As someone who grew up with a giant promo poster of his dead mother on the wall behind his kitchen table ("Triple threat!" his father had a habit of yelling over breakfast), Ichigo liked to think he had a fairly generous idea of normal. The girl that crashed into him, spilling the contents of his bookbag all over the road, was an outlier by even his standards.
Honestly, girl was more of an educated guess. He could pick out black flowers and more frills than remotely practical, but it felt like a shot in the dark to say there was actually a person somewhere under all that fabric. Maybe a rabbit. A rabbit in gothic lolita.
"Kaien!"
A talking rabbit in gothic lolita.
"Get back here!"
She clambered off of him,yanking herself to a stand and saluting the horizon as she scanned the road. Ichigo decided then and there that the laws of physics had been suspended because a) there was no way she could see anything through that veil and b) the fuck she was a third his size, she should have gone flying backwards the moment she made impact. She moved sharp and quick, like she didn't know that much lace had no right being in the same district as Karukara Town.
Except she wasn't looking off into the distance anymore. She was staring back. She narrowed her eyes, and Ichigo's mind reflexively queued up a sweeping but ultimately abortive list of exit strategies.
"You! You'll do just fine."
...
Ichigo would later insist-furiously, vehemently, to anyone near enough to hear-that he had resisted. His version left out the bit where the girl (Rukia) sailed under his protests and daintily plucked the September Issue of Vogue Japan from among his belongings.
Her grin went murderous. "You have the build, you have the look, and you have interest! This is fate slapping you in the face, boy! To be or not be! What will you choose?"
If life with his father had taught him anything, it was the second people started parading in shit like destiny, the easiest thing to do was shut up, sit tight, and pray for deliverance. This was how, Ichigo reasoned, he ended up where he was: trying not to blink while a grievously pissed off kindergartener did his eyeliner. The Hamlet reference hadn't exactly hurt things, either.
"Is this necessary?"
The redhead kept his glare locked firmly on Ichigo's lashline. "It'll bring out your eyes."
Ichigo didn't flinch when a new set of fingers jerked his chin towards the light. It was a testament to how many different things had been done to his face in the past hour.
"Rukia, my Victorian dream, where on earth did you find this child? He's absolutely perfect!"
"Please, Urahara," Rukia said, placidly elbowing deadbeat-in-a-bucket-hat behind her. "Though I have to admit, the resemblance is uncanny."
Ichigo took a moment to study the pile of black Rukia had deposited onto his lap. To its credit, he hadn't seen that many spikes since Karin and Yuzu had busted their asses trying to clear Paper Mario-and not even in his most embarrassingly bizarre dreams had he seen that many spikes on a kimono. This was because, in his humble opinion, spikeless kimonos were the norm. Amazingly, there were more pressing concerns.
Rukia faced him. Ichigo wondered if his dismay had turned palpable. "Concerns?"
"The bottom is sheer!"
"Only from the thighs down," Urahara chided.
"Oh, then I guess-no, it's still terrible. No way in hell."
He still ended up skulking out of a dressing room feeling exposed, but Ichigo was learning to find comfort in the little things. Rukia, in a strange burst of logic, stashed him in one of the theatre wings before she filed off in search of safety pins (he was an imperfect double, however slightly). He watched the cameras flicker across the stage, garish models stalking past, and of course some perverted bastard had gone and polished the flooring, it wasn't like this kimono was doing him any favors-and he could not believe he was losing his shit over walking down a runway.
"This is a student exhibit, you know." Rukia smirked when he started, but the careful way she folded a makeshift hem into his sleeves, like she was wrapping cotton around a knife, made him wait her out. "The clothes you're wearing, I've been working on them for months."
She looked him up and down as she finished her work, long and slow and deliberate. There was something horrifically unfair about how at ease she was about it- drawing a curtain around the world with just the curl to her mouth, making him feel too small and too big all at once. (Since when could girls do that anyway? If he ever got out of here, he was side-eyeing the ever-living fuck out of Tatsuki.)
"You do them justice," Rukia said finally, her voice weighted with certainty and something almost like trust. Then she grabbed him by the shoulders (no small feat, given that she came up to maybe his elbows) and pointed him at the crowd. "Now, walk!"
...
Ichigo had words for what happened next: exhilarating, terrifying, like having too much blood in his veins, like his mom's smile before she was just a bunch of pictures. To the best of his knowledge, though, he never actually said any of them to Rukia. Unsurprisingly, logically, he expected to spend the rest of his week finishing his essay on the Meiji Restoration and, in general, being the good little high school student Kojima was always telling him to be.
He got up the next morning, brushed his teeth, ducked the flash of the Polaroid camera his dad routinely shoved in his face, and almost jaunted right past the suspiciously animate bundle of gossamer and jacquard waiting for him at the school front gate. Except, on a scale from one to ten, the amount of self-discipline it took to just walk past an outfit that willfully anachronistic stood around the order of physically impossible. Literally. There was a crowd.
While he took a back seat to his classmates' impressive facial gymnastics, Ichigo considered his bed. Unmade-because screw his old man and his weirdly elaborate morning routines-but probably still warm, and less than fifteen minutes away. Ten, if he ran. All he had to do was autoclave all memory of this high noon freakshow, turn around, and start walking.
Instead, he did approximately zero of those things, reached out, and grabbed Rukia's wrist. She was a plague uniquely in his orbit, and Ichigo knew better than to not clean up his own mess. His conscience had answered a higher calling to the tune of Drag Rukia Far Away from Your Unsuspecting Friends.
"Lover's quarrel?" Keigo winked and threw him a thumb's up.
Ichigo rolled his eyes. (Maybe there was a part of him that kind of wanted to see her again. Maybe he'd think of a way to ritually disembowel that part of him later.)
They rounded a corner, and before he could even begin pointing out the importance of personal boundaries with special emphasis on not stalking him, Rukia was rattling off the details of her next show, the sketches she'd sent for Urahara's approval, and did he know anything about shirring cloth?
"Is there a world where you thought about, oh I don't know, ASKING ME FIRST?"
"Of course you're going to do it," Rukia said, tipping her head into her hand. "You loved it."
...
Here's the thing: clothes made sense to Ichigo for as long as he could remember.
When she was alive, his mom used to let him pick out the dresses she would wear to the red carpet. He would comb through all the silk and chiffon in her closet-cut in every silhouette imaginable because there was nothing his mom didn't look good in-and watch, wide-eyed, as she built an outfit around his choice.
After she died, Ichigo started pairing his dad's shirts and ties. He'd darn the holes in his sisters' jeans and embroider flowers onto their skirts. He'd scour all the thrift shops and clearance racks and make damn sure his family looked good every time they walked out the door because, between running the clinic and burning dinner, his dad never had the time. Ichigo wound up caring a lot more about oxfords and tailored suits somewhere along the way, and the number of people he'd helped out of wardrobe malfunctions should've probably embarrassed him a little, but it was all just something he did.
Just his own weird way of making the world less of an eyesore. Just his own weird way of missing people.
Until Rukia.
So yeah, maybe he did want this. But he complained the whole way anyway because fuck if he'd let Rukia know she was right.
...
(As for Kaien, Ichigo spent more time cursing an increasingly distant roster of the Shiba line than he cared to admit.)