Rating: PGish? I'm bad with ratings.
Spoilers: None really. Well, I guess if you don't know about Ichigo's bankai, there are kinda spoilers, but even then only vaguely.
A/N: Assume Rukia has achieved bankai, because I believe she has.
I'm back to my most natural style of writing, after a lot of chapters of experimentation. Lot's of fragments and twisted grammar. The English language is my sandbox. Hehe. If this is difficult to follow, please tell me! I'm here to learn.
Thank you for all the comments and reviews! Your feedback is so valuable.
Wow, look at me, Little-Miss-Updater. There may eventually be a third part to this… maybe? Enjoy!
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Making Love II
There is the roar of a Hollow rumbling through the air (through his soul), ripping and clawing with gnarled desire at the pieces of him, and it feels like a column of ice staked through his heart. This one… this one was different. A high level Hollow, but more than that, it was something familiar. A taste in his mouth that he can't quite remember, like the smell of the shampoo his mother used to use that he knows he loved then, but can no longer recall.
He crouches on the rooftop, trembling with the simmering power of his exposed Bankai, and watches the mask of the huge Hollow crack into long, deadly shards that drop to the ground like glittering crystals. He watches because it hurts to. It hurts to see the milky-white eyes skewed into slanted lines of pain, the crimson-dawn red of lips fading to night, the slope of a cheek that was once smooth and clean…
He catches one clear view of the exposed face before the hollow disappears completely, and with the rustling of thread-bare and frayed black robes, he says, "I went to school with him. He moved when I was twelve."
Still staring down at the empty space where the Hollow was, hands flat against the rough shingles, he hears her footsteps beside him. He turns to her small sandaled feet, white socks stained, and then up to the stormy blue eyes that only turn this color when she is trying to offer comfort.
"We gave him back his honor," she says from behind him. "He can have peace now."
He watches her lips move with careful attention. Peace. "Yeah."
A small delicate hand of battle-hardened strength falls against his shoulder and then her voice again: "Let's go," before she jumps from the roof to the ground and begins walking.
But when his own feet connect with unyielding concrete, he cannot move. Her back is framed by the veiled light of a streetlamp and he can't let go of his Bankai, can't let that dark, raw, hunger, the tattered edges of insatiable power, disperse into quiet calm. There is a hole inside of him where the air blows through and he's tired of the sound whistling by his ears like the voice of that Hollow dying. Zangetsu is yearning, desiring, demanding…
And he wonders if this is his own hollow, but he feels such need and there is an instinct that he cannot name moving his hands and his lips. His voice is the tearing of heavy fabric: "Rukia. Prepare yourself."
She turns, eyes following the line of his extended sword to the tight stance of his body and the madness in his eyes. "Ichigo, what are you doing?"
"Use your Bankai, Rukia."
"Ichigo?"
"I'm coming."
And it all feels like reflex. Like reflex when he runs toward her, feet grating against concrete, arms raised and sword glinting in the streetlamp, like reflex when he looks at her with all that desperate, desperate need.
Like reflex when she whispers, "Bankai." Like reflex when their swords cross, black on white, opposite extremes coming together to form a whole, attracted to a point of complete synergy. Like reflex when she looks at him with eyes a color he's never seen before.
And the feeling: his and her reiatsu twisting together, Bankai merging, enclosing them in a sphere of energy that isn't black or white but is every color, every emotion possible all at once with no restraint. This is beyond human senses, beyond words and touch. She is inside of him and he in her and their swords are one and this is what they've always been leading towards, always been seeking in every battle, every shared shedding of blood, what they've always stopped short of.
Because fighting side-by-side had always been just the foreplay. This was making love.
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