MEETING GIN

I didn't know what it was that had hit me at first – all I knew was that something in my chest had made a loud cracking noise, and it hurt. I may not have expected the force of the blow throwing me across the street, either, but I knew how to fall. I quickly tilted my head like Kashiwaya-sensei had shown us during his last seminar and let gravity take me. Then the pain returned, along with a scary spread of warmth I knew was blood.

That's when I heard the creature's roar and realized what I was facing. At first I thought I'd lost my mind – maybe hit my head a little too hard when I fell or something – but as I turned around and caught a glimpse of that ugly, masked face, I knew that I was being attacked by an honest-to-goodness Hollow, right off the sketchpad of Tito Kube.

My chest hurt too much to talk or even move, really, and there was nobody around who could see me or run to my aid. Therefore I could only watch with numb incredulity as a manga machination prepared to devour my heart and soul.

Just then a blur of black and silver darted across my vision and there was a flash of light reflected by tempered steel. Numbly, my mind recognized this blur as a Shinigami. I couldn't see much of what happened next, but whatever it was, it happened quickly. Soon the Hollow was disappearing in the form of black smoke, dissolving, eating away into the aether. I tried sitting up to get a better view of the Shinigami who had stepped in to save me, but my chest and boobs protested, and so I laid back down again with a sharp gasp of pain.

The black-clad figure turned at the sound of my breath and I almost gasped again (until I remembered my injuries) when I realized who it was. Switching to my best Japanese, I tried to speak to him. "O-namae wa Gin, ne? Ichimaru Gin?"

The silvery-haired spirit smiled so bradly that it made my jaw hurt just to see it, much less think about it. "Hai. Ichimaru Gin desu. O-namae wa?" He returned the question with a quirky, adorable tip of his head to one side. I immediately began hoping there wasn't a real Matsumoto Rangiku as well.

"Suton Sera desu," I tried to reply, but barely got out my name before I had to fall silent again and breath carefully for a few minutes. Gin came closer and smiled down at me. If I hadn't watched the anime, I would have thought he was leering at me.

"Daijobu ka?"

"Iie," I responded curtly, then went back to breathing. Wasn't it obvious? I wasn't bleeding and gasping like a grounded fish because I felt like it, that was for sure. I loved Ichimaru's character, yes, but sometimes I had to admit that he was a bit of an asshole.

Ichimaru Gin knelt by my side and began looking over my injuries without a sound, his smile still the same aching span it had been when he first spoke to me. I noticed with some relief that he didn't bear any resemblance to the guy who had played him in the Rock Musical (Tutiya Yuichi). I pretty much knew he wasn't gay, either. After a few minutes, he started opening my gi without so much as a by-your-leave, and, in reflex, I started slapping at his hands with a staccato "eh-te-te-te-te-te!" Gin paused for a moment, withdrawing his slender, dexterous hands as he waited for me to stop, then calmly shrugged and resumed what he was doing. I was hurting too much to slap at him again, and only hoped that he wouldn't notice the five or ten pounds I'd been trying to lose.

As he finished opening the gi and proceeded to rip open my pink cancer-ribbon t-shirt from the bottom up, I finally realized what he was doing. Ichimaru Gin was trying to remove all obstruction from the wound so he could take care of it for me, and had absolutely no interest – very little, anyway; he was sort of Human – in my body at all. I felt kind of stupid at first for not catching on immediately and slapping at his hands, but then consoled myself by thinking, Hey, he should have told me in the first place…

As soon as he'd gotten the wound cleared up and in the open, Gin gave a small "Arara" of patronizing sympathy and began to heal it with kido.

You have no idea how weird magic looks in real life. You think you know what it looks like from watching Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or some other fantasy movie in 3D, but that's all nothing compared to seeing the real thing. This man's hand lit up like a firefly's rump in the dark, and I could feel the glow penetrate my body and begin to heal my wound, aiding my own natural repair system to get the job done faster and to return my chest back to a state of rosy good health. For what seemed like hours I laid there silently, staring at Gin's hand, then up at his face, than back at his hand, and then at my wound, which was feeling and looking better by the minute.

When finally all that was left was a bruise, Ichimaru stopped healing me and rose to his feet. My chest was aching, but I was able to get up too. I knew that he was about to leave, and I still had questions to ask him before he did. He was just about to disappear in one of those flashy steps that Shinigami are famous for when I spoke up quickly, saying, "Matte, kudasai."

The man paused and turned to look at me over his shoulder. "Doushite ka?"

Knowing that it would be a while before I was able to ask him everything I wanted to know in his own language, I decided to try and hold him back with simple questions until I could get him to promise that he'd come back later. "Kotaetachi ga hoshii no desu ga."

His grin got even wider as he though for a moment… then answered in perfect, plain English, "Maybe later," – dashing away before I could shout at him the colorful metaphor that came to mind.

"YOU ADORABLE BASTARD!"

I returned home that night achy and fuming, to say the least. Mom asked me where I got the bruise, and I blamed it on Mattson-sensei, claiming that he'd chosen me as his uke again. Everybody believed me and began offering sympathy, jokes, puns and Ibueprofen until I finally stalked off to my garage bedroom, madder than a wet hen.

My new status on Facebook?

"You win this time, Ichimaru Gin… You win this time."