Bleach: 5_loves: At My Confession
Title: At My Confession
Characters: Urahara, Hiyori
Summary: Captain and vice captain’s personal views of one another.
Prompt: Quirky
Rating: K
Notes: Third of five stories, written for5_loves. This has spoilers for the Pendulum arc. I don’t plan on the remaining two stories taking as long as this one did...
Urahara thinks he must just be a cat person.
It’s the only explanation for his inexplicable fondness for his temperamental vice-captain, who more and more reminds him of a pissed-off alley cat.
It has something to do with the way she stalks through headquarters, hissing at Mayuri and occasionally yowling when she’s particularly displeased with Urahara - her rallying cry of “That’s not how Captain Hikifune did it!” is often heard ringing through the barracks - and the way he knows better than to try and cage her, preferring to let her wander to her content.
He’s never anything but as pleasant and genial as he can manage, giving her the freedom she wants, and still she rebels, wanting him to hold her captive so that she has an actual reason for her never-ending disdain for him and his research.
She acknowledges him as she chooses. He’s pleased to let her go out and spar and pick fights with the members of their division, and on the occasions when she goes too far and tears up the neighbor’s garden (i.e. causes structural damage to another division’s property, usually the fifth’s) he doesn’t mind making the appropriate apologies while she pouts and pretends she’s above the entire situation and slinks through the halls at headquarters and gives the timid rookies a territorial shifty eye.
She goes out of her way to make things difficult for him and still he smiles and waves and resists the urge to pat her on the head for fear of her clawing his eyeballs out. He just can’t help it, his affection for his sneering little vice captain.
There’s just something so remarkably… delightful about her, and the way she storms through Soul Society, hurling insults and punches at her superiors. Most captains would cringe, but Urahara smiles in delight at the attention she attracts.
Cats, after all, are good for pest control, and he finds that the longer he employs Hiyori the fewer people come to question him about his experiments.
Urahara has decided that he’s simply easily entertained.
In time he finds that his affection for his little vice captain only grows, though it seems like her fuse only gets shorter and shorter. Their status quo is embraced by both parties, if rather volatile: he pretends not to order her around, and she pretends not to do work.
Hiyori is very, very good at pretending, and it’s with something akin to surprise that Urahara hears her voice in one of the labs late one night, long after she should have left her mess behind for Mayuri to froth over in the morning.
He doesn’t worry about her noticing his reiatsu; it’s a forgone conclusion that he’s in the laboratory at any given time and so he doesn’t feel the least bit of guilt for cozying up to the wall and focusing his ears.
It’s clear that she’s talking to Shinji; even if Urahara hadn’t sensed the captain’s reiatsu it would have been obvious from the angry pulse to Hiyori’s - it’s a step above even her most irritated, and it seems to be the level she functions at when Shinji’s around.
“For all the time you spend bitchin’ about him,” Shinji’s observing casually, “you spend more time doing work for him.”
“Shut up,” Hiyori mutters under her breath. She’s totally focused on her task, and Urahara tries to remember what she’d been working on earlier in the day - nothing, his mind tells him, since she mostly appears to spend her day accomplishing the bare minimum to keep her job title and uses the rest of it to terrorize others.
“Seriously,” Shinji presses, and Urahara is mildly impressed that the shinigami hasn’t retreated to the corner of the room yet. “What are ya getting out of this, Hiyori?”
“I said shut up,” Hiyori orders. The command is followed in short order by the sound of breaking glass and a sharp yelp.
Urahara winces a moment later when Shinji asks in a strangled, high-pitched tone, “Hiyori, what the hell was that? It’s eating through my coat!”
“Let me see!” Hiyori demands. “I know he hasn’t done any biological testing-“
“You’re taking notes?!” Shinji bellows. “What the hell's the matter with you?”
There’s quiet for a moment or two, and Urahara is torn between rescuing the captain of the fifth division and rescuing his experiment. Finally, Hiyori’s voice pipes up again, using that far away, focused on another task tone from before. “If you gotta know,” she says roughly, “It doesn’t matter how much I hate that jerk. He’s like…” she trails off for a moment, as if thinking, and picks up again. “He’s like some big dumb slobbering dog. And he’s always happy to see you, even when you kick him away.”
“But that never stops you from kickin’ him, does it?’ Shinji asks sourly. Almost immediately there’s the sound of more breaking glass coupled with Hiyori’s usual battle cry. “Ow ow ow ow stop Hiyori, Kisuke’s gonna be pissed when he sees how you wrecked up his lab!”
Urahara, unable to put down the grin that’s risen up on his face, decides abruptly that the mess is best left to clean up tomorrow.