the head of one of the heroes of the Gotei, that would never heal? It was a deal he would've made a dozen more times, if he'd needed to. There was no cost too high, to see that sense of breathless, nearly tear-struck expression on Rukia, to find her so lost for words.

"Did Ichigo ever tell you that you're cute when you're angry?"