Disclaimer: I own everything that doesn't already belong to somebody else.
Warning: Idiocy...
Note: Despite the little almost-smut scene from last chapter, I'm not writing sex this time. Not yet anyway. Maybe later, but not anytime soon. And last chapter was basically the end of the "cute and fluffy" arc and this would be the start of the "oh snap - drama" arc.
Chi Chikai
Next to Impossible Still isn't Impossible
After graduation, Renji, Ichigo, Kira, and Hinamori were all accepted into the fifth division, while Kitsure disappeared into the second. Within six years, Ichimaru was promoted to captain of the third division, taking Kira along as his vice captain. Hinamori was then promoted to the fifth division's vice captain, and Renji and Ichigo were bumped into the eleventh division at the request of Zaraki Kenpachi.
However, it wasn't until ten years later that something unexpected happened that turned the world on its head for Ichigo and Renji.
"I'm on patrol again – two months this time," Ichigo said that night. "I have to leave tomorrow morning."
"Two months? Shit – why so long?" Renji grumbled. Patrol in the real world was nothing new – they'd both been on quite a few trips, but never an extended stay.
"Just be thankful it's not longer. We're still short-staffed, remember?"
Renji sighed and sat down on the bed next to his lover. "Yeah, I remember, but still…"
Ichigo chuckled. "You can't go two months without me?"
"I can barely go two weeks without you – it sucks tryin' to remember how to sleep alone."
"Aye, I know. It's not like it's gonna be a cake-walk for me, either."
"Yeah, but you'll be worn out from killing those damn Hollows."
"I'm pretty sure Kenpachi isn't gonna let you off easy, either."
Renji couldn't help but chuckle grimly. Within the first week of being in the eleventh division, Yachiru hadn't hesitated to label them "boyfriends," which was completely embarrassing, but after laughing it off, everybody else had taken it as a joke, just another one of Yachiru's nicknames. Everybody but their captain, anyway, who was way too keen on noticing how their moods shifted around each other, and had gladly taken it upon himself to make their lives a living hell when they were apart. When Ichigo had finally bitched at him about it (he was the only one brave enough – and fast enough – to even think about talking to their captain that way), Zaraki just said he was doing them a favor by distracting them. All in all, his intentions were well-placed – after all, they really should learn how fight at their best even when apart. Though that still didn't change the fact that it was still a living hell.
"Do I get—" Before he could even get a coherent sentence out, Ichigo had pounced him, cutting off his words with a heated, passionate kiss. Renji practically purred in anticipation. They hated being separated, but the sex before and after was fucking unbelievable.
Ichigo sat on the ledge of a skyscraper, looking out over the horizon at the setting sun that marked his second day in Karakura. It was ironic, really, that he was now a shinigami in the same town he'd lived and died in nearly a century prior. He had already gone around to the places he once knew, only to find they had changed drastically. Almost everything had changed.
The cell phone went off. He sighed and took it out, locating a low-level Hollow nearby. What a pain… He hopped from his ledge, locking onto the Hollow's reiatsu, and began the tedious task of hunting it down and killing it.
When he finally found it, it was chasing a young girl, who was screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs. Sounds kinda like Rukia… he thought to himself with a smirk. Quickly, he took Zangetsu from the sheath on his back and dove at the fish-faced Hollow, shattering its mask in one blow. Within the moment, the Hollow dissipated, leaving Ichigo with the young girl who had tripped over herself and was now on the ground, staring wide-eyed at the shinigami before her.
"Wh-who are you?" she asked in a timid voice.
Ichigo sheathed his zanpakutou again before looking at her. At first, he'd just figured she was a soul, but upon noticing the lack of a chain, he realized the girl was human. He also realized that the girl looked almost exactly like…
"Rukia?" he said before he could stop himself.
The girl turned indignant, as well as scared. "Who are you? How do you know my name?!" she practically screeched.
Idiot… "Lucky guess?" he tried, staying cool.
She didn't buy it. "Yeah right! Are you some creepy stalker?!"
"If I was a stalker, I wouldn't have said your name, idiot!" he snapped. God, this girl was just as stupid as Rukia, too!
The girl was on her feet now. "How dare you call me that! Don't you know who I am? I'm the sister of the famous Kuchiki Byakuya! I can have you arrested!"
Ichigo's brain started hurting. He sighed. "So it's Kuchiki Rukia, then?" he said, pointing out her obvious idiocy of giving away her full name.
That realization seemed to have hit her as well. "W-well… What's your name?" She was attempting to save face.
"Kurosaki Ichigo. And I'm not a stalker, I'm a shinigami. The thing chasing you was a Hollow, which I'm supposed to slay in order to protect souls and humans like you." He decided to get all the questions answered before she thought he was some sort of creep or crazy. "And your name really was a lucky guess – you look like a girl I used to know whose name was also Rukia," he added.
"Oh… What's a shinigami?" Now that her savior wasn't quite so scary to her, she was extremely curious.
"Don't you have someplace to be? It's kinda late," Ichigo pointed out, almost irritated. He really wasn't in the mood to explain something like that to her, even though it was an almost welcome break from the monotony of his job.
Rukia looked at her watch. "It's only six-fifteen," she said. "I know! Why don't you come over to my house? Are you hungry? You can stay for dinner – my thanks for saving me!" She was practically bubbling now.
"I don't think that's a good idea. Humans aren't supposed to be able to see me – it's rare that they do. So I doubt the rest of your family will be able to see me."
"Well, that's alright. I usually eat alone in my room anyway. Our butler won't mind or ask any questions if I order some extra food. You can eat food, can't you?"
"Y-yeah." Okay, there was no wriggling out of this one. The girl was adamant on inviting him over. He sighed. "Fine, alright."
"Yay!" she cheered, grabbing his hand and leading him to her house at breakneck speed (for a human, anyway).
Within minutes, they were holed up in Rukia's large, plush, pastel, and frilly bunny-themed room with a dinner order on its way up.
"So what's a shinigami?" she asked again, sitting on her bed.
Ichigo was sitting backwards on the swivel desk chair, his arms crossed, resting his weight on the back. "A shinigami is…" He sighed. This girl would probably have a hard time understanding words. "You have any paper? I'll draw it out for you."
Rukia hopped down from her bed and dug up a sketchbook from a pile of various things. She turned it to a blank page somewhere in the middle of the book and handed it to him with a marker.
"Alright, first thing – when a human dies, it's soul comes out of the body." He drew a stick figure horizontal with X's for eyes and an attempted "ghost" stick figure above it, which was a head with a squiggly body.
"That looks like a sperm," Rukia said, pointing to Ichigo's "ghost."
Ichigo scowled and turned to another page. "Anyway, when the soul is out of the body, it is either sent to Soul Society by a shinigami," he drew a bodiless stick figure head and a stick figure with a sword next to it, and an area with a bunch of bodiless heads, labeled "Soul Society," "or it turns into a Hollow." He drew an angry stick figure with claws for hands and a fat body with a hole in the chest. "These Hollows eat the normal souls, called Pluses," he drew an arrow to the bodiless head, "and attack humans who have noticeable spirit power." He drew a normal stick figure with a squiggle around it (labeled "reiatsu") and an arrow from the Hollow to the human. He turned to a new page. "In order to protect the Pluses and the humans, we shinigami slay the Hollows." He drew a shinigami stick figure with its sword through the head of a Hollow stick figure. "It's actually just shattering the mask, which protects the Hollow's human emotions. Once the mask is shattered with the zanpakutou – the sword," he tapped the hilt of Zangetsu with the marker, "the soul resorts to being a Plus sent to Soul Society." He drew an arrow from the slain Hollow to a bodiless head, to the area of bodiless heads (again labeled "Soul Society"). "The zanpakutou absolves the soul of sins committed as a Hollow, but not the mortal sins committed as a human, so if the soul is too sinful to go to Soul Society, it goes to Hell." He drew a pit of fire with the word "HELL" in bold letters above it.
"That's a bad word!" Rukia gasped, glaring accusingly at him.
"What are you, five?!" Ichigo snapped.
"I'm fourteen, thankyouverymuch!" she snapped back, sticking her tongue out at him.
Ichigo rolled his eyes.
"Hey – how old are you, anyway?"
"Older than you," he answered. He didn't really have an exact age – he knew he was under a hundred, but by how much, he wasn't sure.
"Let's say fifteen," she said happily.
"Why…"
"Your name! Ichi and go – one and five – fifteen!"
"Yeah, okay," he said. "So you got any questions? Or did I explain everything?"
"You didn't explain what a shinigami is! You just explained what a shinigami does."
He sighed and went back to the sketchpad, turning to another page. "Alright, when a Plus goes to Soul Society, it stays in a place called Rukongai." He drew a circle within a circle and labeled the outer ring "Rukongai" and the inner circle "Seireitei," and then drew what looked like a house on the line of the inner circle with an arrow pointing to it from the word "Shinigami Academy." "In order for the Plus to get from Rukongai to Seireitei, it has to go through the Shinigami Academy, where it learns how to be a shinigami. In Seireitei, there's the Gotei 13 – thirteen divisions, all with different functions."
"Like what?"
"Well, the fourth division is the medic division, and the twelfth is the scientific research."
"Which one are you in?"
"The eleventh."
"What does that one do?"
"It's a fighter-oriented division. Which means we focus on fighting and training and not much else."
"So…you're all brutes, right?"
"You could say that…"
"No wonder your drawings suck."
"And you can do better?"
Rukia took the sketchbook from him and grabbed a handful of colorful markers from her pile. "You can finish without pictures, right?" she said, starting to remaster Ichigo's stick figure explanation.
"I guess… So there's the Gotei 13, and the new shinigami get picked up by these divisions and get further training so they can come here to the human world and slay Hollows and send souls to Soul Society."
"Can any soul become a shinigami?"
"Not exactly – you've gotta have some spirit power in order to be accepted into the academy. Humans who can see souls have some spirit power. They've got more if they can see Hollows and shinigami."
"So…that means I've got spirit power, right?"
"Yeah, some."
"Whaddaya mean some?!"
"The Rukia I knew was just an average shinigami – nothing special. As a human, she wouldn't've been able to see more than transparent souls."
"So? I'm not the Rukia you knew, now am I?"
Ichigo sighed. "Look, just as souls go to Soul Society when they die, souls who die in Soul Society get recycled and reincarnated back into humans here."
She looked up. "Souls can die?"
"Well, not die. We can be killed, though. Not easily, but still."
"So…I could be the Rukia you knew…"
"Possibly. You look and act almost just like her. Well, you're a lot more girly, but it's close enough."
"Girls are supposed to be girly, silly!"
Ichigo chuckled and watched her draw.
After a minute, Rukia spoke again, not looking up. "The Rukia you knew… Was she pretty?"
Ichigo shrugged. "I guess. She had a cute smile," he admitted.
"Were you friends with her?"
"Yeah."
"Good friends?"
"I guess so."
She finally looked up. "Do you think I'm pretty?"
"Well, you're not ugly," he said.
She threw the sketchbook at him. "Meanie!"
"You asked!"
"You're supposed to say 'Yes, you're very pretty'!"
"I ain't here to pad your ego, dammit!"
Rukia giggled.
"What's so funny?"
"Usually when I ask guys that, they say 'Yeah, you're really pretty,' or they say sexy or hot. You're the first guy to not say something like that."
"And that's funny?"
"I don't know why, but yeah," she said with a smile. "And my drawings are better than yours," she added, pointing to the sketchbook, which had landed open on a page of her remastering, covered in what looked like bunnies and bears all surrounded with lines of color.
"They still suck," he said.
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