Disclaimer: Bleach belongs to Kubo Tite. I only play with the characters.
Chapter 01: First Encounters
When he first approached her, it was out of pure curiosity. The first kenpachi, yet to be defeated, the one who put the eleventh division's method of picking a captain into place, danger carefully hidden behind a calm, kind facade – what was she really like? He itched to find out. Books and history lessons could only teach a man so much, and he was someone who preferred finding things out first hand.
It was much more fun that way.
Yoruichi had repeatedly warned him to keep his curiosity in check and stay away. There was, after all, an unspoken rule in Soul Society that one did not bring up Unohana Retsu's past, but they had both known it was a lost cause the moment he voiced his interest. His curiosity was boundless, and if anyone had an uncanny ability to break the rules, it was Urahara Kisuke. Eventually, she had thrown her hands up in exasperation as she declared him an idiot with a death wish and left him with the promise to kill him if the other captain did not.
He followed Unohana on one of her 'hikes', not bothering to hide his reiatsu as he flashed stepped through the trees, moving in the shadow of her zanpakutou, the black cloth of his Onmitsukidō uniform blending into his surroundings before he stepped out into the clearing she landed in. Their distance from any other soul told him that she knew what he came for, and the grin on his face as he pulled down the cloth that covered his face told her that he was perfectly aware of the fact that he was far out of her league.
Yet here they both were.
In the end, neither of them really knew why she decided to indulge him. Perhaps she instinctively sensed the young man's potential and thought him worth testing, or she was simply intrigued by the novelty of his sheer determination. Whatever the reason, sealed blades rang against each other, and on that first sunny afternoon, she had him disarmed and flat on the ground with the tip of her sword at his throat within two minutes – an entire minute longer than either of them had expected. Looking up at her silhouetted against the blue sky, with her zanpakutou threatening to cut into his skin and her reiatsu pinning him to the dirt, Urahara gasped for breath before letting out a breathless, exhilarated laugh, grey eyes shining with delight. It was that laugh, and the extra minute, that brought her back the second afternoon.
And the third… the fourth… fifth… until numbers no longer mattered. Days, weeks, sometimes even months, would pass between each meeting. No words were ever exchanged between the two of them, yet they still somehow managed to find each other in that clearing on certain afternoons – a particularly trying morning in the Fourth Division where the air was filled with the scent of blood, an especially challenging mission that left him both drained and restless, a too silent and unoccupied day of unbearable stillness. It was during one of these encounters that he stored away the memory of her pushing off the vertical face of a boulder, filing it away as a trick to use at a later date.
They both toed a fine line as the years passed. He pushed at her boundaries, tested her control and dared her to crush him even as he challenged himself by borrowing her strength. She sought to overcome his stubbornness without breaking him, balancing desire against principle, keeping a firm grip on her power though it sometimes slipped away from her. He would never escape without various injuries while she always left as unruffled as she arrived.
No matter how serious the wounds were, he never asked her to heal them, and she never offered.
It meant that he had an excuse to keep the dagger she buried in his shoulder the first time he managed to force her into using them by surprising her with a modified kidou spell he had come up with two weeks before. The blade had glinted in the setting sun as he whirled around with a hiss of pain, only to have the hilt of her sword driven straight into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him as he fell back onto the blood-speckled ground. Still, she hadn't missed the triumphant look on his face as she left, and he hadn't failed to notice the brief, eager spike of her reiatsu right before she reined it in and ended the fight.
He considered it one of his wins.
Their skirmishes weren't battles of power but rather one continuous game of manipulation. They pushed and pulled at each other, fighting for control, forcing the other into exposing more of his or her true self, a self they hid from the world with smiles of varying sincerity and eyes that were careful to never show too much. She stood apart from everyone else because of her strength, and he because of his mind. In a way, they were both a little inhuman – vaguely animalistic, faintly machine-like – yet perhaps that was why they understood each other. As their swords screeched against each other and sent sparks into the air, they clawed away at the other's loneliness, tearing down the walls little by little, silently sharing wordless secrets that each had hidden away long ago so that they could appear normal.
They were each other's getaway, and so they lost themselves in one another.
A/N: This fic was inspired by the song 'Animal' by The Cabs and these two pictures: . and . . The two of them just seem really compatible personality-wise, and the type to have a push-pull relationship. Not to mention, Urahara is totally one of the few people who would dare challenge Unohana. This may or may not turn into a collection of drabbles (or even a multi-chapter fic!) depending on whether or not more plot bunnies pop into my brain.
Let me know what you guys think!