title. reverse psychology
summary. Ichigo has a new partner at work. Spy AU.
It was Rukia who pulled him aside on Monday morning.
"What?" Ichigo demanded, snatching his elbow back from her grip. Tiny as she was, Rukia could be very intimidating in the morning, binder-clutched-in-hand and all. He tried not to look intimidated.
She tossed the binder at him. "Heads-up," she watched him catch it last-minute with a confused scowl on his face, "You have a new partner now."
"New—" They really needed to widen the statute of limitations on what counted as a heads-up.
"Hey did you tell him about his new partner?" Renji walked into the break room with a gigantic mug that said, 'Warning: Hot Stuff' in his stupid, gigantic hands. He nodded at the file Ichigo was holding with a whole lot of self-assurance. "With everything that happened with Jaegerjaquez—"
Rukia shot him a sharp glare and he promptly closed his mouth. Ichigo tugged his tie with a whole lot of discomfort, choosing to thumb through the paper-thin beige file instead.
Special Agent Inoue, it said, Department of Weapons.
"She's got a bit of a reputation," Rukia began evasively, watching Ichigo's eyebrows zero in on her, sharp and suspicious.
"What kind of reputation?" he asked, eyes darting back to Renji as the other man chuckled and propped his mug into the microwave. Ichigo hated that mug. He wondered if his new partner was the go-out-guns-ablazin' type. Or at least that's what he'd heard about Weapons anyway. His old partner had been a part of the same department he was, so there'd never been any concern there.
Ichigo watched the golden-yellow of the microwave spin round and round, churning up a wave of uneasiness in his belly.
"She's, uh," Renji moved to crank the knob up to a minute before leaning against the counter, a shit-eating grin on his face, "Well, you'll see for yourself."
Rukia rolled her eyes, but her lips quirked up for a second, too, like she just couldn't help it. "They went over all the possibilities and picked someone we thought you'd get along with. Like, professionally."
"And don't worry," Renji added, "This time they made sure to pick someone exactly not your type."
Ichigo's ears burned and he distracted himself by flipping open the dossier. The photo of a bright-haired, bright-eyed woman stared back up at him. His stomach squirmed uncomfortably.
"Well," he held up the file, "I guess I better go say hi."
They snickered.
x.x
It wasn't exactly that he made a habit of dating his co-workers. Jaegerjaquez had been a one-off (the only off, his brain chimed helpfully) and the circumstance of the situation was that he'd been putting his feelings off long enough so he could finally act surprised when they caught upon him. Except that by the time they had, Jaegerjaquez had gone rogue and there was jack anyone could do to stop him, least of all Ichigo.
It wasn't like they were the dating type. No one at work knew and the 'cutting off losses' part of this relationship-not-relationship had been clean.
Yet, it stung. Fool me once, and all that. It was so typical of Grimmjow to leave him high and dry and make him put his walls up again. Ichigo couldn't deny the high romance of chasing after goons all over the globe with someone that just got you, but Rukia and Renji needn't have worried because he didn't intend on ever repeating a mistake like that again.
"So, we've got word from our allies up north about Aizen Corp expanding," Kyouraku was saying, scratching his beard wistfully, "Truth is, we've expended a lot of resources this year trying to catch up and haven't gotten very far so old man Yama's considering retreating for a while."
"You'd think he'd want to stop a rising threat to global security," Ichigo muttered, watching the screen flick into shifting images of Sosuke Aizen exiting a world bank somewhere in Vienna, looking sleazy.
"You'd think," Kyouraku replied in a cheerful tone that didn't betray his actual opinion on the matter. All the pencil-pushers at the agency were the same, which is why Ichigo loved the 'almost getting blown up' part of this job more than the debriefing. At least the people trying to kill him were honest about it, unlike his own higher-ups at the Gotei Agency, shrouded in secrecy and ambiguity.
"My partner?" Ichigo asked, after a moment's hesitance.
"She's had a three-year run with the Agency," Kyouraku said, with a small grin. "Picked her up off a small village by Nova Scotia after she bugged one of our safehouses with dental floss and a pack of chewing gum."
Ichigo'a eyebrow arched up in interest. "Do you trust her?"
"Sure," Kyouraku said, in a tone that suggested otherwise, "Anyway, she was quickly suspended after a mission went south six months ago." He glanced at Ichigo. "Her partner was shot in the belly taking a bullet meant for her, so you can bet the psych eval came out a little…"
"Got it," Ichigo said, blowing out a long and sympathetic breath. That was probably rough. Then, "Should she even be on active duty?"
"Can't afford for her not to," Kyouraku said, leading Ichigo out of his office. "With half the team dead or MIA, we can't really be picky with our choices."
Ichigo nodded, a solemn silence passing over them when they crossed the memorial hallway, a long stretch of plain gray wall with the names of agents engraved in neat lines.
"I told her you'd meet her by the waterfront," Kyouraku said, once they crossed the threshold and entered the elevator together. "You leave for Vienna in three days. Infiltration-only, so try not to draw any attention to yourselves. We're laying low, the last thing we need is an international controversy that'll push Aizen back into the shadows again."
"And Inoue's been debriefed?"
Kyouraku smiled. "She has," he said. "But she's never been on a Liaisons mission before, so you'll have to lead the way on this one."
Ichigo grumbled under his breath, shoving one hand in his pocket. He hated liaison missions himself but he'd been desperate to get out of the office and pass off all his paperwork to Renji so a trip to Vienna didn't sound half bad.
He glanced down at his dossier again and wondered if it was too late to grab lunch before meeting his new partner.
x.x
They picked up lunch together.
Him and his partner, that is.
Ichigo's first impression of the woman was that she was way too peppy to be a secret agent for an international peace-keeping agency working from the shadows to prevent tragedies on a global scale. Or something. He was sure the epigraph was in the employees' manual somewhere (he'd only read as far as the 'family insurance' page).
Though, he was hardly one to judge. However, he couldn't quite imagine her holding a gun or, say, holding him down—not that there would ever be a situation that required the latter, considering they weren't exactly going to be doing any physical training together. Or—he felt his cheeks grow warm, because people definitely hold other people down for other things and what on God's earth was he thinking about. He forced his attention back to the conversation at hand.
"So, Kurosaki," Orihime said, eyes dark with intrigue like he was a bug pinned to his corkboard. He felt apprehensive for a second. He'd brought his testimonials in case she had any doubts about his experience. Then her eyes brightened, taking another road entirely. "Are you a sriracha guy?"
Ichigo blinked.
"Uh—sure," he said, scratching the back of his neck. He didn't have a lot of strong opinions on the matter, if he was being honest. She seemed rather invested in her burrito, but waited kindly for him to initiate any kind of conversation about their case in Vienna. He stared down at his own burrito, hesitated, then said, "If it's available. Usually I just go without."
She hummed, making a mental note of some sort.
Ichigo shifted a little awkwardly under her gaze.
He stared.
She started back.
"Captain Kyouraku said Aizen's having a thing in Vienna's Embassy Hall five days from now," he said, blinking away as he picked up his phone to show her the details.
"Hmm, a gala," she replied cheerfully, taking a peek, "About three hundred of the world's wealthiest individuals are set to attend while talks are underway about breaking off the Centennial Treaty of Peace."
"That's where we come in," Ichigo agreed, glad that their momentum was better when they were talking about work. "Kyouraku said under no circumstances is that treaty to be broken off, so we've got to keep our ears open. Report any suspicious individuals spreading propaganda back to the Agency for further investigation."
"Seems easy enough," Orihime replied. "I say we drive to avoid attracting any suspicion. Are you comfortable driving long distances if we switch every few pit stops?"
"That'll have to do," he said, "Can't afford getting picked up on any of Aizen's radars."
Orihime considered this for a moment, playing with the beady band on her wrist. They seemed to glow a faint colorless luminescence under the fluorescent lights of the diner.
"Your beads are weird," Ichigo blurted suddenly, feeling heat course through his ears when she shot him a confused look. He pointed. "Your beads."
Orihime smiled, letting them snap back into place on the pale skin of her wrist. "They're filled with nitrous oxide." Her brows fell into a comically stern line. "Emergencies only."
"Laughing gas?" Ichigo asked sceptically. "What the hell's that going to do?" He wondered if this was a Weapons department initiative or she was just the kind of girl that carried nitrous oxide with her on the fly.
"It's a mild sedative," she explained, looking proud of herself.
"I know that, I meant why've you got that on your wrist!" he yelled, quickly lowering his voice when a few families shot him dirty looks.
"Oh. It slows down your opponent. Makes them too calm and euphoric to fight," she explained, nudging Ichigo's calf with her ankle to direct his attention to the heels she was wearing. "I designed them to go with my 'You Snooze, You Ooze,' detachable heels that come equipped with a sticky resin to stop your chasers from getting too far behind your tail." Sure enough, a few drops of ominous green trickled out of her burgundy heels. He wondered how many times she'd gotten her own foot stuck in her goo. She seemed like the type, in the kindest way possible.
Orihime pulled away from his bewildered gaze and reached out for a flyer tucked away into her briefcase. When she tugged it out and slid it over to him, his eyes widened further.
'The Purpose-Oriented-Weapons initiative (or POW) is a passion project started by Special Agent Orihime Inoue in a bid to improve the Gotei Agency's de-escalation attempts during moments of crisis. The shift to non-lethal weapons is an effort that will greatly aid the Agency's push for peace. If you agree, please sign the petition below and make our voices heard!' it read.
There was only one other signature other than her own, by a Tatsuki Arisawa from Weapons as well.
Ichigo wasn't sure what his face was doing, but he wondered if it captured his absolute bamboozlement.
"If you'd like, you can support the project too," she said shyly, withdrawing a pen from her pocket and setting it down beside the flyer. "I'm hoping our efforts in Vienna will make the department see why an initiative like this can do wonders for the wider issue of world-peace."
Ichigo ignored her statement, unsure of what to say. "What does this do?" He picked up the pen gingerly, holding it at a wary distance from them both like he expected it to blow up in his face.
"That's just a pen, silly," she giggled.
Ichigo felt a headache coming on.
x.x
All said and done, his partner wasn't all too bad. She kept her feet off the dashboard, which no one else in Ichigo's circle knew how to do and that won her several points in his book. The second thing she was good at was navigation, which was a blessing because they didn't want to be noticed. The fake identification papers issued for them by the GA could only take them so far.
Speaking of.
There was the elephant in the room he hadn't brought up yet. He cleared his throat.
"You know." He glanced at her out of his peripheral, snuggled up in the passenger's seat as she played Tetris on her phone. "We're going undercover."
She paused. "Yes."
"We haven't discussed our cover stories yet."
He hit a sudden speed breaker, causing something to bump ambiguously in the back of the trunk. Orihime had packed light for herself, as had he, but she'd also brought a briefcase of on-the-go weapons that he was sure were all leaking or exploding radioactively in the back of his car. He felt a wave of grief, but he was unsure who it was for.
"We can be siblings if you want," he offered, feeling bad for her. He wasn't exactly a ten in the looks department and she was—well.
"Oh," she said, and he didn't know why his stomach was sinking at that, but it was. However, she reached out across her seat and tugged his wallet loose from his pocket. "I think they issued married-people documents for us, though, so that wouldn't pass."
Well, that was reasonable. He glanced at her holding his wallet up close to her face to read it. Being in Liaisons meant going undercover pretty often, but he realized she probably had never had to do this before. This was going to be interesting.
"So," he started, trying to be casual so as to catch her off guard, "How did we meet?"
Orihime blinked, but recovered with a surprising speed. "Oh! We met at an art gallery in Spain, 2025," she said brightly, spreading her hands wide apart. "Our eyes locked across the room and before we knew it, there were sparks. You, a realtor with a modern architecture firm. Me, a scuba diver aiming to travel across the brutal transatlantic waters." She cupped her face in her hands and stared at him with an ardor that almost made him crash into the next speed bump too. He really was a shitty driver. "Thus began our torrid love affair."
Ichigo choked on his own spit, but also half-wondered why she gave him the boring job.
"I think," he began slowly, "we should just have met in college. A friend of a friend introduced us, we met up for dinner a couple of nights, and ended up uh—" he bit his lip, "—together," he finished lamely.
"Okay," Orihime said, sounding a bit disappointed.
"Not that your story was bad!" Ichigo said quickly, "It's just that we don't want to invite a lot of suspicion into our marriage."
"Maybe we should have an affair." She tapped her chin.
Ichigo swerved to avoid hitting a drowsy-looking bovine that had wandered into the streets.
"I would never," he said, offended. "Maybe you're the one having one." It was a petty thing to say, but they were supposed to be married and bickering after all. If the shoe fits and all that. He was sure Rukia had taken a class on this kind of acting once, though she made a shitty actor in his opinion.
Suddenly, he realized he'd made a heavy accusation against his wife and snapped his gaze back to her to see how she would react.
To his surprise, Orihime's eyes sparkled. "Oh, who should the other man be?" she wondered, "A firefighter! Ooh or a—"
"You know what," he interrupted loudly, "This counts as inviting suspicion, let's move on to personal histories."
"But that's boring."
x.x
By the time they'd arrived at their cramped little hotel, they'd decided they were Monsieur and Madame Auclair, as suggested by their passports—two animal-lovers travelling down for the weekend to enjoy the local cow-herding festival and infiltrate evil Aizen Sosuke's corporation on the side.
Unfortunately for them, being married as a cover story didn't just mean one elephant in the room at a time.
Ichigo stared at the middle of their barn-like hotel room in horror. He'd tried to ignore it really, but they weren't the only couples who had apparently arrived for the festival and as it turned out, most of the rooms were full.
In other words, there was only one bed.
The concierge left the room with a soft click of the door behind him, leaving the two special agents to gape at each other in befuddlement.
What he would give to know what was running through her mind right now.
"I didn't really think this far," Orihime broke the ice with a sheepish giggle, pulling away from him to go set her duffel bag by the bedside. There was a momentary lull in the air. Ichigo mimicked her mechanically, carding through the alternatives in his head. He could go sleep in the car. They could book another hotel down the road with their own money. He could sleep on the cockroach-scuttled couch.
"I'm going to go," Orihime jerked her head shyly at the bathroom, cheeks pink.
"Oh, yeah, you should," he agreed, feeling his own voice force every last shred of cheerfulness into his voice for her. "I'm going to figure out the—situation."
Neither of them looked at the bed. It was too embarrassing. Orihime bolted to the bathroom, locking it behind her.
Ichigo stared at the bed acidly. He heard the idle noises of Orihime getting settled in her pajamas and he figured he should change while she was gone too, because eventually, when she returned, they would have to figure out what the hell they were going to do.
He considered calling Kyouraku and asking him to deal with Aizen himself.
By the time Orihime returned, he hadn't calmed down but he had slipped out of his day clothes and into the starchy robe the hotel had left for him. He hadn't thought to bring pajamas and he was almost jealous of Orihime's fluffy, home-brought set. It even came with a headband to hold her bangs back and everything!
Had she made that, too?
He was absorbed in gazing at the taxidermy deer head right across their bed to give her her privacy to settle, but when he heard the rustle of sheets, he felt himself blow up in alarm.
"What—what are you doing?!" he demanded, watching Orihime slow-crawl into the right side of the bed.
Orihime pinked. "Oh, sorry. It's just, I like being the little spoon so I didn't think you'd mind."
"The little—" Ichigo turned beet-red. "Inoue, we are not sleeping in the same bed."
Much less spooning! What kind of a guy did she think he was?!
Orihime looked horrified at his expression. She cupped her mouth with a mortified squeak, tossing the sheets back like they'd burned her. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have assumed," she wailed miserably, standing up, "I'll go sleep in the bathtub, I'm sure it's very comfortable."
He grabbed her arm before she could go do exactly that, then dropped it when he realized what he'd done. "Sorry!" he exclaimed, jumping back so she didn't think he was a perv. "It's, um. Well."
She stared at him.
He stared back.
"Well," he repeated, blowing out a breath. Technically they were— no he couldn't say it, not even in his own head. This was ridiculous. "I'll go sleep in the car or find lodging or something. You keep the room."
Orihime gasped like he'd struck her, grabbing onto his sleeve. "You can't do that!" she exclaimed. "I'll just sleep on the floor, Kurosaki, really it's alright, we don't have to share—"
They both stared at the bed and promptly snapped their gazes away.
"For fuck's sake," he muttered after a long moment of silence followed by another long moment of silence. He stormed over to the bed and yanked the sheets, dropping down on the bed with a dull blush on his cheeks.
Orihime stared at him in awe, like he was her hero.
"Inoue," he grumbled, turning his back to her. "We're supposed to be special agents. We can't pretend to be married if we can't share a damn bed. Get in here."
"I—well—" he tilted his head to glare at her, "—yes sir!" She quickly hopped over to the other side, the same side she'd initially picked out for herself in her initial bravado.
He shifted over until he was on the far edge, feeling the bed nudge and creak until she was settled on the opposite far edge. The air was so thick he couldn't slice it with a butcher's knife if he tried.
"Thank you," she murmured, so soft he could barely hear her.
"It's nothing," he dismissed, "Get some sleep, we've got to be up in the morning for that Zoom call with Kyouraku." He made a face, then realized she couldn't see him.
Something in his voice must have given it away though, because she snorted out a laugh. "Goodnight Kurosaki."
Again, he realized she couldn't see him—this time for a vastly different reason.
He smiled.
"Good night Inoue."