This fic is rated R because of language, violence, and sensuality. If any of the aforementioned offends you, please do not read.

Thank you to all my reviewers. I read everything you guys write to me and it makes me really happy :-D

I promised to update this today for two of my pals over at Bleach Forums, so if any of you are wondering why the quick update...well yeah hehehe ;-p

Review if you like. No flames, please.

kaerichi
Chapter 7

Ichigo gave a grunt of disgust as he dragged a rather heavy body down the corridor and tossed it in the nearest cell. The body flopped against the wall and made no other movement. The orange-haired hunter wiped his sweating brow before closing the door, sealing it with a code, and surveying the pitiful form for a few seconds before cursing and stalking off.

He had been out on a raid mission all night – most of it had just been surveillance until around five in the morning, and then finally he had thought it all right to move in, and then he'd surprised some vamps, and then that stupid fucking idiot had…!

Against the cold metal, his footsteps were hard and he stormed further down the corridor, stopping in front of one unimpressive door and punching in (literally) the code.

The vampire was there, sitting in her cell. He couldn't see her face because her hood was pulled over. Ichigo walked right up and undid the codes to get the door open, hardly waiting for it to pull back all the way before climbing inside and pulling the front of the vamp's hood to get her closer to him.

The hood abruptly fell back and her eyes blinked open, her first look a mix between surprise and wariness, but he didn't care about that.

"Tell me," he said, "do you know a vampire named Kurotsuchi Mayuri?"

"Yes," she replied, and was about to say something else, but he cut her off.

"Would he have powers to manipulate the human mind like you do?"

"What do you mean by manipulate?" she looked annoyed at him again. "I don't manipulate. Who do you think I am, Harry Potter? The only reason that you think my mind aura looks like a so-called spell to you is because it just places your mind in a sense of relief – one where you can't feel your body."

"So this Kurotsuchi freak wouldn't be able to, say, take control of a human's mind and make them do things they wouldn't, right?"

"No. Such a sad day for you to run into that "freak," as appropriately termed as that word for him is," she smirked. "And in any case, you look like you ran into an angry food processor. I didn't think Mayuri was that strong…or did you just trip over your shoelaces and he landed a lucky strike?"

"Shut up…" he replied unenthusiastically, "it's just that…fuck, I was on a raid all night, and then, near the end, I run into all these freaks in a building, and then the leader stays and one of my own unit members turn on me!"

"Ah…a traitor in the ranks, hm? Not too loyal." She seemed amused by the thought.

"Fuckin' Asano…I should've known that it was never his style to lie down and take it," Ichigo muttered, half to himself.

"So what the hell happened to you anyway?"

"I faced off against this leader and then Asano jumped me! Fuckin' pinned my arms from the back while that bloodsucker attacked me," he spat in spiteful temper. "Stupid jackass…I turned to the side so that Kurotsuchi knocked him away from me, kicked Asano where it counts, and then blasted off that fucking bloodsucker's head." He wiped at the bit of blood that had escaped his mouth during all his talking, the result of a cut lip.

"Hn. Well, can't exactly say I'm sorry to see Mayuri go. He was a bit of a pain." She looked at him then, most likely taking in all his injuries.

He felt worse than dog shit. His lip wasn't busted (but pretty close to it), he had four long slashes running down his right temple to nose, the skin just under his left eye was bruised purple, and there were various smaller cuts on his arms and neck.

"Well, if you're obviously feeling so bad, why did you come here?'

"Well, duh, I had to find out if Asano was being controlled or not, didn't I? Although a sick little twisted part of me is satisfied that he wasn't, so that I can now beat him to shit without worrying about getting reprimanded for "actions unbecoming of a captain" and all that fuckin' jazz," he said, in a mock-Yoruichi tone.

"You actually thought that Mayuri could be controlling Asano Keigo?" Rukia laughed. "That's probably the highest compliment someone ever paid the freak. He's just a wannabe elite who toyed around with some weird stuff, thinking he'd use human science against us and make himself more powerful. I don't think so."

They sat in silence for a while.

"I'm hungry."

"…you're what?"

"I'm hungry."

"Oh…here then." He offered her his wrist.

"Not for blood, you idiot. If I took any more of your blood you'd probably collapse and die and then they'd really find reason to cut my heart out."

"For what, then? Can't be human food."

"Of course human food; what else would I eat? Grass?"

"But, vampires don't–"

"Didn't I just tell you the other day to stop acting as if you know every damn thing about vampires?"

"You mean you eat human food?"

She rolled her eyes.

"I thought you could survive on just blood!"

"I can. But I'd probably need to take blood every day for that."

Ichigo sat, digesting the newest information presented. "Okay, fine…I'll go get you food," he said as he got up. The building was practically a self-serving small town, what with their own school (karate, fencing, and all that good stuff), practice arenas, shooting ranges, kitchens, apartments, laundry, manufacturing plant (mostly for weapons), and of course, other places only the high-level hunters knew about.

"And while you're at it, go fix your face, would you?" Rukia said, her eyes off to side before turning to his. "It's horrible to look at a monster right now."

He grumbled about her comment as he climbed out, but inwardly was thinking that she did care about how he looked, after all.

After cleaning up his face, reporting his success back to Ichimaru, and grabbing some miso soup and grilled mackerel from the kitchen – how the hell was he supposed to know what she liked to eat? – Ichigo headed back.

He sat across from her and watched as she ate in silence, noticing the size of her hands, pale and delicate. They were almost too slight to be a vampire's.

Come to think of it, this vampire was a paradox in so many ways. Not only did she have those weird wings, she didn't like to kill, her power was absolutely crazy, and there was no way in hell she was full Japanese. Not with those eyes.

"You aren't full Japanese, are you?" he tossed out casually, watching as she abruptly stopped chewing and swallowed whatever was in her mouth. The hand holding her chopsticks lowered as her face turned up to his.

"No, I wasn't."

No surprise there. "What else, then?"

He could tell by the way her face tightened, by the look in her eyes as she stared at some point directly below his chin, that she wasn't planning on answering his question any time soon. The chopsticks in her hand – wooden ones – broke in half.

"All right, all right, I get it…you don't have to answer."

She put the box down. There was still a little bit of fish remaining, but Ichigo figured that she was finished. Silence descended.

"So…what do you like to do? Or used to do, anyway."

"Why do you give a damn?" she asked him, staring at him with very straightforward Yoruichi-esque eyes. The answering question came so quickly after his that Ichigo had the feeling that she'd thought about this before.

But all the same, he fumbled for an answer. "I…I don't know. Just curious."

He half-expected that she would reply with a glare and some remark along the lines of "well, be less curious and leave me the fuck alone." Therefore, when she broke her gaze and looked down at her hands, gently playing with the edge of her robe, he was surprised. And he was even more surprised when she said, "…reading."

"What?"

"Reading. I like to read."

"O – oh yeah? Me too," he said, trying to think of a clever comeback. Her misjudged response had caught him off guard.

"And watching old movies."

"Old movies?"

"The black-and-white tales of samurai."

"Did you know any?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"The last of the true samurai were long dead by the time I was born."

Ah. That gave him some insight as to how old she really was. And if what she just said was true, then she couldn't have been that old.

Interesting, very interesting. She couldn't have been more than 250 years old. That was way young for a vampire, especially one of her stature. Ichigo reached up to scratch his cheek and winced as his fingers scraped the bruise.

Rukia watched before coming closer, moving somewhat clumsily due to her legs being asleep, stopping right in front of him. He was about to panic and flash out his dagger, thinking she meant him harm (after all he was risking a lot being in there with no guards), but she simply placed the pads of her fingers on his cheek.

Wait, what? It didn't hurt.

"Quiet," she said, perhaps seeing the confusion in his eyes. There was warmth at his cheek – it grew very warm, almost hot, and when she pulled her hand away, the warmth lingered like sunlight on a spring morning. The other side received the same treatment.

Ichigo touched his cheek and looked at his reflection in one of the metal bars of the cell. The four scratches on his cheek were gone, as was the bruise. He turned back to the vampire. "You healed it? How? I thought…"

To his eyes, she appeared tired. She was slumping back against the wall, back in her original spot, and her eyes were a little softer than he'd ever seen them. But she replied, "Not all vampires can heal…and besides, I could tell Mayuri gave you those scratches on your cheek. He's dealt with all sorts of scientific things and there was a strange aura coming from the wound, so before it could turn into something bad I healed it."

Ichigo let the question of how she could still use her aura slide. "You mean it was dangerous?"

"Probably. It wasn't his aura, so it wouldn't have turned you into a vampire, but would have done something else. Killed you, most likely."

"And you healed it," he said. There was that funny feeling again, bordering gratitude – that was a strong word – and something else that he couldn't quite place.

Well, he didn't want to place it. He didn't need to start feeling as if he owed something to this vampire.

"It might have come off you and affected me," she said in an offhand tone, eyes not looking at him. "I just didn't want to deal with it. Mayuri would laugh his ass off if he ever found out that he'd killed me by just an extension of his poison."

"Huh, that so…" Ichigo yawned. The yawn was a reminder of just how tired he really was, having been up most of the night with little sleep the day before. The muscles in his legs were aching in protest just from being straightened. "Well anyway," he said, "I gotta go, maybe I'll come back tomorrow, but since I just came back from a mission I need sleep. You understand."

She said nothing, but he was accustomed to that from her anyway – and so got to his feet and climbed out, taking the plate of remaining food with him. Maybe if he had looked back, he would have seen that the vampire watched him for quite a long time.

"So, you have learned all this, Kurosaki-san?"

He nodded to Yoruichi, trying not to show how tired he really was. The surge of fury caused by Keigo's betrayal had kept him alive earlier; now all he wanted to do was sink into a bed. He had already explained about the situation and all the things he'd learned so far.

"Well, well, this is certainly going better than we expected, hm, Shihouin-san?" Ichimaru said, leaning back in the chair to look up at her face. "Kurosaki-kun is doing a very good job of getting information."

She nodded at him, then turned back to Ichigo. "You've been doing very well, Kurosaki-san, but before you go, I should tell you something."

"Yes, Shihouin-san?"

"You see, the vampires recently called a meeting – a temporary truce – and we met to discuss certain things. Yes, I know it sounds absurd," she added, at his look, "but I've already gone to the meeting and there was no bloodshed. This is why I was not present the other day when you were giving Ichimaru-san your information."

"A meeting?"

"Yes. And quite surprisingly, it was about your vampire."

Suddenly he wasn't so tired any more.

After he had finished a relatively easy mission the next day, Ichigo came to his vampire's cell. With him he had a few books.

She looked at him strangely, wondering what he brought them for; well, that should have been obvious.

"Here, they're for you."

She took them after hesitating. "I…"

"You like to read, right? I didn't know what kind of books, so I, uh, kinda brought a little of everything."

She shuffled through them. "All About Spain? 101 Ways to Plant a Healthy Garden? Money Matters?" She raised an eyebrow at him. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?"

"Well, you mentioned Harry Potter the other day," he flushed, "and even if you don't like the story, at least the book's thick enough to last a few days!"

He sat down after closing the door, though it didn't lock. "They're all books that I took from my family, so if their choice of books doesn't coincide with yours, then deal with it. My younger sis likes all kind of fiction, so the wizard book was probably hers."

"Hm…" she said, examining the books more in detail, and not really listening to him.

"So who was your favorite old-time samurai star?"

It wasn't a personal question, but she looked up at him and put the books down before answering. "Maybe…Okawa Hashizo…with all his makeup on, he was good-looking, especially in that last remake of Chushingura they did."

"Aa, Okawa? My dad liked him and Yoshinaga Sayuri, was always comparing her to my mother…" He trailed off into a long explanation of how his father had always said he'd never find a woman to marry cuter than Yoshinaga, but had fallen head over heels for his mother and the rest had been history. Rukia mostly listened.

"So you mean, if your parents never had a formal ceremony, they eloped?"

"Yup. See, my mom's father didn't want her marrying some Japanese dude and settling here, so she just packed up and left her family home. And then she moved in with dad for about a year – he was still in school, so they really had to struggle for a while. And then my dad got his PhD and then mom got pregnant with me, and then yeah…that pretty much ends it."

She gave him a strange look, a compromise between laughing and trying to hold it back. Her face was the least serious that he'd ever seen.

He came back the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that, and there were days when he would look into her eyes and just feel so totally at ease, and then she would take blood from his wrist – and then there were the days when he just brought her human food and they chatted in the company of each other. The things they talked about weren't important, the kind of trivial information that one would forget within seconds of departure.

It soon became as simple for him to see her as it was like eating in the morning – he didn't think about it, he just did. From that one simple subject of what she liked to read, he would ask questions, and learned she liked cucumbers and bunny rabbits, that her age was closer to 150 than 200, and that she'd always wanted to learn karate.

"Why didn't you?" he asked. "You have all the time in the world."

"I'm busy," she'd replied vaguely back. "Especially in this day and age, when things aren't as simple as they were before."

He reported everything that he learned, down to the smallest newest piece of information about her, to Ichimaru and Yoruichi. They listened impassively and often congratulated him on his work. He nodded and accepted the praise, thankful that they had closed everyone off from sector 13-1 but him.

"For the last time, no. We are not handing over the vampire to anyone. I do not care if you butcher my hunters; if that be the price we pay to keep her, then so be it."

Yoruichi's eyes left Urahara's as she stood up and gathered her robe about her. "I do not want any more meetings. This is to be the last. If you have something to say, then you should well say it now before we never meet again."

Urahara's eyes bored into hers; she could feel it. "We want her around," he said softly, dangerously. "If you are not to return her, then we will have no choice but to attack. This could escalate our war past whatever level of bloodshed we have already attained. Is that really what you want, Shihouin Yoruichi?"

She paused from walking away. "What I want is to keep her. If this vampire is to be the rope between two sides of a tug-of-war, then I swear as I live, I will fight to pull. I will not give her up. Do not underestimate the hunters." And she swept out.

tsuzuku