My Afternoon with Kurosaki

Urahara Kisuke.

Genius. Scientist, inventor. Shinigami. Ex-captain of the Gotei 13.

Criminal. Exile. Runaway, fugitive hiding in the Human World. Shopkeeper.

And late riser.

Yes, even though the afternoon sun was high in the sky, he would normally be bed. For him, the nighttime was the right time for thinking and tinkering. For listening to the spring wind blow through the neighborhood trees as it made its way for summer was much more satisfying. And he preferred being the sole audience member of a chorus of sounds the rest of his neighbors and stayed unaware of. The good ones like crickets and moths' wings. And the not-so-good ones like the unearthly roar of a Hollow and the sound of a zanpaktou slicing the air.

But alas: he was expecting company. Curious company.

"Tenshu!" Tessai rose from his crouched position behind a shelf. His partner-in-arms had paused in his task of restocking their wares. If the small, rectangular glasses perched on his nose weren't so thick and adept at catching glares from a light source—in this case, the fluorescent light from overhead—there may have been more to the look of surprise on his face.

"Ahhh!Tessaiiii," Kisuke said through a heavy yawn. He adjusted his hat, careful to knock Benihime into the doorframe, as he made his way to the front, his sandaled feet like a horse's hooves along the floor. She wasn't excited—no, his princess wasn't one to feel that way outside of battle—but she was interested. As quizzically interested in their guest as he was. "It seems like we've been getting a lot of customers lately."

"No…we haven't had anyone wander in here for months," Tessai murmured. "I'm only changing these because they've expired. But—but outside!"

"Yes. Will you please make some tea? Something mild. It is late in the day, after all." He had finally reached the front and didn't need to watch Tessai bow and take great strides to the kitchen.

Now, for their guest.

With a flourish, he opened up the store's door. With a smile, he stepped outside into the sunshine. "Welcome, Kurosa—"

With wide eyes and spit caught in his throat, his greeting came to an abrupt end.

Kurosaki Masaki.

Ex-Quincy. A former patient, if you will. A young girl whose soul contained a Hollow of which origins he did not know—but could guess.

A university graduate. Medical professional. And not just a wife of two years: a wife of what was surely one of Seriteri's lost sons.

It wasn't that the young girl, now a young woman, stood at his storefront's door. He had already surmised that the letter that had left him ruminating quite distractedly over the last few nights had came from her. Shiba Isshin—now also "Kurosaki"—preferred the direct, unannounced approach of communication. It wasn't even that there had been a stretch of years between the last time their paths had crossed. After all, that day—a happy morning that tipped her towards the precipice of her own death as the evening unfolded, and then, pulled her up into blessed night by the strength of a string—may have become nothing more than a disjointed set of memories. And from her perspective, he may have only been a minor character when compared to Shiba Isshin, a deus ex machina. In any case, he had learned a lot about her from the increasing lovelorn words of S—Kurosaki Isshin. In fact, as brilliant as he was, Kisuke could have been given a quiz on Kurosaki Masaki and passed with flying colors.

No, it wasn't for those reasons he paused.

It was…her stomach.

The lemon yellow, floor-length spring dress she wore did nothing to hide the roundness of her pregnant belly. But by the mischievous look in her eyes and the smirk on her face, he could tell that she hadn't planned on hiding it from him.

She certainly had a way with words as it were. And he could respect that. After all, he was free of making unnecessary small talk, although his curiosity had only grown.

"Mister Urahara," she said, her voice full of a singsong levity. "Hel~lo!"

"Ah, Kurosaki-chan. Thank you for coming!"

"Thank you for having me!" Those words. He knew enough about those words and human exchange to know that it was on the guest to make their way inside, and yet Kurosaki Masaki made no such move.

He stared at her from underneath his cap in such a way that she knew he was watching her. "…I hope tea is to your liking."

"That's perfect. We both like tea." Her hand wandered to her stomach and made a small, smooth circle around its side.

There was another pause. A pregnant pause.

He gripped what would have been Benihime's hilt as his other hand dug through his coat and produced a fan. Perfect for hiding a smirk on his face at this strange interaction, her inadvertent hilarity. "You…are coming in, yes?"

"I would, but today's the day I learned I can't tie my shoes by myself anymore." Her sneakered foot jutted from underneath the ruffle at her dress' hem. "Isshin's at a conference and I had to ask the nosy neighbor lady next door to help me. She smells like cat and cabbage and her husband tried to get me to buy radishes. I don't really want to have to go through someone else tying my shoes again."

He giggled.

"Did you just…giggle?"

He had. He stopped. "Ahem. Let me bring out some chairs."

Kisuke went inside and brought out two chairs and a small folding table to wedge between them.

Tessai, surprised at the sight of Kurosaki Masaki, went back inside with the promised platter of tea, sugar and honey, and returned with a plate with two taiyaki and a bowl of the strawberries he had bought from the market not one day before.

Masaki gently, gently eased herself into her seat. It was her idea for them to carefully clink their porcelain cups together, and she was the one to gleefully yell, "Kampai!"

They sipped. She munched on the cakes contentedly and then began on the strawberries.

He watched her from the corner of his eye. He watched her pretend not to notice him watching her. Eventually, they forgot they were watching one another and began to truly observe the neighborhood that passed them by. The sights and smells and sounds of the afternoon ebbed and flowed around them: a music station that could only bring pleasure to an elderly woman; a television show; a lover's quarrel; cooked food from an apartment window; a passing car; the sounds of young kids riding bikes and running with no destination, never knowing why they avoided the stretch of dirt that would bring them to his front door. There were no sounds of a lost soul fighting against its inevitable change or a brandished sword or the pull of an arrow.

They both seemed to know that the first questions belonged to him, and so, the shopkeeper acquiesced to ending the suspense. "How far along are you?"

"Almost seven months. I actually figured out I was pregnant before Isshin did." She smiled that smile of hers again. "His eyes nearly popped out of his skull—he almost didn't believe me! But…my reiatsu had been fluctuating like crazy in the beginning."

She quieted. Her hands grabbed for a napkin to wipe her strawberry red-stained fingers and her gaze again focused on the outside world. Kisuke's eyebrow rose at the implications. A reiatsu fluctuating in the manner she described was not so strange as all pregnant women in Seriteri—wives of noble clan leaders—experienced spikes and dips in their spiritual pressure, a testament to the existence of a child and its health. But for her to be able to tell…

He placed his cup down on the table, but made no move to pour another cup for himself, instead refilling hers. He kept his thoughts on the matter silent and decided let her continue.

And continue she did. "It's a boy," she said, answering the second question he had.

"A boy?! Tell me, has Isshin preformed the ceremonial dance for boys?"

"Nooo... What is that?"

He did not talk about Seriteri or noble families or her husband's prestigious clan, but he stood and walked towards the stretch of dirt. To his audience of one—two, counting Benihime, or maybe even three; it's possible that Tessai was watching through the crack of the store doors—pulled his hand into his robe once more and produced yet another fan. "It is a ceremonial dance performed where your husband is from. And it goes," he opened the two, "a little something like this."

What followed was a series of flourishes, spins, turns and jumps. His fans wafted and spun and were flipped high in the air. "Congra-tu-la-tions-on-your-baby boyyyyy!" He ended the dance on bended knee, his head bent towards the ground.

"Oh. My." Masaki said after the long pause, silent save for Kisuke's heavy breathing. She suddenly jumped in her seat and her hand landed on her belly. "Do you practice that of—? Ohh!" She looked down at her stomach for a few seconds and then back up at him. "I don't think he liked it very much."

"WHA?"

"Yeah. Now that you mention it, Isshin did do a dance like that a while ago and the baby kicked me back then, too. It was really, really hard. I really don't think he likes dances."

That brat!

"Mister Urahara?" Masaki asked after Kisuke sulked his way back to his chair. "It's a little late to ask now that he's almost here, but should I be worried for my baby? With the Hollow inside me?" Her hand returned to her stomach. "He seems to be healthy like a normal baby. My doctor can't find anything wrong, but…I'm not normal and when he's born, he won't just be a Human baby. Or a Quincy baby."

"Is there a way Quincy babies are different from Human babies?"

She laughed. "There's no way I can answer that question anymore. But still—he's different."

"Kurosaki—Missus Kurosaki," he said to her, adopting the same strange manner of recognition she had addressed him with. "Your child—if you so choose, children—will be unlike anything anyone on any plane of existence has been. Even more than you, yourself.

"But that does not mean you should worry. I can tell that the child has been well protected for this long. And I'm certain the same will be true as he grows."

She stared at him with no sideways glances or quirk of the lips. If anything, her stare was as fascinatingly disconcerting as her joking expressions. After all, such a declaration was worthy of a rebuttal, or merely pointing out the obvious: he was not a psychic (not that he, a man of science, believed in such things); it was impossible for him to know if the Hollow within her, being a thing that had never been witnessed before or since those years ago, could truly stay contained in an operation not meant for a human; and that in the event the Hollow ever somehow escaped, it would not harm Masaki or her unborn children was also an unknown.

But then she spoke again. "May I ask you another question—a question after this one? Are you aware of human families?"

"Human families?" Again, he grabbed at his fan, this time to hide the surprise on his face at her unexpected question. "In what way?"

"Well. There's a regular family: two parents and a kid, maybe a lot of kids. The nuclear family." When he didn't interrupt her, she continued. "Maybe there are also extended families: an aunt, an uncle and cousins… Grandparents. But some families have godparents—like, a godmother and a godfather."

"Ah, yes. A godparent." Kisuke now drew from the expansive knowledge that one like him could only have about the Human World. "A Western religious tradition that establishes a third party close to a parent, or parents, as being responsible for the child's religious upbringing. The Japanese call it kari-oya, and in that tradition, it is one who is tasked with establishing a non-legal parent-child relationship and ushering the child into society socially, economically and at times, psychologically." He regarded her wide eyes as a clue of her being impressed and smiled behind his fan. "Why do you ask?"

She smiled. A true smile, one that he realized he had learned of before from one of Isshin's one-sided conversations about her. "I know that it's unexpected for me to ask. And it might become a secret between us since Isshin doesn't know that we know each other to have teatime. But I was wondering if you would be the godparent to this little one?

"You knew what was going on with me a long time ago. And you will probably know more about how extraordinary this one is going to be when he grows up. More than me or Isshin. And if things change…if he learns more about things," she said.

"You can't say for sure that that thing will repeat itself," he murmured. Although, with her letter and his ruminations of their last meeting. His mind had wandered over to that rainy night and those who may have been wandering around the clouds more often than he wanted to admit.

"If that thing…does repeat itself, I would want to have someone who can help him."

She placed the balled-up napkin on the folding table and began to try to stand. He stood and helped her. Even with his help, the act had left her winded. "You don't have to agree right now. Or even tell me. But, if something should happen, please lend him your strength."

"…I'll think about it."

She smiled in the manner he would later realize he would most know her for. "Thank you, Mister Urahara. Until next time. Or that day. Whichever comes first."

That would be their one and only meeting. The next time he would hear of Masaki would not be the day her son was born, but on the day of her death when Isshin, beside himself in grief and unsure of what to do, would wander to his doorstep, soaked to the bone with rain.

He would learn of the boy's name—Ichigo.

Kurosaki Ichigo. Human. Part Quincy, part Shinigami. Primary school student with the definitive power to see ghosts and the last to have seen the renegade Hollow killer called Bone Fisher and survive.

And he would make his decision and agree to Masaki's request.

This was almost always headcannon for me, even before the "Everything But the Rain" arc (which, after Rukai's bankai, was the only other good thing about the "Thousand Year War" arc—honorable mention goes to Urahara's bankai and Yoruichi's Cat Mode). It just makes sense. Sure, Urahara felt guilty about Rukia's being targeted by Aizen, but I've always found the fact that before that time, he shadows Ichigo in certain ways and teaches him how to become a Shinigami and intervene when Ichigo and his friends are at their weakest interesting. And I'm a big fan of sassy Masaki (it's so much like Rukia when she teases Ichigo, I can't even stand it). I imagined her shoes to be high-top Converses, thus her not being able to tie them herself.