Chapter Fifteen

Grimmjow stormed through the door some time later, hands shoved in his pockets and shoulders bunched up like he was the Hunchback of Notre Dame or something. He was frowning fiercely, the bone-like piece on his jaw gifting him with a more gruesome glare than anyone had a right to have on their face.

He strutted right past me, through the other doorway into his bedroom. I stayed in my corner without making a noise, bag on the ground next to me and hands clasped in my lap. More and more shadows seemed to be flickering in my peripheral vision as though they were taunting me, telling me that they knew I could see them and that I would have to give up on ignoring them at some point.

It was a good handful of minutes before he stormed back out of his room. He finally caught sight of me sitting in the corner, staring at the opposite wall with half-dim eyes. Instead of saying anything like part of me expected him to, though, he changed his course and slowed himself down, coming in my direction.

I didn't blink when he sat on the floor next to me, one leg stretched out and the other one pulled to his chest. I simply continued to focus on the other wall, hands tangled up with each other. My fingers were digging into the skin on my hands, pulling the skin taunt over the bones and bleeding most of the color from my epidermis.

"Aizen seems to think you're lying about something." His voice was soft, and it lacked to growl it contained earlier. And though I don't look away from the wall to look at him, I can tell from his tone of voice that he is no longer glaring.

"He can think that all he wants," I stated. "Just because he counted all of his chickens before they hatched doesn't mean I'm a liar."

We lapsed into silence for a few moments before, the only noise reaching my ears the sound of our breathing.

"Usagi told me what happened earlier with Aizen and in your room." I nodded minutely, increasing the grip my hands had on each other and twisting my wrists.

"Yeah, well, I just want to go home. Get more medication. Go back to as close to my normal as I can. I don't want to be here, surrounded by a species that I can't name and people I'm not familiar with."

You were never normal, and you'll never be normal.

I ground my teeth and flinched back into the wall farther, shadows in my peripheral vision growing larger and fighting for my attention.

"Fucking stop." I jumped, startled as Grimmjow placed a hand over mine. My hands, which I had been twisting this way and that, grinding bone against skin and bone against bone, stilled almost immediately. "You're going to break your hands if you keep doing that, and it really wouldn't do well if you broke your fucking hands on my watch."

I tore my gaze from the wall to look at our hands, only one of his completely covering both of mine. His hand was warm over mine, though calloused—likely from fighting and handling that damned weapon of his. My own hands were cold, fragile, nearly like porcelain and soft from never really doing any hard work or physical activity.

"Sorry," I mumbled, not even attempting to move my hands out from beneath his.

We stayed like that for a few moments more before he removed his hand, stood, and stretched, popping sounds emitting from his body as his joints popped.

"Go and get some sleep. I'll be back later. And if anyone stops by and asks where the fuck I am, you've been sleeping this whole time and didn't even know I was here to begin with." He started towards the door, which wasn't too far away from his previous location, one hand shoved down into his pocket and the other picking something out from between his teeth.

"And don't do anything stupid, okay?" he asked when he reached the door, not bothering to turn around.

"Alright," I answered quietly, eyes still focused on my hands. They were limp in my lap now, still trembling slightly but not quite as bad as they had been before.

It wasn't until shortly after he left that I realized the shadows had stopped their macabre dance.

It was almost an hour later when I stood up, yawned, and stretched, hands reaching towards the ceiling. Small, fingertip shaped bruises were slowly forming on my knuckles from where I had been twisting my hands earlier, and I knew they would be very, very painful later.

"I know your mother taught you that harming yourself while stressed was a big no-no, Kaori." I froze mid-stretch, an angry hiss escaping from between my teeth as my eyes darted around the room. Some of the medication should still be in my system. I'm still shaking.

"No, no, Kaori—the medication is out of your system. The trembling is there as a side effect from your prolonged use of it and should disappear in about six months or so if you don't start to consume it again. If you had actually stopped to read the label as I had suggested, you would know this. But since you did consume the meds, no matter how loudly I screamed at you, you didn't hear me.

"Such a shame, really, that you did—if you had actually listened to me so many times, we wouldn't be standing here at this point. You would be in a much, much better place that would have better forwarded both of our positions."

I spun around on my heel, arms immediately dropping to my sides as I did a full one eighty. He stood in the corner behind me, leaning nonchalantly against the wall with his large, scarred arms crossed over his chest. There was a sly grin on his face, his silver-white hair slicked back and hanging down to nearly his elbows.

"Go away," I snapped acidly.

"You're much sassier now that you're not seven, Ka-chan. I have to congratulate you, though; that silly person you spoke to a number of times per month—you know, the one with the silly chair and the soft voice that asked "Tell me how you feel," every time you went and every time you would lie—that silly person said you would never grow a personality, that all you'd ever really amount to was a paranoid schizophrenic in an asylum. Feels good to prove people wrong, doesn't it?"

"If you want to prove me wrong, then maybe you should stay for a bit—you know, take a seat, prop up your feet, I'll even bake you some cookies."

He chuckled darkly, sending a chill down my spine. "I'm never going to go away, Kaori—you can find respites, even have days where I'm not visible, but I'll always be here. Whispering, watching you, trying my best to influence you choices, you hard headed wench."

"Like you've been helpful thus far,"I said with a snort, hands on my hips. I knew that, should anyone walk in, all they would see is me having a heated argument with thin air. "If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be in this mess in the first place!"

"Now now, Kaori—laying blame all over the place isn't nice, especially when you're blaming someone for a good thing. Of course, given this good thing, you have a hard decision coming up." He had his eyes trained on me—eyes that I had never, ever wanted to see again. They were pale, white, pupiless—by all rights, he should have been blind, but he could see everything perfectly.

"What kind of decision?"

Instead of a snappy answer, his form flickered and he disappeared from my sight. I frowned, tightening my grip on my bony hips and staring intently at the wall.

"I said, what kind of decision?"

After five minutes, I didn't get an answer. I snarled in frustration, attempting to make fists out of hands there were still gripping hip bones.

When I knew I wasn't going to receive an answer, I snatched my messenger bag off of the floor and stomped towards the bedroom.

I needed to get some sleep.

Ohmagah, May Day has been killer ;-;. I still have one more show to get through tonight, and then I have to help tear everything down, and then I have hours and hours of community service I volunteered for on Saturday & Sunday.

However, things should start moving on this piece now-both plot wise and chapter wise, so I'll see you guys next Wednesday (because, like I said, I'm going to try to keep updating on Wednesday's and Friday's).

Thanks for the reviews, too!