A/N: Woah, I'm on a roll.
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3. Just a Cold
One fateful day, Rukia discovered that gigais can get sick, too.
It wasn't pleasant. Only a cold, confirmed Ichigo, but that didn't do much to make her stuffed nose and sore throat feel any better. At least her real shinigami form wasn't sick, so there was nothing to bother her during a fight.
But otherwise she spent most of her time in the real world in her gigai, and this cold was not pleasant. Not pleasant at all.
It wasn't like she hadn't gotten sick before; it was just that this cold was extra big and extra nasty and intent on making her miserable. She could swear it was making her die a slow painful death from the inside out, and then back again. She would say "noooo" at it a million times, and it just wouldn't listen, and make her cough in return. Stupid cold.
Ichigo knew that there were medicines that could temporarily stop the coughing or the sniffling - but he didn't want to risk her getting even sicker from the chemicals and substances in those medicines she would never have been exposed to.
He made her hot tea with lemon instead.
She liked that.
"That was good," she'd say every time he brought her a mugful to drink in bed (his bed, for the other beds in the clinic were full at the moment - or maybe because she wanted to stay in his familiar room). She would ask for another mugful, and another mugful, until he had to limit the number of mugfuls to five a day; otherwise the tea and lemon would run out in no time.
It wasn't that the tea was so amazingly good, though it did make her throat feel better. It was mostly that she liked to have him come upstairs and then be there, and wait for her to drink her tea. She liked the attention, she realized a little selfishly.
Most of the time he would leave her to sleep, and sometimes she did, but her coughing would keep her up, and occasionally it got so bad that Ichigo would run upstairs and tell her to resist the urge to cough, breathe slow, and drink this water, here. When it ceased, he would tell her to try to sleep some more, and she would nod wearily and huddle into the covers, knowing that he was by the bed sitting in a chair - watching over her. She warned him that staying so close might make him sick too, but he only shrugged and told her it didn't matter.
Ichigo slept on the sofa downstairs while she was sick. She protested madly the first evening, used to them being in the same room every night, but after a bit of awkward realization and silence (first, the closet was too small for him to sleep in; second, there was only one bed, and unless they wanted to... er), the matter was left alone.
When she was sick, he looked at her with a little bit of raw worry in his eyes that he tried to mask with a gruff voice and his regular scowl, which she saw right through.
He saw right through her tea scheme, too.
Once, when she threw up and nearly choked to death from a massive coughing fit in the middle of the night, he hugged her. Now that made her warm and happy. It set out a pure positive path to recovery, there and then.
His excuse was that his family would murder him if she didn't recover.
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Unfortunately, that hug meant a few deadly germs traveled over to Ichigo.
When she hopped out of bed a few days later, good and bright and healthy, Ichigo was effectively "dead" on the floor.
"See, I told you," she said sadly, drawing the covers up to his chin. He grumbled and told her to shut up, aka stop worrying, because he, too, could see the raw worry in her eyes.
She left him in peace for the most part - but she always had him on her mind (for she was a worrywart, secretly), and remembering how she felt when Ichigo would go check on her, she also scurried up at random intervals. If he was sleeping, she only peered in to reassure herself and then left; if he was awake, she hopped inside without an excuse and quietly seated herself beside the bed.
She wasn't sure what to make him. He was already taking the mysterious medicine he hadn't let her take (though it didn't seem to be doing much good for the most part), and when she asked him if he wanted hot tea with lemon, he sincerely refused. "I had enough of that darn tea when you were sick," he rasped. "If I drank it, I think I would get sicker."
Rukia didn't want that. So she made him some good old traditional porridge, steaming hot, and though it looked tasteless Ichigo had to admit that it was actually very nice. She swelled with pride and thanked him in her smirking, wordless way.
Some nights Rukia disappeared strangely from the household. Isshin and Karin had an idea of where she went, but only Ichigo knew she was out fighting hollows, alone. One night she returned slightly battered up, and that was the snapping of his thread. He tried to say sorry, that she shouldn't have to fight them alone, that he'd get better as soon as possible (except it was all in a jumble of panicky mixed up sentences). She physically covered his mouth with her hand and looked at him with a tight something that could only be described as no.
Then she loosened up, and told him in words that he needed to take his time getting better.
That didn't entirely satisfy him, but her gaze was so steady, so Rukia, that he sighed and said he understood. Her smile was worth it.
On his worst night of coughing, she stayed up all night and sat right beside him on the bed, comfortingly close. This time it was him who warned her not to come too close, through a spatter of coughs - but she told him proudly that she'd already had the cold once, so she wouldn't get it again, which was maddeningly true.
He was glad she stayed.
It was only after the whole sick business was done and over with that they both realized they hadn't quarreled once.
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A/N: I like this one.