"I LOVE YOU YORUICHI!" he yelled to try and overcome the noise of the fireworks but they had ceased firing momentarily so his words echoed in Yoruichi's ears and stopped her heart, if only for a second.
Yoruichi didn't know how to react to this; she wasn't normally surprised by anything, especially not Kisuke; she had always been able to tell exactly what he was thinking and what he was going to say, but his confession of love had rendered her speechless. All at once she began to remember all of their time together, over all of these years.
*Flashback*
It was Valentine's Day last year and head captain Yamamoto had encouraged the people of the Seireitei to give out cards this year. The day before Squad 4 had delivered little paper post boxes to everyone in the 13 Court Guard Squads, they were supposed to be left outside your door the night before and collected at noon on Valentine's Day. This event had been set up due to the declining economy in the Rukon district, buying cards and craft materials from those who manufacture paper was supposed to help the poor get back on their feet. As well as this, the mood in the Seireitei had become stagnant in the recent weeks so this was also a mechanism to try and cheer everyone up.
Yoruichi didn't expect many Valentine's cards as she didn't really know any men, she often had conversations with the guys on her Squad, but that was normally just during training so that didn't really count for much. Because she believed this, it came as a shock to her that her box contained quite a few cards when she went to check on it later that day. Of course there were a few cards from her friends that weren't sent with a romantic intent, even Tessai had sent one! But there were also quite a few ones from secret admirers that surprised her greatly, one of these cards was sent by Yamada, the young and nervous man who used to be assigned as her escort when he first joined the Squad.
What was perhaps the most intriguing of the cards was the one that she found tucked away at the bottom of the box, it was very small and was sealed within an envelope, when she opened it all that it said inside of it was:
To Yoruichi,
Just know, that I'll always be thinking of you.
?
At dinner that night, she sat next to some of her girlfriends who were showing each other all of the Valentines that they had received and before long they asked her what she had received as well. At this point she proceeded to pull out the card that was signed with a question mark, immediately all of the girls pounced on it and tried to guess who it was from.
"….wait, I'm sure that this handwriting belongs to Kisuke," one of the women said.
"Your right!" another agreed, "this is totally from Kisuke, Yoruichi."
"You should go and ask him."
Hearing this made Yoruichi's breath catch and her heart to speed up just a little bit. She shook it off quickly and turned to smile at her friends who continued to enthuse over the card, she insisted to them that it couldn't have been Kisuke's and soon the conversation shifted off the subject. When she had finished her meal she excused herself from the table and made her way back to the Squad 2 Barracks. Once she was outside she allowed herself to wonder, why had she reacted like that? What did this mean? In the end she decided that it was only because the thought of Kisuke feeling anything for her was impossible, and nothing else.
The morning after, when Kisuke woke her up for training, she decided to ask him about the Valentine just in case.
"Kisuke?" She asked tentatively.
"Yep," Kisuke replied, he was in the middle of yawning and seemed completely nonchalant to her, she almost didn't ask him what she wanted to , but in the end she got up the courage to say,
"Do you know who this Valentine is off?"
After looking at the small card that she held out for him to see, he shook his head and confirmed,
"I'm sorry, I don't recognise the handwriting," he smiled, "but wait, did you get mine? Tessai was supposed to write my name in his?"
"Oh, he must have forgotten."
After that they continued to talk and train as normal, but Yoruichi felt something unpleasant stir in the pit of her stomach, only later did she realise that the feeling was that of disappointment, but the real question was, why was she disappointed that the Valentine wasn't off Kisuke?
*End Flashback*
After Kisuke's confession, the air grew still, as if a great deal of tension had been released. Yoruichi looked up at his face and she could see that he was looking straight into her eyes with a confidence that contradicted the blush in his cheeks. Quickly reining in her surprise she stated,
"So why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"Erm, I-I thought that my feelings would jeopardize our friendship," he stated, taken about by her reply.
"If you believed that then you don't know me very well!"
"You know, that's funny, that's exactly what Tessai said to me the other day!"
They both proceeded to laugh, for no particular reason other than to show one another that nothing about their relationship was going to change, not if they didn't want it to. The last of the tension drained out of Kisuke and after a quick conversation, they both decided to ditch the party and go and hang out somewhere.
Somehow, they found their way to the underground training centre where they discarded their fancy clothes in exchange for their regular outfits. After a while of talking and laughing, Yoruichi was the first to bring up the events of the dance again.
"I really am sorry Kisuke," she said after the laughter had died down and they lay on the ground, staring at the patterns on the ceiling.
"It's alright," Kisuke replied, not looking at her face in case she saw the hurt that made it clear that it certainly wasn't alright, "you don't need to feel guilty, and I wasn't expecting anything anyway."
"But still, rejection must be hard." This only drove home the point for Kisuke and it soon became clear to him that they may act like they used to, but something had changed inside of Kisuke that made him so sad that he felt if he focused too much on his emotions, he would surely drown in them. But he wasn't disheartened, he wasn't going to give up on her.
"It's probably just a crush, it'll go away soon" He clarified, although he himself was sure that this was completely untrue, that it wasn't going to go away from a long time.
