Characters: Ishida, Nemu.
Pairings: slight Ishida x Nemu.
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Soul Society arc, and for chapter 126 in particular.
Timeline: Post-Soul Society arc. I'm not really specific, but past Soul Society arc.
Author's Note: The flashback is taken from Chapter 126, with some small revisions. I make no claim upon them as my own work.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
He hadn't been sleeping that night. Instead, Ishida sat up in the small living room of his apartment, reading silently and listening as the clock ticked away the seconds, moving further on in the early morning hours, the moments melting away into the darkness outside.
It had been night, and a million different things roared in Ishida's ears. The virulent anger that had only just began to die down, the after-memories of battle, the terrifying feeling of his spiritual power draining away from him with every second, with alarming speed.
Blood was dribbling from his mouth; he was getting dizzy and disoriented. Kurotsuchi's poison had definitely begun to take effect.
Ishida had to get out of there. At that rate, he doubted he would be able to survive, but he didn't want to stick around with the possibility of Kurotsuchi finding a way to keep him alive and dissecting him.
His eyes flicked nervously down every street. Where to go, where to go…
"Qu-Quincy-san…" The soft voice barely registered in Ishida's consciousness at first, but when he turned around, the green eyes of Kurotsuchi's lieutenant and daughter were staring at him. "On my left arm…under my vice-captain badge… there is…antidote."
A very slight knock came at the front door. Ishida reflected that with time and experience, he had come to accept even the strangest facets of his life as perfectly commonplace, expected, even welcome.
Another knock came. Ishida put the book down on the coffee table, stood up, and stood silently for a moment. His heartbeat was coming back from a barely sensed slowness to normal time, and it was a little hard to compensate for the first few minutes.
The third knocking came on the heavy door, like God knocking on the door of the soul, and this time Ishida answered, undoing the lock on the inside that kept the clutter of the outside world out of his home.
In the darkness, a pair of wide green eyes stared up at him.
"…Do you want to lie down instead?"
"No…" Her voice, though not a whisper, was barely audible at first; Ishida almost had to strain to hear her. "This is fine."
It had been very difficult to get Nemu into a comfortable position without aggravating her injuries. Nothing short of picking her up would have done it easily, but that was out of the question considering how weak and wobbly Ishida's limbs had become.
Moreover, she shied away from his touch in a way that indicated by soreness and a lingering fear; not, Ishida guessed, was the fear entirely of him. If anything, he wasn't terribly threatening as he was. Just a scrawny teenager inching closer towards death thanks to poison raging in his veins. And Ishida doubted that Nemu was at all concerned about some of the copious amounts of blood on his clothes rubbing off on her.
Nemu leaned with her back against the wall, thin legs splayed at awkward angles. She didn't ask for any further assistance, and, with painstaking slowness, drew a thin bottle out from under the badge on her right arm.
"Here," she murmured softly.
"You should take it first." Ishida tried to hand the bottle back to her, leaning down on one knee against the tile street.
"No…I'm okay…" A wistful suggestion of a smile briefly crossed her face. "I have the same blood as Mayuri-sama—" Ishida stiffened at the mention of the name "—so I am not affected by the poison."
That gave Ishida pause, as he stood up, and stared at the bottle. A chorus of second thoughts went screaming through his mind. My third-grade teacher said to never look a gift horse in the mouth. But look what happened to the Trojans…
"Do you think it's a trap?" Nemu's voice came up unawares on Ishida's jumbled thoughts. Across the half-apathy of her face there arose for a second a look of sympathy. Ishida flinched away; he didn't want sympathy. "Then please let me drink some."
"No," Ishida said hurriedly. "It would be pointless to trick a dying man."
It was difficult to get the cap open; his fingers wouldn't grasp and turn the knob on top.
"Mayuri-sama's poison acts as a muscle relaxant," Nemu explained softly. "It will paralyze you to the point of suffocation."
Ishida managed to twist the cap off, and lifted the bottle to his lips. The clear liquid sent a slow, dull burn down his throat as he swallowed with difficulty. "…Thank you…"
Ishida had only been surprised the first time Nemu showed up on his doorstep. Even then, he hadn't asked any questions as to why she was there or for what purpose. People didn't always need a reason to visit, even if it was at two in the morning.
Strangeness was normalcy, as far as Ishida was concerned.
She was sitting at the kitchen table, fidgeting with her hands, so subtly that Ishida doubted even she knew it. It might have been a nervous habit, something she did out of practice to deal with stress. Fingernails slid under fingernails; Ishida wondered if it was at all painful.
Her eyelids and thick lashes hung low over heavy-lidded eyes, a small smile of reminiscence playing over her mouth, as her chin tipped over her neck. "If you had aimed for his head, you could have killed Mayuri-sama… But you didn't…"
There was a tone of idealism in her voice that Ishida hated; he had stopped buying into idealism over cynicism a long time ago. "…That was an accident," Ishida admitted. "I truly intended to kill him." He could take no satisfaction when he saw that smile on her face. Bizarrely, he almost felt guilty for pulling the curtain down over the idealism of her world.
Nemu didn't appear to care, or to take that much into account. The smile remained on her pale face, pretty despite the blackening bruise appearing under the left side of her lower lip. "Even so… Thank you, for sparing Mayuri-sama. The antidote is just a small gift of gratitude."
At that point, Ishida at last found anger bubbling up in him, renewed. But not for the reason he had expected.
Kurotsuchi didn't deserve anyone's loyalty. He didn't deserve for anyone to be worried about his welfare, especially not the young woman huddled against the white-washed wall in front of him, the woman Kurotsuchi had been more than willing to kill in order to get to him.
Ishida hated collateral damage, and despised anyone who was willing to throw away their subordinates, especially subordinates who clearly felt great loyalty towards them, just to achieve their ends. The only thing that made it more disgusting was the punishment leveled out to her after failing to carry out her order the way Kurotsuchi wanted.
With a jolt of shock, Ishida realized that he almost took more issue with the way Kurotsuchi treated his daughter, rather than what Kurotsuchi had done to his race.
"Are you hungry?"
"No, but thank you."
Ishida moved on and pulled a bottle of Diet Coke out of the refrigerator, putting it on the table and getting ice out of the freezer to put into two glasses. "Do you want any Diet Coke, then?"
Nemu leaned forward to examine the bottle closely, and put it back down gingerly. "Matsumoto-san brought a bottle like this back from a venture to this world once. It hurt my stomach."
"Just water, then?"
"Alright."
"…I don't get it." Ishida couldn't keep confusion and frustration, a maelstrom made out of the emotions and spiraling in his throat, out of his voice. "Isn't it better that someone like him doesn't exist?" The question, though quietly asked, was taut with tense sensation.
Nemu looked down, the smile evaporating off of her face, clearly restraining the urge to bite her lip. "…I-I…don't know…" A combination of confusion, uncertainty and pain ringing in her voice and showing clear on her face made Ishida instantly regret that he had asked the question. "But…" she hesitated "…When I saw that he was still alive," Nemu whispered, "I was glad."
Ishida wasn't sure what sometimes made the children of those who abused them so loyal to their abusers. But in that moment, the conflicting emotions roiling across Nemu's face was one of the most painful things he had witnessed thus far.
Neither one of them spoke; neither Ishida nor Nemu were very talkative, especially not in the early hours of the morning. The only sounds were the soft clink of ice hitting glass as one would raise the cup to their lips, and the sounds of heavy footfalls and muffled noise above head.
"The tenants upstairs," Ishida explained, a sudden sardonic gleam in his eyes, "are very noisy, and enthusiastic in their activities. They're actually much better tonight than they usually are."
Nemu nodded slightly, then shot her eyes shyly at him. "Ishida-san… I don't think I've bothered to ask before… but is this alright?"
A small pause passed before Ishida answered. "Yes," he answered slowly, "it's alright with me."
In the quiet and the easy silences, she wasn't Kurotsuchi's daughter; Ishida didn't think that anyone who treated their children the way Kurotsuchi did could be called a father. She wasn't the lieutenant of the Twelfth division. She wasn't even a Shinigami.
She was just Nemu, the girl who kept showing up on his doorstep in the early hours of the morning when the sky was still inky black and the stars glittered hazily through the smoke screen of smog.
Her head was bowed, though whether in exhaustion or painful emotion Ishida wasn't sure. A fresh trickle of blood started to come from the wound on her abdomen. "Please… Leave quickly after you finish. After seeing Ashisogi Jizo, the members of my division will be here soon."
Ishida frowned at her, the offer to help her get somewhere safe on the tip of his tongue before he really realized what he was thinking. He could barely walk steadily himself; trying to help her would tax him beyond safe limits. At the same time, the fact that he was gone would surely implicate her in his escape, in the eyes of Nemu's comrades.
"I'll be fine," Nemu whispered. "They will help me, but if you are still here when they arrive, they will surely kill you."
For a moment, Ishida paused. He didn't want to leave her at the mercy of that monster of a father of hers. The knowledge remained that Nemu would be implicated in his escape, that she would most likely end up suffering for his sake.
But then, Ishida remembered what he had come to Soul Society for. Kuchiki-san still faced execution. He had told Inoue-san that he'd catch up with her, and he had to.
He just hoped Nemu would be alright.
"…I'm leaving." Ishida bent down to place the bottle on the street, but before it could reach ground, his grip failed, and it clattered to the stone ground, droplets of blood painting the white stone around it and remnants of the clear liquid inside spilling out.
"Thanks for the antidote." Ishida willed himself not to look at her.
"Goodbye," he muttered, before disappearing into the shadows of the deepening night.