My first Bleach fic. There should be more IchigoxRukia fics out there, I'm hungry for them!
I don't own Bleach.
Faerie Tales
Once upon a time there was a faerie in a neon green cocktail dress.
Once upon a time there was a boy with a perpetual frown and bright orange hair.
Once upon a time there was a girl who risked her life for a stranger.
Once upon a time there was a world that brought them all together.
It was a dark night; surely you know the kind. You go outside on one of these nights and you can feel the power in the air. It coils and snaps like a whip through the silence. It was the kind of night where electricity and machines hold little power over the land and its people. It was perfect time for the guardian faerie to be sent out.
So, on this night the faerie fluttered down on her thin black wings, her whites narrowed as she stared at the building suspiciously. This could not possibly be the place, could it? Such beings could not live in the humble a home, could they?
Yet it would have been impossible for her to return and ask for corrections. Once again she would have to suffer for her superiors' mistakes. She sighed as she sunk lower in the sky and approached one of the windows cautiously. Peeking in made her feel guilty and perverted, but she quickly smothered the feelings and examined the room from the windowsill, using her large wings to balance herself perfectly.
Inside a figure laid under a mess of covers. When she closed her eyes and concentrated on smelling she caught a whiff of Shinigami power emitting heavily from the room. It seemed they had given her the correct instructions, for once. And so she began pulling roughly at the window, annoyed at humans for the fiftieth time that day for their ingenuity when there was no need for it. If humans weren't so greedy to begin with, they wouldn't need these heavy windows!
No appreciation for their guardians. None at all.
After several minutes of struggling—not counting the ones that she had spent blasting the window with curses and harmless firespells—she managed to open it far enough to slip under. Unfortunately, the window banged shut as soon as she was through, so she didn't have an escape route in a case things got ugly.
Which was a horrid mistake on her part, seeing as how she should have known from experience that when it came to dealing with humans and Shinigamis, trouble followed her like a lovesick teenage fangirl would follow an over-indulged male singer.
Then again, this faerie wasn't exactly notorious for planning ahead, so it shouldn't have surprised anyone that she went ahead without thinking. Either it was the fact she didn't want to waste time planning out an alternative escape route, or the way her fingers itched to pat the orange spikes protruding from under the sheets, but she landed softly on the pillow next to his ear.
Close up, his scent became nearly intoxicating for the small girl. The aroma curled around her like a smoke from the pipe of a caterpillar, sedating her momentarily. He smelt like flowers on the ground in summer, and like rain falling on the rooftops. Like girls dancing naked and tigers hunting prey. There was also the lingering odor of swords and blood and robes too black, and this mad the faerie sick with bad memories.
And even fainter, she could smell a Barbie dressed in plastic, and masks and makeup used to cover up too much truth. That must be the girl, she thought to herself.
"Kurosaki Ichigoooooo . . ." she whispered in a singsong voice. He didn't stir and she poked his earlobe roughly. She kept repeating his name tirelessly over and over, until her fingers got tired of poking the loose skin. So she climbed up the side of his head and sat down comfortably among the orange, shampoo and flower smelling spikes. She rubbed her hands lightly over his scalp and smiled as she heard him make a noise and shift in his sleep.
"You're so cute!" she squealed, and her wings trembled. "If only you weren't so big." She paused and then broke out in a fit of giggles. "Aika, you are one perverted woman!"
"You're an annoying one, too!" Said woman had no time to react before she found herself gripped in a large, warm, sweaty hand. Her wings were pressed roughly against her back and she felt herself disliking the silky feel of her wings against her bare back. She would have struggled, but she knew enough to know it was useless.
"Now you wake up, you useless dog!" In response he held her even tighter, and she gasped as the wind blew out of her lungs. She didn't try to speak again. Instead she stared at him stonily. Now that he was awake he was far more interesting to study.
His eyes are angry, suspicious, sad, full of unrelenting emotions that pull at one from all sides until one's emotional guts and sanity are splayed all over the walls in a which unpleasant manner. Aika felt an odd feeling poke her heart irritatingly, a sort of mother-hen sort of thing. Never having been one to like children very much, this feeling was rather rare for her and at first she thought she had reached a new level of disgust for humans.
"Just what are you? A Shinigami? They come pint-sized, too?" She glared at him, but didn't answer. Rude manners would get anywhere with her. Shaking her angrily, he repeated his questions "What are you?"
She felt her teeth rattle uncomfortably in her mouth, and she bit her tongue accidentally. She still adamantly refused to respond to his question, though. She imaged piles and piles of ice cream at home waiting for her once this little mission was over. This kept her mouth shut.
"Fine!" He relented as he threw her down onto his crumpled covers. She was extremely relieved—cute boy or not—not to have fallen onto his groin . . .
"You may be cute—for a human, mind you—but you're mean." She stuck her tongue out at the orange-haired boy childishly, and wriggled her wings at him shamelessly before fluttering up towards the ceiling. "And what is she, a skeleton in your closet? Queen Mab, you are hopeless." She flapped over to his closet door, and Ichigo—for that was the rude boy's name—was a little slow on the uptake. By the time he realized what the faerie was trying to do, she had already opened the door enough to slip though—large wings and all—and she had disappeared into the darkness of the closet.
He expected to hear a gasp of surprise, accompanied immediately after by a thump as the annoying faerie hits the wall—or door as may be the case. Instead he heard a scream of fright and found a girl clinging to his waist tightly. He looked down at said girl—more like woman, if he believed her vague statement about her age—and was surprised as to why she was hanging on to him.
The faerie watched the two of them from the ceiling with extreme amusement. Their scents dissolve into one another like an old animal carcass in soil and chocolate power in milk, to make something intoxicatingly beautiful. His flowers fell onto her own deep scent of clean winter snow, and sweet chocolate right out of the wrapper meeting soft, hungry lips. Of course, their weak human nostrils would never be able to make out such smells, and obviously they could not see what was right in front of their faces.
"I'm here on a mission," she declared loudly as soon as she was sure the two of them were listening. Ignoring the fact that the girl's face was still buried in the boy's chest, she continued, "Something evil is afoot, and I, Aika, infamously known to Shinigami, have been sent to you two to stop it!" She expected some sort of response. Nearly anything would have been acceptable.
Except for what they gave her of course.
The girl looked up at her briefly, only to squeak and push her head back down.
The boy cocked an eyebrow up at her and looked incredulous. "Yeah, I'm sure Shinigamis tremble in their shoes at the sight of you."
Her wings began fluttering angrily, and she pointed an especially long nail in his direction accusingly. "You don't want to see me angry, little boy!"
"Little!" he scoffed, still holding onto the girl, the faerie noticed haughtily. "You're one to talk!"
"I'll have you know, I knew this earth in the days when your kind was barely beginning and building dirty, polluted things out of sand with the blood and sweat of their slaves." She was beginning to get worked up and her whole body—small as it was—practically quivered in response. Her anger had a horrible, tangy reek to it, and it seemed to spread through the whole room so quickly and heavily that even the two humans on the bed seemed to sense it.
"I didn't think faeries were real! I thought all those stories about them were children stories!" The girl managed to get her words heard when she pulled away from Ichigo slightly. He looked down at her distraught face and almost laughed. This little creature scared the girl who looked large, terrifying skull creatures in the face fearlessly?
"They are children stories," the faerie cries indignantly. "You Shinigami think you're all-knowing. Please. Not of you is alive that remembers the time when our kinds lived together and lived simply, like the birds in the trees.
But you Shinigami liked to pretend to be powerful, to be knowledgeable, to be the knights in shining armor. Don't you remember the tale any longer? The real one, the true one? Apparently, not. So you created a balance to keep. We faeries didn't agree. Don't agree. So we left, and now you all think this balance is natural and that you are the heroes when you are really the dragons, hovering greedily over a hoard of lives."
By now the girl—whose name was Rukia, in the end—was looking up at the faerie, the look on her face a mix of fear and wonder. "What do you mean?"
But she wouldn't answer, this small creature with the years on her wings and nature in her veins.
"I am here to protect the two of you from a specific danger. I will not leave until this mission has been accomplished. This is a promise I make by the flower and the tree and the earth in its entirety." Ichigo and Rukia stared at the faerie in confusion and wonder and some soft, hidden bit of respect.
And so, they didn't live happily ever after, in fact, in the faerie's opinion, the two of them had barely begun to live to begin with. And there was worse to come—that's why she had come—so there wouldn't be happily any time soon.
And ever after? What was that anyway? Human words twisted to make pretty sounds, when any intelligent creature knew that happily ever after was a trick of the light, an illusion, a slip of the hand.
But she was a faerie, after all, and her profession was in the land where all those stories came from, slipping through the cracks and arriving in the mind of a young child. So, she thought as she watched the girl and the boy she was charged with protecting, why not give these simple creatures some semblance of the happily ever after all thins strive for so desperately?
You know, just for kicks.