A/N: I'm still alive, I promise! I want to say that the next chapter will be up sooner, but it probably won't, unfortunately. Adulting is hard, but I will do my best. Enjoy!

Monday

8:35 a.m.

Orihime quickly discovered that she had been wrong about the desk.

"Good to see everyone back," their teacher had greeted the class after the bell rang. "I hope you all enjoyed your break."

It was their first day back after summer vacation and the start of the fall semester. The summer had flown by unbelievably fast in a whirlwind of karate tournaments, visits to the hospital (in which Tatsuki had broken her arm just before moving on to the finals, costing her the championship), late night conversations, and several red bean buns.

"We have a new transfer student that I'll be introducing to you in a little bit," she continued, "so please wait patiently until then. But for now, please pass your homework to the front."

There was a buzz of excited whispers mingled with the sound of shuffling papers as students speculated over their new classmate. Orihime could hear Michiru and Tatsuki's hushed conversation in the row behind her, but had no desire to join in.

Instead, she glanced over at the empty desk a few rows over, where Rukia had previously sat as a student, then shifted her gaze to the desk beside it, where Ichigo sat by the window. Keigo was determinedly trying to get his attention from a few rows back and Ichigo was determinedly ignoring him, tapping the student's shoulder in front of him and handing him the growing pile of homework. He rested his head on his hand and stared out the window, bored.

Orihime remembered how Ichigo had looked that last day of school when he showed up suddenly after being absent for more than a week. He'd had a tense, miserable, yet determined look to him and he'd walked out of the building resolutely, head held high, as soon as that last bell rang.

She wondered what had happened in that short month to cause such a sudden change in his demeanor. Whatever had been the cause of such distress had obviously been resolved. At first, Orihime was sure it had something to do with Rukia's mysterious disappearance. They had both started playing truant at the same time after all.

But the girl was still gone, so that couldn't be it. Sometimes, she wondered if she had just dreamed everything.

Nevertheless, even though it wouldn't be Rukia sitting there, she had been wrong about the desk. She wondered how Ichigo felt about getting a new neighbor after he had bonded so quickly with the last one and she had disappeared so suddenly. Orihime wondered if his memories of her were still intact, or if she would get the same bemused stare she had gotten from the rest of her classmates should she approach him.

More than anything, she wondered if he knew what had happened to her. Maybe someday she would actually have the guts to ask him.

Through her daydreaming, she was vaguely aware of a door sliding open.

"Ah, here he is!" the teacher announced, her voice barely registering in Orihime's ears through her reverie. "Please come introduce yourself to the class."

She half expected Rukia to walk through those doors.

"Happy to!" a voice replied cheerfully, and Orihime's head snapped up. Her heart skipped a beat, then pounded heavily in her chest. She felt a sudden buzzing in her ears, effectively blocking out the new student's introduction. She didn't need to listen to it anyway—she already knew his name. And she didn't need to hear his explanation about why he had written his name backwards on the board—she already knew he was a complete weirdo.

But what she didn't know was why Shinji Hirako was suddenly in her classroom, sitting in Rukia's empty desk, introducing himself to Ichigo, sounding confident that they were going to be best friends.

Shinji Hirako, the new student? The universe was obviously playing a sick prank on her as some kind of punishment. Since when did Shinji care about school? He didn't even care whether or not she went to school. And if Kensei wasn't there to breathe down her neck about getting homework done, he definitely wouldn't be the one to take his place. He was so lazy, and as far as she could tell, cared more about having fun than being studious.

Yet there he was, just two rows over, diligently coping down formulas into his open notebook. He didn't turn and look at her from his new desk, even though they were sitting close enough for him to get away with a cheeky smirk in her direction. How unlike him.

Even with the threat of an upcoming test hanging over her, there was no possible way Orihime could pay attention to a 45-minute lecture on trigonometry. She was too busy screaming in her head. She risked peeking back over at Shinji, hoping the reason he had decided to intrude in her class would be written across his face, in only a language she could decipher. It was not.

Orihime laid her head on her desk and pulled her hair to cover her face. It was going to be a long, stressful day and she had no idea what was happening.

But she did know that there was going to be hell to pay later.

3:37 p.m.

To his credit, Shinji didn't try to talk to Orihime at school. Not that she gave him any opportunity to. She avoided him as much as possible during breaks between classes and during lunch time.

When Orihime was little, the vizard would take turns picking her up from school, and Shinji was one of her family members to volunteer for it more frequently. Orihime was deathly afraid that any moment, one of her classmates would put two and two together, jump up on a desk, point at Orihime, and accuse her of being related to such a weirdo, in which case she would promptly pray for the ground to swallow her whole. However, since it had been several years since Orihime was young enough to need someone to pick her up from school, no one pointed and shouted, and Orihime did not have to pray for such drastic measures. Even Tatsuki didn't seem to make the connection between this man in the classroom and the one she was sure to have seen waiting for her at the school entrance during their time in elementary school.

Besides, everyone was too distracted at his behavior to pay any attention to her. He was so obnoxious, and it was hard enough ignoring his stupid, blonde head while taking notes during a math lecture, let alone having to watch him loudly flirt with and get rejected by the other girls. Orihime tensed briefly when a boy tried to pull her into the conversation, but after a very short, pregnant pause in which she did not look up from her desk, Shinji distracted them with another stupid comment, and Orihime was safe.

At least he wasn't a complete idiot.

After the last bell rang, she had quickly scooped up her things, and darted out into the hall and to the safety of the classroom where the handicrafts club took place. She didn't always go, but there was no way she was running even the slightest risk of being seen walking home with her obnoxious family member who was now her new classmate.

She sat and chatted with Michiru while she struggled to both sew an arm back onto a pink stuffed rabbit and simultaneously steer the conversation away from the topic of their exciting new classmate. She failed royally at both.

After fifteen minutes of frustration and pricking her thumb at least three times, she set down her needle and glanced around. The Ishida boy sat aloof at a desk in the corner, as he typically was during these club meetings. He was reading a book and tuning out the idle chatter that buzzed about the room, most of it about Shinji. Orihime had heard from Michiru that he came religiously every day, but rarely participated, and only spoke when spoken to. Still, he was the most talented member in the club and her frustration at not being able to sew the stupid thing together negated any shyness she felt about approaching him.

Orihime stood up and walked over to him, silently proffering her rabbit and its dismembered arm. He stared at her wordlessly, accepted the doll, and reattached the limb with deft movements almost too fast for her to follow. He finished in moments, the doll back in her possession almost as soon as he had taken it. She thanked him politely, but sincerely, to which he responded by picking up his book and resuming reading, giving her only the slightest of nods.

Uryu watched her as she walked away. He lowered the book he had been reading, a German translation of essays about trigonometry, and listened with interest as Orihime tried to carefully and unsuccessfully change the topic of conversation by going on tangents, which she seemed to be very good at. Nevertheless, it appeared as if her friend could only be distracted for so long.

It seemed that the Orihime girl was smarter than she looked after all. Uryu was impressed that she had managed to go her entire life without letting a single soul in on her secret, even her closest friends. How stressful it must have been for one of them to suddenly show up out of the blue without telling her beforehand. Her panicked reaction upon seeing that man told him she had no idea he would be there, after all. Or maybe it was less that she was smart and more that her friends were oblivious. Orihime's erratic, nervous behavior throughout the entire day was blatantly obvious to him, yet no one else seemed to notice.

Uryu knew about Orihime's family, of course. He knew that they lived together on the edge of town (though he had personally never seen their place of residence), that they were soul reapers who had probably defected (it seemed that they couldn't be trusted even by their own kind), and that several years ago, Orihime had survived an attack from a particularly vicious hollow who made a den in a vacant house in town. Uryu would have gone to take care of it himself much earlier if it had not been so clever at hiding its spiritual pressure.

He briefly pondered over Orihime's relationship with that blonde-haired clown from earlier. He didn't hold it against her that she was living with soul reapers—she probably didn't know any better. And she was most likely going through some kind of training with them to improve her spiritual pressure that was so faint, he had only just noticed it this year. If it really was training, it didn't seem to be going very well.

He turned his attention back to his book, blocking out the idle chatter once more.

Honestly, he didn't really care.

7:26 p.m.

Michiru had finally gotten the topic of Shinji out of her system, to Orihime's relief.

The two were sprawled on the floor of Michiru's bedroom, halfheartedly studying their notes from the math lesson earlier that day.

"I give up," Michiru announced, slamming her notebook shut and tossing it across the room. "I accept failure. I'm quitting school and becoming a nun."

Orihime merely stared at her notes (that she had copied from Michiru later), her brow furrowed. She was having as much success in her studying as her friend was. They both looked up as the door suddenly opened.

"Orihime," Michiru's mom began after lightly knocking on the door she had already cracked open, "Your sister is here to get you. Why don't you pack up your things and I'll get you some sweets for the road. Does she go to Karakura High School? I don't recognize her uniform."

There was only one person that could be. Orihime started shoving her things back into her bag.

"No, she goes to a school nearby," she answered with a cheerfulness that she didn't feel. "No need for the sweets, Mrs. Ogawa. I eat too much as it is."

She forced herself to wait patiently as Michiru walked her to the door. She stepped outside and saw Lisa's usual serious face, this time even more solemn.

Something was wrong.

7:31 p.m.

Uryu could faintly sense Orihime's spiritual pressure, now almost completely overshadowed by another's. The two were quickly moving in the opposite direction from him, towards the edge of town. It was for the best, he thought, as he turned back around to face the massive, grotesque looking menos in front of him.

A hollow of this level may have been a problem for him even a month ago, but he had trained relentlessly since then. Every day since he had been cut down in the middle of the night by those soul reapers and left to die in the pouring rain.

That wouldn't happen again.

Uryu despised soul reapers. The Kurosaki kid wasn't so bad, though he still thought he was pretty irritating. Still, he didn't hate him, and maybe that was what had brought him that night toting a plastic bag full of nothing but lame excuses for why he was on that particular street at two in the morning.

Or maybe it was the promise of the possibility to humiliate a couple of soul reapers.

But he had miscalculated, and had paid dearly. Kurosaki had gotten it even worse though, it seemed, when his powers had been cut from him and that new soul reaper girl at school Rukia had uttered those words that seemed to cut even deeper.

When Kurosaki and Yasutora left to venture into the depths of the Soul Society to find a way to drag her back, he found himself going with them, albeit for his own reasons that had nothing to do with playing savior. He'd had his own business to take care of there.

A single arrow left the hollow in front of him howling in rage and disintegrating in an instant.

He hated soul reapers. But he hated hollows even more. Heaven forbid the two ever combined into one being he would despise that creature with every inch of himself.

Thank god that wasn't possible.