Every day he comes in, but he doesn't act like he should.
Shuuhei Hisagi dwells in the same neighborhoods you dwell. Beneath the shiny cities and pretty lights of a new age, where the rich and beautiful drink Champaign and are too busy worrying about scuffing their shiny shoes to dance, there's the place where people like you dwell.
Almost beneath the city, enshrouded in the shadows is where they real parties are with loud, vivacious music and dancing to an almost violent rhythm that shakes the inner-city to its core. The nights are brighter here, the morals looser. Upper-crust folk pretend such a place doesn't exist, just as they do with anyone and everyone beneath them. Underneath the city of the rich is the city of ghosts, and the experience is a spiritual one indeed.
At the heart of the city of ghosts is your club. And how fitting in this world run by the dollar that your success wasn't even earned on your own, but by inheritance. Kisuke left this place to you when he retired to see the world. He was sent across it once upon a time when he was in the service, and now he wished to trek it as a spectator rather than an invader. You kept the name of the joint the same. "Urahara's" just has a better ring to it.
On a night like this, warm and carrying a sweet scent from the coming spring, the place fills up quickly. Women slink free of the shadows and into the light, flashy dresses and bold colors painted on their face as their bodies move gracefully to the waves of the music that fill up the building. Men in two-dollar suits grin as they leave their drinks to join them on the dance-floor. If you don't come to Urahara's to dance, you don't come at all.
Sometimes you spot a less-than–innocent spark of silver in someone's pocket, under their shirt, occasionally even tucked into the front of their dresses. Your clientele isn't always a nice one, but what business is it of yours? Renji Abarai just serves the liquor, keeps the good times going with offerings to the spirits of the city of ghosts.
And then he comes in. Almost every night now, per your request. He doesn't stick out at first, another slim figure in a dark suit, with a fedora pulled suspiciously low down over his face. Hides the scars, you guess, and that isn't unusual either. In downtown looking a little roughed-up is practically the norm, he could just be another shadow with a shady operation who got into trouble but escaped with the scars to boot-leg his way to fortune for another day. Not even the tattoos are that odd, certainly they're less dramatic than yours, which earn you quite a few curious comments from tipsy folk at the bar.
But no, it's nothing to do with how he looks. If that were only it, he'd fit right in with the skeeze of the club. It's how he walks, holding himself with the poise of a man with money you know he couldn't dream of. It's how he talks, speaking with a stubbornly reserved tongue that utters words smooth and slick as the whiskey you sell, his voice a smooth growl like the hum of a new car's purring engine.
He slips into the club, a solemn dark figure drifting through the throngs of people like an angel of death. The beautiful women in short skirts and the chisled men in broad suit-jackets don't hold his eye, the only thing that steel-slate gaze is fixed on sits in the dark corner of the club.
That piano is a fucking prize and you know it. It's probably the most expensive thing in this whole building, including the deliciously illegal bottles of liquor stacked on the shelves behind you. The baby grand piano shines with the glow of the dim lights bouncing off its slick black surface. It is clean, preserved with the history of only being touched by one person, and is the single beacon of class and elegance in the otherwise rancorous and crass underbelly of the city.
Shuuhei loves that piano. Adores it, in fact, as he has told you many times. Subsequently, you adore it, because you adore it when he caresses its wooden frame as gently as he would a lover before sitting down at the bench, settling himself comfortably and familiarly before he plays.
That's when the night really kicks off, because everyone responds to Shuuhei's music like a siren spell. Rukia puts down the deck she had been using to lighten the wallets of a few innocent persons who clearly don't come around often. Whatever charming words that had been falling out of Ichigo's mouth as he chats up a pretty girl with long green hair die on his tongue. The "business" deal Izuru and Rangiku are making with a potential client who wants some work competition out of the way gets put unceremoniously on hold.
The room is filled with a soft sweet sound like the innocent trickling of a stream as Shuuhei's fingers glide and tease the keys of the piano, making a simple melody. Progressively, the music gets louder, the rhythm faster and it carries the quickening pulse of its listeners with it as it skyrockets. Every time you hear that playing it gets harder for you to breathe just from the speed of the music that is suffocating your ears and making it hard to think, hard to concentrate and absorb anything except that sound.
Finally Shuuhei has worked up to a tempo like lightening, pounding the keys almost savagely. The music pierces, pulling people to the floor as they are trapped by the music. They move to Shuuhei's ministrations, infected by the all-encompassing beat.
Sometimes he sings, and you like those times the best. When the engine purr of his voice kicks up and reverberates as if he is a powerful machine, an wind-up automaton fueled by the music just as much as the dancers entranced below him. He sings about long nights tucked away in secret from the outside world, of sorrow and joy ringing like bells in the minds of all who hear. He sings about worlds not tapered by injustice or rules, but that spin on with the force of people existing in that most sacred state of simply being people. And sometimes, on certain nights, he sings of love.
The love songs are for you. You know because he lifts the hat higher so his eyes are visible and he looks at you behind the bar, impaling you with his captivating stare. He looks at you when he sings, a smirk tugging at his mouth around the sweet words and his voice drops another octave, low and deep like a physical pressure squeezing around your heart.
You'd like those times more if they weren't so obvious. You think he likes to watch you squirm when other people notice. Your friends and patrons take note pf his private looks, the way he undresses you with his eyes even from across the room. They notice the way you respond, too. Ikkaku chuckles around his glass when you fumble with a bottle while you try to pry your eyes away from Shuuhei's form. Soifon rolls her eyes and traces sarcastic little hearts and lewd pictures with drops of her drink on the wood of the bar.
But still Shuuhei sings love to you. A part of you tells yourself that he shouldn't. You've seen this story play out too many times, you've been too disillusioned by life for things like being in love and Shuuhei has as well.
Maybe you aren't too disillusioned though, maybe you're just disillusioned enough. Enough that well after three in the morning you push your customers out the door, sending them home to their ordinary lives in the city of ghosts for another week until they show up on your door again to repeat the cycle, and then it's just you and Shuuhei.
Shuuhei waits until you're cleaning up the bar, reaching up to set a bottle of gin back in its place on the high shelf to feel a strong set of arms around your waist, a clever hot tongue flicking your ear and being disillusioned is the last thing on your mind.
All your life you've been reminded what kind of person people think you are. Tall, broad, intimidating, you look the kind of guy to take whatever and whoever you want with nothing short of dominance. But Shuuhei has a way of taking all that power from you, and he doesn't even do it by force. He coaxes control from you, gently unwrapping your fingers from around it until you're offering it to him in your open palm.
His mouth on yours, hot and wet, it makes you feel so much, too much. His hands on your face, the tips of his fingers framing your cheeks as his tongue plays sneaky tricks on your lips makes you feel more than any person should have the right to make you feel. Your hands explore the lean expanse of his back, and with the right press of his weight against your body you suddenly find yourself being lowered to the floor.
You could never remember what he was wearing on those nights because all you care about is that he gets whatever it is on his person off as fast as possible. He reacts in turn, an almost frightening grin teasing the scars of his otherwise smooth face as he all but rips your clothes off your body. His skin is cold but you have enough heat for the both of you, and he knows where all your hottest spots are. He's always prepared, he reads you and your needs like an open book so why bother hesitating in this dance to ask a question you both know the answer to?
Your own scarlet hair obstructs your vision when he pulls away your hat, wrapping his fingers around the long strands and pulling with only enough force to let you know what he wants. Your nails tear into the skin of his shoulders, and you want to give him everything he wants and you want everything back in return. Equal in trade, equal in passion and in want and in touch.
The taste of his skin is better than anything the law could ban, salty with sweat. You taste him as your teeth graze and eventually dig into his shoulder when he fills you, and you are struck with the indescribably intense but familiar feeling of being penetrated. You want to scream, it's the closest you can get of being able to sing your love back to him. It feels like he's tearing you open and filling you with affection and heat and the guilty pleasure of your every dark desire.
The desire is in his touch, in his voice he carries the music with him. Carries the pulse and the fast sounds like the hammers of the piano against the tightly coiled strings. Every night this happens you realize how much you need that music, that sense of something entirely enveloping and consuming like a ballad. Without Shuuhei you are hollow, another empty soul in the city of ghosts that lurks beneath the glitter and gold of the living world above. But with him you are alive, so very much alive and the rest of the world is dead and dust for being deprived of his touch.
You could lie in his arms for an eternity. You could let the whole world pass by, the glow outside of a city that never sleep bleeding into the rising daylight, the roar of cars pass by as the days spin away and out of your hands in favor of continuing this one moment.
You can't, of course. You have liquor to serve for the next night, and the one after that. And Shuuhei will come in, walking and talking as if he doesn't belong here, here in this place that defines you and he doesn't quite fit in. But he does fit, you know it because he'll sing love to you. And the song will be make you alive.