Tastes Great, MORE Filling
Hey, even filler needs love. A collection of Bleach one-shots, all involving elements of filler. Fill yourself up—with pure, unadulterated crack. Ratings range from K to T.
(a/n) The rules: all one-shots in this collection must involve anime filler, which includes but is not limited to...the Bount Arc, the New Captain What's-His-Face Arc, all small filler arcs, all stand-alone episodes, both movies (not that I've seen them yet), and even anime-only characters like that Saidoh guy from the Grand Fisher Arc.
The reason: for the lulz. What else is Bleach anime good for? Certainly not for the quality freaking animation. Also, this is for getting back into the swing of just writing for the heck of it. Summer's a-coming, and I need to be in writing shape.
(disclaimer) Tite Kubo, TV Tokyo, Pierrot, Viz Media, lather, rinse, repeat. Lyrics to all songs belong to their respective artists, to be named at the bottom.
(a question) Would you call the upper part of the shinigami robes a kimono? Or a gi? I want to go with gi, because in the manga, Rangiku says something to that effect to Hitsugaya, but I'm not sure. Anyone familiar with Japanese culture, please let me know. EDIT: Never mind, the part of clothing that I actually needed to name was the hakama (the pants). But an answer would still be nice, as I may need it at some point.
(Bount Arc: what should have happened to Mabashi, as well as some gratuitous scenes of Hollow Ichigo being a bamf. Because he's awesome.)
I. Play That Funky Music (Rating: T, language)
There is a cityscape somewhere. Actually, no, it's not somewhere. You'll never find it. It's really located somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen-year-old Soul Reaper Ichigo Kurosaki's brain, but for now, as our narrative thread bears us towards this metaphorical city skyline, let us assume it is actually located somewhere.
Oh, and it's sideways. Just to help with the visualization.
Anyway, there are many skyscrapers in this city, most of them dark from uninhabitation, but one stands out in the dimming light of sunset, as it is the only one lit from within. Lit from within, strangely, by flashing lights in a variety of colors. A figure, silhouetted black against the psychedelic display, is apparently dancing inside, its movements revealing astonishing agility, flexibility, and an apparent ignorance of conventional laws of physics.
But it is boring, figuratively floating outside and watching, yes? Let's go in. A curious and fun feature of the sideways orientation of this world is that though all gravity on regular objects appears normal, the walls become the floor and the floor and ceiling become the walls. Our mysterious dancer has taken advantage, draping the sideways conference table adorning the "wall" with a banner proclaiming, "ROOKEE NiGHT," written in what looks suspiciously like human blood.
The first noticeable thing is the music. Loud, pounding music pours from speakers clustered in corners of the room. The funky beat of the currently-playing song is timed well with the flashing of the dance lights. The next noticeable thing is the person we see dancing and singing to said music. This person is a young male, human-looking enough except for the minor fact that he's as completely white as a blank sheet of paper, skin, clothing and all. The only visible parts of him that aren't white are the tabi he wears under his sandals, and the obi sash cinching his hakama at the waist, both of which are black. His eyes are closed in what seems to be furious concentration.
The glass windows of the "floor" don't even creak as our dancing figure lightly steps across them, always moving, never still. He carries a microphone on a stand with the cord still attached, his hips gyrating against the stand as if he were an aspiring Elvis, and sings along to the music.
"And they were dancing! And singing! And movin' to the groovin'! And just when! It hit me! Somebody turned around and shouted, 'PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC, WHITE BOY!'" he sings loudly and discordantly, grinning madly and wailing into the microphone like a man possessed. His pallid skin soaks up all present colors, staining him with the eerie, pulsating dance lights from the "ceiling," and the bloody glow of the sunset outside. His voice is a cacophony of madness—in it, one can hear the screams of the dying, the crackle of consuming fire, and the distorted, twisted laughter of pure killing insanity. It is redolent with lunacy, with warped joy, whose only love is discord, and chaos, and destruction and terror and death and blood and fire and, and...and breaking things.
It is pure psychosis we hear, channeled through the unexpected medium of beloved cheesy dance music.
The young man's eyes—his black-hole empty eyes with hellfire at their core—snap open as he belts the last line of the chorus, lending it a new and altogether more terrifying significance.
—"and play that funky music 'till you DIE!!"
xxx
The only hint of the Rave from Hell that is going on in Ichigo's subconscious is the song he's absent-mindedly whistling right now. "Will you stop that?" Renji snaps. "I'm tense enough as it is, without you giving me a migraine."
"Why so tense?" Ichigo retorts, although in truth, he's just as on edge as his Soul Reaper comrade. "You're, what, one of the top twenty-six shinigami in the entire Soul Society, and I'm ready to kick ass too, and all we're doing is looking for some of these Bount guys to beat the crap out of. I mean, it shouldn't be hard."
"I'm tense because Rukia and Chad haven't reported in recently," Renji says, his hand going to his Soul Pager reflexively. "I just get a bad feeling..."
Ichigo shrugs. "She'd call if something—hey!" Renji's Soul Pager goes off suddenly, startling Renji so much that he flails around with it a bit before finally getting a grip on it and flipping it open.
"Yeah?"
Rukia's voice, a bit crackly with interference: "We've got one. I've faced this guy before; he's dangerous. Get here quickly." A beep, and she's gone.
Renji stuffs the pager back into a pocket. "Let's go," he says. Ichigo nods and they dash off in the direction of Rukia's and Chad's reiatsu. Upon arriving at the scene, however, they immediately wish they hadn't.
"Is it just me, or is this guy completely batshit?" Ichigo asks, as the Bount (whom Rukia identified as Mabashi) cackles loudly while declaring his apparent kickass-ness, power, yadda yadda et cetera ad infinitum to the sky, complete with twitchy eyes.
"No, he's completely batshit," Renji agrees.
Rukia finishes the Hadō 33 she was preparing, and the ensuing blast distracts Mabashi long enough to allow her to biff Renji upside the head and bark, "Are you two going to stand there, or make yourselves useful? Chad's under attack!"
"Any tips?" Ichigo asked, gripping Zangetsu and allowing the hilt-wrap to unravel from the blade.
"Avoid his doll—the small zippy thing. It's fast. You don't want to get hit by it—"
"Okaythanksbye!" Ichigo yells as he leaps forward to engage the enemy.
"Hey, wait!" Rukia shouts, incensed. "I didn't finish—"
But Renji is already rushing after Ichigo, Zabimaru in hand, and Rukia is left silently cursing her luck that the two people she values most in the world are also probably the two biggest goddamn idiots in the world.
Chad is firing blasts at Mabashi and dodging his doll, but he isn't very fast and the doll is. He almost looks like a person at a summer holiday picnic, waving wildly at the flies and in general seeming uncharacteristically spazzy. "Ichigo!" he shouts as Ichigo approaches.
"On it!" Ichigo shouts back, vying for the opening he sees as Mabashi suddenly spots him. "Getsuga Ten—"
—this tiny little, what the heck, mouse thing? comes shooting out of nowhere and WHAM—
"—SHIT," Ichigo finishes, being propelled into Chad, knocking him out instantly, and continuing into a conveniently placed nearby wall with a crash and a crumbling of concrete. A cloud of dust rises at the site of impact, rendering Ichigo temporarily invisible.
xxx
Inside the sideways world, all motion suddenly ceases. The dance-party tower's lights extinguish themselves, the music shuts off with a loud screech of feedback, and even the sunset outside goes black. Nothing is visible, save a pair of glowing fire-yellow irises floating in the dark.
A brief and intense silence falls, and then a single word is uttered, not even a question:
"...What."
xxx
Renji would have been concerned, really, except that he found it exceptionally hilarious that Ichigo ended up saying "getsuga ten-shit," so he is actually busy laughing his head off when Rukia approaches.
"I missed it, what happened?" she demands.
Renji fights laughter as he says, "Ichigo got (heh) nailed by the thing, he (snrk) landed on the wall, what a dumbass..."
Rukia's eyes widen. "What?" she stammers. "Renji, that—that's not good."
"What, Ichigo's been hit harder than that, Rukia, come on—"
"Renji, I don't think I can articulate to you how especially not good that is," Rukia says all in one breath, as the dust begins to settle in a strangely ominous way. Ichigo is still lying in the rubble, breathing heavily, which Renji knows is odd enough, considering the kid has the constitution of a bull on anabolic steroids.
"Hey, Ichigo?" Renji ventures cautiously, and Ichigo's eyes snap open.
xxx
Ritz is understandably frustrated at this point. She's had a decent amount of practice at invading Soul Reapers' minds by this point, but this…this kid's consciousness is just being a pain in the ass. "What, does everything have to be sideways?" she mutters furiously, trying to wind her feelers into the metaphysically metaphorical (try saying that three times quickly, we dare you) brain control panel, which, cutely enough, was located in the middle of a public fountain in the cityscape. She grabs a lever-looking spire (conveniently labeled LEFT ARM), and pulls. "What was it, righty-tighty, lefty-loosy? Or the other way around? Does this entire brain run backwards, or is it just me?" she continues to talk to herself. "Give me back that one guy—he was a cinch to run."
Ritz, what's taking so long? I want to blow things up! Mabashi demands through their linked consciousness. I mean, have you felt this kid's reiatsu? I feel like I just found an H-Bomb while playing Dead Rising!
Yeah, and can you operate an H-Bomb? Taking over brains isn't like picking up a rock and throwing it at someone, Mabashi, Ritz answers snippily. Give me a minute; I've almost got it. She suddenly feels a presence behind her. Hang on a minute, Mabashi, looks like his zanpakutō is going to give me some trouble.
She turns her head almost 180°, leaving her feelers entwined in the control panel, to see the newcomer. It looks like a mirror image of the shinigami himself, she notes, an odd shape for a zanpakutō to take. Still, none of the zanpakutō spirits she had ever faced in any Soul Reaper mind had given her much trouble.
"Didn't your ma ever teach you to knock before walking in?" the apparition asks lazily, tilting his head to the side and widening his eyes as if to take as much of the scene in as possible. His bone-white skin gleams palely in the false dusk that Ritz had brought with her to the inner world.
Ritz sniffs with disdain. "And who are you?" she asks haughtily, making sure to project an air of dominance. She, after all, is in charge now.
She expects him to give a great big show of insult, demanding who she is and what she's doing here and why and how and waah-baaw, but he doesn't. He just stands there in mid-air, parallel with her and perpendicular to the ground, hands in his pockets jauntily and looking down at his feet as if stalling while wondering what to do next with his face.
Then she realizes he's laughing. Low, almost imperceptible chuckles are bursting out of him at irregular intervals, seemingly with a mind of their own, rising and falling in pitch as the tempo increases. He clutches his stomach and laughs harder, gasping deeply as if emerging from the sea. Madly, riotously, he continues, throwing his head back with wild abandon and displaying every one of his coal-black razor teeth as he positively shrieks with mirth.
Cold fear trickles through Ritz. Oh, my god, she thinks. This Reaper is actually completely and fatally insane. "You," she begins haltingly, "you're not his zanpakutō, are you? Who are you?"
His laughter ends as abruptly as it had begun. "Who am I?" he repeats, his jarringly discordant voice distorting the words into something less a question and more a set of famous last words. "Who am I?" His Spirit Pressure bursts out suddenly now, stifling, suffocating, and rough—both heavy and sharp, somehow, like a crushing boulder covered in shards of glass. Ritz screams as it hits her, its unexpected breadth and depth paralyzing her. She doesn't feel like the spider anymore. She feels like the fly.
Ritz, what is going on? Mabashi breaks in, now sounding extremely worried. He can feel her pain and fear through their link, she knows. Get out of there!
Ritz tries to lash out at the mad spirit, but he flicks her feelers aside with two fingers, giving the thick, brutally strong, and dangerously sticky limbs no more mind than he would a mosquito. He's still grinning like a man possessed, and she watches in horror as an incongruously cotton-candy-blue tongue snakes out and wets his lips, sliding over the black razor-sharp teeth with theatric pause.
"Who am I?" she hears him whisper in her ear, instantaneously behind her and to the left a little, and she screams in absolute horror. "I'm the last and worst nightmare you'll ever have."
xxx
Chad is still unconscious, slumped against the wall. Renji is standing, weight on the balls of his feet, and twisting Zabimaru in his grip nervously. Rukia is holding her sword, Sode no Shirayuki, before her with shaking hands. So far, Ichigo had, 1.) Stood up, 2.) Moved his left arm a little bit (odd), and, 3.) Said something in that horribly, horribly creepy Ritz-voice about a brain and throwing rocks (umm, what?). They were now at a strange sort of impasse, with Ichigo standing remarkably still and Mabashi asking Ritz what the hell was happening in there. It was seeming to Renji and Rukia that Ichigo was giving Mabashi and Ritz a run for their money in the art of telling him what to do, perhaps because of his extensive practice for much of his school life in taking no shit and trusting no authority. "You tell that bastard where to shove it, kid," Renji whispers encouragingly beside Rukia, and she has to smile a bit.
Ichigo moves, and the two of them are back on guard, warily watching their friend. But he doesn't move towards them. Instead, his left arm, ever so slowly and jerkily, reaches up to his chest, where Ritz is visibly embedded, and clutches it, tendons and veins popping out in his arm as he fights some invisible force. His head is locked, staring directly ahead of him, but his unfocused eyes begin to change. They begin to glow feverishly, though perhaps, Rukia believes, it's a trick of the light, and a black film begins to creep over the sclera in his left eye.
"What's going on?" Renji hisses to Rukia, unable to keep a slight tremor out of his voice.
Slowly, Ichigo exhales, expelling a lungful of air, which turns into a hiss, and then a growl. His grip tightens, and with a sudden wordless snarl, he rips the doll from his chest and flings it to his left side with terrible force. Ritz's body slams into the wall and slides down, leaving a trail of blood, and Renji and Rukia see, with shock and confusion, that her head is gone.
Mabashi blinks, as if he can't believe what he is seeing, and then grips his head. "Aaa-AAUUUGHHH!" he shrieks in agony, as his eyes, ears, and nose begin to pour blood. His head bulges, stretches, and with a final grinding blast, explodes in a disgustingly graphic shower of blood and brains. His headless body slumps to the ground and withers, drying out and crumbling to dust and ashes before their eyes. Ritz's does the same.
Renji and Rukia are left clutching each other, both completely forgetting decorum and dignity in the utter terror of the moment. Ichigo blinks hazily, the glow and blackness receding from his eyes.
"What…happened?" he slurs, stumbling a little bit as he loses his balance. "Chad…is he okay? What are…you guys…why are you looking at me like that?" he asks, regaining his full awareness and usual suspicion.
As Rukia realizes that they're in an odd position for a pair of bad-ass shinigami—holding each other like teens in a horror movie—Renji jumps into action to salvage the situation.
"Oh," he blusters, wrapping an arm around Rukia's waist and pulling her closer, "you two got taken out ridiculously fast. Rukia and I took care of the Bount. We were just…sharing the moment," he invents, ducking next to Rukia's ear and whispering, "Play along—do you want him to know he exploded a guy's head with his brain?"
"Oh—Oh, fukutaichō-dono," she says loudly for Ichigo's benefit, running a finger down Renji's chest, "you're so…heroic, and…ah, your eyebrows are so…"
"Oh, get a room," Ichigo says with disgust, turning around to give Chad a hand. The two shinigami quickly extricated themselves, silently congratulating each other on their deception. "Didn't even help you out, Chad, the scumbags," Ichigo says pointedly from across the alley, gripping the larger teen's arm and helping him to his feet.
Chad seems to be largely unhurt, thankfully. "You have quite a solid elbow, Kurosaki," he remarks, rubbing his temple and wincing.
As they leave, Renji whispers so that only Rukia can hear, "I'm glad that Soul Reapers only need to eat when we expend spirit energy."
"…Why?" Rukia whispers back.
"Because," he confides, "if I had had a digestive system, I would have just shat myself."
"So, it's agreed that he never finds out?" Rukia asks.
"Agreed."
xxx
Back in the sideways cityscape, our little white terror is whistling cheerfully and picking fur out of his teeth. "Damn," he says out loud, "that was fun. I wish stuff like that would happen more often around here."
He approaches his favorite skyscraper, but notices that the lights are on again, and the music is playing—without him! He blinks, and jumps up to look in a window.
Another individual is dancing in there, boogying down Saturday Night Fever-style. He is an older man, dressed in a long, ridiculously flowy black cape, and stylish sunglasses. His hair is an absolute jungle of snarls, and his stubble is just short enough not to be an actual beard. The music is inaudible from outside, but by the looks of it, he's singing pretty well. He notices the white voyeur peeking in the window with a slack-jawed expression that didn't seem to quite match his face, and smirks. The man throws the mic in the air, executes a completely implausible breakdancing maneuver, something like a quadruple spin and flip, and jumps up in time to catch the microphone on its way back down.
The teen grins and mouths three words at the man:
Oh, it's ON.
.owari.
(a/n) Aha, this was fun to write. The lyrics quoted above are from Wild Cherry's Play that Funky Music. Send me ideas involving filler! The crackier the better! See you next time!