Characters: Rangiku, Ichigo
Summary: She can tell immediately, whose son he is.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for the Arrancar arc
Timeline: Arrancar Arc
Author's Note: Nicky Eira gave me the idea, and it became a little more than just a drabble for Time in Seconds.
Dedication: Dedicated to Nicky Eira.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
She puts two and two together very quickly. Rangiku may be written off as a vapid blonde by most of the world but she's not stupid and it's not like the name Kurosaki is all that common. She can spot the truth from a mile off.
Ichigo, Rangiku decides, doesn't look much like his father—the kid must take pretty strongly after his mother, whoever she is, Rangiku realizes when she gets over the shock of what this must mean. It's more a case of her being able to tell he's Isshin's son from that blunt, straightforward, aggressive and at times ridiculously short-sighted personality of his.
Her former captain, the one who went missing over twenty years ago, is not by a long shot dead as everyone thought he was. Can't be, if he's got three kids. The moment she gets over the anger she feels at this abandonment Rangiku has to ask herself the obvious question:
Who on Earth would want to marry Kurosaki-taicho?
When she hears about the poster down in the kitchen, she has her answer.
Rangiku casts a glance at Ichigo, and smiles slightly.
Poor kid. Having to live without his mother, and with Isshin, too. He was a good, if erratic and distracted captain, but honestly, Rangiku can't see Kurosaki Isshin as being a terribly wonderful father. He's not father material.
In this moment, Rangiku becomes a secret keeper without really intending to.
Isshin could get in a huge amount of trouble with Soul Society if someone was to find out that he's been hiding out on Earth for all this time instead of being dead as the official report states. Rangiku wouldn't turn him in, wouldn't do that to him even if he didn't have three children to raise. The point of the matter is, Isshin has children to be taking care of, he'd probably never see daylight again if Rangiku were to turn him in and he doesn't deserve that.
Ichigo is… different, from his father, for all that he's just as brash at times. He's just a kid, really. A teenager, on the verge of adulthood, but still a child, as much as he tries to deny it.
Rangiku decides to make it her business to make sure he doesn't do anything stupid. She could never stop Isshin from doing stupid things because he outranked her, but she doesn't have that problem with Ichigo.
As of yet, she already plays big sister to half of Seireitei and Inoue Orihime, anyway. What's one more?
However, the night they meet, Rangiku discovers one way in which Ichigo is nothing like his father.
Rats, Rangiku thinks to herself moodily as she buttons her blouse back up, to the point where it was before but not all the way up—that's too constrictive. She feels several things in this moment. Thwarted, insulted. But really, mostly disappointed. That always worked on his father.
But then, Isshin was pretty easily distracted to begin with, so rolling up her hakama enough to show the curve of her leg or just batting her eyelashes probably would have worked on him.
Not so with Ichigo.