[7 Days][01/10/2007] Release Redux [Ichi_Ruki not-drabble-at-all set]

Title: Release Redux
Author: Ten
Phrase: "You better be sick or dead."
Word count: 2807 (AH HA HA HA dork)
Rating: Spin cycle (Soft R, because Ichigo and the F-word are friends)
Notes: A ha ha ha. So jaina wrote this fic. And at work we were talking about how to follow up on it. And I had this idea...My thanks to raynos for laughing at the right moments and the whip crackin' beta.


The last thing he remembers is the feeling of something crawling up the back of his brain, like some sort of mental dry heave. The next--

"Ichigo."

He stirs. Is that Rukia?

"Ichigo, wake up."

That's definitely Rukia. What is she doing in his room?

Wait--what the hell is he doing in his room? Weren't they in an alley?

"Ichigo, you have been in bed for two days. Your father is saying that 'you'd better be sick or dead' to miss so many family meals."

Two days? In bed for TWO days? What the hell?!

"So wake. UP."

He does.

He blinks at the darkness. He may have been in bed for two days, but it doesn't feel like he's slept for shit; grogginess pulls at him, beckons him to come back to the lap of sleep. He starts to sit up and winces as his muscles protest the movement; stubbornly, he resists and manages to sit up all the way. The soreness echoes down his arms and across his stomach, spreading warm hands of subtle agony down his thighs. He clamps his jaw tight against it, then looks over at Rukia.

She is sitting at his desk, facing him with her arms crossed over her chest, her ankles hooked together. Her expression is both serious and...smug? That's a weird thought, but he's seen that look before, and it's definitely got smug connotations.

"What happened?" he says, and his voice sounds like broken ice.

"You do not remember?" she says. She picks up a glass of water and takes a sip, and Ichigo realizes that his tongue is a dry leaf in a drier bed. In fact, his whole body feels like he's starting a fever or just coming out of one; his skin is dry, flammable.

"No," he says, reaching out. She gives his hand a look, then reluctantly hands over the glass. He downs half of it in one gulp and looks at Rukia again. Her lips are pursed. Well, she can get another one--he dumps the rest of it over his head.

She holds out her hand without comment, and he passes her back the glass. "I feel like shit," he says.

"You look like it," she says. "Are you sure you do not remember anything?"

"No," he snaps. "We'd just taken down a Hollow in the city, and were starting back, and I stopped..." He trails off, shaking his head. "Why did I stop?"

She doesn't say anything. He looks at her, but her expression hasn't changed. "Why did I stop?" he repeats.

She shifts a little in the chair. "You said your head hurt," she says. "A lot. And you kept mentioning that your eyes itched."

"My eyes..." He reaches back into the black, tries to pull up that sensation. From a purely medical standpoint, it sounded like the beginnings of some sort of sinus headache-hangover thing. From a purely Ichigo standpoint...

Fuck.

Fuck.

He looks over at Rukia, and he's really not sure he wants to see the expression on his face. Again, her expression doesn't change, though she does shift in the chair. "You do remember something," she says.

"No," he replies, voice hoarse, "but--shit." He looks down at the bed and tries to gather up more memory, tries to remember what exactly had happened.

" 'Shit'?"

It takes him a couple of tries, but he gets it out: "The Hollow--"

"--makes your eyes itch?" she says.

"Like a bad allergy."

"Ah."

He peers at her. "What kind of response is 'ah'?" he asks. "You'd think you'd be more interested in such important information!" But if she didn't know that, then maybe he didn't come out, he thought.

"I am interested," she said.

"You don't sound it!"

She shrugs. "It is good to know, but not of real concern."

"Not of real concern?!" he explodes, trying to turn towards her and only succeeding in nearly pitching himself off the bed. He glares at where his legs are tangled in the sheets, then up at her. "It's a sign that my damn Hollow is trying to come out! That's a good thing to know!"

"Why?"

"So that y--people can get out of there!" Just in case I can't get rid of him again. Damnit, I thought I was done with this!

She cocks her head slightly and somehow manages to look...even more smug. "It is of no real concern, Ichigo," she says.

Blink.

Blink-fucking-blink.

"...I'm not actually here, am I," he said. He pushes himself back up to a sitting position. "I'm in my own mind somewhere, and this is some sort of--"

She leans over and pinches him hard on the arm. Added to the sore muscles there, it hurts like a--

"BITCH!" He glares at her. "What the hell?"

"You were babbling," she says.

"You're not real!" he yells back.

"Didn't that hurt?"

"YES, but..."

"Do I need to do it again?" She holds up two threatening fingers. "Next time, it will not be your arm."

He stares at her for a long moment, and another piece of memory falls into place. Grabbing her arms...he'd grabbed her arms...and sneered...

He looks away. "Shit."

"Mm?"

"You met him." He can't look at her. Of all people--

"Yes." Her voice is calm.

He turns his head a little, to see her out of the corner of his eye. "You MET him."

She uncrosses and recrosses her legs. "I believe I said that."

"What--what happened?"

Her mouth purses. "Do you wish to know?"

He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Does he really want to know? He's got it half-figured out--no wonder he's so damn tired and so damn sore all over. Which means they fought. They fought, and Rukia knocked him senseless--probably with that ice thing, which'd explain the fever, since damn, she'd put him in a wave of ICE and it's kinda weird that he's still not there but then again, if Rukia can do it she can undo it, right?--and carried him back here and healed him up a bit and now he's up and oh, oh, OH that's why she's sitting that way, she won't move, 'cause she's got her own hurts and FUCK, how had he injured her and FUCK, Renji is going to have his head and FUCK, he's gonna let him...

No. No, he doesn't really want to know. But when he tries to say it, what comes out is, "Aa."

She passes him something, and he takes it without really looking at her. If he looks at her, he's gonna see where her kidou-healing had softened the lines of a cut, lightened the color of a bruise. No wonder they were sitting in near-dark, she didn't want him to see...

What she passes him is a mirror. A pocket mirror, like the one Yuzu occasionally carries around with her. He frowns at it.

"Look at yourself, idiot," she says.

He flips it open and the first thing he sees is the big scar on his chest. No help there. He moves it out a little and the first bruise flowers, a brutish red. He swings the mirror around and more flare into view, a field of blotchy flowers across his chest and shoulders. He checks his arms, and there are faded finger marks there, spotted with the crescent impressions.

He lets his eyes fall shut for a moment. Shit, it was worse than he thought.

"You fought," he says, snapping the mirror shut.

A pause, and he steels himself for her response.

What she says is, "What?"

He looks at her--tries to not, then just does, 'cause...'CAUSE--and says, slowly, "You fought him. My Hollow."

For the first time, her expression shifts. Except not to something sober, or to that expression she gets when she's bottling up something. No, she looks...puzzled. "You think those are from fighting," she says.

"What the hell else would they be from?" he snaps. Is she playing dumb on him? Of all people, she should know better than to play--

One hand covers her mouth. Her shoulders start to shake.

Oh, hell, he didn't even know Rukia could cry!

"Rukia..." he starts. "I..."

Which is right about when he realizes she's giggling.

Hell, he didn't know she could do that, either. Pinch or not, this has got to be a dream.

"Rukia?"

She stands up. The movement is not entirely fluid, but it's not pained, either. It just looks like she's been sitting there for awhile.

"Get up, Ichigo," she says.

He gives her a dumb look.

Her mouth flattens. "Do you want to know what happened?"

He didn't before, and he's still not sure now, but maybe following Rukia will get him out of whatever fucked up place he's in. And his neck works better than his mouth right now anyways.

"Then get up."

He pauses for a moment to make sure he's wearing something. He pauses for another moment when he realizes it's only boxers. He looks at her.

She crosses her arms over her chest again. "Ichigo, if you don't move, I'm going to drag you out of that bed." She turns away. "Besides, they just look like shorts to me anyways."

He colors in the dark, then remembers that this Rukia isn't real. He reaches down and gamely untangles his legs, wincing with each movement. Stupid fuckin' dreams,, he thinks as he stands. Pain ain't supposed to happen in them. Rukia ain't supposed to giggle. I'm gonna fire my subconscious.

By the time they get to the bathroom, he's figured the whole thing out. The reason he blacked out on the way back from the Hollow fight is that he was gettin' sick. Sick enough to have an elaborate, bizarre fever dream like this. The itchy eyes were really a reaction to the sickness, and the lack of memory--well, he doesn't want to contemplate it, but he'd bet he passed out and hit his head on the pavement. Knocks to the skull caused memory problems, didn't they? Yeah, that fit. So really, this isn't happening at all. Really, he's lying in his bed, and Yuzu's there with a cold compress or something, and Rukia's probably tried to get him up--that'd explain the beginning of the dream, her trying to get him up--and he's never sick for long, so this'll all be over in a day or so. Which is like five minutes dream time, isn't it? That's not too bad, when he's faced down scary frickin' monsters, not even counting Kenpachi. Yeah. Just five more minutes. He can take it.

So he's not bothered when Rukia pulls him in front of the mirror then turns on the light. It's backward, but given the state of his inner world, he's lucky it's not sideways.

He looks at himself in the mirror. More bruises there than he could see with the little mirror. He lifts his arm and yup, those are finger marks. The bruises are mostly fairly small and reddish, little clumps that look almost indented, like the nail marks in his arms.

He frowns. That's...weird. Bruises don't normally do that.

"Figure it out yet?" Rukia asks, and her voice is warm and somehow sticky.

He looks at her. "Yeah," he says, "you ain't real, and I'm dream--"

Rukia gives him a look that cuts him off. "You still think that," she says, voice flat.

"It fits, don't it?"

She lets out a long suffering sigh, then leans in and bites him right on a bruise.

His skin seems to catch fire. The muscle under it does, too, and he yelps. "What the fuck are you doing?" he says. "You crazy--"

"Ichigo, look," she says.

"What do you mean, LOOK? You just bit me!"

"Look at it in the mirror," she says, "before I put your head through it."

So he does. "I'm looking," he says.

Rukia bumps him aside and puts her finger next to the bite. She draws a circle around it slowly.

Bruise, bite. Bite, bruise. Bru--

All the blood drains right out of his face.

"I didn't fight your Hollow, Ichigo," she says, in that wet n' kinda sticky voice. "I had sex with him."

Oh. Uh. Um.

Renji isn't just going to kick his head in, he's going to kick it right off his shoulders. BAM, like a vengeful god of war.

"You--had--" and then words fail, because even shaping the first syllable-as-thought makes him feel more than a little light-headed.

"He thought he would intimidate me that way," she says, moving away from him.

He looks at her and tries to beam to her head, How the hell did you get that?

Her receiver is apparently up, because she says, "It was easy to figure out."

His eyebrows lift, as much as they do.

She gives him the you-really-are-dumb look and says, "Ichigo, your inner Hollow was formed when your inner world broke apart. It was not introduced from some outside source; it came from you. Which means that it IS you, only tilted one hundred and eighty degrees. So if you are tenderhearted, inefficient, and sexless--"

"HEY!" Wonder of wonders, he could speak.

"--then he is brutal, efficient, and lascivious. Which meant that though his first thought was hunger, I could turn that hunger into something that did not end in death." Her lips curl, and it is almost a smile. "So I did."

"But...but..."

She tilts her head. "You wonder how I survived?"

He nods. Surviving--that he can think about.

Her lips flex, and it is a smile, albeit tiny and chill. "He is your Hollow, Ichigo. Do you really think that he could best me at something neither you nor he have ever done?" The smile broadens a bit. "A virgin is a virgin, Ichigo, no matter if his eyes are yellow or brown."

Then she does something really weird. She puts her hand on his shoulder, leans up, and brushes her lips across his cheek. The touch is cool and electric and makes his mind go fizz-POP, and it's all he can do to blink at her. She glides down to her feet with ease, then brushes past him--the front of him--to the door.

She pauses in the doorway. "And Ichigo..."

He thinks he might be able to speak now. He tries. "Uh?" Okay, not quite ready...

"Dinner will be in fifteen minutes," she says, and her voice is completely normal, completely straight Rukia. "You'd better get down there, or your father is going to come looking for you."

And she's gone.

Ichigo looks back at himself in the mirror, if only so he doesn't stare after her in mute shock. He's already done enough of that as it--

His eyes widen.

In the mirror, like stop-motion photography in reverse, his bruises are disappearing. They shrink in increments, little jumps, as the color fades: red to green to yellow to skin. He blinks, as if that'll stop it, but nope, it still goes on. One by one, the bruises vanish; one by one, the nail marks fade. Even his scars look a little less glossy.

It's like he's been healed by Rukia. But she hadn't...

He reaches up and touches his cheek. Where his fingertips touch, he can feel a tingle of power under the skin, the coolness of kidou-healing.

How had she..?

And what did THAT mean?

He turns and stares out into the hallway, but there's nothing there except the shadows.


In the shadows of Ichigo's mind, Zangetsu peeked out from between the buildings. As he watched, a figure all in white drifted across the bright blue sky. Every once in awhile, he would sigh--not the half-disgusted sigh Zangetsu was used to, but a happy, floaty sigh.

"---." he said.

The Hollow rolled lazily on its stomach. "Zangetsu-san!" he called. "No need to wake up yet!"

"It is hard to sleep," Zangetsu said, "with all this sunshine." He squinted at the sky. "And are those clouds...heart-shaped?"

In response, the Hollow let out another happy sigh and rolled back onto his back. "Yeah," he said, sounding almost perky. "They are."

Zangetsu looked around some more. He frowned. "Is that Rukia's name in the clouds?" he asked.

"Yeah," the Hollow said with a sweet sigh, "it is."

Zangetsu thought, for just a moment, of asking what had happened. Then he said, "I am going back to bed."

The Hollow gave him a half-hearted, if cheerful, wave. "Sleep well, Zangetsu-san."
(2807)


Please don't kill me, Jai.