Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
BGM: "Nisoku Hokou" composed by DECO*27.
Quick and Clean
The room was quiet, clean, and almost sterile. A lone young man stood in the doorway, brows furrowed as though there were something crucial he had forgotten. Shaking his head slightly, he shut the door behind him with a quiet click.
Walking down the street, school bag in hand, he noted that the sky was slightly overcast. Perhaps he should have taken an umbrella, but he'd overslept as it was.
He stopped at the crossing in front of the middle school and waited patiently for the crossing guard, a perpetually poor young man who worked odd jobs to make ends meet and made a point of greeting his "regulars" by their family names every morning. Finally, there was a break in the traffic, and he walked past the man, giving him a quick nod of acknowledgement.
It was raining.
"The weather man was wrong. What a surprise," he deadpanned under his breath.
"Not really," came the equally dry reply.
Surprised, he looked at his classmate. "Excuse me, Arisawa-san?"
She glared at him.
Growing impatient, he asked, "Did you need something?"
She flicked her gaze away to look out the window, but no less intensely. "No."
Curious, he turned to look at what had captured her attention. Perhaps Kurosaki had been foolish enough to get into a fight in the front yard?
He froze, eyes widening as he recognized the figure at the gates. A thin, pale young man with straight black hair almost to his chin, wearing black slacks, a plain white dress shirt and a gray tie and holding a clear plastic umbrella. Behind him was a girl with bright red-brown hair cut short, her bangs falling over eyes he knew were large and gray, wearing the uniform of the middle school he always passed on the way to school.
There was a chain coming out of her chest, the other end attached to something in the man's pocket.
Uryu felt slightly ill. The hole in the child's chest was over halfway open. At this stage, she could hollowfy within a moment. Shaking his head, he turned to leave and hesitated, turning to the classmate who had been glaring out the window past him.
"Arisawa-san, why were you glaring at the crossing guard?"
She jumped, and then forced herself to settle back into the familiar contemptuous glare. For a moment, he couldn't hear anything but the sound of the rain and their breathing. Then she relaxed infinitesimally, and replied. "I thought I saw someone I knew. That's all."
Uryu blinked. Had that been- was Arisawa Tatsuki, one of the class troublemakers, crying? Then he stepped back as she glared at him in a way that clearly meant "tell a soul and I will put you in the hospital" without needing a word.
Slightly discomfited, Uryu turned and left. It was none of his business, at any rate. The shinigami refused to do their duty, so he would keep the living safe from the restless dead on his terms.
There was no saving a fallen soul.
A/N: Just a short AU snippet. What I imagine the Bleach-verse would be like if: Instead of Sora Inoue dying in that accident, he'd only been injured badly enough to stay at the Kurosaki clinic for a short time. Tatsuki still would have befriended Orihime, and Ichigo wouldn't have drifted from Tatsuki quite so far. Unfortunately, Ichigo is still a Hollow magnet. One would have found him, and yet again, someone he cared for died in front of him. He and Sora Inoue had next to no contact after that, so Ichigo never noticed Orihime had become a fixated spirit, and now...
Why didn't I write the rest? Because this would inevitably turn into a huge undertaking, and I have too many WIPs already. There may be other stories set in this 'verse, but I have no idea when.