Don't Just Pass Me By
Disclaimer: All characters featured herein are Kubo Tite's property. The concepts surrounding the plot are also loaned from the same person. Anything in this fiction which may resemble elements from published works are purely incidental.
Summary: Muguruma Kensei had a promise to make Mashiro Kuna pay. KenseiXKuna. One shot.
It was a process akin to the progress of cancer. It ate him up inside in the fastest possible way and lasted just so long as he had air to breathe. At various stages, he caught himself losing track of time; how long has it been since he's had this mask? Decades? Centuries? There was too much time unmeasured, too many games he had to play just to keep up with its passage. And for better or worse, Mashiro Kuna would be there to remind him, overwhelmingly. The mere sight of her told it all.
"Kensei, what would you have for lunch?" she had asked him without drawing any closer. In most cases, as he would learn time and again, it was better to keep her at a distance.
"The usual." Kensei replied.
"What's that again?"
"Ramen, you idiot. How long and many times have you been asking that question?"
"Just now, remember?" she said. There was a weak indication of confusion in her face.
Muguruma Kensei threw her an irritated glance. Another word from her was sure to spark an outrage as she waited for his answer with bated breath. It was no use trying to improve her memory; what one told her one moment, she lost soon as the next one whirled in.
"Get off and get me my ramen." Kensei said quietly, letting his shoulders fall. He turned his back to her and joined Aigawa Love to the far end. From where they sat, they could hear her taking down orders, making people repeat what they already spelled out to her yesterday, and the day before that, and the one before that and so forth. Kensei shrugged as if to shake off the mood and be rid of whatever annoyance Kuna might've caused. He wished she'd just dash off to the market, get him his lunch, probably be gone for good afterward, give him peace; training this morning had been a bit of a bitch and there was a great need to replenish the energy he lost into the activity.
"You know, she's not exactly useless." Love began. With his sunglasses on, Kensei could hardly read his gaze.
"I didn't say she is. But I've been hoping for the day when she'd push the brakes on the first-rate moron act. I've been putting up with it longer than reasonable; I actually thought I was free off her."
"Being free is a choice, Kensei. With Kuna, how well do you stand against the odds?"
"Whatever you mean by that." Kensei muttered. "Whose fault is it anyway?"
"Don't point your finger at me. I haven't the remotest idea just what you're saying." Love protested.
"Right."
There was silence. Like always, words had let Kensei down, leaving him nowhere to resort to but to frown and sigh one breath after the other. Mashiro Kuna wasn't the one to blame, that much was true; if anything, time was the culprit. He hated that he had to be reminded and get swept by these thoughts only to wind up back to square one. Why did the world have to play these tricks on him? Why was Kuna still around her as much as she was in his thoughts? Why the overpowering desire to strangle her, make her pay? They were the old priceless questions. Nothing changed from day one.
After all had been said and done, resenting it didn't make things any better; loving it was worse.
In his days at the Central Soul Academy, he would walk along the corridors trying to get accustomed to the eager whispers surrounding him. He remembered distinctly how the voices sounded more like squeals than human voices, but not the sources of these voices. Sometimes, if he could be bothered, he'd dart them a questioning look, never stopping on his tracks and always, always making them cringe. He had always been the most popular guy in school, no one dared to contest that, but he had all the same been untouchable. He also remembered a few faces from those years. Some of them could pass off as good-looking but they either had the wrong sort of hair or posture or luck. In short, none of them came close to Muguruma Kensei.
"Always the celebrity, are you, Kensei?"
"Trust me Shinji, I don't know what you're talking about."
"That really sounds like something you'd say." Hirako Shinji teased him, a vast grin flashing across his jaw. "Anyway, just so it won't shock you later on, I'd be taking the regal jock title soon."
"Anytime, Hirako." Kensei replied. All he really needed was a fucking pair of ears that worked if he wanted to know what was going on all around him. Girls swooned at his presence and made no secret of their desire to covet his attention. To their despair, though, at no point was he close to giving in. He didn't want any part of that thing called relationship, serious or otherwise, and was more concerned with the number of Hollows he'd so far taken on than with the number of women he unwittingly caused to faint or led to seizures. As a senior, his priority was none other than to excel. His course was bound to run smoothly, his plan near its completion.
Then she came along. Her appearance came at such a time when he needed nothing but peace in order to go through the mazes of youth. If it meant anything in the greater scheme of things, he only hoped to tilt a little and avoid it.
But on a bright summer morning, things promised more than just a turn of the events; the freshmen lined up for their placement exams. Muguruma Kensei, Hirako Shinji and Aigawa Love facilitated the procedures as acting junior officers. The group was far quieter than the one that preceded it, not to mention likely to be every bit as problematic as an unresponsive engine. When it came down to it, they were just children after all, liable to shyness that only their youth could have ever accounted for. Or so that's what was on the minds of Kensei, Shinji and Aigawa as they looked upon them with a bit of smirk on their faces.
"I'm starving. Do you think you guys could let us off a few minutes? And it's hot. I wanna go." She piped up amidst the crowd, her voice towering over the taller heads that closed in on her. Kensei only had to strain her eyes a little to see who the whining brat was. And there she was: not more than five-feet tall, loudly and literally green in the head, and making annoying movements with her lips and eyes. Kensei furrowed his brows in an attempt to communicate warning, but it had to be learned soon enough that this was a fashion alien to her. Like a force field that enveloped her, her indifference kept her safe from the world outside.
"You aren't given that choice. If you want a few minutes, you can have it in an hour." Kensei glared at her before clearing his throat. "Now, as we were saying before the rude interruption—"
"But we've been here for two hours. If you guys are thinking of moving a little faster—"
"Shut up, you idiot! It's not like it's our fault you twerps need preliminaries." Kensei said in a voice that instantly hushed the crowd. Among many other things, he was known for his short temper.
"Oh, sempai has a blown fuse. Sempai is an ass." she sang the words loud enough to conjure nervous laughter from the group. On either side of Kensei, Shinji and Love sniggered; in a moment, they were thwarting Kensei's efforts to leap unto the crowd and grab her by the throat.
He learned later on that her name was Mashiro Kuna. Of her lesser known attributes, only her closest friends could say. The extent of her abilities was not known, save for one fact: she could send anyone closer to the edge just by being near. She was a free soul whose only dream was to stay clueless forever, eat as much as she needed and die of natural causes. Far from being principled, her decision to immerse herself in a career as rigorous as a Shinigami's was as shallow as the excuses she made to avoid classes. Over and above everything, there could possibly be no pathological explanation for the failure of her logic: Most of what came out of her mouth sounded like Yachiru Kusajishi's or some other interchangeably dumb person's arguments on a really profound subject, metaphysics or affective psychology. Her appearance, of course, gave it further handicap; she had such tender eyes.
Kensei, for his part, steered clear of her as often as he could manage. It was the safer thing to do as he saw things from where he was; what he didn't know and would later learn the hard way was that fate does a lot more than keep one in peace. Fate links people in profound, misunderstood ways.
And as fate would have it, he caught himself distracted and bemused. Morning prolonged his befuddlement; night found him turning on his sides for hours at a stretch. Mashiro Kuna was not a woman to try or at the very least a woman to lump together with the ordinaries. She was detached in her own straightforward way. Within weeks, or days as Kensei was beginning to suspect, she had altogether forgotten who he was. Far apart from his fan girls, she kept him at bay without knowing how much she was aiding his intentions. In one sense, it defeated the purpose of trying to escape her. Mashiro Kuna simply didn't know he existed.
In his world, though, she was as omnipresent as fucking Oxygen.
"Here you go, Kensei. Your ohagi as requested." Kuna shoved the warm plastic bag to him. Her smile was unknowing, sharp around the edges as usual.
"I didn't order ohagi, you moron; I said I wanted ramen. Just when the hell are you going to get it right?"
She tittered. "Surely, you didn't fall for that? Kensei is stoooopid."
He gritted his teeth and roughly snatched the bag away from her. His violence toward her had always been a signal of larger, yet unchecked anger; but instead of indulging her and her attempts to appeal to his humor, he moved back to his spot where he only meant to quench his hunger silently. He bent double on the ground, unwrapping his lunch and feeling the waft of aromatic spices pervading his senses. If he paid enough attention to his surrounding, he could've easily marked the additional presence that now hovered so close to him.
"I was thinking of giving you a few extra lessons on subtlety but you came right in showing exactly just what you're made of. I have to give it to you, Kensei."
It was Hirako Shinji, unsheathing his wide-open grin that occupied the lower half of his face. That smile, legendary in its own right, would come to foster so many interpretations.
"For the last time, Hirako, I don't know what you're quacking about."
"Sure, you don't. I don't blame you for wanting to scratch the itch. It's actually been years..."
"Hirako, I'm trying to find peace here. If you want to bring up old scores, you'd better choose your words carefully."
"I'm only trying to sound nostalgic. Geez, Kensei, don't you ever miss the past?"
"I miss being a Shinigami, if that's what you want to know."
"Sure, that was a life well led. But I was under the impression that you missed something more." Shinji rounded on him, his smile—if at all possible—lengthening cross-wise. Its meaning, at least from where Kensei was positioned, was hard to miss: it had far too much awareness.
"Fuck off, Hirako."
Like a spine-shivering moment, thunder rolling after lightning, it came to him in a quick, binding spell. He couldn't remember afterward how he came to stand there before her, begging to be acknowledged, accepted, to be loved back. A senior student asking this much from a freshman when he had so much to offer, too much at stake, was a scene that required both mastery and credibility. It was a rarity; otherwise just always a joke. But jokes weren't part of Muguruma Kensei's system of beliefs; jokes were vices men could easily do without. So when he stood before Mashiro Kuna on a fine, wind-swept afternoon, in a space secured by privacy, he was very far from trying to make fun of himself. He wanted, as much as possible, to lend the episode an element of graveness that hardly ever graced Kuna's world. At this time, the world seemed at one with him, a timing that couldn't have been more perfect, which didn't happen very often. It was the only way he knew he could get by her.
"Kuna." he approached her with her given name. "I've been thinking, perhaps, you'd like to go out with me?" he mumbled, and his voice—its gentleness--didn't seem to belong to him.
She stared at him with the same dreamy eyes. She looked prettier up close, radiant under the dense touch of twilight. For a moment, Kensei thought he saw something in her that pleaded for devotion until it flickered back into a pool of numbness, vanishing in the depths. Like sunset, he thought.
"You mean a date?" she replied. Her tone was suddenly flat, disinterested.
"Well, yes… that's a good way to put it, actually." he said. He was on the point of feeling utterly sure that he wouldn't receive her attention unless he asked for it; he was sure what he was doing was right, worth the risk. Desperation calls for such measures, remember?
"You're not really my type, so I guess it's a 'no'." she smiled at him then. She could've made it terser by not saying anything else, pretending to be insulted or something, but she chose these indifferent words, and to Kensei, that was the hardest to take.
"I see." He wheeled around and wended his way along the rugged trail. That was that: he needed no convincing that things had stretched as far as they could. He failed and the moment that marked it would remain forever in the closet, never to be unearthed, unless Kuna decided that it was an issue worth passing around like pamphlets. But Kensei was sure she wasn't the type, in which regard, he was thankful.
"I think you ought to rest more; you really look like you've aged a lot." She blurted out after him in a way that brought him up short and made him turn around. Kensei knew she was making reference to his white hair.
"Yare, yare." He uttered, inwardly swearing that those would be the last words he'd ever say to her.
When it came down right to it, it wasn't worth the risk.
"This is all your fault, Hirako. Any you too, Love. You can fuck each other and go right to hell." Kensei spat and sent his chopsticks torpedoing toward their direction. Shinji gaped at him; Love choked on his noodles. It was a near hit.
"Just how is it my fault that your lunch sucks?" Love rejoined, frowning.
"Thanks for the offer but I won't wreck my chances with Love." Shinji grinned.
"Chances are, you would." Kensei's eyes flared. A brief silence, momentum gathering, then, "It's your fucking fault I'm still stuck with her!"
"Oh, that." Both Shinji and Love's expressions subsided, a ray of recognition dawning on their faces. To manage to get a word edgewise would've been impossible. As things stood, Kensei could win this debate without so much as burrowing far into the background.
As a matter of historical fact, Shinji and Love had been there, scurrying in the bushes and smothering their laughter, as Kuna rejected Kensei. In less than a day, the gossip flew in wildfire fashion as pretty much everyone at the Central Soul Academy learned every detail of the encounter. Neither Shinji nor Love showed any indication of shame in taking the credit for the speedy spread of the news. And when Kuna left the Academy, six years later, Shinji and Love would be there to make sure that her name was engraved in shining calligraphy on the Ninth Division's roster; they had to ensure her necessary recommendations, which was the "least" they could do in order to make Kensei and Kuna reunite or to otherwise set up a similar physical circumstance in which they could recreate the experience.
"About that, Kensei, it's ancient history. Why don't we just bury the hatchet and get on with our lives?" Shinji offered.
"You make it sound so easy, Hirako. You didn't have to spend your whole captaincy getting cut down by an idiotic vice-captain. Just what the hell do you know? Just what were you doing prying on my personal business? Spying on my affairs as I got busted by a moron who didn't know any better than to waste her time? And on top of that, you had to act like a pimp and force her into my Division. Is that your idea of fun? Now look where it landed me: I had to leave Gotei 13 and after all that, I'm still with her. Shit."
"Kensei, calm down. None of us could've foreseen any of this. If it's closure you need, there's really no harm in —" Love reasoned.
"The only harm I know of is the one I'm about to give you both right now." Kensei seethed.
"Listen here, mate; we really didn't have it in mind. It was a whimsy little trick, alright. We just thought, you couldn't go too wrong with an underachieving freshman who had no idea herself what she was doing in a spirit academy. She was practically harmless. We didn't know we'd hit smack into Achilles' heel… I'm sorry but we can't give more comfort than that; what's done is done and we're all the sadder for it." Shinji said.
"What, is that supposed to put things on an even keel? You're sorry?"
"Kensei, are you sure you're not blaming us because she turned into a Vaizard? I mean, it makes sense, right? If she didn't become your vice-captain she wouldn't get that shit from Aizen. Somehow I feel like part of you does care about her." Love began.
"Don't get me started on that, Love. I just want to get rid of her, now more than ever. You have no idea…"
Kensei faltered. It had always been that from the beginning. It was always her acting in a manner that made him contemplate her safety. He didn't care, he had no right to. She chose a life that would endanger the rest of what she built, deployed herself to a mission he warned her not take in the first place; what did he have to do with it? He grew restless just by thinking of it, grew tired of growing restless, and finally decided—after a long time and recurring indecisions--that it was time to put things behind him. Let memories chafe by themselves until all that was left were words. To forget, like she had forgotten.
"It's no use. She doesn't remember." Kensei sighed. "She doesn't remember, the first meeting, the rejection… it's like nothing ever happened. I tried to confront her, a few times at intervals, and her claims have always been consistent. She doesn't even remember the days at the Academy when I was her sempai. As far as she knows, we met at Gotei 13, particularly on that day when they proclaimed her as my lieutenant."
Kensei let his shoulders fall. The rise and fall of his chest grew deeper by the seconds. In the silence that ensued, amid the thickening strain in the air, Shinji and Love scuttled to search for the right words.
"It's funny, isn't it? That the heartbreaker Ice King should fall into the trap of an idiotic stray? What was I doing offering myself to her like that? She couldn't have been good for anything but a makeshift shield against the Hollows. And yet, here I am unable to put the episodes behind me. I tried all sorts of distractions but never quite managed to pull any of it." Kensei confessed. His undertones slowly boiled to the surface, revealing ill intent, bitterness among other things. All he ever wanted was his revenge, to finally humiliate her to his own satisfaction if it meant taking back the dignity he nursed and lost at almost the same instant he made the tribute and flopped.
"I'm not sure if these fantasies of wiping your slate clean are even remotely healthy. But I can say this much: you can try again." Shinji said.
"And give you another reason to make me your laughingstock again? I'm done trying, Hirako. I've tried hard and many times that they've reached the point of self-injury. She wouldn't remember and that's all there is to it."
"You said you want your revenge—or you might as well have said so. It's pride that's been preventing you from doing what is sensible, maybe that's the first thing that needs recognition here. I think that, at this juncture, the best you can do is to begin from the start." Shinji said.
"What do you mean?"
"Relay the story as it happened, as you recall it, because no one here knows it as well as you do. You owe it to her to make her remember, so fulfill that part, give yourself a reason to smile, do it on behalf of yourself. And hers. If she doesn't remember, at least there's a good fiction to remember you by." Shinji smiled. Beside him, Love was mimicking the noble expression. Kensei didn't have to look at them twice to read the thoughts running on their minds.
They watched as the sun sank slowly into the horizon. The grayer area of the sky had expanded, casting over them larger dimensions of shadows of varying shapes and textures. Muguruma Kensei recalled his first meeting with Mashiro Kuna, at the freshman inauguration at the Central Soul Academy, and found himself smiling in intuition. It had always been impossible never to sentimentalize first meetings, even more impossible to forget the old reasons to smile. In her own little ways, she made him act like a human being with a heart. She shattered the mold.
"I will try, Shinji. If it's the only way to make her pay."
END