a/n: Quick note before we start: This is a sequel, it does contain OCs, and there are established relationships. You can read it without the prequel (which is Bruised), or you can just say 'fuck it all' and hit the back arrow or burn your computer or whatever you feel is necessary. There's another a/n at the bottom.
one: the sun goes down, and the lights come on
"Are you sure you live here?"
I rolled my eyes and took a sip of my tea. "Yes, Ichigo, I'm sure I live here." 'Here' was my apartment in Karakura Town, all white walls and hardwood floor. One bedroom, one bathroom, a rather sizable living room, and the dinky little kitchen that Ichigo and I were currently seated in.
I could see the sun setting just over his shoulder, lighting up the sky in a haze of pinks and oranges. It was only five in the afternoon, and the fact that the sun was already setting reminded me that it was closing in on winter, and that it was much colder outside than it looked.
"It's not even decorated!" My attention flicked back to Ichigo.
"I'm still settling in!" I insisted, slightly offended. Not decorated? Psh. It was totally decorated. He just didn't have the eye for it.
"You've been here for two years, and there's nothing on the walls, and your furniture is less than the bare minimum that you need!"
"It is decorated," I insisted, waving a hand around to motion to the table we were sitting at—the top was old and worn, and it was wobbly because one leg with an eighth of an inch shorter than the others, and none of the six chairs I had for it matched. An old box of pizza and various pieces of paper were scattered across the tabletop, pinned the fridge, and even in haphazard stacks on the counters.
"I don't call a wall of faded sticky notes and eight empty boxes of pizza décor, Kaori."
"Jokes on you," I half shouted, pulling the nearest pizza box across the table with a finger, flipping the lid open. "They're not all empty!"
"But that pizza has mold on it."
"And a little mold has never killed anyone," I stated boldly, punctuating my sentence with a bite out of the cold, stiff piece of pineapple pizza in my hand.
I nearly choked on it as I fought to chew and swallow it, eyes filling up with tears at the texture. I swallowed it anyway, gasping for the air the second it left my mouth.
"I told you," I rasped, reaching for my tea cup and taking a swig of the cooling liquid. "A little mold never killed anyone."
Ichigo looked like he didn't believe me. "You're going to die, and I'm just going to sit here and laugh."
"Jokes on you, because I'm either going to haunt your ass until someone puts me out of my misery for good, or someone's going to come and find me in the Soul Society. And I'm sure Urahara will lend me a gigai to live out the rest of my life peacefully." I waved the moldy pizza slice around in the air, pointing at it with my other hand. It was stiff as cardboard, and weirdly moist. "Besides, I don't think eating moldy pizza is going to be my cause of death."
"Then what will be? Your diet and choice of boyfriend are the only two things that pop into my head immediately."
"Why would Grimmjow be my cause of death?" I threw the slice of pizza back into the cardboard box it tasted like, pushing it away from me across the cluttered table top. At the end of the table, a stack of papers crashed to the floor. I didn't make a move to pick them up; it was just how I organized things.
Ichigo threw his hands up into the air, pointedly looking away from me and at the wall somewhere to the right of my head. I frowned at him and shook my head, focusing instead on the open laptop in front of me. A blank document filled the screen, cursor blinking at me, daring me to actually write something.
So I typed my name, Kozume Kaori, before sitting back with a sigh and crossing my arms over my chest. That had been a lot of work in and of itself, and that totally deserved a break. Right?
"What are you even here for?" I asked, turning my attention back to Ichigo. He had picked up a piece of paper off of the table and was reading, but his head jerked up when I spoke again. "Shouldn't you be filling out college applications or something?"
"Shouldn't you be doing your coursework?" he shot back, waving he piece of paper in his hand. "Or your thesis or something? That is what all of these papers are for, right? Otherwise I would think it would be super weird that you have all of this stuff about anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder just lying around."
"Yes," I said grudgingly, nudging a couple of piece of paper that contained pretty much the same contents of what Ichigo held in his hands away from my personal bubble with an elbow. It was hard to tell what most of the papers contained anymore; I would have to look through them at some point, clean them up from off the table and the counter tops and the corner in the living room, maybe organize them in a somewhat logical way.
"And you're not working on it because?"
"I do better under pressure," I insisted, eyes flicking to the screen on my laptop and away, daunted by the expanse of white space, filled only by my name in size twelve font.
"So you're going to wait until, what an hour before it's due?"
"Two, actually." I shifted in my chair and rested my hands on the keyboard again, pretending like I was actually going to work on it. Maybe if I pretended hard enough, something would actually get done. Maybe I could psyche myself out enough to do it.
We fell back into silence, Ichigo reading the papers I had printed out for research, my fingers dancing the keyboard of my computer without actually writing anything on it.
By the end of twenty minutes, I still only had my name in my document—which I had successfully saved, by the way, under 'help me I can't actually do this'-and Ichigo had managed to swipe most of the research papers into two manageable piles.
"You really should decorate in here," he stated into the silence. My fingers stilled in their imaginary typing. He was really going to try and bring that up again?
"Why?" I asked, lowering the lid on my laptop to give him my full attention. It wasn't like any of my coursework was actually getting done, anyway. "Maybe we like it the way it is."
"Really? Because it looks like you've either hardly lived in it, or you've just moved in and haven't quite decided on how you should decorate yet. And I know neither of those is true, because you would have said something about the first one and, as before stated, you've lived here for two years."
"Why are you so focused on this issue? Why is it even an issue? It's called minimalist décor, Ichigo. And it's totally in style right now."
"Was it in style when you moved in? Or are you just trying to use that as an excuse?"
"What are you, my therapist?" I snapped, closing the lid on my laptop completely and leaning across the table. A huge chunk of my brown hair decided that that was the time to fall from the bun at the top of my head and hang in my face.
And that—that probably didn't help me look serious at all.
Neither, apparently, did the look on my face, because all Ichigo did was laugh at me like I had said something funny. I made a noise in disgust, pushing the chunk up hair back into the rubber band that held my bun in place, and looked at my watch.
"Are you going to stay for dinner?" I asked Ichigo, pushing my chair back and standing up. Grimmjow would be home soon, and I knew I would need something in my stomach other than moldy pizza before too long. It was my night to make dinner, anyway.
"Not if you're eating more moldy pizza."
"Gosh, I do something once and you're never going to let it go?"
"You just did it twenty minutes ago! I'm going to have nightmares for years."
"Why are you going to have nightmares for years?" Our heads whipped toward the doorway, where Grimmjow is standing in rumpled jeans and a black t-shirt and bare feet. I smiled widely at him, happy to see he had actually made it home.
"Nothing," I said quickly.
"Your girlfriend ate moldy pizza," Ichigo answered at the same time. "It was really gross."
"Are you all right, Kaori?" Grimmjow asked hesitantly as he moved into the kitchen. We crossed paths as I moved to start dinner, giving each other a hi-five. "Like, do you need to go to the hospital or something? Does Kurosaki need to, I dunno, pump your stomach? Are you going to die?"
"Why does everyone assume I'm going to die from eating a little bite of moldy pizza?" I demanded, slamming a cupboard door, a bag of rice in my hand.
"It was a mouthful of moldy pizza, Kaori!" Ichigo corrected, flipping the lid back on the pizza box that held the evidence.
I snorted and shook my head, starting in on preparing food.
'Why are you even here, Kurosaki?" Grimmjow asked as he took my recently vacated chair.
"Why does it matter?"
"He's here because college applications got the best of him," I sang. "And Urahara is overbearing, which is why he didn't go there, before you inquire about that part. Which you do every time, so don't say that that wasn't about what you were going to say."
I heard much rather than saw Grimmjow snap his mouth shut in response to my words.
"And Kaori is much more understanding of my pain than my father is," Ichigo tacked on. "She's actually had to fill out college applications. She knows how hard it is to make yourself look good on paper." There was truth to his words, but he hadn't complained about any of that. We had just sat down in the kitchen without discussing why he was there, tea in our hands.
And then he had started complaining about my lack of decorating in my home.
"I hadn't known we were joint commiserating," I commented. "If we had, I would have worn my 'wow, college applications suck' outfit."
"You actually have a set of clothes for that?" Grimmjow asked. I rolled my eyes, because we had been through this before. After I had come back from Hueco Mundo and moved to Karakura, my wardrobe might have needed a little expanding. And I might have gone a little crazy and bought more clothes than I needed, but it had been pretty therapeutic.
"Unlike some people, I don't have multiples of the same item." I was referring, of course, to his own wardrobe which was basically t shirts and jeans and they all looked identical; I would be damned if I could even tell half of them apart. "Besides, all I would need is a tub of ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other and bam!"
Ichigo had nearly choked on his own spit and left when I opened the front door in a ratty old t shirt and a pair of boxers. If I had the tub of ice cream, I would have perfectly replicated exactly what I had been wearing when filling out college applications. Just, you know, without all of the tears and the clumps of hair I had pulled out.
The conversation stilled for a moment, and I checked the rice. It was still to soon for it to be properly done, but I was impatient. I could practically feel Ichigo and Grimmjow glaring at each other behind my back. They still did not get along very well—I had known what had gone between them before, how they had both tried to kill each other multiple times, how Grimmjow had lost an arm because of it (which was a whole 'nother story entirely, ugh), and he had nearly died. How they had both nearly died on multiple occasions because of one or the other.
They still wanted to kill each other, most of the time, and I had had to break up more than a few fights over the past year with the help of Kurosaki-sensei. They had gotten better about fighting, though-at least, they had when I was around.
Ichigo hadn't really paid any sort of attention to me until he had found out I had been in Hueco Mundo for a number of months before meeting me. And then he had really started dropping by often when he came to terms with that bit, like he thought Grimmjow was going to hurt me or my body would show up in a ditch somehwere.
"And it's still kind of hard to adjust not going to school everyday," Ichigo forged on after a few moments. I glanced at him, then at Grimmjow, and then back to the rice cooker. "I mean, yeah, I voluntarily took a gap year and I have a job, but it's still. Just. Really weird."
"We never had to go through high school," I stated, turning around and leaning against the counter. "I mean, I did it online, but I had a reason." Like, a 'voice in my head telling me to kill other people' kind of reason. "And. Well. He's not exactly human. So."
"Hey! I am very human," Grimmjow protested, twisting around in his chair to get a decent look at me, disgruntled expression on his face. A year later, and he was still coming to terms with the fact that he was very surprised me a bit to hear him own up to that fact, and willingly.
"Yeah, now." I shook my head quickly, casuing the chunk of hair that I had clumsiy pinned back in eariler to fall back into my face. "Anyway, we haven't had to adjust like that. Not like you have."
"But you both did have to adjust to not being in Las Noches doing . . . doing whatever it was you did there. So it's almost the same thing, right?" I had to admit that he did have a point; it had been harder for me to adjust to not being there anymore, mostly becuase it had been in Hueco Mundo that I had come to terms with the fact that the voice in my head that had been there for as long as I could recall was actually an entirely different entity from myself.
"Kind of," I said at length. "Like, I get where you're coming from, but-"
"But don't you have friends from school or whatever to commiserate with instead of sitting at our kitchen table? You know, people who actually fucking understand what you're talking about?" I frowned at Grimmjow, who smirked at me; it just made me frown harder.
"None of them took gap years," Ichigo immediately explained. "They're all off at University. You two are the only people currently in Karakura that I know around my age group that have actually been involved in the same weird shit I've been involved in."
Point for Ichigo.
"And Rukia's always in the Soul Society, so don't even start on that part, fucker," Ichigo carried on quickly. I must have missed something in mentally tallying up the point system I had developed over the past year (Grimmjow had only 70 compared to Ichigo's 81). When my eyes focused again, Grimmjow's mouth was part way open, like he had actually been thinking about saying something about Rukia.
He should have known by that point that Rukia was an off-limits subject, but he just couldn't seem to process the idea that there was something he wasn't supposed to talk about.
"So what did we all get up to today?" I asked quickly, changing the subject immediately. I knew what would have happened if I hadn't: Grimmjow would have fired back, and I would have had a brawl on my hands before I could count to two.
"Some of us had to work today," Grimmjow said after a moment, eyes flicking to my legs. I kicked one of my legs up in the air with a laugh before turning to check on the rice again, glad to know that my plan had worked yet again. "And those are on backward, by the way."
'Those' meaning the faded plaid boxers I wore.
"I haven't left the apartment; do you really think I care?" The rice wasn't done yet. "Besides, you're lucky I deigned to put a bra on."
"You probably should have put pants on, too, and taken out all of the pizza boxes," Ichigo said thoughtfully. "Then we could have avoided what will forever be known as the Moldy Pizza Incident."
I hurled the spoon at him.
a/n: and i'm back. again. because I can't seem to let things go. this will be updated regularly, and since it is nanowrimo and I've already hit 50k for the month, this is my second project. so.
i have much in store for this, but please leave me your thoughts! there's a cute little box down there just hungry for some words!