I don't own Bleach or its characters. Hello all! I am delivering to you a fresh, new story. I want to tell you that this really is my baby; this story is born of my life experiences, my area of expertise - special education, and my life's passion to work with children who are cognitively and emotionally impaired. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do writing it. Also, I have a poll up that I'd love for all my readers to do involving helping me decide what will be my next project after this one, because I have so many plot bunnies bouncing around in my head and I really can't chose!
Chapter 1
Ichigo carded his fingers through his thick orange hair, skewing the array of spikes that always stood up all over the place portraying a sexy, messy bedhead. His hand snaked out on autopilot and slender tan fingers wrapped around a well-worn travel mug full of lukewarm coffee, bringing the rim to his lips as he proceeded to gulp down what was his third cup of coffee in two hours. He didn't even taste it as his eyes scanned through the document on his screen, reading the IEP of his newest transfer. Absentmindedly, his teeth gnawed at his bottom lip, his scowl deepening as he read further and further down the document.
As usual, the goals were utter shit. They were blasé; copy and pasted from a goal bank on the internet type of goals that didn't seem to be grade level appropriate. He sighed and pulled a pen and a pad of post-it notes from his desk drawer and began jotting down all the assessments he could think of off the top of his head that he was going to have to give this kid so that he could best meet his academic needs. Tawny eyes flashed down to the clock in the corner of his computer; he had 20 more minutes before his class would be coming back from art class.
Suddenly, he remembered he had to print word work sheets and was navigating through his documents folder to find them as his cell phone vibrated in the pocket of his vest. He read the message that was simply "S.O.S". Quickly he pressed Control and P on his keyboard and entered a quantity, sending the request off to the printer down the hall. He closed his laptop cover and sprinted out of his room.
His black Converses squealed over severely faded gray and white checkboard styled vinyl tile that was chipped and cracked in some areas. The brown brick walls were covered by student work and colorful teacher bulletin boards in attempt to add some cheer and hide the dilapidated state the building was falling into. He turned the corner and snagged the handrail, hopping on and sliding down the flight of five stairs that led to the wing that was for reserved for lower elementary.
He skidded into a classroom, his eyes quickly assessing the situation. There was a small, wiry child in the reading area, screaming and wreaking havoc on the book shelves. Books were being torn off the shelves and thrown in fury to ground, tears streaming down the kid's face as he worked through his crisis phase. Ichigo moved toward the teacher, who was leading a math group at a semi-circle shaped table that was kept from wobbling with an old text book under one leg.
"What happened Asano?" Ichigo questioned quietly.
Asano almost always had the same expression on his face, unless he was trying to flirt with a girl. The usual small smile that always sat on the other man's lips was gone, replaced with a frozen mask of feigned nonchalance. All teachers knew you had to hold it together and never crack in front of the kids, and Ichigo knew Asano long enough to know he was holding back some major stress.
"He just blew up during silent reading. When I tried to talk to him about it, he became the little tornado of destruction over there."
"I'm on it," Ichigo said, making his way over to the furious child.
Keigo Asano was a good guy. In high school, he was always there to cheer Ichigo up and was sort of dramatic but good natured. Ichigo was surprised to find that he too wanted to become an educator and they even got accepted to the same college. Keigo went the route of general education and Ichigo took the special education program. Keigo went on to find a job in Seireitei whereas Ichigo was still in the school of his very first job in Hueco Mundo.
Hueco Mundo was a total 180 from Seireitei, especially this particular school, but Keigo did his best to bring nice things into his classroom that most of the students didn't get to experience much. His reading area had a host of brightly colored bins all labeled by genre and levels on shelves, containing many shiny new books that Ichigo had helped him write a grant for at the end of the last year. Keigo had lots of plump cushions and attempted to hide the ugly, stained brown carpet with a pleasant blue and green chevron area rug.
Said rug was now buried under just about every book Keigo owned in his classroom library. Ichigo tentatively approached the child, wary of being beamed in the head with a hard cover of Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? Ichigo was becoming very well acquainted with this child; he had already intervened on his classroom antics five times since the start of the school year. It was only the beginning of November.
The small boy set his red and puffy eyes on Ichigo, his small body shuddering from the force of his sobs. Ichigo crouched down on one knee to his level but kept a good half foot of space in between them in case he needed to move quickly.
"Hey Hibiki," Ichigo said lowly and gently, "I see you are very upset right now, and that's okay. When you are ready to talk about it, I'll be right here and ready to listen."
Hibiki ran to a green plump cushion and angrily tossed his little body onto it, burying his face in the cushion to hide. Ichigo waited patiently, watching as the boy began deescalating, his crying subsided and he sucked in large amounts of air. He peeked out from under his arm at Ichigo, and Ichigo smiled kindly.
"Would you like to somewhere private to talk, or would you like to talk here?"
"Here," came the muffled reply.
Ichigo scooted in closer on his knees but still maintained space so the small boy would not feel threatened.
"Can you tell me why you got so upset?"
"Cuz I couldn't read the words in the story," the boy pouted back, pulling his arms away and sitting up on the cushion. His small face scrunched up into a scowl and his green eyes were growing stormy again.
"Which story would that be? Could we look at it together?"
The boy considered Ichigo for a moment before getting up and retrieving the book from beneath a small pile next to an overturned green plastic bin on the carpet a few feet away from Ichigo. He handed it to Ichigo with a huff.
Ichigo looked at the title and then back at Hibiki.
"Hibiki, did Mr. Asano approve this book for your book bin?"
"Yes," he answered, giving the book a dirty look.
Ichigo looked down at the book. It was Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.
"Hibiki," Ichigo said gently, "Mr. Asano approved this book because it's supposed to challenge you. I want to tell you a secret about this book, come closer so I can whisper it to you."
Hibiki looked intrigued and leaned in close to Ichigo, who cupped his hands around the child's ear.
"You are only in second grade and this is a fourth-grade level book!" he whispered excitedly.
Hibiki's eyes widened in shock.
Ichigo smiled widely, watching the boy process that information.
"Hibiki, you are a very skilled reader, one of the highest in the class," Ichigo continued lowly, keeping their conversation as private as he could.
"Mr. Asano approved this book because you are ready to read more challenging vocabulary and longer books than just picture books. This is a very amazing skill for someone your age. I'm very sorry you got frustrated by some of the vocabulary, but that is how we learn new words and improve our reading skills. We cannot learn anything if we are never challenged. When you encounter a word you cannot read, it doesn't mean you aren't intelligent, because clearly you are since you are reading at such a higher level. It just means you are learning and growing your brain."
Hibiki took the book back from Ichigo and hugged it close to his chest, and Ichigo could see the relief flooding into the child's eyes. Ichigo knew from previous encounters with the child and multiple discussions about him with Keigo that Hibiki's parents were both highly intelligent individuals and put a lot of pressure on their child to excel. Unfortunately, their pressure and other factors created a child with an anxiety and perfectionist complex, driving him to emotional outbursts that could become destructive when he couldn't get things right.
The reason Hibiki was in this school was because no other school was equipped with the personel to deal with his emotional impairments. The level of his impairment was just not acceptable in other schools, especially private ones, so all the money his parents had could not buy this child the education he deserved. Ichigo was literally only one of two certified to deal with emotionally impaired children in the school. The other was their behavioral interventionist, Lisa Yadōmaru.
Lisa was a stern woman with long black hair she always wore in braided ponytail. She wore black pants suits and red rimmed glasses that flashed when she strode down hallways. The first time Ichigo laid eyes on her was in her interview panel and he thought there was no way this tiny woman, who was only 5'4" and barely 115 lbs was going to be able to handle the older kids, especially those who displayed violent behaviors. That was until she trialed for a day and he watched her handle an eighth grader who tried to hit her with a desk chair multiple times like it was no skin off her back. Everyone learned very fast to respect her because she took crap from no one.
"So, Hibiki, we can discuss with Mr. Asano some strategies you can use when you encounter a word you don't know, but I'm sure you understand that you chose to make bad decisions in the classroom when you were upset."
Hibiki frowned once more and looked down at his feet.
"So here is what we are going to do. You are going to go move your behavioral clip down and then you are going to clean up these books and apologize to Mr. Asano. You will join your classmates for math and make good choices so that your clip can move back up, because I know you are a very capable young man and one part of the day going bad doesn't mean the whole day has to. I'm sure you could do something helpful like help a friend who is struggling and that will show Mr. Asano that you are trying to turn your day around. If you can do these things, I'll come around at the end of the day with a surprise for you."
"Ok Mr. Kurosaki!" agreed Hibiki happily and trotted off to move his clip down, unfazed thankfully for the punishment with the promise of a surprise. Ichigo remained for a few moments to watch as Hibiki began sorting the mess on the floor back into the proper bins before waving to Keigo and slipping back into the hall.
Checking his cell, he saw he had five minutes to collect his worksheets off the printer and get ready for his math lesson when his students got back from art class. He took off with a sprint.
Four o'clock finally came and Ichigo trudged the four blocks to subway station to ride home. He used the 30 minute train ride to catch up emails from his Iphone, seeing one from his principal, Retsu Unohana. Principal Unohana was an extremely kind, patient woman and a great friend and mentor to Ichigo. She was requesting he come in early tomorrow to sit on an interview panel for a new physical education teacher; their previous P.E. teacher quitting last week due to the abuse experienced by the students, both verbal and physical. Not everybody was cut out to handle kids like they had at Hueco Mundo Exceptional Academy.
Their school took the kids that schools in Seireitei and Hueco Mundo could not handle or children who could not afford to go to private schools and did not get a voucher into a charter school. Unfortunately, Hueco Mundo was overrun with poverty; 85% of their students received free or reduced lunch. The ramshackle building was funded through both Seireitei and Hueco Mundo, each year receiving no more than was needed to keep it running. Anything else had to come from grants or the teacher's own pockets.
Ichigo was lucky that his father owned a health clinic, and Isshin Kurosaki was nothing if not a generous man. He offered free health services to the students by coming in twice a week to perform checkups and give free immunizations. He also donated to their extracurricular programs and saw to it that Ichigo would have whatever he needed to keep his classroom running smoothly. Often, he'd find boxes of pencils, erasers, markers, glue sticks, and packets of loose leaf paper stuffed in his mail box in the office on the days his dad worked at the school.
He typed out a reply to his boss that yes, he'd be there for the interview and pocketed his phone in favor of pulling out the daily work his students turned in to grade. He used daily work to reinforce math and reading/writing skills and it was the first thing students did when they came into the classroom for the first 45 minutes of the day. He had the front and back worksheets in a leveled system of red, yellow, and green.
His red group was working on recognizing nouns and verbs, and that capital letters started a sentence and punctuation ends a sentence. He frowned over a few of the papers, noting mentally who to pull for small group re-teaching tomorrow of the concepts. Yellow group was working on recognizing adjectives and writing a main idea sentence and a supporting detail sentence. Most of them were doing amazing. The green group had progressed to writing whole paragraphs, and were focusing on identifying the main idea, supporting sentences, and the closing idea. Some students were struggling with the order the sentences should go in and Ichigo noted them mentally as well.
The subway lurched to a stop and Ichigo discovered it was his stop. He exited the subway station up into the sun of Karakura Town and smiled. A quick 5-minute walk and he'd be home. He walked the tree line streets preoccupied as his thoughts wandered into lesson planning and assessment of his new student. Those thoughts went to the backburner as he reached the gate of his home.
He and his partner had purchased a lovely 3-bedroom condo just outside the bustling city. It was painted a deep blue with white trim and neatly shaped square hedges lined the front porch. It was enclosed completely with a black wrought iron fence. The front was shaded by a large tree from which a small wooden swing hung. He bounded up the steps, feeling the stress of the day slipping away.
However, when he crossed the threshold, that stress creeped around the doorway and brought with it some friends to slam back into Ichigo full force. There in the hall was a small toddler with sea foam green hair pulled into messy pigtails in nothing but a pair of pink underpants, covered in paint as she merrily splattered her art all over Ichigo's white wainscoting.
"Daddy Ichi!" she squealed upon seeing him, dropping her paints to splash all over the hardwood in favor of racing toward him and leaping into his arms. Ichigo hugged her tightly and planted a kiss on the only part of her forehead that wasn't covered in colorful paint.
"Nel, my sweet girl," he said when she pulled back and looked at him with her large hazel eyes, "where are your clothes?"
"I saked off daddy, so I keep my dress clean!"
Ichigo smirked, at least she had the foresight to not ruined her clothing.
"Where's Papa? Does he know you are creating art in the hallway?"
"Papa is in office, and Nel pains picsures and self so Nel has picsures on skin like Papa!"
Ichigo nodded and gave her another kiss.
"Well Nel, you pictures are beautiful sweetheart, but we only paint on paper, remember? Paints are not for the walls of the house. We are going to have to get you in the bath."
Nel's giant eyes welled up with tears.
"Nel is bad. Daddies are gonna send her away. I sorry!"
"Sshhh, enough of that," Ichigo cooed and carried her to the stairs, carefully avoiding the large splats of paint now drying on the floor as to not track it up the steps, "I'm not mad at you sweetheart and we aren't going to ever send you away. Your daddies love you very much. It's nothing that can't be cleaned up, I just want you to only paint on paper next time, understand?"
"Ok daddy," Nel sniffed as they stepped into the bathroom.
Ichigo set her in the tub and helped her out of her underpants, turning on the water and adjusting it so it was the perfect temperature. He put strawberry scented bubbles into the water flow and Nel squealed in delight as the bath began filling with foamy suds. From beneath the sink Ichigo retrieved a pink basket full of rubber duckies and toy boats, and Nel's personal favorite, a mermaid that swam if you wound up her tail.
Once she was clean and happily playing with her toys in the bubbly bath, Ichigo stripped off his now wet and paint covered dress shirt and tie. He hung it on the hook on the back of the door to remind him to drop it off to the cleaners tomorrow before work. Thankfully it was washable paint he thought to himself as he thought of all the mess he had yet to clean downstairs. His thoughts turned a little darker as he could hear his husband down the hall, playing video games in his office, oblivious to their daughter and the mess she had gotten herself into downstairs while she was supposed to be supervised by him.
Renji was Ichigo's first boyfriend all throughout college, and Ichigo fell hard and fast for the man. He was incredibly fit and was covered literally from head to toe in black tribal tattoos. Ichigo had always made fun of him in college, telling him how could he get a job like that, especially as a business major, but Renji never stopped adding to his ink. Renji also secured himself right out of college a job working at Kuchiki Industries, Seireitei's largest and most successful international corporations for computer hardware and software. He had made Ichigo eat his words in the most delicious of ways.
They had gotten married in an intimate ceremony after graduation, each of them barely in their early 20's but so sure of their love. They bought this house together, and a year ago, Ichigo convinced Renji to at least foster a child as he wanted to start a family. Renji had agreed and they had little Nel for all of six months before they finalized the adoption. She had stolen both of their hearts and Ichigo couldn't believe someone had given up such a beautiful baby girl.
Renji was phenomenal at his job, so much so that he was promoted to Vice President of his Division. He became in charge of the new branch which was developing video games. He spent a lot his at home time "beta-testing" games. Since this had happened six months ago, Ichigo was left to pick up a lot of his responsibilities as Renji suddenly seemed to not have time for them. Ichigo couldn't complain, Renji was the one who was really providing their comfortable lifestyle, but doing everything on his own was starting to spread him thin.
Ichigo drained the tub and scooped Nel up into a fluffy gray towel. He carried her to her room and let her choose what pajamas she wanted to wear. She picked a purple nightgown with a large Chappy Bunny on the front. Ichigo dried her off and slathered her in baby lotion before getting her in clean underpants and pulling the gown over her head. They sang the ABC song while he brushed her hair, a darker green now that it was wet. With another kiss to her head, he set her down to play with her doll house and took off with the wet towel.
The towel was dropped in the black wicker basket in the bathroom on the way to his husband's office. Renji didn't even hear him enter as he had on a headset and was stuffed into his gaming chair, playing some first-person shooter game.
Ichigo stood in front of the large flat screen, effectively cutting off Renji's vision and getting his character on the screen shot and killed.
Renji tore off his headset and looked sheepishly at Ichigo's scowling face.
"Hey babe," he said hesitantly.
Ichigo pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Ren, this is the second time this week that I've come home to find Nel in some sort of mess. She repainted our hallway and herself this time. You are supposed to be keeping an eye on her!"
Renji smirked.
"Well, paint is a hell of a lot easier to clean up than syrup."
"That is not the point," Ichigo hissed angrily, not wanting to raise his voice and frighten Nel who was just down the hall.
"I'm sorry, Ichi," Renji pleaded, "you know I gotta get through this. It's hopefully the final run before we can release a first playable version. It's work babe."
"I know," Ichigo sighed, "but can't you at least wait until I get home so Nel doesn't get into trouble? She only two and half, she can find trouble everywhere. It's seriously a talent of hers."
"Yeah, ok Ichi, I'll wait until you get home next time to keep the scamp from destroying the house," agreed Renji, pulling his headset back in place.
Ichigo took that as a sign that the conversation was over, and headed out of the room, his heart aching. Not so much as a kiss or a how was your day. He couldn't wait for this fucking game to hit the market so he could get his husband back.
"Hey Ichi," Renji called out and Ichigo's heart skipped a beat. He turned the doorway to see Renji's face peering around his chair.
"When's dinner going to be ready? I'm getting hungry."
The hope in Ichigo's heart died an instantous death.
"I'll get right on it after I clean the hall," he spat, but the headset was already back over Renji's ears before he could hear the anger and hurt in Ichigo's words.
End chapter. Well, what do you think? Is it interesting so far? Comments and reviews always appreciated! 3