A/N: God, I haven't written an Bleach fic in literally years. But yeah. This is set an in a sort-of-X-men-ish-type mutant!AU verse that I have set for an actual multi-chap story (which I have like the first chapter posted on in LJ), and the main character for that is actually Ichigo (-_- surprise, surprise), but Ikkaku and Yumichika are pretty main in there, so I decided to test the waters-of-reaction with a one-shot of Ikkaku's semi-backstory here. It's more like Ikkaku and Yumichika's backstory, though, and how their relationship got to the point it did at the start of the actual fic (which is gonna take place during their third year, while Ichigo'll be a first year).
So anyway, reviews would be greatly appreciated since like I said before, it's literally been forever since I've been in the Bleach fandom, and I want to see if anyone would read the actual multi-chaptered fic.
And to keep this A/N from sounding too business-like and boring: ^^/0_0 Because I"m actually very nervous.
Invisible Flying Objects
The first time they meet, Ikkaku's ten and Yumichika's ten and Ikkaku is wondering why his mom wants him to be best friends with a girl because Ikkaku thinks girls are gross. He tells his mom this and his mom just looks at him funny and then looks back to Yumichika's mom with that you-know-kids look and apologizes for her son calling Yumichika a girl.
And then Ikkaku realizes that Yumichika is clearly not a girl. He's just a girly boy, which really doesn't change much because Ikkaku would rather be forced to be friends with a real girl than a boy who looks like a girl.
When they're eleven and Ikkaku has once again been dragged to the Ayasegawa house for another barbeque, he finds himself bored out of his mind as soon as he finishes stuffing himself with as many hamburgers as he can. He tells his mom that he's bored and whines about how she should've let him bring a game or a ball or a movie to watch or something but his mom is too busy laughing with Mrs. Ayasegawa to pay any attention to him.
Mr. Ayasegawa passes by Ikkaku on his way to help Ikkaku's dad finish up the hot dogs and suggests that Ikkaku join Yumichika inside the house to watch movies.
Ikkaku rather likes Mr. Ayasegawa—compared to the great irritation he feels for his son—so he restrains the urge to tell Mr. Ayasegawa that his son is a girl with boy parts and that Ikkaku would rather not play barbies with a girly boy who probably trips over grass while he's trying to play soccer. Plus, Yumichika is nowhere to be seen in the yard and he's clearly not in the living room, Ikkaku finds when he finally gives up and wanders inside the house.
It's not much different than the inside of Ikkaku's house, and he's been inside the Ayasegawa house so many times that it feels like Ikkaku's second home. He's been everywhere in it, so there's no being-a-guest-guilt surging through him as he climbs the stairs up to the second level—intent on finding Yumichika so at least he'll have someone to talk to, even if it's mostly just making-fun-of talking.
He knows which room is Yumichika's from the many times his mom and Mrs. Ayasegawa talk about refurnishing and so on and Ikkaku is always dragged around everywhere by his mom. The door is closed, but Ikkaku doesn't really care, so he turns the doorknob and pushes it open.
The first thing he notices is that there is a red rubber ball floating right in front of his face.
Then he notices that Yumichika is sitting on the edge of his bed, holding other similar rubber balls, in assorted colors, and an orange and purple one are also floating in mid-air. The other boy's clear gray eyes are wide and surprised, and Ikkaku feels his own face mirroring the expression. "Um—" he says.
"Don't tell my mom," is how Yumichika replies.
"Um—" Ikkaku repeats, staring at the floating red ball. "Are you—"
"Yeah."
"A mutant?"
"No," Yumichika says, "I'm just a really beautiful alien from outer space and these rainbow-pack balls are my kids. They're going to kill you in a few seconds."
Ikkaku blinks. And then scowls. "Hey."
Yumichika smiles. "I'm a mutant. Don't tell my mom."
"Why not?" Ikkaku reaches up tentatively and finds that when he tries to wrap his fingers around the rubber ball, it lands nicely in the palm of his hand.
"I'm going to tell her and my dad later. By myself—you'll ruin the surprise." Yumichika makes a blue ball float in the air. The orange and purple balls spin around a little. "I've been practicing."
"Your face is stupid," Ikkaku blurts out, and isn't really sure why.
Yumichika doesn't look offended, or surprised, or even confused. He just continues to smile. "No it's not."
"Yeah—it is. You'd make an ugly alien."
"I'd make a beautiful alien."
Ikkaku scowls again.
Yumichika tosses Ikkaku a yellow ball. "You can help me practice."
Yumichika gets the letter when they're twelve.
It's a letter to that academy—the mutant academy that everyone in the country knows about. It turned out that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Ayasegawa had really been all that surprised when Yumichika finally told them. Yumichika's grandmother was a mutant and the line is supposed to go this way. It's supposed to happen when someone hits puberty and even though eleven is early for a boy, it's still not uncommon.
Ikkaku isn't sad or anything.
He's not sad that Yumichika has to go away for middle school before they've even had a few months as friend. He's not mad at himself for not being friends with Yumichika earlier so they would've had more time together. He's not sad, and he's definitely not going to try and stop Yumichika.
Of course not.
"You're going to miss me," Yumichika says practically when they're lying in the grass of Ikkaku's backyard.
It's the last night before Yumichika is going on a train to Tokyo. The summer air is hot and sticky and it doesn't help that they were just playing soccer together—well, they tried to until Yumichika got bored, which happened often, and decided to turn it into a game of see-how-stupid-Ikkaku-looks-chasing-after-a-flying-ball.
"You can go to Antarctica and I'm not gonna miss you," Ikkaku snorts.
"I think your head gets shinier when you lie," comes the retort.
Ikkaku kicks the other boy's foot. "Shut up. It doesn't."
Yumichika smirks. "I'll come back for Christmas and stuff."
"Don't."
"Aw," Yumichika sits up, turns, and leans down so that his face is inches away from Ikkaku's. "You're going to miss me so much."
"I hate you," Ikkaku mutters, shoving him away. Yumichika falls back, laughing. Ikkaku tries to swipe away the sweat beading on his forehead. He blinks a few times, scowling because it's getting into his eyes. His eyelids shut instinctively at the sting when something soft nudges him in the cheek. He manages to open his eyes enough to see a towel floating next to his face. It begins wiping away his perspiration and he opens his eyes completely to Yumichika's satisfied face.
"You so need me," the other boy says smugly.
And Ikkaku just snorts because he can wipe his own sweat.
And he definitely isn't going to miss a freaky mutant's absence. So there.
During the summer that they are fourteen, Ikkaku goes missing.
Well, he doesn't really go missing—not intentionally at least, and he's only missing to everyone else except himself. It's a kind of confusing way to think about it, even to himself, but it's the only way he can put it. It happened when Ikkaku woke up this morning, did everything he always did, pissed, pulled on some pants, and went to look in the mirror to brush his teeth.
And saw nothing but the bathroom wall behind him.
He proceeded to look down and saw nothing but the bathroom floor and everything else around him and behind him and basically just everything there except his own body. He can't even see his pants, which is fairly weird considering that he definitely saw his pants when he was putting them on just seconds ago.
The first reaction he had was to storm downstairs and start yelling to his parents in the hope that he could still be heard. There was no way to describe the relief that flooded through him when his parents looked in his direction, clearly concerned if their son had developed some rare, tropical disease. But then that turned into a look of pure confusion because their son wasn't there. There was no one there.
From there, it was a lot of confusion, some explanations, more confusion, and then a call to the Ayasegawa house for Yumichika to come over because a mutant-in-mutant-middle-school is better than no mutant at all.
So now, Ikkaku is sort of missing. Only not really because he's just invisible.
The first decision Yumichika makes upon seeing—or not seeing—Ikkaku is to laugh in the general direction that Ikkaku yells from. He laughs for quite a long time—to the point where he's doubling over, choking on his spit, and a few of Ikkaku's mom's throw pillows behind them start floating and making figure-eights in the air. Once the throw pillows fall back onto the sofa and Yumichika has regained his sanity, he looks to Ikkaku's mom and dad.
"I thought Ikkaku's grandparents weren't mutants," he says.
"They aren't," Ikkaku says back. "Idiot," he adds because Yumichika laughed at him.
His mom looks thoughtful. "My parents and his parents," she nods to Ikkaku's dad, "aren't. But—" she raises her eyebrows and shrugs. "My grandfather was."
Yumichika smiles softly. "Oh—that's it then. Sometimes it takes a few generations for the mutant gene to turn on again. It was on my final exam. I got a ninety-seven on it."
"Goody for you," Ikkaku says under his breath—he flicks Yumichika off even though he knows it's useless.
Only the other boy turns in his direction with a smirk. "Did you just flick me off?"
Ikkaku's mother frowns deeply.
"You can see me?" Ikkaku's eyes widen.
Yumichika merely smiles. "No—it just feels like something you would do."
Ikkaku huffs. "Freak."
"I guess that makes two of us now," Yumichika replies brightly.
Ikkaku doesn't reappear until the next day and after that he flickers in and out of visibility much to Yumichika's amusement. He doesn't exactly know what he's supposed to do in order to make himself visible or invisible and Yumichika doesn't exactly know how to explain it to him since controlling your powers is kind of like controlling your limbs—it just sort of happens when you want it to.
Nonetheless, when Yumichika goes back to school for his first year in the high school sect, he brings Ikkaku in tow, scowl visible even if his legs sadly aren't (because at least now he has partial visibility, damn it).
When they are fifteen and first years, Ikkaku learns about Yumichika's world, and he supposes, his world from now on. It's not that much different from human school except that they're in Tokyo and he's away from his parents. And then there's of course the fact that all the other students are mutants.
Apparently, this whole controlling your powers things isn't supposed to be really focused on until the high school sect, which would explain why Yumichika used to come home from the academy and whenever he was excited—whether about something good or bad—something around him usually ended up doing twirls in mid-air. And this is good for Ikkaku because he doesn't want to be the only one without control of his powers and look like a partially visible dumbass.
He remains partially visible (his legs mostly, but then sometimes it was his stomach) until they walk into their first class with Aizen-sensei and he kindly tells Ikkaku how to make himself completely visible. Ikkaku learns that it's just a matter of wanting to be visible and imagining it clearly enough in his head—after the right amount of practice, it's supposed to feel as natural as moving your arms and legs, just like Yumichika has said.
He's still with Yumichika most of the time because they end up being roommates, they're in the same year, and their schedules just end up colliding for nearly every period. But Ikkaku makes new friends, too. They're all around the same level of insane as Yumichika, but Ikkaku figures that that's probably why he's friends with them.
He meets Renji from the middle school sect when he makes the great mistake of lending the red-head a spare textbook which Renji proceeds to leave finger indents on. And after a short spat about that that involves Ikkaku getting so angry that he turns invisible and has to be turned visible by Aizen-sensei again, they don't really talk again. They don't talk again until they're partnered up for control practice and Ikkaku finds himself facing a boa constrictor that is probably as tall as the school building and thinks that maybe he should've been nicer to Renji.
They become friends while Ikkaku is in the nurse's office with a bruised lip and an invisible arm and Renji is stuck in snake form, albeit a smaller snake form that can fit in the school building.
He meets Rukia through Yumichika. She accidentally freezes his soda when they first meet because she sees his bald head and tries to restrain her laughter. He scowls and that makes him lose visibility of his left foot, but he becomes friends with her too because she's a smart, snarky bitch that freezes Yumichika's hair products for fun sometimes and he loves that.
Rangiku is already an alumni when Ikkaku meets her during his first year. He doesn't know at the time that she would eventually become a teacher. She comes back from university to visit the school and Renji and Rukia clearly know her and Yumichika clearly adores her in a bitch-meets-bitch kind of way. She's introduced to Ikkaku and he really doesn't know what to say. He's kind of too busy staring at her chest. But when he shakes her hand and yelps because she's hot—not in the sexy, fuck-me-now way—but in the literally she is burning hot kind of way and that gets his eyes to look at her face and she's smirking the hell off.
He likes her because she's hot and she's hot, and there's never a need to worry about eating his food before it cools when she visits. Plus, her boobs.
It happens one night at the very beginning of their second year. He's playing a game in one of the common rooms even though he has a test on electron configurations the next day and hasn't studied at all. Yumichika is sitting at the same table—they are the only ones in this common room. He taps the table a bit and closes his textbook—because Yumichika is such a girl and actually cares about grades.
"Ikkaku," he says pointedly.
Ikkaku kills an elf and swears when another elf he didn't see shoots his wizard in the eye. "What?"
"I like boys," Yumichika says easily.
Ikkaku looks up, not even noticing that his wizard is getting stampeded on. "What?" he says again.
Yumichika doesn't look impressed. Although, he never really looks impressed with anything Ikkaku ever does—not even when Ikkaku was finally able to maintain visibility for an entire day. "I like boys."
"Um—look—I don't feel that way about—"
The other boy snorts. "I didn't say I liked you. Dumbass."
"Oh," Ikkaku grunts. "Um—"
"It doesn't make anything different," Yumichika waves a hand dismissively. It looks dismissive, but Ikkaku abruptly notices a couple of textbooks and pens that someone left on a table behind Yumichika and how the objects have started lining up in the air and dancing. He also notices a nervous light in the other boy's eyes that he's never seen before except for the first time they met. "We can still be us."
Ikkaku stays silent for a moment longer and he watches as the dancing books and pens start to speed up, despite the fact that Yumichika looks determinedly calm. He finally snorts nonchalantly. "Well fuck, what else would we be? It's not like I didn't know already—girly-ass motherfucker."
The books and pens slow down and fall with soft thumps onto the floor. Yumichika grins. "Ugly bastard."
Ikkaku likes girls. He's always known that he likes girls because he knows that he likes watching Orihime from the middle sect walk past him because of the way her boobs bounce and her skirt brushes against her thighs. He knows that he likes it when Rangiku comes to visit because of the tight and low shirts she always wears and how she flirts with Ikkaku even if he's nine years younger than her. He knows that he likes Yoruichi-sensei's classes the best even though he's failing because she's just that hot. He knows that he even likes Rukia getting mad at Renji because Rukia is the kind of girl that's sexiest when she's pissed.
He doesn't know, however, why all of a sudden, towards the middle of their second year, he likes how Yumichika's uniform pants are slung low on his slender hips. He doesn't know why all of a sudden he zones out while his best friend is talking to him because he's too busy watching his lips move. He doesn't know why all of a sudden he pays even less attention in class because he's distracted by the way Yumichika's shoulder blades shift inside of the white uniform shirt.
He doesn't know why because he knows he doesn't like boys.
He knows he doesn't because whenever Renji drapes himself all over Ikkaku, sweaty and heavy, after a long training session, Ikkaku doesn't get an erection—all he gets is extremely pissed and it usually ends up with them yelling at each other until Renji gets mad enough to blow up into a snake. When Grimmjow is being a cocky ass bastard and showing off his abs right in front of Ikkaku's face, Ikkaku doesn't get horny—he just gets annoyed and kicks the blue-haired boy in the knee, which also ends up with yelling and some grappling.
However, when Yumichika walks past Ikkaku on the way to the showers, sweating from physical training (even if their powers are mental powers, they still need to know how to fight), clothes clinging to his thin frame and hair mussed and wet from perspiration, Ikkaku definitely does get hard—and that usually ends up with him being pissed too, but with the add-on of him jacking off in his own shower stall later on. When Yumichika leans too close to Ikkaku, close enough for him to see the perfect curve of the bridge of his friend's nose, the clear gray eyes, the high cheekbones, the deep set eyes, Ikkaku can feel his legs losing visibility even though they're second years and should be way past losing control.
It figures though. Since it's Yumichika, and Yumichika's always made Ikkaku do weird things.
The first time they kiss, it's because Ikkaku has no idea what else to do and because Yumichika is a smart bastard and Ikkaku is grateful for that. It's at the end of their second year—the end of a year where Ikkaku couldn't figure out if he was straight or not because Yumichika was so fucking weird and everything was so fucking unfair and he would have been damned and fucked if he ruined everything because he didn't know what to do when you fell in love with your best friend.
Except Yumichika doesn't think it's love.
Ikkaku knows Yumichika doesn't think it's love because after they kiss for the first time, they have sex for the first time—Ikkaku's first time, and he doesn't know if it's Yumichika's first time, too, but he supposes it probably isn't because Yumichika seems to know what he's doing even though Ikkaku has no clue because he hasn't even done it with a girl yet despite all his posturing around Renji and Grimmjow and Rangiku and it's mind-blowing and awkward at first but then amazing and more mind-blowing and unforgettable and wonderful and—
"We're still friends, right?" Yumichika asks as he lies, fitted in perfectly to Ikkaku's side. They're naked under the sheets of Ikkaku's bed, even though Yumichika's is just meters away.
Ikkaku frowns. "Friends?"
Yumichika smiles up at him. "Well—you know, I guess sex friends, but there's still friends in the phrase, right?"
"Yeah—I guess," Ikkaku says absently.
The problem isn't so much about being friends, he thinks. It's more the fact that Ikkaku had something more than friends in mind.
"Have you heard?" Yumichika continues, hair tickling Ikkaku's chin.
"Gossip mongrel," Ikkaku mumbles.
His best friend laughs. "No really. This one's good."
"Fine. Just go on and tell me, fucker."
"Rukia said that Urahara located this kid," Yumichika explains brightly. "She told me that he's one of those mutants that has more than one power."
Ikkaku raises an eyebrow. "What—you mean like Yoruichi and Urahara?"
"Yep," Yumichika chirps. "And they're going to try and bring him here."
"Jesus, I feel bad for the kid already—being recruited to a school of freaks."
Yumichika grins wickedly. "Aw—you know that's not true."
"We're freaks," Ikkaku says in sarcastic grimness.
"No we aren't," Yumichika purrs. "We're just special, that's all."