A/N: Thanks for all the nice little things you could possibly do to this fic, so here's number two! Typed speedily while waiting for a Saturday language class to commence and edited while I'm gorging myself silly with mooncakes and Chinese tea. Sheesh. Enjoy, and happy Mid-Autumn Festival to all. :)
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Chapter Two
You know those kids who enjoy skidding past you at insane speeds in shopping malls in their impeccable roller shoes, and sometimes in your tragic lack of fortune they skate right over your toes, leaving those poor flesh and bone limbs dangling by the scruff of their joints? Those insolent kids giggle as though it is the most natural activity in the whole damn world, and you wonder whatever happened to Mr. Manners and Miss Consideration. Then you turn around to sneer at them with your best Hannibal Lecter impersonation, and those silly mini people make faces at you for laughs. Deep down inside you mock them for being clueless runts. You stalk down the path toward them, looking to consume their brains in a variety of criminal methods, and attempting to yank those horrid inventions off their feet and...! You wind up being chased by their pissed off mothers and badgered by their fathers' hairy fists.
Oddly so, this is the mindboggling situation at hand. Make a few changes and we're good to go. Pissed off mother – Inoue. Father – Ishida. Hairy fists – pins and needles. Then swap those giggly kids with an ignorant one giving you an obscenely blank look whenever you sharply turn on your heels to scare him into immobility. And then you blame yourself for even harboring thoughts of berating him for being a massive annoyance, and you progressively feel like you've sealed a pact with the angels and their melodious harps when he blinks, and blinks, and blinks at you, thereby proclaiming his wide eyed innocence like a row of glittery Christmas lights. Blink flash blink. Flash blink flash. It feels like some melodramatic Precious Moments advertisement, forcing you to pick up the phone immediately and purchase their interminable supply of greeting cards. Of course I scoff at it! What am I? An eighty year old granny knitting horrendously mismatched wool sweaters in a rocking chair? And then I completely subscribe to it. I'm such a champion of life that it leaves me in tears just by thinking about it.
Damn kid.
Damn the kid named Ulquiorra Schiffer.
Damn the makeshift black whatever Ishida made for him from the remnants we found. It resembles a rice sack and despite the overwhelming urge to point it out I don't. I hear Ishida packs a mean punch. He'd make for an ideal father in the pervasive shopping mall phenomenon depicted above.
Anyhow, damn the kid and his reckless acceleration. Previously he was trailing behind me quietly, and out of the godforsaken blue he disappeared when I spun around in my most spine-chilling smile, whizzing past me, and reappeared in the sky. And what was a peaceful traveling session plunged straight down into hellish grounds. He began to discover his unnerving speed and zipped about tirelessly. In fact he's so blindingly fast that he doesn't see where he's going, not to mention he obviously doesn't know where he's heading for, and when you don't know the directions you either ask or walk behind someone who does. You don't blaze ahead of everyone else – I'm nowhere his equal yet – and when you finally realize that you are anything but a GPS device, you simply don't dash backwards until you knock into something. That's not very proper of a kid, isn't it? And the rest don't get it; it is only I. It is only me. They don't understand. Battles after battles, with each opponent proudly declaring to dice me into numerous cubes and claim victory, and now that's temporarily done and dusted with, all I have is a kid who rams into me continuously. I know, I'm a champion of life. Sod it. Sod the tiny piece's powerful Sonido. And I ain't whining.
Someone ought to tell him to turn it down several notches. Forget it. He should just stop moving altogether. I need obedience. I need names except mine. But who can I call upon?
Inoue? She'll digress horribly and perhaps nag (I swear kids bring out the worst in her) and stuff some inedible food (I'm not sure if you can exactly call them that) down his throat. Potential manslaughter. She already has done her share by commenting he's quicker than Yachiru, who for a child is already donning a wig plucked from bits of cotton candy. I kid, I kid. Kenpachi's still somewhere out here. I hope he's done lopping off the praying mantis' arms that sprouts out at a disgusting rate.
Ishida? He would probably whip out diagrams and bar charts detailing every excessively tedious bullet point on PowerPoint slides. He's a bore. But a good bore no less. Maybe his boring explanation would send the Sonido fan into some much needed sleep. Not for the likes of that tiny fellow though.
So we're back to Ulquiorra after all. Damn his teeny-weeny piece of a self; it's getting increasingly difficult to not peek at him and burst into heartening guffaws. What was a fearsome and analytical warrior is now reduced to a pipsqueak bopping around in a rice sack, and appears almost adorable enough to pinch and tickle and pull funny faces at.
Who else is there to blame? Oh!
Damn Aizen for ruining everything. Perhaps I could start up a business in Soul Society after the war of both worlds has come to a closure, and set up help desks for people whose lives have been sadly altered by the mere mention of Aizen's existence. It would rake in a mountain of cash. This pesky, tiny brat here can be the poster child. He epitomizes Murphy's Law to the point where ridiculousness ain't apt no more. He deserves a brand new Law to himself. Say, Schiffer's Law, where everything that could go wrong definitely goes wrong, and topping that, it's a peculiar type of wrong that leaves you shrunk and bewildered and exceptionally retarded. The worst kind of wrongs. Maybe it's my fault that I whacked him too hard on the head.
I feel an abrupt jolt of revitalization; Ulquiorra is walking beside me like a normal kid, and I refrain from poking at his sides. And he blurs away in parallel strobes of light before I could stick a hand out. Then it's back to the graceful vilification of people around me.
Damn Inoue for being taken away to Las Noches.
Damn Rukia for appearing that fateful night.
Damn women in general.
Damn Ishida for swaying the vote against my favor – the sensible option of the two.
Damn Kon. I want to phone home and inquire about the status of my family – I heard they've been placed under some sleeping spell, so no one would pick up my call anyway.
Damn these dead people.
Damn me, for being talked into this implausible affair of not deserting him and not having him enjoy his sweet deserts of languishing in the vast expanse of sand called a desert. That sounds somewhat cruel, but I'm no Aizen nor do we share the slightest trace of affiliation – other than sharing contact with his zanpakutou. That's me at the end of it, blood pouring out in copious amounts, and he wielding it, tricking naïve and wizened souls alike with sheer pomposity. He is one who takes self-aggrandizement to otherworldly levels, and sees the incessant need to conquer all in sight because one place alone can't quite house his ego.
In brevity, that's a second 'Damn you!' to Aizen. I'm sure everyone would throw grenades at him if possible. That is if he doesn't hypnotize us into dumping the chewed off grenades into our own mouths. Hence the safest alternative would be to cuss at him from an endless distance.
"Kurosaki-kun!" one of the damned ones shouts.
I pretend not to hear and continue dishing out practical advice to a circus of fools parading in my mind.
"Kurosaki-kun! Ulquiorra's coming through!" the damned one yells. "Kuro-"
"Just let him go, Inoue. He can go anywhere he wants, except near me!" I yell back, annoyed, and just in time for something tiny to knock a double whammy into the back of my knees, making me keel over on the spot. I look pretty much a legless worm squirming along the cold sand grains, and angrily scan the precinct for the sole culprit.
"Oi brat!" I narrow my eyes at Ulquiorra, who is sufficiently honest to not dash away in guilt. He however remains as chatty as a block of wood. His huge green eyes blink once, then twice. His bottom lip twitches for a moment, and he actually has the gall to seem...amused?
"Say sorry, you nasty kid," I growl threateningly. "This is the fifteenth time already!"
Ulquiorra's eyes grow larger in disbelief, and his stubby fingers shoot up in some sort of calculation that clearly evades me. "It's only the thirteenth time."
You don't get convicted for pulling a homicide on kids here in the Spiritual Realm, do you? Even if they are technically not kids to begin with? Suddenly Inoue's legendary culinary abilities whet my appetite.
"Look brat," I say, with all the logical, sensible maturity I can muster, "when you do something that incurs another person's wrath, you apologize. Regardless whether that person hints at it or not."
"Kurosaki, don't talk to the child like that," Ishida pipes in. "He can't understand."
"Then what?" I glower at the bespectacled teen. "Mollycoddle him and make baby sounds?"
"Leave that to me," Inoue interjects. "Kurosaki-kun, you're too strict with him!"
"No," says the pestilential kid. "I'm not an infant."
"See?" I pat his diminutive back in triumph. "Even the brat himself knows!"
Inoue's watery gray orbs suddenly turn to goo, and in my befuddlement she begins to make a series of notes, comprised entirely of meaningless syllables. "Awww..."
Ishida pushes his spectacles up with a lithe finger and smiles wryly. "That's quite a sight, Kurosaki."
"What sight, Four Eyes?" I demand, failing to notice my arm is now looped around Ulquiorra's small shoulders.
"I always knew you have a thing for little children, Kurosaki-kun," Inoue makes yet another absolutely unnecessary comment. She then gazes at me with fish eyes, slippery and emotive. Women.
"You have a heavy arm, Kurosaki," an infantile voice creeps in, and the mysteriously debatable consensus at last connect with my senses. I, Kurosaki Ichigo, self-proclaimed enemy of Espadas United and righter of all things wrong, am currently engaged in a Precious Moments snapshot with a vile little snot who has been consistently left out of Santa's Annual List. Yes, that damn kid! He appreciates nothing – not even a comforting arm round his shuddering self, doesn't he? As Cuatro Espada hours ago, and as a bothersome prat with espionage tendencies now.
"Didn't Aizen and his traitorous ilk teach you about the ways of life?" I say snidely, to everyone's badly disguised horror.
"You said the 'A' word!" Inoue frowns mildly.
Meanwhile, Ishida's frown is so discernible that it could have been a perpetual scar. "Didn't we agree not to breathe a word of 'A' until we get to Soul Society?"
"Aizen who?" asks Ulquiorra, his childishly curt vocals cutting through the noise. He sounds rude; he doesn't. But at least he doesn't sound as subservient as we reckon him to be. Formalities as Aizen's reliable henchman are cast away. We heave a massive sigh of relief; we shouldn't. When a kid is as well-behaved as a potential street ruffian is when you roll up your sleeves and a thick wad of newspaper, and send it to the kid's bottom. But Ulquiorra Schiffer is an abnormal being of tiny proportions. Hence the opposite must definitely apply to him, thus removing his abnormalities and making him a wee bit normal.
"Well, he's a candyman!" I grin, wanting to test his reaction further. "You run when you see him, get it? Away, not toward. If he comes close enough with an insatiable lolly, you bite his hand off, grab the lolly and cero him in the nuts. Understand?"
Ulquiorra blinks at me; his understanding is as crystalline as a muddy swamp. "Cero? Candyman? Run away? Insatiable?"
"Hey Kurosaki. Quit confusing him further," Ishida remarks. "He doesn't remember a thing."
"He might be feigning it!" I cross my arms. One must always exercise caution when in the presence of enemies. Their shapes and sizes and ages bear no percussion. Even though this tiny piece, who has just Sonido-ed into the overextending stretches of sand, looks very much like a human soul – his bone mask has completely vanished, leaving behind a horn of the shortest ever imaginable length. It is so inconspicuous that it may have as well grown inwards. It makes him bear semblance to some Halloween project gone wrong, and yet he looks too...I hate to admit it, guileless, to be planted in the same sentence as something as devilish as said festival. Not to mention his very hollow hole located at the larynx closed up. There is no evidence of his previous Hollow existence, save for the tiny horn atop his equally tiny head.
"Obviously," Ishida rolls his eyes. I resist the urge to roll mine too.
"Hush, the both of you!" Inoue chastises. "He looks like he's going to cry."
"You've been repeating the exact same sentence since the day those teal lines are formed," I mutter, not caring if anyone hears me or otherwise. "He is, and was, and will always be going to cry. Just on the verge of tears because he's that melancholic naturally and he's a tiny piece now, so his tear ducts must, without further consideration, be tiny too. Watch out as tears spil-OW!" I am left clutching my shin as the damn perpetrator of domestic violence acts again. Damn kid. I retract whatever positive statements I have earlier made about this tiny bozo. It's also time to restart my mental seminar of people to blame.
"Kurosaki-kun, why do you have to be so mean?" Inoue sobs. No she says it calmly. No she says it calmly with a reproachful stare. "Is it because he was an Espada? But so was Nel-san."
It's a struggle to delve into the origin of her thoughts. A hopeless struggle at that, therefore I shan't bother.
"If meanness is a disease then Kurosaki is a natural carrier," says the King of Needles and Threads. He rubs his chin in some wise introspection, and Inoue smiles. I feel nothing but frustration lumped together with exhaustion.
"Get lost, brat," I scowl at Ulquiorra. "Do it again and I'll bury your pathetic mug in the sands!"
He stares at me, green eyes flashing owlishly, dark lips set in a petulant line, and promptly zooms off like a crisply fired missile.
And so comes the bunch of merrymakers and a champion of the world, tossing confetti, blowing french horns and a-marching into town.