-My GOD I am such a negligent person! I'm so horrendously sorry for all of you who have been waiting for me to update, I will do my best to get back on my writing shoes so you don't have to wait any longer. More notes down on the bottom, etc.
1: Sunburn
"Good God, Toshiro, I didn't even know they made SPF with a number that high!" Ichigo said, looking with wide eyes at the bottle that Toshiro had set on their kitchen table. The man was currently packing up their cooler, which he insisted on bringing if Ichigo insisted on dragging him along to the beach. Which, much to his imminent chagrin, involved a lot of heat, sand, and just about every other thing he despised on a semi-regular basis. "Why did you need to get one this high? You're not going to be out in the sun anyway; you're just going to be hiding in that damn shanty."
Toshiro's unamused glance from beside the door of the fridge was all he got for an answer for a long moment. And the longer it lasted, the longer he got the idea that this was very much Toshiro's point. "Ichigo," he said flatly, "have you perhaps observed my complexion lately?"
Ichigo stared at the other, decadently confused for a few moments. "Yeah, why?"
"Then you should be able to note quite openly how pale I am."
"Yeah… so?"
"Then how long do you think it would take any skin of mine to burn to a crisp without extensive precautionary measures?"
"Touché."
2: Flip Flops
"Toshiro, where are Mikan's sandals?" he called from the hall, holding the squirming bundle of their giggling daughter in his arms with some amount of struggle. As she got older and bigger she got harder to handle with just one arm, and he was beginning to wonder just how much time he would have left before he would have to just hold her by the hand rather than carry her. And though that thought scared him a bit, he also couldn't wait to see where she would lead him.
"Top shelf of the hall closet," Toshiro responded coolly as he wandered out into the hallway, his eyes skimming over the last page of his weekly report as he made his way to their front door where the picnic basket they'd arranged lay waiting.
Ichigo walked over, opening the closet and feeling around with one free hand to see if he could reach them. Sure enough, his fingers bumped them after a moment, and he plucked them off the shelf to set down next to his daughter. She slipped into them knowingly, before toddling off to stand next to Toshiro at the door.
"Why were they all the way up there, Toshiro?" he asked as he made his way over, picking up the basket and ruffling her little head a bit as Toshiro folded the papers back and set them on the coffee table.
"Because as cute as they may be," he answered with a smile as he picked up their daughter, "they do make a decent amount of noise when she decides to put them on in the middle of the night and go wandering around the house."
Ichigo's fiery eyebrows rose, his eyes looking down at his daughter as she looked innocently at the two of them. "She does that?" he asked incredulously.
"Oh yes," the white haired Captain replied, amused as he brushed a strand of their daughter's hair out of her face. "You'd be amazed at the antics you miss when you're sleeping like a rock in there."
"Sleepy Daddy!" Mikan chirped in supplement, and that got the both of them smiling.
3: Opera
"What on Earth is this?"
"It's called a flash-mob, Toshiro. It's where crap-tons of people get together, choreograph a dance to some music, and then go into a public place and storm it for ten minutes for the amusement of the onlookers," Ichigo explained, watching on with a rather large amount of amusement himself as the vast expanse of high schoolers danced about the tram station to a song in Italian that he didn't have any particular recollection of.
"I understand that much," Toshiro admitted, looking around with a scowl curling his upper lip, "but why did they have to pick a song from TOSCA? Surely they could have picked something better than an opera. Or at least a better opera than that one in particular."
Ichigo glanced down at his companion curiously, wondering where the sudden knowledge had come from. "I didn't know you were a fan of musicals, Toshiro."
"True. But you also didn't know I could sing until about a year after we got together, so what does that say about your current knowledge of my most vague interests?" Toshiro quipped back, earning only a laugh in response.
4: Wine
"I think I'm going to die," Toshiro wheezed as he pushed the glass back towards Isaiah, who sat laughing at the bar stool next to his own. They'd abandoned Chico for an afternoon in order to hop down to a local town called Bozeman; a hopping young place during all months but summer when the ten thousand or so college students all went home, and a place where the ski bums came to warm up a bit when Big Sky's pretentiousness became just a bit too much to handle. They were tucked away in a small Irish pub on Main Street called The Bacchus, where Isaiah had assured him there was some fantastic watermelon wine available.
What he hadn't told Toshiro, on the other hand, was that watermelon wine tasted nothing like watermelon, and everything like turpentine. And also felt like turpentine, judging by the way it practically seared down his esophagus. He coughed again for good measure, trying to get the noxious gas brought on by the mere sip he'd had out of his lungs.
Isaiah merely clapped a hand on his shoulder as he laughed. "Aw, lighten up, Toshiro," he said a bit too jovially to be taken seriously. "It'll put hair on your chest."
5: Women
"I don't fucking get it!" Ichigo roared as they strode down the cement walkway the open courtyard of the marketplace they were visiting in before The Grace arrived. "How the hell can she just slip in and out like that? She must know where I'm going to be just so she can prod in and annoy me!"
"Perhaps you haven't realized this, Ichigo," Toshiro said, looking over at his fuming inamorata with a keen glance, "but women of all sorts have the strange capacity to just know things. Whether or not they use that knowledge purposefully or accidentally is also up to the tendency that women have to be completely unpredictable. Now, before you go and pull any more of your hair out, please calm down. Our train is almost here and I don't want to have to suffer the looks you'll get when you look like you have mange."
"Oh, you're one to talk! Let me know the next time you start bumping into your time-lord stalker on every street corner within a hundred dimensions! Then we'll see how you feel!"
"Probably much the same."
"Shut up."
6: Song
It took decades of marriage for Ichigo to realize that Toshiro was a highly musical person. Not just in singing, which he did to occasionally much to Ichigo's delight, but also in battle. He'd been in the courtyard of the practice grounds, practicing with some of his lower ranked officers. The rest of the division was assembled, waiting for a turn to train with their illustrious Captain. Ichigo, who had been some distance away when he'd heard it, had come to investigate.
Because, even above the din of the assembled crowd and the cheers of the onlookers, he'd heard a rhythm. A lilting little thing, fragmented yet no less complete. The clash of a sword, the even stride of a warrior padding in the dirt. The long drag of a sandal across the ground as a stance was adjusted. The swords clashing again, click, click, grind. It was random to anyone without an ear for the poetry of battle, but Ichigo was unsurprised to find that he was not the only non-Squad 10 officer there.
Ikkaku had come also, and was wearing an expression of vague awe on his face, and he smiled at Ichigo as the other man entered. "You have good taste, my friend," Ikkaku said, nodding towards the ring where Toshiro's sharp little cadence went on. "Not often that someone can make a song like that."
7: Over-Eat
Toshiro wasn't one of the best cooks in the world; this much he knew. But he did take a rather considerable amount of pleasure in cooking whenever he could. And, considering Ichigo wasn't exactly a very capable person, he'd taken it up as his own personal project to improve his culinary skills. But in trade for getting better at it, most of the time it required an almost embarrassing amount of focus for someone proclaimed to be a genius.
So when Ichigo would inevitably interrupt his process, he was always less than marginally pleased. And, that day as seemed to always be the case whenever he invaded the kitchen, he was startled out of his reverie by Ichigo wrapping his lanky arms around the smaller man's torso as way of greeting.
"Love it when you cook," he heard the larger man mumble into his neck with far too much warm-fuzzy-pleasure to be at all fair.
In his irritation, considering it was soufflé he was making and not some kind of simplistic hash recipe that Ichigo would love anyway, he gently-or-not-so-much-so clouted Ichigo in the face perched on his shoulder with the whisk in his hand.
The soufflé had turned out wonderfully, and Ichigo had even managed not to completely gorge himself on Toshiro's cooking as he usually did. But, most rewarding of all, no one even batted an eyelash at the bright red lines that still sat on Ichigo's face the next day, in spite of the unspoken pervasive knowledge that it had probably been Toshiro that put them there.
8: Storm
"Could you tell your boyfriend to lay off the weather, Ichigo? It's making fighting kind of a bitch," Renji howled at him over the din of the downpour crushing down from the blackened heavens.
"Just hold out, okay?" Ichigo yelled back, holding an arm up to shield his eyes from the rain. "There's a lot he can do by controlling the water up there. He's practicing some new technique about creating friction by modifying temperature and density."
"What the hell good is that going to do?" Renji barked, before his statement was answered by a clap of white needles that shot across the sky before a rumbling drum of thunder announced the answer.
9: Void
"As much as I find it terribly charming that you're a stargazer, Toshiro, I can't help but disapprove of your choice of attire."
The small Captain glanced up at his companion, who had joined him on Chico's lawn as he lay sprawled out over a snowy patch in order to get a proper look at the stars. It was rather incredible, he thought, that out in the wilderness he could see the Milky Way with nothing but his naked eye. Away from light and air pollution, it was a stunning thing to lay eyes on.
Isaiah's face as he looked down at him, however, made him think that there was something derogatory about the situation that he may have been missing.
"Can't say that I agree," he said, shrugging. He was wearing a coat of sorts; and considering the tendency of his spiritual pressure to hedge towards cold, it really wasn't much more than what he would need to keep his gigai from freezing up. But, as he noticed the rather heavy parka that Isaiah was wearing, he began to realize that the tendency of his spiritual pressure was not the problem.
Rather, it was the weather, the dimly lit clouds settling over the valley to the south only barely visible under the starlight and the black void in space they created, that served as the problem.
"For now," he added, noting the farm boy's distinct lack of humor towards his quip, where usually he was in always such a grand favor of a mood. "But if it is that storm to the south of the basin you're worried about, I can see where your logic lies"
"At least you get that much," the young man replied, crossing his arms over his burly chest. "Can you guess what else I'm worried about, or is this going to end up being a formal game of Twenty Questions?"
Toshiro sat up and shook the snow out of his hair, resting his hands in his lap a moment later as Isaiah finally gave in and sat down next to him. "I'm guessing that my lack of weather-appropriate clothing disturbs you. But I can assure you that no harm will come to me because of it. I'm… quite hard, I suppose one could say."
At that, Isaiah did laugh. "That much I'm sure of, Toshiro. But I've seen far too many people come into Montana winters without the proper gear and leave either dead or frostbitten. You're too smart for that, I think. So I just don't want to see you make that mistake."
Toshiro chuckled, nodding lightly. "Understandable," he conceded, but made no obvious move to relocate. "But I can assure you that I of all people know the powers of winter better than most, Isaiah." Toshiro glanced off towards the distant bowl of the southern horizon as it curled into darkness. He could see the front of the storm more clearly now as it crept into the starlight. He let out a low whistling breath, and a fell rumble on the air tore across the basin as the black curling mass retreated back beyond the stretch of his sight and into the south where it had come from.
When he looked back at Isaiah, he came to a heady start that the man had not been paying attention to him, but to the clouds that had unnaturally retreated against the once again silver-freckled skyline.
One glance at Isaiah's curious expression and Toshiro realized his mistake. Isaiah, much like Brego, had an uncanny understanding of things about Toshiro the smaller man had forgotten.
"So, Toshiro," Isaiah said, the smile very prevalent in his voice, "how old are you?"
Toshiro had held onto the vain hope that the young man would ask a vague and idiotic question that Toshiro could weasel himself out of, but at that point, he knew it was well and beyond moot. Isaiah, as per his annoying usual, had gone and done something incredibly intelligent while Toshiro wasn't looking, and had asked him the one thing he couldn't lie about without being discovered.
10: Black Hole
Ichigo never much liked to acknowledge the inarguable fact that Toshiro and his hollow half had contact with one another. He realized that no harm would come to Toshiro because of that part of himself, but that didn't mean that he was terribly chuffed about it to begin with. He, of all people, knew how that silver tongue could swallow the light out of the world. He was a black hole, swallowing everything that he could get his white hands on and absorbing it with little remorse.
11: Nova
But as time wore on, Ichigo began to realize that he had little to worry about. Because as much as his hollow was a black hole, Toshiro was a star gone supernova; explosive and unyielding as it drew lines of light and fire and ice across his darkened world. Destructive, perhaps, or perhaps just a tool of reformation.
12: Doll
"Ichigo, you are a horrible influence on my son," Renji griped at him one day after clocking him on the arm. "All of you are, especially Mikan."
"The hell did I do?" Ichigo asked, rubbing at his arm and glaring at the other petulantly. "And what the hell are you blaming on my daughter, Renji? She hasn't done anything."
"Oh yes she has," Renji rebuked. "Now because of that silly shark doll she loves so much, Reno wants one too. And since we made it especially for her, there's no possible way for me to make one for him exactly like it."
Ichigo burst out into laughter. "Well, you never know Renji. You could always ask Byakuya where he got his material. It's always a start. And hey, who knows, maybe he'd be happy to chip in on an effort for his nephew, eh?" At that, both of them laughed, knowing that in spite of the blood relation between Renji's son and the Head of the Kuchiki house, there was far more affection in the stoic man's heart for his and Toshiro's little girl.
But, as Renji set of with a determined expression on his face, Ichigo got the feeling that he'd be willing to give it one hell of a go anyway.
13: Telle-Tubbies
Toshiro looked skeptically at the DVD in Ichigo's hand, his eyebrow kicking up as a scowl mottled his usually becoming features. Mikan wriggled in his arms, her binky unable to hide the smile she had on her face. Thankfully, it wasn't directed at her father's selection in movies, and rather towards just about everything else.
"Ichigo, we are not having our daughter grow up on Telle-Tubbies. Find her something better than that, for heaven's sake," he said, hiking her further up on his hip as Ichigo looked mildly crestfallen. He didn't hold a lot of sympathy for the man at the moment; it was the third disturbing children's show he'd come back with. Each, sadly, worse than the last.
"She has to have something fitting her age, Toshiro. She just watch older kid cartoons," he said, before realizing that as a child, he'd done no such thing. Age-specified cartoons had come out a bit too late for him; so he'd grown up with the good old fashioned ones regardless of his age. He set his third failed attempt back on the shelf, before scanning for a more suitable title.
One caught his eye that he couldn't resist, and so he snatched it, knowing that this one at least wouldn't get shot down at first glance when Toshiro caught wind of it. It made it so far actually that Toshiro took it into his own busy hands to examine it. Mikan's interest, though fleeting, settled on it with approval, her little wiggling hands tracing the faces on the cover of the box set.
"I think this might be a better choice, all things considered," Toshiro said, a satisfied gleam in his eyes. Ichigo smiled, knowing that the old Hanna-Barbera classics like Jonny Quest really couldn't go wrong.
14: Southern Fried Chicken
"So it was Xavier that sent you down here? Seems like an odd place to be snoopin' around fellas, I must say," the strange man sitting across from them admitted as he deftly flicked an entire deck of cards from one set of nimble fingers to the other. With apparently no fear of spilling any of them on to the picnic table laden with all manner of southern fixings, including a rather savory looking bucket full of fried chicken.
"We're not snooping," Toshiro said, his wrist flicking out to snatch one of the cards out of the deck flittering between the mutant's hands. "We're gathering general information," he said, holding the card in front of the man tantalizingly before setting it face down on the table.
The Queen of Hearts stared up at the table, and the Cajun man seemed wildly taken aback. "Well, gentlemen," he said with a long drawl, "when you put it like that, I can't help but be interested. What can good old Gambit do for you?"
15: Darker than Black
It was like looking into the depths of hell, Ichigo decided as the sky seemed to descend around them in a curtain of enraged black. The line of Captains alongside him did little to comfort him as they faced down the one enemy they had always expected to be rid of.
But, sadly unsurprisingly, Aizen had escaped again to meet a world preparing for his eventual treachery. But as Ichigo caught the gaze of that man, he realized that the dark pupils held something that none of them could contend with, and that was the silence of a genius sentenced to isolation.
Aizen said nothing, and in that moment, the years of peace broke apart into silent war.
16: Lost and Found
"Who knew that the key to Byakuya's heart was a couple of kids running around the house," Toshiro mused from the balcony of the Kuchiki Mansion as the Squad 6 Captain and the two children he'd agreed to babysit engaged in a very serious game of Hide & Seek.
"I think you figured it out first, Toshiro," Ichigo conceded with a smile. "And, admittedly, I'm very glad that you did."
17: Contact Rubber Cement
"Where the hell did you find contact rubber cement in the Soul Society?"
"Toshiro, you do have to remember sometimes that I have family back on Earth that have very easy access to things as useful as contact rubber cement… That, and along with duct tape, it's one of the things that I keep in the house at all times."
-So, yes. I do live, it's been a long time, I know, and I will do my best to get back on track this fall. Things got really stressful at the end of my college semester in the spring, which was about when I dropped off the face of the earth. I was concerned with not failing, finding a job, etc. Everything worked out, all is well, and now I'm back to school/work/writing, and will have more updates very soon. Not sure when Burn to Black's next chapter will be up, but I will do my best to get it up and running as soon as possible. Please don't forget, lovely readers, that I am still taking prompts; feel free to donate in reviews or messages. They will be gotten to, I promise.
8-90s love,
crypto