Chapter 12: Truth

Tatsuki, now in her own clothing, pounded on the door to the Kurosaki residence. It was quickly answered by Karin, who looked up in aloof boredom. "Oh. Hey, Tatsuki."

"Uh, hi Karin. Is Ichigo home…?" She managed not to sound angry to the younger girl, telling herself it was just Ichigo she was pissed off at.

"Yeah. He's still in bed."

"Ha!" Tatsuki smirked, walking inside. "Figures. He'd be one to sleep in until noon. How lazy!"

"Well," Karin said, closing the door and following. "He was out pretty late last night."

"Oh, really? Where was he?" Ichigo, after all, wasn't really one to go out. Much less stay out late.

Now Karin looked a little anxious, though she hid it rather well. "You should ask him."

With that, the young girl turned and left, leaving Tatsuki standing at Ichigo's door. As soon as Karin was gone she felt her anger roar back to life, shooting up like flames around her. She was going to kill Ichigo.

Without knocking, she turned the door handle, about to burst into his room. She barely caught the sounds of him and a feminine voice- Rukia's?- arguing.

"Get out of my bed, shorty! What if someone comes in here?!"

"Oh, shut up! Just let me do this, you idiot!"

"Get your hands off of me, Rukia! Just let it be!"

"I'm trying to make you feel better!"

With that, Tatsuki threw the door in, loudly, stomping into the room. She was pissed as hell, to say the least. She saw Rukia, straddling Ichigo, holding bandages up to his head. A small trickle of blood fell from his hairline, dripping down his face and onto Rukia's lap. It was obvious that the female shinigami was unaware of what a position she was in, only intent on fixing up Ichigo's wounds.

Ichigo knew what it looked like. "I swear, this is not-"

Tatsuki couldn't have cared less. "Ichigo, you stupid idiot! What the hell have you been doing this whole time?! Are you that stupid?! What, you think no one was going to catch on?!"

Evidentially, Ichigo thought they were still talking about Rukia and him. "It's not like that!" He roared, blushing madly, pushing a very confused Rukia off his lap to stand. "I-"

"Not that!" Tatsuki shouted, waving it away. "I'm talking about Orihime!"

Then there was silence.

"Oh." Ichigo sat back on his bed, not noticing the glare Rukia shot him for pushing her off of him so roughly. She came up behind him and started bandaging his head from behind, which he didn't protest to at all. He actually didn't seem to notice, like she was some sort of constant in his life, as usual as air. "… Why don't you sit down?"

"Sit down?! SIT DOWN?!" Tatsuki took a step forward, slamming her fist into the side of Ichigo's head. He flew down on the bed, clearly having not seen the attack coming.

"Argh! What the hell Tatsuki?!"

"I just finished bandaging your head, baka!" Rukia snapped at him. "You can't even dodge a simple punch? How have you survived this long?!"

"Can it, Rukia!" He growled at her, rubbing his cheek. She sat back in his bed with a huff, crossing her arms and glaring. Ichigo turned back to Tatsuki, who was still seething. "What is your problem?"

"I'm done playing games, Ichigo." She yanked his desk chair out into the middle of the room, sitting down and crossing her legs under her and her arms over her torso. "So start talking."

"…What are you talking about?"

Thinking quickly, trying to come up with something that would make her seem more knowledgeable about it all than she was, she came up with a pretty convincing sentence. "I don't know, Ichigo, what do you think I'm talking about? Surely not the fact that you run around in black, swinging around a huge sword, looking for monsters. And of course not about Orihime's disappearance, right after those freaks showed up in the park, wearing white robes and bones on their faces. Not about any of your group's little powers. Of course not!" She finished off her speech with another glare, hoping he got just how extremely livid she was.

Now Ichigo's face dropped. "Damn." He cursed, his fists clenching in the sheets. "Isn't there anyone in this town who doesn't know about shinigami?" He looked back at Rukia, glaring.

"It's not my fault your reiatsu is so out of control!" She intoned, grinning. "Maybe if you weren't such an idiot you could have prevented all this." She really didn't seem surprised to know that Tatsuki had a clue about what was going on.

"Mostly," Tatsuki broke in, looking down at her lap, talking a bit quieter now. "I want to know about what happened to Orihime. Because we both know she wasn't sick. Was she, Ichigo?"

He looked extremely uncomfortable. "Listen, Tatsuki… you really shouldn't be sticking your nose in all this stuff…"

"Why?" Tatsuki sneered. "Think I can't handle it?"

"It's not that… it's just… there are some things better left unsaid."

"I think I might have heard that one before." She said, rolling her eyes. "Now spill, Ichigo. Where was she? Somewhere with bars on the windows, and a constant crescent moon, and endless deserts, ne? Somewhere where everything was white."

"…How do you know all this?"

"How do you think?" She scoffed. "Orihime."

"She… she remembers?" He looked full of dread now, and Rukia had finally lost her smug look. She looked pale now, too, staring at Tatsuki as she sat by Ichigo.

"No. But she's starting to. I have a feeling she's gonna see something, or hear something, and then bam! All her memory comes back, just like that. And when she finds out you lied to her… I wonder just how much you're going to look like the hero."

"… This is none of your business, Tatsuki." He ground out, glaring at the wall.

It was a lot to bet, but she had thought this would happen, and had one last trick up her sleeve. "Fine. Maybe I should just ask Orihime herself. After all, it looks like it's only going to take the smallest push to get her memory back. A phrase, a picture… a name." They watched her tensely, wondering where she was going with her speech. Tatsuki stood, stretching, and started for the door. "I guess I'll just have to ask her who this… Ulquiorra guy is."

"WHAT?" Both Ichigo and Rukia jumped up, blocking her path with looks Tatsuki was surprised to see. Ichigo was actually shaking in pure anger.

"How. How do you… how do you know that name?!"

It was more of a reaction than she had expected, and it scared her a little, but she wasn't going to back down now. "Maybe you ought to answer some questions before you start asking."

Defeated, Ichigo let himself shift back over to the bed, heavily sitting down. Rukia came over and lay down, putting her head in his lap without ether of the two realizing it.

"Fine." Ichigo growled. "I'll tell you."

And with that, he launched into the story, starting from the day that Tatsuki had just recently remembered, and going until the present. When he was done, Tatsuki just sat there in shock, not noticing that almost an hour had gone by.

"So… you're telling me… that she was this guy's prisoner?"

"That's what surprises you?" He asked, bewildered. "Out of the whole story?! I'm a hollow, a visor, and a shinigami, and there's worlds you never knew about, I lost my powers, got them back, and the fact that he kidnapped Orihime surprises you?!"

"Yeah… because she was dreaming about him last night." Rukia and Ichigo shared a surprised look. "And it didn't sound like he was her enemy."

Ichigo scowled. "I guess I left a little out of the story… you see… it was weird. Before he died… they had some kind of… thing. I'm not really sure what it was all about."

She laughed, devoid of humor, and then leaned back in her chair. "He was number four, right?"

"Yeah. Why?"

Why had she drawn it so much? If the guy had kidnapped her there was no way she could harbor feelings for him, right? Surely her nightmare last night had been about him, in the light that he deserved, as a monster. But… her scream hadn't sounded like one of anger, as it had when she had said Aizen. It had sound like she was screaming over the death of someone very dear to her.

"You saw her drawings, didn't you?" Rukia guessed. "Uryuu Ishida said he noticed she had drawn the number in her school book."

Tatsuki simply nodded. "Yeah."

There was a tense moment of silence, and then suddenly, there was that heavy feeling in the air. Everyone in the room jumped up, looking around in panic, as things on Ichigo and Rukia's person beeped.

"It... it can't be." Rukia mumbled, staring wide-eyed at her pager. "This… this spiritual pressure-"

"Rukia, we have to go!" Ichigo yelled.

One of Ichigo's drawers opened, a stuffed animal sticking its head out. "Keep it down, will you!?"

"Kon!" Ichigo grabbed the stuffed animal, which Tatsuki was staring at in great surprise. The martial artist watched in shock as Ichigo shoved his hand down the animal's throat, drawing a pill out of the mouth, and then popping it in his mouth. Rukia grabbed an odd badge, one Tatsuki had noticed before, off of Ichigo's hip and hit her body with it.

Both Ichigo and Rukia flew out of their bodies, becoming Shinigami before Tatsuki's eyes.

"Here!" Rukia tossed her phone to Tatsuki, to both Tatsuki and Ichigo's confusion. She then turned to Ichigo, throwing the window open. "Let's go."

They both vanished.

Tatsuki looked down at the phone, seeing a beeping red dot over an area on a map of her town. And if she wasn't wrong… "Oh no." Stuffing the phone into her pocket, she ran.