The human world was very different to Hueco Mundo. The sun beat down fiercely, it was flooded with people and there was so much more stuff that it left Apacci's senses reeling from one moment to the next.
She wasn't sure if she liked it.
The shop was dusty, which smelled strange to her, and there were a lot of reiatsu signatures that put all her instincts on edge. Even the more common ones - the shopkeeper's assistant and those two ugly, obnoxious urchins of his, for example - made her nervous.
Apacci stayed close to Tier Harribel, and Harribel...
Stayed close to Mila Rose and Sung-Sun.
Sometimes, that proximity seemed like an all right thing. Rarely, even a good one. Mostly though? It just pissed her off.
"It's a change," Mila Rose agreed, equally unsettled but less vocal about it.
They had commandeered one of the seemingly endless supply of small, sparsely furnished rooms in the back of the shop. There were cushions, tatami mats, a low table, a rice paper partition and a tea set that Sung-Sun had dug up somewhere. There wasn't much else.
"You don't have to be scared of it, though," she added, raising her eyebrows.
Apacci opened her mouth, but she was quickly cut off again by Sung-Sun: "Adapting quickly to change is the sign of a higher life form. Try not to slow Harribel-sama down, Apacci."
Apacci felt her eyebrow twitch. "Stop acting like you're so much better than I am," she snapped.
Sung-sun turned away, smiling delicately - condescendingly - behind her sleeve.
"Apacci," sighed Mila Rose. "She's baiting you."
"And a barbaric personality like yours doesn't recognise wisdom when it's spoken," sniffed Sung-Sun.
The teacup in Mila Rose's hand cracked ominously. "Ah," she said, baring her teeth. "Is that so."
"See? She's just a bitch," Apacci hissed.
"You're fighting a lot," Harribel murmured, from where she was standing in the door way. All three of them turned from their bickering to look at her. "Is it because you're scared?"
"No," they chorused, all in one voice.
Harribel didn't seem to believe them. "All creatures fear sudden change. Something like this..." Her gaze was distant for a few long moments. Then, finally, it settled back upon them. "It would be natural, if you were."
There was a silence. It wasn't a very happy one.
"Hm," said Harribel.
There was a moment's pause, and then she moved quietly into the room and slid the door shut behind her. She dropped down to the floor between Sung-Sun and Mila Rose, close enough that her skin brushed theirs, and stretched out her long legs so her ankle touched Apacci's knee beneath the table.
Harribel usually held herself so aloof in public, it was always a tremendous distraction when she let herself relax, even just enough to touch each of them so casually. That point of contact felt warm despite Harribel's rough skin, and for a few long silent seconds the heat and touch of her was all Apacci could focus on, like all her awareness had fallen into her skin and concentrated right at that spot.
The light in the human world lit Harribel's skin warmly in a way that moonlight never had, and Apacci was sure she was blushing.
"I think they're scared," said Sung-Sun, and the moment was lost.
Apacci lunged forward, snatched up Mila Rose's cracked teacup and slung it at Sung-Sun's head. "Would you just shut up!"
Naturally, Harribel caught it out of the air before it could collide with Sung-Sun's stupid mask, and just as naturally, Sung-Sun shot Apacci a smug look over the trailing edge of her sleeve.
"Mou, it's obvious you're only resorting to barbaric physical attacks because you have nothing to say in your own defence."
Mila Rose looked at the spot on the table where her cup had been, then just took the opportunity to lean closer into Harribel-sama to get another cup. Clever, thought Apacci, narrowing her eyes and trying to muster some animosity - but there wasn't any, not really.
Sharing Harribel with the others was sort of like sharing one dessert with another, slightly less exciting, dessert. They bickered, but... it was all pretty sweet in the end.
"Enough," said Harribel. "We'll all just have to work together. Then there's no need to be afraid."
As usual, then.
The human world was safer and gentler than Hueco Mundo.
None of them lost their wary habits. One of them was always awake. They moved in pairs when they weren't together as a group. Apacci could feel it when one of the others twitched their reiatsu in a lightning-fast perquisa, taking stock of who was around and what might be incoming, and she knew they felt it when she did it too.
So none of them really stopped being careful, but real physical danger was ...rarer here. Nobody was hunting them, looking for something to eat - the worst thing Apacci had felt lurking was the Kurosaki child, his reiatsu rising and falling with his moods at the edge of her senses.
It was to be expected, then, that they fell out of the most paranoid habits. None of them was as wary of making noise, for example.
There was music in the human world, too, and it was nothing like the sounds Apacci knew. Hollows didn't make instruments like humans did - they hadn't the luxury. Their music was more about the thump of their feet, raised howling voices and the rhythmic clatter of bones.
The singing and the rhythms were similar, sort of, but human music otherwise was... artificial. Synthetic.
Interesting.
It was played, sometimes - not so often by the shopkeeper himself, but Karakura was a busy residential area of western Tokyo, and there were plenty of vehicles and neighbours. The shinigami who came through had a fascination with human television and music, too, and sounds carried even if the resident arrancar warily avoided direct contact.
Apacci had seen Harribel pause, tip her head. The bone of her mask gave away no expression, but her eyes were distant and considering. Apacci knew she wasn't the only one of them who was listening.
Human music was also unbearably catchy.
The tunes stuck in her skull and came out in odd moments, soft and half-remembered and -
"Apacci," asked Sung-Sun, in a tone of the mildest polite inquiry. "Are you perhaps tone deaf?"
Apacci stopped humming and glared at her instead. She could keep a beat, but singing really wasn't her strong suit and she knew it. But no, she was not tone deaf.
"You can leave if you don't like it," she pointed out in a growl.
"I was merely asking. Only, I don't believe that sounds like any music I've ever heard..." Sung-Sun raised her eyebrows, the smug bitch. "If you want to call that music."
"Enough," sighed Mila Rose. "If you don't like Apacci's singing, perhaps you should do it."
They knew from long cold desert nights that Sung-Sun was a lot better at it - had one of those high clear voices that echoed beautifully with the undertones of a hollow's howl.
Apacci ground her teeth.
Sung-Sun cut Mila Rose an annoyed glance and didn't take her up on the offer. In the end, though, Apacci didn't start again - she wasn't about to open herself up to that kind of commentary - so they went on in stony silence.
The days ran into each other like this, full of bickering and oddly human experiences and the struggle to adjust. Apacci wasn't entirely sure she liked it here, but she wasn't sure she liked Hueco Mundo any better, either. A hollow's life in Hueco Mundo was a very hard one. This was... uncomfortable in many ways, but certainly easier in others.
However else Apacci felt about the living world and all its attendant complications and experiences, though, she knew she definitely didn't like the shopkeeper.
They didn't have anywhere much else to go for now, struggling to settle in as they still were. But the longer they stayed at the shoten, the longer they were exposed to a stream of shinigami, vizards and strange humans.
And Urahara Kisuke looked at them all with a sort of cheerful lechery - except in the odd, off-guard moments when he looked at them like mildly dangerous animals instead. Apacci wasn't sure if it was because they were arrancar or because they were women.
"Hmm," said Sung-Sun, when she brought it up. "You're really stupid, aren't you?"
Apacci twitched. One day she was going to ram Sung-Sun's face into the floor so hard her mask cracked.
"It's both," Mila Rose said later. The four of them shared a room here, ostensibly to save space - and so the shopkeeper could leer harder when he felt the need to cover some worse emotion - but Apacci wasn't sure they'd have remained in separate rooms had they been given them.
They got anxious without one another. They were used to each other. A shared pallet on the floor boards wasn't quite the same as falling together in a heap in a dim cave in Hueco Mundo, but it wasn't that different either. Apacci could still feel Sung-Sun's silky hair in her face and Mila Rose's warm arm flung over her hip. Their soft-skinned, breathing warmth soothed the remains of the animal instinct in her - the imperative to stay with the herd was satisfied, and her herd was warm and drowsy and safe.
Even if it hadn't been, nothing could possibly have made her feel safer than the low thrum of Harribel's reiatsu nearby, watching over their rest.
It was a lot easier to be calm and honest in the nocturnal half light of night.
"Hm?"
"It's both, Apacci," Mila Rose repeated in her steady, even voice.
She frowned fiercely into Sung-Sun's hair. The other woman was tense and quiet in her arms for a change, and there was a silence while she digested the comment.
"Fuck him," she muttered. "He's a piece of shit. And we should leave."
"Don't make me agree with you," murmured Sung-Sun drowsily, "it makes me nauseous."
Apacci kicked her in the ankle. She grunted but didn't respond.
"We will leave, then." Despite the topic, Harribel's voice in the dark did something powerful and pleasant to Apacci's spine. She shivered.
"Aa," mumbled Mila Rose. That was the last thing Apacci heard before sleep took her.
"You want to go back to Hueco Mundo?" asked the cat, Yoruichi. Often it was a lot more pleasant to talk to her than to the shopkeeper. On this occasion she stopped cleaning her face with one dark paw and peered up at them instead. A large delicate ear twitched. "It's a wreck."
"No," Harribel said from behind her high collar. "We will find somewhere here. We are... grateful, to you for your hospitality."
Apacci snorted, but didn't actively contradict Harribel's polite statement.
Yoruichi gave her a long steady look, which Harribel matched easily.
"Are you sure?"
"Maa, maa, Yoruichi-san, I'm sure these lovely girls know they can't just take over a building," came Urahara's voice. Apacci whirled to face him.
His reiatsu was soft and sneaky when he wasn't actively fighting, and it saturated the shoten so completely that it was hard to tell where he was at any given time. Apacci was sure she wasn't the only one surprised by his entry... although Yoruichi certainly didn't seem to be.
The man himself was a pair of dark eyes staring out from between the shadow of his hat and the barrier of his fan.
Harribel moved her head slightly, putting both man and cat in her range of vision. Apacci ground her teeth. Mila Rose shifted uncomfortably on her feet.
Harribel was implacable and unreadable. "Thank you for your help, but we will find our way."
Something passed behind the shopkeeper's dark eyes for a second, and then he snapped his fan closed and sighed. "I suppose so. I'll find gigai for you, Harribel-san."
By 'find', Apacci inferred he meant 'make', and that... He definitely didn't owe them anything, and free gifts weren't to be trusted.
"Why?" she demanded, bristling.
"Well. You certainly won't get very far without them," he said. Behind them Yoruichi sighed, stood up, stretched her back into a high sinuous arch and then curled into slightly different ball.
"That isn't even an answer," Apacci spat. Mila Rose bumped her elbow into her biceps - a warning at her tone, but not actually a contradiction.
"...To track us, of course," said Harribel. She didn't sound put out about it, even, just bland and matter-of-fact. Apacci's lips twisted.
Urahara raised his eyebrows.
"Ma... You're so suspicious, Harribel-san," he said, covering his mouth with his fan. His eyes crinkled into a smile, mostly insincere.
"You're transparent," said Harribel, with a steady voice and a steadier gaze.
In the end they accepted the gigai, largely on Harribel's advice. Her argument was that it was natural for Soul Society to want to keep an eye on them, and it was in their best interests to make that eye as friendly and noninvasive as possible.
The gigai he supplied them with were strange and confining, but they hid their masks and holes. It was strange to see Harribel's face - it was a lovely, compelling face and very dear to Apacci, but usually it was only visible when they were all in terrible danger.
On the other hand, now when Harribel smiled at her, Apacci could see it in more than just her eyes. It made her stomach flutter and her joints loosen until she felt sort of... warm and giddy and appallingly weak.
It wasn't a feeling she mentioned to the others, but she was pretty sure they, too, felt something. Certainly the sight of Harribel's faint, indulgent smile made Mila Rose go all still and soft. It turned Sung-Sun uncommonly quiet.
Apacci felt simultaneously sort of trapped and sort of naked in her own gigai. She frequently shucked it at the door, leaving it sprawled and insensible in the entryway.
At first Urahara chided her for it, but once they got their own place his feelings were completely irrelevant. Harribel just asked her to prop it against the wall so nobody tripped over it, and that was that. (Harribel was more reasonable than pretty much anybody else Apacci knew. And stronger. And safer. And just - Harribel was objectively better than everybody.)
Finding their own place was a little bit of a challenge to begin with - they learnt the hard way that most landlords and agents took a dim view of the idea of four adult women sharing a one bedroom apartment.
Humans expected adults to be less interdependent then they three were, which was ...stupid.
"Who's going to keep watch while you're sleeping?" Apacci wondered loudly, crossing her arms and scowling.
"I don't think humans do that."
"Well." She looked dubiously toward Mila Rose, who just raised an eyebrow. "...No wonder they need shinigami to stop them getting eaten."
"We'll have to change our approach," said Harribel.
As usual, she was correct. Eventually they got the hang of applying for places. It always ran best when Harribel went to inspections alone and submitted applications with just her name on them.
Her fraccion felt guilty and resentful that this burdensome work fell upon her - generally speaking, they felt that since she made the difficult sacrifice of fighting for them when she preferred nothing but peace for herself, they ought to take care of the minutiae that would make her life more comfortable. However, it was true that people responded better to Harribel's calm and quiet demeanour than they did to the others.
During their search for an alternative living situation, Apacci got the distinct impression that the shinigami were humouring them and did not think they were sufficiently adjusted to actually find and maintain their own space in the strange living world.
"Of course," said Sung-Sun, sweeping the trailing spill of her hair away from her face. "Think of how they would live in Hueco Mundo."
They wouldn't, Apacci thought sourly, because it's a shit hole.
Nobody would live in Hueco Mundo if they had the choice. She was sure she'd even felt Grimmjow slinking around the edges of her perquisa here in the human world.
But Sung-Sun's pretty eyes narrowed poisonously, and her hand came up to cover the unpleasant smile on her lips. "They wouldn't survive a week. It's only natural that they'd expect us to be as incompetent as they are."
Startled, Apacci laughed raucously, and even Mila Rose cracked a smile. Harribel's eyes crinkled at the edges, just a little.
But find somewhere to live they did: a cramped, top-floor apartment in a run down building. There wasn't a lot of room, and they argued constantly about each other's things taking up space, but it was theirs. Happily, they were so accustomed to sharing a bed - or just a warm pile of sand, actually - that it would have been weirder and much more stressful to sleep alone. They could cut down on a lot of space when there was only one, admittedly giant, bed in the whole apartment.
And, given that they were four adult women sharing a single one bedroom apartment, it wasn't that expensive, either. Unfortunately, "not that expensive" was relative, and in this case it was relative to four adult women who had neither employment nor money.
"Humans have money, and they're weak," Apacci pointed out, sneering down at the busy street through their new window. Without her gigai, nobody below could see her, so it didn't matter how dangerously far she hung herself over the windowsill - except in that it was a temptation for Mila Rose and Sung-Sun, both of whom had threatened to push her already. "Can't we just take their money?"
Harribel sighed softly, and a moment later she laid her hand on Apacci's shoulder, right near the bend of her neck.
Apacci went still, except for her brain, which took off at a gallop and only sped faster. She could feel the dull buzz of reiatsu in Harribel's skin, muffled by her gigai but never truly suppressed.
"If we took their money from them, we would cause conflict eventually. There would be fighting."
Her fingertips slid away and Apacci shivered at the movement. She wanted to lean back into her, to fling herself under Harribel's beloved hands. She took a deep breath, felt her ribs expand, felt her lungs inflate.
Right.
Harribel did not want violence, so kicking humans in the face and shaking them down for cash was probably not ideal. Even though they could. Even though it would be easy.
"A...Aa," she agreed, unsteadily but quickly.
She turned away from the window to find Sung-Sun perched on the bed. Her fingers were in front of her mouth but her eyes were smirking. Apacci glowered.
"We need jobs," said Harribel finally, and the smile on Sung-Sun's face went from 'hidden' to 'nonexistent'.
"...We do?"
They did.
Not one of them was cut out for gainful employment, and they couldn't work at the same place at the same time.
Apacci hated that none of them worked together right off the bat.
She hadn't spent this long away from all three of the others in years, and it made her nervous and twitchy - and even her senses were dulled in her gigai, so she had to pay close attention if she wanted to feel their reiatsu signatures in the city. Even then, they were all buried in their own false bodies, so they felt slightly off and subdued which just made her more anxious.
She did a few days in a call centre. Training was easy. She wasn't stupid, thank you very much, even if the other girls - human girls - who worked there thought she was strange and poorly educated.
Apacci was baffled by a lot of the social interactions. It showed.
They gushed over who had the healthiest or cutest lunch, complained about their weight, behaved like it was a badge of honour to be the one struggling or suffering the most in any given situation.
There was some strange ongoing subtext about working hardest for the least reward that Apacci didn't understand at all, but which seemed to indicate that subjugating oneself to the needs and culture of the call centre was... ideal?
Apacci understood the nature of sacrifice just fine. She was willing to sacrifice herself, and in fact anybody else who happened to be nearby, to the whims or desires of Harribel-sama. That was was why she was here, listening to the tinny voice of a middle aged businessman complaining that a bus was late, instead of just kicking him until he gave her all his money.
She didn't understand bragging about sacrificing yourself to the business. Harribel-sama was - Harribel-sama was different. Harribel-sama was a goddess.
The business was... a business. The difference was agonisingly clear to Apacci.
Apacci didn't eat at work, because that would have been weird. And she didn't care if the girls here had skinnier bodies or nicer tits than she did, because she could rip them in half by accident and that was the sort of knowledge that gave a person a certain perspective on the matter.
Instead of telling everybody how much she was suffering and sacrificing to the company - which felt like a goddamn lot, if you asked Apacci - she went out of her way to make everything she did seem as effortless as she could. There was, after all, nothing good about showing weaknesses to strangers.
She certainly wasn't about to discuss her problems or vulnerabilities over a salad with a human girl she didn't even know.
"I don't know," she drawled into her phone, twenty minutes into her fourth shift and already bored out of her mind. "This isn't a bus service." She didn't think it was, anyway. The company was a large one and Apacci didn't understand, or care about, its many interests. Either way, that wasn't what her line was for.
"But it's your number on the sign."
"That's an advertisement." Advertisements were a thing she understood pretty fast, actually: people put up big pictures about things they were selling and tried to persuade other people to spend money on them. She thought that made a lot of sense, given that money was what she now needed to keep her home with Harribel and the others.
Maybe she and the others could find something to sell, and thereby just work at convincing people to give them money for it.
Although... that was kind of what she was doing right now. But instead of selling something cool like knuckledusters or fancy makeup, Apacci was selling eight hours of her life, which the company had elected to spend on ...listening to people whine.
"But, excuse me, but this number is on the sign."
Humans had been living here for a lot longer than she had, she figured, and they were pretty fucking stupid not to understand the concept of advertising by now. "It's an advertisement for a different service," she said in an increasingly strained voice. "Call the bus people instead."
"Can you transfer me?"
Apacci peered at her phone. It was large, dark, dusty and had a multitude of flashing lights. One of them said 'transfer', but she'd also been told she had to get through at least twenty-five calls every hour. Apacci wasn't great with time measured in hours and minutes, but she'd figured it out with Harribel and she understood that his meant she had to go fast enough that she'd be completing six hundred calls per moonrise in Hueco Mundo... if she worked for that long at a time. That was just over two hundred per shift.
So: "Nope."
"But it's your number-"
"Yeah, it is. Bye." She hung up.
Well, at least it was easy, even if it was boring.
"Excuse me - um, I couldn't help but overhear. Are you, er, are you having trouble with your calls?" asked one of the other women, who was peering at her past the oversized microphone of her own headset, wide-eyed.
Apacci gave her a long, flat, unimpressed look. Her hesitance was ugly and her reiatsu was so minimal that she didn't even really feel like a person to Apacci. "No. Don't you have things to be doing?"
"Erm... all... all right," muttered the other woman, and turned back to her screen. She darted several looks in Apacci's direction. Apacci pretended she hadn't noticed. The girl was no threat, anyway. Let her stare.
Apacci heard them, though - around the edges of her hearing, when they thought she wasn't paying attention. They made soft comments, asked quiet questions. "A little strange," said somebody, and then, "a bit, er, unfriendly".
"How did that sort of person end up working here?" asked another girl.
Then, critically, lower but bolder: "She's not very pretty, is she? With her eyes like that."
Apacci twitched. She didn't have to be pretty to cut them in half.
When they were actually talking to her it was somehow even worse. Everything they meant was veiled by implication - but so thinly as to be perfectly transparent.
Then, it was: "You don't have a boyfriend? Oh... well, how old are you?"
And she didn't quite know how to answer that, either. How old was she?
Or: "So, Apacci-san, that's a very... unique name. Where are you from? You're not Japanese, right?"
Or even: "Ano... you can see, though, right? With your eyes... like that?"
It became rapidly apparent that they all looked down upon her here, and not in the habitual, harmless way that Mila Rose and Sung-Sun did. This was more like how the other two hollows had been at the very outset, when they were all uncertain of their place in Harribel's frustratingly opaque regard. It was testing. It was mean.
It was like these humans had an innate sense for who wasn't part of their herd, and they had zeroed in on Apacci almost immediately.
And she knew, deep in her belly, in her spine, in her veins, simmering and dark and angry: it was absurd for these pathetic animals to be this rude to Apacci. She could paralyse them with a flare of her reiatsu. She could eat them in one bite. She could just - just grab their spindly human limbs and pull. She could -
She wouldn't. Harribel didn't want her to.
But she could. And the humans had no way of knowing how far her patience stretched, or how dedicated she was to Harribel-sama. The sheer nerve of them, being this offensive, it was -
She didn't have any words for how frustrating it was - when she tried to express it she just came up with noises, through her clenched teeth.
"I hate it," she moaned to Mila Rose, who had showed up to walk home with her every evening so far. How any of them mistook her for human was a mystery to Apacci. She was a beautiful thing, lit warmly in the sunset, tall and dark and lovely, leaning against the side of the building and watching the humans rush past with a mild, cool expression.
"It's so fucking stupid," hissed Apacci without bothering to greet her, "Everything I do there," she jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the towering grey office building where she worked, "is completely pointless. And those stupid bitches- the fucking dumb little skanks-"
Mila Rose was unmoved by her outburst. "Focus on why you're doing it," she suggested, sighing, already tired of Apacci's complaints. It wasn't helpful, but her arm bumped Apacci's shoulder, and that... sort of was.
"Well, it's not like you're helping."
Mila Rose had had minimal success in getting a job of her own thus far - too foreign-looking, seemed to be the consensus, with her tall figure and her big green eyes and her smooth dark skin.
Stupid, thought Apacci; they were all foreigners here. None of them had any clue what they were doing. The concept of a bank account was one she struggled with, and she was walking home after every shift because, by and large, she didn't understand how the train worked.
"I'm trying."
Apacci snorted. Yeah, she was trying. And trying still didn't pay the bills.
"This is all so fucking stupid," she complained.
"Harribel-sama-"
"I know," she snapped.
"Well."
Apacci made a thin, high noise of frustrated pique and smacked Mila Rose in the side with the back of her hand. "Shut up."
For a wonder, she did, although not like she was remotely chastened about it - more like she happened to be ignoring Apacci. It was almost as annoying as her talking.
Honestly, the most helpful thing about seeing Mila Rose after work was that she was safe and familiar. Her reiatsu smoothed all the raw edges of Apacci's. By the time they'd finished the walk from the building to their rundown apartment complex, Apacci was more tired than angry.
"Fuck this," she snarled, kicking off her gigai and staggering the three whole steps across the apartment floor to belly-flop face down on the bed. "Fuck everything," she added, muffled by the blanket. "Fuck."
Mila Rose gave her a long, long look. Apacci could feel the weight of it upon her back. Then, without comment, she propped the gigai up against the wall so nobody else tripped over it.
Nobody interrupted her for a good twenty minutes, and she was sufficiently tired that she slipped into a restless doze in that time.
When she woke it was to the sound of Mila Rose's throaty and compelling singing and the throb of Harribel's reiatsu in the air - thick, like the taste of rain on her tongue - and the feeling of somebody's fingers carding idly through her hair, so delicately the touch almost didn't register.
There was new fabric next to her face. Apacci didn't bother to crack her eyes open. She inhaled.
Huh. The familiar smell was neither Mila Rose nor Harribel. They were Sung-Sun's sharp nails scraping gently over her scalp. They reached the end of her hair short hair and travelled a few inches down her neck. The feeling echoed down her spine and she shivered a little and slumped further into Sung-Sun's touch. Mm, that was good.
"Don't get any ideas," Sung-Sun said, without halting the movement of her hand. "I was just combing my own hair and saw you looking like a complete fright over here. Your hair was unsightly and I couldn't look at it any longer."
Apacci considered that for a few long moments.
Then, without looking, she flung out a fist and thumped it into Sung-Sun's arm. Sung-Sun was a great deal sturdier than she looked and didn't even twitch at the impact. She also didn't stop the slow movement of her hand through Apacci's hair, so Apacci dropped her hand again and resumed her slow fusion with the mattress. She contemplated saying don't stop, but nothing would make Sung-Sun stop faster. She was naturally contrary.
"'S the cafe?" Apacci asked tiredly instead.
"...I'd rather not discuss it," Sung-Sun murmured.
"That shitty, huh?"
"Do shut up."
Apacci subsided. She felt like she didn't have the energy to argue with Sung-Sun, which was how she knew she was in trouble.
"Besides, I'm surprised to see somebody like you is restraining herself," said Sung-Sun, in that drawling, needling way.
Apacci cracked her eyes open. "What are you implying?" she growled, levering herself up on one elbow.
Sung-Sun's fingers left her hair. She covered her snide smile with them instead. "Oh. Just that I'd have thought you'd have been fired by now."
Apacci lurched up and went for her throat with a roar.
(...So, okay, maybe she did have the energy to beat Sung-Sun's stupid face in after all.)
Of course, two shifts later, Apacci's manager asked her to come into his office to 'talk', which actually turned out to be some mysterious code for 'listen to him talk'.
Nothing he wanted to talk about was good.
He said Apacci was 'not integrating' with the office staff and that her customer service skills 'needed work'. She eyed him over the desk, but he'd stopped talking and was looking at her with a weak smile. The lights above were bright and shone on his slicked dark hair.
"So?" she prompted.
He blinked. Nervously, he pulled his glasses off and began to clean them. "Well, er, that is-"
She waited with what she felt was way more patience than necessary, but every fraccion understood the basic concept of having a boss. He wasn't really her boss, but she understood that she was meant to pretend. She got it. So she stayed quiet and waited for him to stumble through his sentences.
...although she was sort of also imagining being this guy's fraccion for real. What a thought. She lifted her chin and stared right at him. No way.
"Ehem. We're letting you go."
He seemed to feel that this was a very final, very direct declaration, and he sagged back into his tall wheeled chair.
She squinted. "Go where?"
He shot her a look of muted horror. One of his eyelids twitched. "Apacci-san, you can't work here anymore."
She blinked. "I... can't?"
"That's right, you can't." He nodded encouragingly.
For a second, she entertained the idea of taking his head off and taking over his office. Then she'd get to decide who worked here, right?
But, no, she reminded herself, humans didn't work like that. And they weren't meant to kill anybody who wasn't hurting them...
...although arguably he was kind of hurting them...
She eyed him.
He shifted uncomfortably under her gaze. She could smell him beginning to sweat.
Some humans were like that - even if they saw another human because of the gigai, they knew somewhere in the frightened animal part of their brain that what was and what they saw weren't adding up.
That the manager was one of them made it even worse that he had the nerve to tell her to go.
But -
"Fine," she said finally, and stood up.
"Ah-" he scrambled out of his chair as she moved.
Apacci collected her things from her desk under the wide and unsettled eyes of the other staff, even as they tried to split their attention between her and their calls.
One phone rang and rang while somebody watched her. She shook her hair back from her face and straightened, gathered up her keys and her coat, and left with her spine stiff and her head high.
She could hear the hissed voices start up before the door even closed behind her.
Apacci got three blocks before her futile anger wore off. Or - she thought it had. She slowed to a stop, and then the feeling rose up, soared again, and overwhelmed her. She let out a sharp, chopped-off roar and slammed her fist into the side of a building.
The brick gave a crunch. Cracks spread from the impact of her hand. Dust trickled.
A bystander yelped. Several of them glanced at her and sped up, but the ever present crush of humans continued more or less apace.
Fine. She could deal with this. This was fine. This was -
"I see... you got fired," repeated Harribel slowly, eyebrows furrowing. Apacci couldn't quite hide her wince.
Mila Rose twitched. "How did you get fired? I thought you said it was easy-"
Sung-Sun hissed. "It's just like you to be selfish when everybody else is relying on you-"
"Shut up, shut up!" Apacci snarled, baring her teeth and screeching over both of them.
"I will not! I suppose we should be surprised you lasted this long -"
"Enough," said Harribel, quiet but commanding.
Her hand landed on the back of Apacci's neck. It was cool and gentle and her calluses were rough. Apacci fell still and silent like the off switch had been struck - even as her every nerve came alight under the weight of Harribel's touch.
"It's all right."
There was a long, long pause.
"It's all right, Apacci," she said, and something about her name in Harribel's mouth made Apacci's stomach flip over. "We can't expect to be successful the first time we try something."
No. No, they couldn't. It had taken Apacci ages to learn a lot of things she knew now. It was just...
It was just Apacci's luck that she'd be the first of them to fail.
"Apacci?"
"I'm fine," said Apacci. Her voice felt distant. Cool. Empty.
"All right." And then her touch was gone and the world came rushing back, bright and accusing. But Harribel wanted her to try again.
"Instead of yelling at me, you could get a job," she hissed to Mila Rose, who was an easier target than Sung-Sun. Even the echo of Harribel's hand on her neck took a lot of bite out of her sniping, though.
Mila Rose scowled, but Sung-Sun sniffed and lifted her chin. "I have a job, and so does Harribel-sama," she started in with a superior set to her mouth, "and once again it is you who-"
"Stop," said Harribel with a sigh. Sung-Sun subsided mid-sentence. "We have enough money until next month."
Apacci frowned, because that was a month - a month was twenty-eight moon rises, more or less - and that sounded like a lot of time, but it wasn't necessarily. She supposed they could always return to Hueco Mundo if they had to.
"I don't want to go back to Hurco Mundo," muttered Mila Rose, unknowingly echoing exactly what Apacci was thinking.
"Then get a job," hissed Sung-Sun.
Harribel rubbed her hand through Apacci's hair. She wasn't usually so tactile, but Apacci took advantage of it while she could and leaned shamelessly into the pressure.
"We will persevere," said Harribel said, and as usual could not be swayed to take any side in the ensuing argument.
Sung-Sun was a lot less smug the following week when she was fired on the spot for telling a customer that 'all the skim milk in the world wouldn't fix her ugly face' and that 'some people simply weren't born to be beautiful'.
"It was true," she said bitterly, flinging herself upon the bed next to Apacci. She did this with a degree of elegance Apacci brought to exactly no task ever, and she wasn't even trying. "That stupid bitch was only mad because it was true."
Apacci was trying - mostly in vain - to find advertisements for jobs she could do in the local paper. There were a couple she'd scribbled an asterisk next to, but she wasn't feeling optimistic. In the tiny bathroom, Mila Rose's reiatsu was a comforting hum over the moan of the pipes and the sounds of running water.
"She's not the only stupid bitch around," she drawled, feeling annoyed by the interruption. Sung-Sun went all tense and sharp-edged on the bed next to her. Apacci ignored that and shoved the paper toward her. "Here."
"What did you just call me?" demanded Sung-Sun, ignoring the paper. Her voice soared effortlessly in both volume and pitch.
Apacci looked up from her pen, which was leaving inky blue marks on her fingertips, and met Sung-Sun's eyes. She licked her teeth, showing them all long and white and sharp, and then loudly repeated: "A STUPID BITCH. Are you going deaf as well, Sung-Sun? You want to pay attention to that -"
Apacci had never been struck while already on a bed before. Even Sung-Sun's girlish open-handed smack - more intended to sting than to actually injure Apacci - was backed by enough strength to knock her elbow out from under her and send Apacci sprawling. A mattress, even a cheap one like theirs, was a fine thing to fall into. It was very forgiving.
She took the opportunity to smoosh Sung-Sun's face into the covers and muffle her increasingly shrill insults, and the mattress continued to give beneath pressure in a satisfying sort of way. Sung-Sun's arm flailed wildly in Apacci's direction, and Apacci pulled her head out of its path.
"What are you doing?" At some point the pipes had stopped, and now Mila Rose came from the bathroom in a cloud of steam and humid heat.
"Suffocating her," Apacci reported. Judiciously, she pushed harder on Sung-Sun's head. Her hair was super silky. Bitch.
She glanced over at her, and became momentarily entranced by the winding path of a drop of water, which was making its way down Mila Rose's long smooth thigh just beneath her towel.
Sung-Sun's flying hand collided blindly with Apacci's face while she was distracted, more by luck than by skill.
"Ow!" she rubbed her chin.
Sung-Sun ripped her other hand off the back of her skull and emerged from the blankets, red-faced and breathless. "You -"
"Shouldn't you be working?" Mila Rose interrupted with a frown.
She unwound her towel and used it to dry her hair, and Apacci watched, chewing on her bottom lip.
Sung-Sun coughed delicately and covered her mouth with one sleeve. "My manager made a very stupid mistake -"
"She got fired," Apacci corrected.
"Oh, as though you can talk."
Mila Rose drew the towel from her head and flung it over her shoulder instead of wrapping it back around her body. This was definitive proof that, despite everything, there were still a few good things in Apacci's world. Mila Rose's breasts were one of them.
"What happened?"
"I told some stupid person the truth, and she complained-" Sung-Sun began, just as Apacci yelled over her: "She told some lady she was ugly!"
"She was ugly."
"So... Harribel-sama is the only one of us with a job?" Mila Rose asked, crossing her arms. This didn't impede the view much, since it just crushed her breasts against her chest until they pressed against one another. Apacci watched avidly.
Then she registered what Mila Rose had actually said. "Shit," she muttered.
There was silence for a moment.
Harribel-sama was the only one of them with a job, and, as expected, she'd had it from the beginning. She worked as private security in somebody's bar, and it seemed like she had none of the problems the others had experienced in their own roles.
That, Apacci felt, was to be expected. If there was anybody who could seamlessly adapt to an entirely new world with all of its strange pressures and unspoken expectations, it was Harribel.
It felt good to have Harribel taking care of her. But at the same time, not pulling her weight was... the worst feeling in the world.
"Pass me the paper," sighed Sung-Sun, and silently Apacci did.
Over the following month and a half, Apacci did all sorts of work. She tried her best to get them right, but she wasn't well suited to all of them. For example, she learnt that she had to type more than approximately thirteen words per minute to be acceptably skilled for basic data entry work. Who'd have thought?
And babysitting had nearly been a catastrophe. The screaming toddler had stopped screaming by the end - but his mother was having trouble getting him to talk again at all. Apacci felt she should be paid extra for that service, but as was becoming usual in the living world, Apacci was alone in her very practical opinion.
With regard to the jobs to which Apacci's actual skills were well suited, it always seemed like her conflict resolution skills were...
Less advanced.
Or at least less advanced in the living world.
Apacci was very well adjusted to life in Hueco Mundo, which was sort of the problem.
"How do you get fired from being an artist's model, exactly?" Mila Rose wondered as they walked away from the scene of her latest disaster.
Mila Rose had come to get her when Apacci had flared her reiatsu wildly from halfway across the city. Although Mila Rose had managed to find some work now, it was mostly cleaning - for a bunch of lazy fucks who chose not to clean up after themselves, because apparently that was a thing here - and so her hours were pretty light. Some of the chemical smells stayed trapped in her hair, though. Apacci and Sung-Sun both hated that, and even Harribel turned her face away sometimes.
Mila Rose sounded honestly curious as they walked back, though, so Apacci didn't immediately tell her to fuck off. But she also didn't quite know how to explain.
"I thought all you had to do was take your clothes off and stay still? That was all, right?"
And... yes. That was more or less the role, although Mila Rose was underestimating the difficulty of holding any given pose like a rock for three hours. Apacci shook her head.
"You're going to have to explain it to Harribel-sama anyway, you know," she pointed out.
"I didn't get fired, exactly," Apacci admitted, with a frustrated growl in her voice that made the humans they passed edge away from both of them, even if they didn't quite know why.
Mila Rose made a face. "What?"
This job had been a bit different. And... part of the issue was that it had been okay the first few times, although the artist had been very interested in making conversation and Apacci had just wanted him to shut up and sketch.
The room where he worked was icy cold, although not quite as cold as everywhere Hueco Mundo. He'd said the temperature was on purpose, because of something about 'perkiness' that she figured was largely irrelevant to her. The whole place smelled like spirits and turpentine, and he never showed her his sketches, citing something about works in progress on the single occasion when she asked.
None of that context had really mattered to Apacci, since she was getting paid and money was money, even if he was a little weird. When he asked her questions and seemed to want to talk to her forever, she felt like that wasn't really part of the agreement they'd made - she was just supposed to be a model, and did models have to talk to boring humans? - but her silences had just made him ramble on and on, which was even worse than an actual back and forth with him. So Apacci answered, shortly and unhelpfully, and that seemed to be enough encouragement for him.
The fourth time had been... a problem.
"He wanted to have sex," she finally said to Mila Rose, because there was really no other way to say it. He wanted to put his hot human hands all over her - her gigai, if not her actual body exactly - and smear her with his fluids and put his gross human penis inside her and just -
She was insulted. She knew it was irrational to be insulted, since all four of them were working so hard to seem harmless and human. But she was. Even now. She was still insulted, even though it had burned down from anger to disgust. Angry disgust. She could feel her expression contorting as she thought about it.
It was the call centre girls all over again, but worse. She could have cut him in half without trying, and she'd been incoherent with rage that he'd been so - presumptuous. Why was she supposed to care about what he wanted, when he was so insignificant and powerless?
Mila Rose blinked. "A... human?"
"...Aa."
"A man?"
"I said so, didn't I?" she snapped.
"But..."
"Mm."
And in the end, he'd been pretty explicit about it. He'd told her he was putting photos of her naked on 'Twitter', whatever that meant, and she'd said that she didn't care and she wasn't going to have sex with him.
The artist had had a lot to say about women who came to stranger's houses and took their clothes off for money.
Apacci had stood, naked, and listened with increasingly incoherent rage. And then she'd punched him in the gut and he'd doubled over, wheezing and gasping. Then she'd taken him by his soft dark hair and she'd clenched it tightly in her fist and, screaming, smacked his face into his desk until the reek of the turpentine mingled with the rusty smell of his blood.
And then Apacci had put her clothes back on and taken all of the money he'd had on him and around in his house and raised her reiatsu until Mila Rose noticed and came to get her.
She'd sniffed Mila Rose's hair, almost compulsively, and ignored the faint smell of chemical cleaners. She'd put her hands on her arms, angry at the barrier of the gigai that kept their reiatsu contained to a dull buzz beneath the skin. Mila Rose had pushed her away, bemused and annoyed, and pulled her out and down, down to the street level.
And now she was here, walking home, trying to figure out how to explain that it had gotten so far out of hand so quickly. She didn't understand what had gone wrong, and wasn't sure if it was her fault or his fault or a mix of the two.
There was still blood on her gigai. It was on its hands, balled into fists and on its belly, hidden under her clothes. She'd wash it when she got back, she figured. If she remembered.
"I guess he thought you were a human," Mila Rose said, and although Apacci could tell she was trying to sound normal, she could also feel the disturbed flicker of her reiatsu.
"Mm-hm," she agreed.
Apacci felt like she'd failed badly, and had no idea how she was going to break this news to Harribel.
But she wasn't going to lie to Harribel-sama, that was - that was ridiculous. So she told her everything, in detail, and let Harribel's questions and conjecture carry her along.
Harribel, however, was surprisingly sanguine about it, despite her unwillingness to hurt humans in general. "The condition of women isn't very different," she said, sliding her fingers lightly through Apacci's hair, until it was hard to think about what she was actually saying. It felt good to have Harribel touch her. But that, of course, was different - Harribel could do what she wanted with Apacci; that was an honour, not an insult. And the others were just - there, familiar, normal. This was good and comfortable, and not at all the same.
"Whether we are hollows or humans, we experience... unique difficulties."
Apacci let her eyes slide shut, ignoring the smile Mila Rose was giving her, even though it was a little too smug around the edges. When she couldn't see it, she could just let herself fall into the touch of Harribel's hands.
Unique difficulties. Yeah. That they did.
"This is one of them, I think. He should not have done that. I would not have..." Apacci cracked open an eye, wondering what comment Harribel was hesitating over so uncharacteristically. But she didn't continue. Instead: "What you did was understandable."
Even Sung-Sun didn't give Apacci too much shit for it, tipping her head and sniffing and saying: "Well, if you must physically attack your employers, I suppose the least you can do is make sure you take all their money."
Then she paused and, after a second, asked mildly: "Do you suppose you killed him?"
"I doubt it," Apacci said, with a nervous look toward Harribel, whose fingers had gone still. She had not actually checked.
"Pity," murmured Sung-Sun, and gave a mean little laugh.
Harribel's face remained unreadable, but she didn't scold them.
Despite that regrettable business, Apacci was still not allowed to kill humans and rifle through their pockets for loose change in the more general sense. So instead she got a job stacking supermarket shelves at midnight, so they'd be full for the next day.
She liked that job as much as she liked any job. The store was closed when she was working, so there were no customers, and there was a clear goal in what she was doing. The tasks made perfect sense to her even if they were a bit mundane, there weren't many people out on the streets when she arrived or when she left six hours later, and she got to do something physical. Sure, stacking ten kilo bags of rice wasn't anything like fighting for her life, but it sure beat sitting on her butt at a desk all day. And with the store closed, Apacci's coworkers played the radio as loud as they felt like - and nobody cared how tunelessly she sang along, because they were all just as bad.
Although the people she worked with were human and had almost no reiatsu to make them seem like real people to her, they were still pretty okay - for ambulatory snackfoods, anyway. They developed a general respect for Apacci's ability to lift an eighty kilo box with one hand and otherwise largely left her alone.
She lasted almost five weeks in that job, and although she didn't love it, she felt reasonably productive and got paid enough to cover a big chunk of their bills - which seemed like all a job was really for, anyway.
During her fifth week, Apacci threw a guy through the front window of the supermarket.
By this point she was expecting her 'discussion' in the manager's office. Hitting other staff was almost universally frowned upon, and she doubted throwing them through windows was considered more favourably.
The living world had rules about these things.
They were stupid things to have rules about. If you didn't want people to be thrown through your windows, you needed either less stupid people or stronger windows.
This office was a nicer one. It was clean and white-walled, with no windows but a strong chill in the air because it was the room next to the huge freezer room out the back. The lights overhead were too bright.
Apacci was getting used to explaining herself to people she didn't really have a lot of respect for simply because they were the arbiters of whether or not she brought home any money to Harribel and Sung-Sun and Mila Rose. Life in the living world was just as unfair as Hueco Mundo; the humans just threw an added layer of absurdity over the top of it all.
She leaned her elbows on her knees and scowled fiercely at her manager. "He said he wanted me to take him home and keep him as a pet," she said to her manager, who made a face.
"Okay, well, some of the others mentioned that too, and that was very inappropriate, but -"
"I told him to fuck off, and then he said that nobody loves girls with arms like men."
"Well. That's..."
"So I threw him through the window."
"Yes," said her manager again, slowly, "I can see that. And I understand that you must have felt very frustrated, because those things were not okay for him to say to you, and I want to be sure that you know that. But do you -" her manager paused. "Apacci-san, do you understand why what you did wasn't the right way to handle that situation?"
"I'm not supposed to hurt the humans," Apacci said by rote, feeling exhausted - exhausted physically, mentally... existentially. She knew that. She just - Oh. Wait. "Other humans," she clarified. "Humans other than me. Because I am human."
Her manager's eyebrows rose higher and higher until they were threatening her hairline. "Right," she said slowly. "Look, you've been a really good worker, but Iwasaki-san says he's going to press charges if you're not let go."
'Let go,' Apacci reflected, was a weird half-euphemism. Every time it was used, she was certainly going, so that was literal and correct. But to 'let' something go implied that her job had been keeping her against her will somehow, and that she was now being allowed to fly free, released from the terrible chains of gainful employment. Which was a big fat crock of shit.
She took a deep breath. "Okay."
Her manager didn't look happy. "Put me down as a reference when you apply for your next job," she said. It was impressive how she looked somehow more stressed than Apacci.
"Are you going to say I threw someone through a window?" Apacci asked suspiciously.
"Not unless somebody specifically asks," hedged her ex-manager.
Apacci considered that. Job interviews almost never asked about things like that. It was like they never expected the topic to come up, which she felt was quite a severe oversight on their behalf. "All right."
And that, unfortunately, was that.
...except for the following argument with Mila Rose and Sung-Sun, of course.
"I can't believe I associate with such an idiot," was the kindest thing Sung-Sun said about it.
But that, too, was mostly resolved with a lot of bitter yelling and only a little bloodshed.
Time wore on. They weren't doing well, and they were always on the cusp of catastrophic bankruptcy, but nevertheless they did manage to pay their rent on time nearly every month, although it was even odds whether they had jobs by the time rent day came.
Harribel was the most consistent of them, and had been 'let go' only when the club she was working at had closed down. Something, she'd said, in tones of bafflement, about contacts she'd made there had rapidly resulted in a new position.
"They want to engrave some kind of picture on the arms of my gigai," Harribel had admitted. "It's a marker, to say you're part of their group, and that you run in safety with them."
That had made Apacci and Sung-Sun and Mila Rose all acutely uncomfortable. Apacci wasn't sure about the others, but she knew that her own discomfort was primarily due to seething jealousy.
None of them quite came out and told Harribel no, because none of them was willing to try to control her behaviour so blatantly, but they exchanged looks and Apacci knew they all felt the same words throbbing like a heartbeat behind their teeth: no, you can't, we're your herd, that's us -
But then, they hadn't needed to say it anyway. Harribel declined. She hadn't needed to be told; she knew.
"I will look for a new position," she said serenely, as though being made unwelcome was such a small and insignificant thing.
"Fuck 'em," muttered Apacci, who had a job at that point and could afford to express her inner resentment.
"For once, I agree with this savage," sniffed Sung-Sun.
"Who are you trying to insult?" Apacci snapped. But it made something dark and possessive curl up and purr deep inside Apacci's belly to see Harribel reject other people for their sake. If that made her a savage -
Savage was fierce, violent, uncontrolled, ferocious. Savage was fine. Apacci could be savage. She'd not had much luck being anything else.
She met Sung-Sun's gaze, and was unsurprised to see her turn her nose up in distaste.
Apacci scoffed.
Sung-Sun's veneer of civility went about as deep as her gigai.
The cafe was the easiest of Apacci's jobs and so far it had lasted seven shifts. Her manager was extremely patient, and also blessedly inattentive. Only rarely had she actually noticed Apacci snarling at a customer, and only twice had she even seemed to care about broken dishes beyond suggesting that they be cleaned up before somebody hurt themselves.
For once, it was a workplace that the others visited - not just Mila Rose, showing up to walk home with her in the evening half light, but Sung-Sun too, and rarely even Harribel (upon whom Apacci scrambled to wait with much greater deference than any actual customer).
Sometimes after her shift, they would linger in one of the little-used back booths. The seats were unadorned wood, faintly sticky, and the lighting was low in the one corner just beneath the speaker. As long as they were't too loud, they didn't bother anyone - and Apacci had cottoned on fast, so now when she finished a shift she bought exactly one milkshake and shoved three straws in it, just to justify their staying there.
"It's strawberry," she said, without preamble, setting the big metal cup down on the table.
"I want green tea," Mila Rose said mildly.
Sung-Sun didn't even look up from her magazine, but one besleeved hand shot out, snatched the cup and took a sip from one of the straws. The condensation left a darker patch on her sleeve. "Your magazine is out of date," she told Apacci instead, and then took another long slurp.
"So buy one," Apacci suggested to Mila Rose, and snatched her cup back from Sung-Sun before she could drink all of it in one go like a filthy glutton.
"It would be nice if you'd buy one, yeah," called the human boy who'd taken over at the end of Apacci's shift.
Apacci ignored him. Humans were annoying. And beneath her.
Some time during the conversation - if it could be called a conversation, exactly - Sung-Sun got bored of her magazine and tossed it onto the table imperiously. Mila Rose picked it up, idly flipping through the pictures.
"You're going to get fired," Sung-Sun predicted with that simpering, insinuating tone of voice she was so good at. She took the opportunity to take the milkshake back and finish it in one long, obnoxious slurp.
Apacci clenched her fist, ready to ram it into her face, but after a second she lowered it without striking. What was the point? She wasn't even wrong.
Besides, this was where Apacci was working. If she hit someone here, even Sung-Sun, there was every chance it would be please step into my office Apacci-san all over again.
Even so... Despite her patience and inattentiveness, Apacci knew exactly what the looks her manager had been giving her meant. They meant long conversations about 'appropriate customer service' behind closed doors was coming closer either way, as well as pointed questions about why one of the other arrancar was always lingering during her shifts.
It was inevitable. But she was prolonging it so she could get as much use as she could out of this job.
"Shut up," she muttered sourly instead, staring at the polished surface of the table between them. This, more than the incredible awkwardness and offence she caused on a regular basis, made Sung-Sun look uncomfortable.
She reached out one cloth-swathed hand and hesitated without touching, leaving the hand hovering in the air.
Apacci glanced up. Then, twisting her mouth, she batted her hand away. Sung-Sun withdrew with an offended huff.
"What about music," interjected Mila Rose, nodding toward the speakers.
"What about music?" Apacci said, frowning. "We can't sing."
"You mean you can't sing. Which is true. You sound like a cat in heat," Sung-Sun interjected. "Mila Rose and I can sing just fine."
"Stop it!" snapped Mila Rose impatiently. Then: "They can't sing either," she pointed out, waving one hand toward the speakers.
Apacci listened for a moment. It was true, they were more... sort of rhythmically talking. Every so often a woman said 'hhhah,' in the background, corresponding to a beat. The lyrics weren't that inspired, either.
"All they do," Mila Rose said triumphantly, turning the magazine around and pushing it across the table top, "is look good."
Sung-Sun, instead of feigning indifference like she might usually, leaned in to get a good look at the page. "We look better than that," she said finally, conclusive and confident. "Even a barbarian like you looks better than this trash."
"Whose side are you even on?" Mila Rose yelled.
Apacci thought the answer to that was self evident: Sung-Sun was on Sung-Sun's side.
"How do we get that job, then?" she asked, scowling down at the image. She had not seen it advertised, after all... And frankly Apacci considered herself sort of a connoisseur of job advertisements at this point.
It was true, the women in the picture couldn't hold a candle to their looks. They were...soft, without muscle tone, sweet-faced with big eyes and huge tumbling locks of 'd been photographed standing on a stage in colour-coded outfits, each carefully branded for specific appeal.
"Well," said Mila Rose slowly. "I... don't know."
There was a long pause.
"That's helpful, then."
"Shut up! You don't know either!"
Apacci tapped her fingertips nervously on the table top. They could do that, she was sure of it. They could do it easily, and better than the women in the photographs. And maybe Apacci couldn't sing for shit, but she could definitely grunt into a microphone. How hard could that possibly be?
And maybe she wasn't beautiful like Mila Rose, or clasically put together like Sung-Sun, but she could snap any one of those twiggy idols in half and somebody had to find that hot.
And... Sung-Sun could sing. Better than what was on the speakers, anyway.
The boy on shift was looking over at them every few moments with increasing ire and she was sure they were about to be politely invited to leave at any moment, probably for being too loud with their bickering. They could buy probably another hour by declining, but then somebody would definitely call the manager to tell them more firmly to stop loitering and they might not be allowed to come back. Or worse, Apacci could get fired again. Polite requests were... strangely important in the living world.
"Shut up for a second," she barked, cutting through the increasingly loud sniping. "We should take this to Harribel-sama."
So they did.
Their music was, in a word, bad.
They'd heard plenty of human music, but their efforts to mimic it fell pretty much flat. They were not good.
And yet.
It seemed that in the living world, people showed up to see three beautiful women - and Apacci - do anything. It was slow and hard and did not make them very much money at first.
Hell, half the time Sung-Sun and Mila Rose couldn't even coordinate. Their whole performance strongly relied upon looking beautiful and being confident with it.
Much of the time they couldn't even get live music slots in local bars or izakya. Instead, they got a street performance license and took to making a public spectacle of themselves. To Apacci, Mila Rose and Sung-Sun this came more naturally than to Harribel.
Getting Harribel's cooperation at all was only possible because she was still looking for another, non-Yakuza related, job - and because she loved them and wanted to humour their ambitions.
Harribel wasn't a natural born performer. She had confidence in herself, but she was naturally reserved and steady.
"That doesn't matter," hissed Apacci, "it's Harribel-sama. People should line up to see her!"
"Not everybody is as enlightened as we are," said Sung-Sun loftily.
Apacci disliked Sung-Sun a lot less when she wasn't the butt of her snide commentary. "Fuck 'em," she muttered.
"Vulgar," sniffed Sung-Sun, and the moment of camaraderie was over.
Despite their relative lack of success, Apacci kind of liked the small crowds that they did draw - people not so much interested in music as interested in watching them transgress social boundaries: in seeing them be loud, unashamed, colourful. And, admittedly, hot.
The daytime streets were more interesting than the inside of an office and way more interesting than the bleak sands of Hueco Mundo. The crowds were impossibly dense, populated in part with cookie-cutter, soberly dressed businessmen and very proper housewives. These people nearly never stopped to watch or listen - but the people who did stop looked more like the hollows Apacci knew than the humans.
They saw a lot of very tall shoes and off-beat, dramatic styles: fur coats with ripped trousers, a woman in a skirt that looked like a picnic blanket, a gyaru girl with her hair dyed fairy floss pink over the blond, a boy in a bomber jacket printed with comic panels.
There was even one woman with a series of pale pink dots drawn painstakingly on her face, which Sung-Sun complimented her on with absolutely no indication of irony.
They continued in this vein, barely breaking even on the cost of looking this good, until one day when, under the towering weight of sky scrapers and the press of polluted city air, a passing suited businessman slid his hand over the back of a bystander's skirt.
Apacci was focused on keeping her beat on pain of... well, pain, from Sung-Sun, but she felt the ripple of Sung-Sun's reiatsu. She saw the way Mila Rose's whole face went blank: mouth hard, eyes narrowed, sharp and on point like a hound picking up a scent.
The woman in their crowd went stiff and still, and for the first time Apacci actually felt something for a human rather than because of one - something uncomfortable, to be sure, but something.
Harribel put her bass gently down in the middle of the song. Sung-Sun stopped singing. Apacci carried on for a few beats before she realised, and then she felt all the hair on her skin stand on end with the swell of Harribel's reiatsu.
Her reiatsu rose, and rose, and rose, and the humans froze, shivering and still in the sudden silence. Not one of them moved.
Harribel stood up, and cut through their small crowd in a few short steps. She stepped around the stiff, embarrassed woman.
She took the businessman's wrist in her dark, long-fingered hand. "What are you doing?"
There was a long pause, and for a moment Apacci wondered if he didn't have the strength to answer.
At length, he did gather himself. "It's nothing," he said, tugging weakly on his wrist in Harribel's grasp, which Apacci could have told him wasn't going anywhere. "It was nothing-"
Nobody moved. She didn't think the humans really knew what they were feeling. Harribel was controlled enough not to hurt them with her spiritual pressure, but probably a lot of them were unable to move their limbs.
"Uh," said the woman in a soft voice, playing nervously with the strap of her bag, "it's not anything, it's not-"
"No. It is," interrupted Mila Rose, propping one hand on her hip. She looked annoyed. "We were trying to perform, you know," she drawled at the businessman.
"It's not your business," said the businessman, looking between Harribel's unflinching eyes and Mila Rose's scowl. "Let me go, please."
The woman looked deathly embarrassed, although Apacci wasn't sure why. It wasn't her fault. She edged away from both Harribel and the man. Her limbs shook beneath the weight of Harribel's spiritual pressure, but nobody stopped her when she stumbled away, hands smoothing down the back of her skirt suit nervously.
Apacci saw her glance, wide-eyed, over her shoulder as she retreated.
"I consider it my business," Harribel said. After a long moment of deliberation she said, "It won't happen again," in a tone that was not to be contradicted.
She let go of his arm.
Her spiritual pressure dropped. Apacci missed the feeling immediately. Her eyelashes fluttered all on their own.
The humans swayed on their feet.
The man clutched his arm to his chest. "Bitch," he said, sharp and incredulous and mortified, and then a second later he was gone, weaving through the stressed and confused crowd, quick to make his retreat.
"Don't," said Harribel, before Apacci could take off after him.
"He called you-"
"Such an uncultured pig should not be allowed-"
"Harribel-sama-"
"Enough. Barking is the nature of a dog. It's just noise."
Apacci swallowed, bit her bottom lip.
Their performance, such as it had even been, was dead in the water. The crowd was dispersing, and what was left of them seemed deeply unsettled.
"We should pack up," Harribel said, bowing to the inevitability of it. They wouldn't make much money today.
There was a clatter, and then a clear high voice through the uneasy milling humans: "Miss! Miss, what just happened here? Why did you grab that man -?"
Harribel turned to face the woman - a stranger with a camera phone, who snapped a candid picture of all of them when they turned. She waved her phone at them as she spoke, and Apacci caught a glimpse of a recording app.
Harribel paused. Apacci could feel the ripple in her muffled reiatsu, but that was only an indicator to somebody who knew her well. The woman didn't know her at all, and all she could possibly see was Harribel's impassive face, bared and maskless in her gigai.
"It seems that in all places," she said in her steady, measured way, although Apacci thought maybe there was an edge of unhappiness in her voice yet, "It is common for women to be preyed upon. Because of that, we need to work together. If I see something and I can help, I won't stand by."
"And your name is -"
"I am Tier Harribel. Excu-"
"And these others-?"
"My fraccion." This time she didn't wait for the woman to recoup and ask another question.
Instead she turned away, laying one hand on Sung-Sun's back to guide her forward. Sung-Sun went just as biddably as any of them did when Harribel laid hands on them, soft and pliable and perfectly obedient under her touch.
That afternoon a shaky clip was uploaded online, and a popular infotainment site ran a brief article about 'TIER HARRIBEL AND HER FRACCION'.
And then the unthinkable happened.
They got a gig.
Someone called Mila Rose up on her phone - she was the only one of them who had one, owing to her incredibly boring work as a freelance cleaner of lazy people's homes - and asked them to play at his bar.
It was... surprisingly all right, actually.
They were still bad, but they were beginning to incorporate more of the kinds of music hollows made into their style, such as it was. The complicated beats and occasional unearthly vocal harmonies sounded strange to the humans listening - but at least now it sounded more like they were trying a style that people were not quite sure about, rather than failing to mimic a style that was familiar.
The owner billed it as TIER HARRIBEL AND HER FRACCION and linked to the article across all his social media. Apacci had someone's glowing phone screen shoved under her nose at some point during the night, and she blinked to see the comments. 'This ought to be hilarious, I'm already embarrassed for them', and 'I suppose it's popular for obscene women to get attention' and 'is this some kind of gimmick?' Somebody else had written 'Can't sing for shit but I'd wreck her cunt' beneath the link.
Apacci didn't understand half the comments, but she got the gist - and she also did not care, because they collected an actual, sensible paycheque from their first organised bar gig.
"Do they like us, or hate us?" Mila Rose wondered later, after they were done and walking in the icy night air. Her high heels clicked on the concrete. It was a part of the look they were going for, and they made Mila Rose's legs look particularly long. (Apacci could not wear them without falling over, but that was all right - neither could Harribel.)
The weather was turning and there was a full moon. It was almost like home, if Apacci closed her eyes and pretended she couldn't hear the traffic. She turned her face into the wind. Hueco Mundo was a shit hole, but sometimes it was a shit hole she missed. It was complicated, and Apacci was simple; she tried not to think about it too much.
"I can't concern myself with their opinions," Sung-Sun said, unwittingly echoing exactly how Apacci felt, but, like, pretentiously. "They're not important. But we did get paid."
"We did," said Harribel pensively, as though she couldn't quite believe it without reflecting on it for a long, long time. "Although I am not sure what we got paid for. I wonder how often we can do this?"
Surprisingly often, it turned out.
The next time they played in a predetermined location - a bar with poor lighting, the smell of old wheat and a red paper lantern out the front - a man showed up and bought a drink in the packed, noisy environment just to come up to the raised platform they were performing on and scream that they were disgusting, that it was no wonder they weren't married yet, and that they should stop trying to act political to disguise their complete lack of musical talent.
Unfortunately, he didn't say it to Harribel. Harribel would have found it annoying but insignificant; she'd never hurt somebody for running his mouth about something so stupid and absurd. Harribel was a pillar of patience and steadiness.
Apacci wasn't. He said it to Apacci instead.
And Apacci didn't have a manager to cower for today, so she punched him out.
"You talk tough, but you're really weak," she mused popping the knuckle of her index finger with her off hand. There was a ring on it, big and clunky and with a stylised number 'four' on it, which was now imprinted on his cheek. Big, dramatic costume jewellery was part of her aesthetic now, to go with her flat shoes and her bare, muscled biceps. Punching out assholes, she felt, was also shortly to become part of her aesthetic.
...Maybe they could market that somehow? Mila Rose was in charge of their Instagram. Maybe she'd be able to do something about that.
"What a disappointment," murmured Sung-Sun, fluttering her eyelashes over one long sleeve.
"Apacci," said Mila Rose, although it wasn't really that chiding, "you're so impatient."
It was the first time, but it wasn't the last.
After the third write up TIER HARRIBEL AND HER FRACCION received for band-on-audience violence, they somehow ended up in the pristine and upscale office of a record agency in western Tokyo. It was a nice place, all plush carpet and double-glazed windows. There was a potted plant in one corner, very green and well cared for, and the only sound after the swish of the lift doors closing was the soft hush of the air conditioner.
"I'm going to be direct," said the man who had invited them to his clean and expensive office. His name was Masahiro, and in Apacci's experience 'direct' was a euphemism for 'very rude'. She crossed her arms and waited.
"You have less than zero musical talent."
All four of them continued to watch him attentively. This seemed not to be the reaction he'd anticipated.
"...You all know that," he said slowly, squinting through his thick glasses at them.
Apacci looked at Mila Rose, who looked at Sung-Sun. Sung-Sun looked back at them and then, as one, they all glanced to Harribel.
Harribel looked steadily at Masahiro.
"We're not stupid," Apacci said, when the silence got too loud.
Sung-Sun made the world's most expressive dubious noise, but for once she restrained herself from making the snide comment that Apacci knew was on the tip of her tongue. Since she didn't say it, Apacci could pretend she hadn't heard it.
"Right. Er." Masahiro looked very nervous, and Apacci wondered suddenly if he was one of those rare humans would could sense their reiatsu - and thus sense the rising tension between them. "So, you have no musical talent. But you have a... a look, an image. And it's very, you know, fresh. People want to talk about it. It's a bit niche, but the label thinks we can market your, erm, your 'girl power' thing. What do you think?"
'Girl power' Apacci mouthed to herself. She glanced at Sung-Sun, who looked equally confused by the phrase. None of them said anything. Finally, they looked to Harribel.
The face of Harribel's gigai was as smooth and expressionless as it ever was with her mask over it. She leaned forward slightly and gave him a long moment of direct, and doubtless terrifying, eye contact.
"We don't care about music," she said finally, and, perplexingly, Masahiro looked like this was an enormous weight off his shoulders. "We have bills to pay, Masahiro-san. What did your label have in mind?"
"Harribel-san, I am..." he paused, as though trying to come up with a way to express exactly how relieved he was to hear all of this, "I am very sure we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement."
tumblr user teslalindocruz prompted this fic with: 'for the au meme - band au with ur choice of character(s)? :o'
If you particularly liked something, feel free to let me know about it in a review or comment. Otherwise have a totally awesome night I guess.
EDIT 3/4/18 - there's a very pornographic coda to this fic. To include a link would be against ffnet's terms of service, but if you are interested it's "Six Weeks And Home" by user fascinationex on Archive Of Our Own.