The Plotbunny with a Wedding Dress, part 1
This plotbunny showed up in a wedding dress. (beats head against screen) Why can I never come up with good names for things like this? (beats head against screen more) And why can I never write SHORT?
Title so far: The Plotbunny with a Wedding Dress (I'm sorry! ;__; I take suggestions if anybody has name ideas...)
Series/pairing: Bleach, Ishida/Orihime
Rating: PG-13
Background: More in the was-supposed-to-be-drabble-that-turned-into-miniseries of the Plotbunny with Three-piece Bib Overalls. It probably helps to read those first.
Within three days of Orihime's acceptance of the ring, at least half of their wedding had already been planned for them thanks to the monomaniacal obsession of Chizuru and the sturdy practicality of Tatsuki being allowed to coexist in the same room. They'd even roped Rukia and Ichigo's sisters into the planning. Yuzu was a sweet girl. Karin was not.
Ishida had long since decided that it was safest to retreat into the kitchen while the gaggle of teenage girls were planning the indignities he was about to be subjected to. Among other things, it kept himself poised between Orihime and any food she might accidentally poison her guests with. Unfortunately, people noticed that he had essentially backed himself into a corner with a stack of books, which made him a stationary target.
Karin was the sixth to say it to him -- Ichigo, of course, had been the first, and Tatsuki had been hot on his heels; Ishida suspected Ichigo was only first by virtue of having much longer legs to travel more quickly with. But somehow it stung more when coming from a glowering little girl who seemed to be training to grow up into a woman as sharp-edged and sour as the shinigami camping in her elder brother's closet.
"You don't deserve her, you know," Karin said, glowering.
"I know," he replied mildly, flipping a page in the book.
"If you make her cry--"
"--you'll kill me, yes, I know. You'll be somewhere in the middle of the line. I think your elder brother is making up the waiting list; you should claim your spot soon."
The girl's eyes narrowed. "This isn't funny."
"Do you see me laughing?"
"Nobody ever sees you laughing," she accused.
Since that was generally true enough that there was really no non-ridiculous retort he could make, Ishida simply readjusted his glasses and turned another page.
"You're not supposed to come to pick out the wedding dress!" Chizuru protested. "No man is supposed to see my Hime-chan's beautiful body in all that glorious silk until I have to surrender her to her tragic fate at the wedding itself!"
Tatsuki rolled her eyes and told Ishida, "Ignore her. The rest of us do."
"Tatsuki-chan, you're so cruel!" Chizuru turned another solid glare on Ishida and poked a finger into his chest. "You've had your fun. She's p-p-pregnant, isn't she? Go away and let me have my fun."
"No," he said.
Chizuru's eyes widened, and then filled with tears. "Hime-chan! Are you going to let that awful man speak to me like that? The indignity! The pure humiliation--"
Trapped between her lover and her friend, Orihime giggled nervously and scrubbed a toe on the ground. "Um... er... ah..."
Ishida silently took Orihime's arm and began walking with her toward the bridal shop. A smirking Tatsuki followed.
By the time Chizuru stopped dramatically wailing and sobbing all over the light post, the street was empty.
The tailor in the wedding shop looked down his nose over a pair of supercilious half-glasses at Orihime's hand-me-down maternity top and the bulge of five months of baby rounding out the front of it. "Well, I can see I have my work cut out for me," he said with a sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Something cheap enough for a couple of children to afford. Naturally, we'll be emphasizing the girl's cleavage, and de-emphasizing the size of that belly, and white really isn't suitable, is it--"
He took out a tape measure and reached for Orihime's bust, and blinked when Ishida stopped him short with a grip on his wrist that was quickly beginning to be painful.
"Excuse me, boy," the tailor said, trying to twist his hand free with a disturbing lack of success. "I need the girl's measurements to determine how best to disguise that belly you've given her--"
"No, you don't," Ishida replied.
The tailor's brows arched skyward. "I beg your pardon?"
"Now, if you'd actually meant that, we might have a conversation," Ishida said, putting Orihime's jacket back around her shoulders and taking her arm again. "As it is, there is nothing we need to discuss here."
"You're standing in my shop, boy; you are planning on marrying the little strumpet, aren't you?"
Ishida's reaction was slower than Tatsuki's because Orihime was hanging onto his arm tightly; but she hadn't thought to grab for Tatsuki too, and so by the time Ishida had (rather slowly and only due to Orihime's urging) dragged Tatsuki off the tailor and out of the shop, the man was sporting two black eyes, a bloody nose, a split lip, and a sprained wrist.
"I'll make your dress myself," Ishida said, fuming. "That imbecile is not to lay his hands upon you. I'll make your dress myself. And it will be breathtaking. Far better for you than anything that purblind fool could create -- I promise you that."
Orihime simply smiled, and patted his hand gently, until the shaking white-knuckled grip he had on the sleeve of her jacket had relented a little.
Chizuru, who'd been looking blankly around the street, let out a cry of dismay when she saw them walking back out of the shop. "You picked out her dress already? And I missed it all?! Tatsuki-chan, even for you that's too cruel~!"
"We don't need anything from that shop," Tatsuki growled, shaking her wrist, because the tailor's head had been harder than she'd anticipated when she hit it.
"...oh." Then Chizuru brightened again: "Oh! So we get to go shopping more!"
"No we don't," Ishida said firmly. "I'm making her dress."
"...But-but-but-- you CAN'T!" Chizuru protested, horrified. "You're a man! You can't make Hime-chan's wedding dress, you're her fiance, you shouldn't even see it--"
"But Orihime and I are being -- I believe the phrase is -- 'hip and modern, yo.'"
Orihime put a hand to her lips to stifle her giggles at the sound of her elegant and dignified and extremely non-ethnic fiance saying 'yo.' The corner of Tatsuki's mouth was twitching suspiciously too. Chizuru was too caught up in her crusade to notice.
"Modern? Modern? Who cares about modern! It's bad luck for you to see her dress!"
"I'll sew with my eyes closed," Ishida said sharply, still walking. "Happy now?"
Chizuru blinked in bemusement, then realized that they were getting away from her and trotted after them like a puppy. "But -- but -- but -- the bridesmaid's dresses, the flower girl, the ringbearer--"
"Would you take care of choosing those for us, Chizuru-chan, Tatsuki-chan?" Orihime asked at her most wide-eyed. "I'm sure they have pretty dresses at the Karakura Station department stores, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit it but now that my tummy's growing round, my back aches so much when we walk around like this, and so if you could...?"
Ishida actually flinched back from the roar of flames that shot up behind Chizuru's skull.
"ALL RIGHT!" the girl shouted at the top of her lungs. "Tatsuki-chan! We have a MISSION! For the sake of my beautiful Hime-chan, so exhausted from carrying around the adorable little baby some man had to go and put in her, the two of us are on a QUEST! A quest for SHOPPING no less! You can trust us, Hime-chan! We'll find the most gorgeous, practical, inexpensive, and magnificent bridesmaid's dresses in a fifty-mile radius! --Come, Tatsuki-chan! We need to go get the orange-headed one's little sisters and that glaring Kuchiki girl so that we can fit their dresses on them too! It's a MISSION! --For SHOPPING even! Ah, my Hime-sama is so kind to me~!"
Tatsuki looked a little white around the eyes as Chizuru grabbed her by the shirt and dragged her off toward the train station so quickly that the rubber of her sneakers left skid marks on the pavement.
Ishida did not gawk, because it was undignified for a Quincy to be seen gawking; but it took a supreme effort of will and several glasses-adjustments to manage to prevent himself from it.
"Poor Tatsuki-san," he managed, very faint.
"I know," Orihime said, with a sheepish little smile. "I'm going to have to apologize later. But it worked, didn't it?"
"You," he said warily, "are a very, very dangerous woman."
Orihime giggled. And didn't deny it.
The one trouble with her fiance, Orihime thought to herself, was that he was so terribly serious about everything until you tickled him for quite a while. And also so terribly focused. It probably had something to do with the archery, with learning to focus until there was nothing in the world between you and your target. With Hollows, of course, that was good. But now he was focused on a bolt of exquisite cream-colored Italian silk that poured from his hand like a pale soft waterfall... and they really couldn't afford it.
"It's all right, really," Orihime said, tugging gently on his arm. "Karin-chan's given us their mother's maternity dresses; I'm sure there's a nice spring dress I can wear. You don't need to make me a wedding dress, I'm happy to marry you in anything. And your exams are coming up. It's much more important to have time to study for those than to worry about something silly like a dress, especially when I have several that still fit over my tummy and we know I'm going to be changing size and it would be too difficult to ask anybody to guess how much my tummy's going to grow, so really, I'm happy to wear anything that fits; what's much more important is the being married part, isn't it?"
Between the tugging and a couple of conveniently timed rubs at the small of her back as though it ached more than it did, because he always noticed when she did things like that, and she felt terribly guilty for imposing on his sweet concern for her, but it really was in both of their best interests to coax him out of that fabric store -- in any case, Orihime managed to entice him away from the silk and over to the ice cream shop.
At the ice cream shop, she ordered two extremely girly desserts with little carved kiwi-bunnies and strawberry-kitties and sugared corn flakes and vast quantities of whipped cream in pink parfait glasses, and then she teased him into eating the second before it would melt. And the embarrassment of being seen in public with a profoundly overgirly ice cream confection was enough to take the shadow of the silk from the surface of his eyes; but Orihime wasn't quite sure whether she'd managed to distract him well enough, because he hid so many things behind his eyes that he thought she didn't need to worry about.
In any case, he sat close to her, and his free hand kept rubbing that place in the hollow of her back where the baby's weight pulled, even as he was careful to keep the rest of himself restrained and straight and proper and barely even deigning to acknowledge that the spoon he held was attached to a Sugar Plum Fairy Starburst Surprise with pink tassels sticking out of it.
Orihime couldn't help giggling at him despite her best intentions. And he looked so uncomfortable and shame-stricken behind the careful readjusting of his tie that she had to stop and hug him and reassure him that it was all right to be seen with uber-mega-ultra-shoujo ice cream as long as your girlfriend was there too; because he could blame it on her, so that was all right, wasn't it? And wasn't it good ice cream?
He adjusted his tie again, staring fixedly at the menu on the wall so that his eyes wouldn't have to focus on the pink parfait glass in front of him, and picked up his spoon with the exhausted precision of a martyr resigning himself to his fate; and yet that other hand still rested gently in the small of her back, to keep her often-aching muscles warmed and comfortable.
And so to express her delight at his carefully understated sweetness and her adoration of his far too cute embarrassment, Orihime snuggled closer and started designing another mecha for them on a spare napkin, because obviously they were going to need something that made pink girly parfaits whenever they had a little girl, and she didn't think it would be practical to retrofit hers to shoot both flowers and ice cream, because imagine how tragic it would be if the technicians filled the wrong ammunition tanks with the wrong ingredients one day.
Tessai opened the door of Urahara's shop bright and early the next morning, and blinked to find the last Quincy kneeling in perfect homage on the doorstep.
"I need to make a bargain with your master," the young man said, head bowed nearly to the floor and fingertips perfectly placed against the boards, and not showing the strain of his humbled posture at all.
All in all, Tessai approved of this one more than the loud orange-headed barbarian with no aesthetic taste whatsoever, and so he grunted something that might have been interpretable as assent and turned and walked back inside.
Urahara was sitting on a crate with a vaguely smoke-wafting pipe in one hand. Much to his amusement, the Quincy had resumed his perfect formal submission once he'd been brought inside, and was explaining the entire situation in what appeared to be all one breath -- clearly his woman was rubbing off on him already.
"...and so I can't work for you directly until after the wedding, I'll need that time to sew, but as soon as the wedding is finished I will be at your service until I've repaid the debt for the silk and the working area, and you can set whatever rate you consider just, because I understand that I am imposing greatly upon your patience and am in no position to ask for adjusted terms."
Maybe she wasn't rubbing off quite so much after all, Urahara thought, rubbing his chin. The boy could still finish a sentence.
"Urahara-san?" the Quincy asked, not flinching, except for the slight tinge of panic just barely coloring his voice.
Urahara tapped the ashes out of his pipe onto the floor, and scratched one ankle with the other foot. "You know, boy..."
"Yes, I know," the Quincy said, with a great deal of exhaustion in his voice. "I'm not worthy of her. Believe me, sir, I'm well aware of that. And have been informed upon more than one occasion. --Kurosaki is keeping the waiting list of those in line to kill me if I make her cry, if you wish to add your name to the roster, sir."
Urahara snorted his amusement. "Let your new boss finish," he said.
"...Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir." And he still knelt there huddled on the floor, waiting.
"Get off the floor, for one thing," Urahara told him idly. "How are you supposed to do any work when all you can see is the wood grain two inches from your nose?"
"...Yes, sir." Ishida stood, and brushed the creases out of his school trousers reflexively, and stood waiting with his head bent.
"What was the other thing?" he mused, tapping his chin. "Oh, yeah, right." Hopping down from his crate-perch, Urahara slung an arm around the boy's shoulders, at least in part for the amusement of feeling him flinch. "What I was going to say," he informed the young man with a grin, "is that she's a lucky girl."
Ishida shot him the most startled look he'd ever seen on that inscrutable face. "...Sir?"
"Come on, kid, you've got a workshop to set up," Urahara said, half dragging his new slave (intern, he reminded himself; they called underage underpaid slave labor interns nowadays) down the hall toward the trap door.
When Ishida explained that he had taken another part-time job in order to try to earn more money for the wedding and the baby, Orihime immediately asked in a tone of blissful, inquisitive delight, "Are you going to be a stripper? --Oh! And can I watch?"
Two seconds later, she was blinking down at where Ishida had fallen over flat on the floor and was twitching all over.
"...Was it that strange a question?" she asked wistfully. "Kuchiki-chan seemed terribly convinced that you were going to become a stripper; and you've got such a beautiful body, so graceful and slender and elegant, and you have all those nice shoulder muscles from the archery, and I can certainly see why people would put money in your underwear! Even if they weren't drunk at the time, though I'm sure being drunk always helps. So I thought it would be fun if you did become a stripper and I could watch and--"
Somehow, more explaining didn't seem to help his twitching any. If anything, it was making it worse. Orihime tilted her head back and forth, and then asked with great curiosity, "Are you having a seizure? Should I call Kurosaki-kun's father for an emergency house call?"
By this point her fiance was curled up in a ball with his face buried in both hands, shivering like a guinea pig on crack. "No," he squeaked, "no, that... that won't be necessary...!"
By the time she'd coaxed him off the floor into lying on the sofa and put a pillow under his feet and an ice pack on his forehead and loosened his tie and was debating looking for a blood pressure cuff, he'd managed to stop shaking enough to reassure her that he wasn't going to die of shock. But then she began anxiously wondering whether he was under too much strain between exams and the wedding and the baby and now another part time job, and whether she ought to go to his part time job for him. For some reason, he didn't seem to think that this was a very good idea either.
It took several assurances that he was fine, three or four promises to go see Ichigo's father if he found himself twitching like a hamster again, and even an agreement to let Orihime do the housework in order for her to be satisfied. After all, it was only fair that she should cook dinner if Ishida was working so hard for the baby's sake, and came home to study for his exams so that he could get into Tokyo Daigaku; he would make an excellent surgeon really, he had such deft and skillful hands, and years of practice with neat and precise sewing, and so in order for Ishida-kun to become the world's best mecha-piloting surgeon, Orihime had to take over the housewifely duties like cleaning and cooking him dinners so that he could study in peace.
He looked entirely too pale as he agreed with her. Orihime touched the back of her hand to his cheek to make absolutely sure he wasn't running a fever or having chills or about to start bleeding out of his eyes or something. He assured her that he was feeling perfectly fine now, and perhaps he could help her in the kitchen to start with, just a little, to give himself a domestic rest and get his mind off his studies and such. A little skeptical, Orihime agreed with some caveats.
"I was thinking," she said. "We've got that package of curry in the cupboard, and some carrots and potatoes; how does curry for dinner sound?"
"Fine," he said, cautiously. "It's got directions on the back and everything, doesn't it?"
"Yes, but those are so boring," Orihime said earnestly. "I was thinking. In Mexico they make this wonderful sauce called mole and it doesn't sound like it would be too different than what you do for curry, and they use chocolate in it, and I know we've got a couple packages of hot chocolate powder with the cute little marshmallows -- marshmallows make everything more fun -- and Indian recipes use a lot of fennel too, only we don't have fennel, but we do have licorice. So if I made a chocolate marshmallow curry with licorice I'm sure it would be MUCH more interesting than -- Ishida-kun? Ishida-kun, are you all right? You're twitching again..."
By the time he'd stopped making little hysterical wheezing-gasping sounds and trying to suffocate himself with a throw pillow and convinced Orihime that she didn't need to call Ichigo's father (and also confiscated the hot chocolate mix and licorice to a shelf she couldn't reach), they'd somehow tentatively come to the conclusion that cooking was really very therapeutic for Ishida and he would be terribly upset if she took his favorite housework from him entirely.
"You could have told me that sooner, silly," Orihime said with a sigh.
"...Yes, dear." After a moment, he put down the potato he was chopping and rinsed his hands and set a fingertip under her chin. "There's something else we're going to need to decide too, you know."
"Hmm?"
"You keep calling me 'Ishida-kun,'" he murmured, a wry quirk at the corner of his lips. "It's going to be a little awkward if you call your husband by his surname, you know."
"Oh! Er... um..." She could feel her cheeks turning pink. "It just seems -- too forward of me to call you anything else. I don't know why. It's just... Ishida-kun is Ishida-kun, you know? Like Kurosaki-kun is Kurosaki-kun..."
"Yes, but you're not marrying him." The little protective-possessive growl in his voice was terribly cute.
"I know," she said with a giggle. "And I like it when you call me Hime. I just... I'd feel shy calling you... Uryuu-san..."
His cheeks were a little pink too. "Then... why not leave the -san off of it?"
She squeaked, and put both hands to her cheeks. "I-- I don't know if I could-- I mean-- um..." She giggled again, and he sighed and smiled and kissed her forehead softly.
"We'll think of something."
Ishida did make very nice curry, though it was a little bland for Orihime's taste; when he wasn't looking she climbed up onto the countertop and rescued the hot chocolate and licorice, and snuck it into her own plate-- yes, definitely much better. She supposed she'd simply have to deal with the fact that her husband preferred boring food, and didn't have an adventurous palate like her own and...
"I know!" Orihime exclaimed, delighted. "I can call you Unit Zeta Commander!"
Ishida choked on his tea, and spent a while coughing.
"...Are you sure you're not ill? Really, I can call Dr. Kurosaki--"
"...no, no, fine," he wheezed. "Hime... Unit Zeta Commander? Why on earth...?"
"Because your mecha needs a cool and sophisticated name and everybody seems to like borrowing Greek letters like they're all significant and things and they mean whatever you want them to mean when you put them in calculus so I thought I could put them in to mean you and--"
...He was laughing. Helplessly, shaking all over, clutching at his ribs with one hand and scrubbing the laugh-tears off his face with the other. Orihime blinked twice, and then brightened.
Laughing was good. It was certainly rare for him to relax enough to laugh about anything. So Unit Zeta sounded like it had definite potential... except for the problem that she didn't want him to choke to death every time she said his name, and he looked like he was about halfway there already, torn between laughing and coughing the inhaled tea out of his lungs.
She reached over and rubbed his trembling shoulders carefully, until he could breathe again, and was leaning on the table gasping for breath that didn't come back as a cough.
"Or," she said, a little shyly, "I could call you honey, or darling. Or sweetheart."
When he smiled up at her, really truly smiled, it lit the whole room. "I think I'd like that," he said softly, and kissed the back of her hand. "Especially if I can call you those things too."
They settled into a quiet, gentle routine as they waited for the wedding to arrive. Chizuru had taken to the traditional duty of having mad hysterics over every detail of planning like the proverbial duck to water. In order to keep her from having a hyperventilating meltdown over the impossibility of predicting weather more than a few days in advance and the vital importance of a perfect sunny day for her Hime-sama's wedding, Orihime had decided that she wanted their wedding to be in the great sky-painted room beneath Urahara's shop, where it never rained. Once Chizuru got done clinging to her knees in fountains of sobs at her Hime-sama's brilliance and tore away to start rescheduling thirty-five different items on her planning list, which she did several times a day, all Orihime needed to do was to tidy up the house after the Chizuru-whirlwind vanished, and then finish her homework.
Because she understood now how Ishida loved to cook, she would let him cook on the weekends; through the weeks he was so very busy, though, and so she would cook his dinners exactly according to the directions no matter how boring they were, and decorate her own dinners while she waited for him to come home each day.
He really did appreciate her efforts to make his food perfectly generic for him, however strange it seemed to her. He always looked so overwhelmingly grateful whenever there wasn't wasabi or pickled radishes or soy sauce on his pancakes. She coaxed him into letting her put sweet bean paste in the pancakes once in a while, or chocolate chips in the banana muffins, or cheese in an omelet; and she teased him about how adventurous he was being with the cheese omelet, while she put pickle relish, mustard, and kimchee on her eggs and put them between two pancakes since they didn't have a hamburger bun at the moment.
He simply adjusted his tie a little, which in his dinner-conversation sign language dictionary usually translated to "you're embarrassing me but I'm too shy and uncomfortable to protest," so she kissed his cheek and kept eating her pancake-kimchee not-quite-hamburger-omelet sandwich.
After dinner, they had a routine too. Ishida would gather up half a dozen of the throw pillows he'd crocheted, and Orihime would sit at the end of the sofa and put her feet up obediently, and he would spend several minutes carefully adjusting the pillows behind her back and beneath her ankles until he was confident that she was as comfortable as she could be; and then he sat beside her and lifted her ankles into his lap, with a schoolbook in one hand, and the other gently rubbing her feet to help with the slight swelling that came from carrying around the baby's growing weight. He'd learned to flip pages with the same hand that was taking notes in the margins; Orihime had offered to take notes for him, but her notes tended to wander off into mecha wiring schematics and recipes for things that would make her fiance twitch, and so he kept his own notes, and kept quietly rubbing her ankles as he studied.
He really did work himself too hard, Orihime thought. Because another part of the nightly tradition was that sooner or later he would drowse off with the book still in his hand, asleep sitting up; Orihime kept a pile of bookmarks on the table with the lamp, in easy reach, so that she could tuck a bookmark into his book before it slipped from his fingers. She usually paid enough attention to catch the books just before they fell, because when they fell they woke him up but if she reached too soon he wouldn't be asleep and would scowl and scrub his eyes and grumble something groggy about needing to study.
So when she successfully intercepted a book from fingers that were just sleepy enough not to notice, she would set it aside and gently coax him into snuggling in beside her, tipping him just enough that his shoulder rested between the sofa and her hip, folding his glasses aside, pillowing his head against the curve of her belly, and stroking his hair, because it seemed to soothe him like the touch of a mother neither of them had had for too long.
Sometimes the baby kicked strongly enough that her tummy bounced and wobbled, strongly enough to wake him; but when he woke snuggled against her, warm and relaxed and comforted by her touch even if the angle was a little awkward for the crick in his neck -- when he woke that way, he wasn't cranky at all about his missed studies, because waking to the warm soft roundness of her body was surely much nicer for him than waking to a book falling on his foot.
Sometimes he would carry her to bed and tuck her in, and insist on returning to his studies for a few more hours. Other times, times when he didn't have essays to write and tests to take quite as soon -- then when he carried her to bed, she didn't have to work very hard at all to convince him to join her there.
Ichigo was cranky.
He wasn't entirely sure why, except that it was somehow Ishida's fault, unless it was Rukia's, which it generally was. One of their faults, that was. It was usually a toss-up as to which one made him cranky more often.
Right at the moment, Rukia had clamped a muzzle and leash -- a literal muzzle and leash -- on the hysterically hyperventilating Chizuru, so right now Rukia was making everyone's life less cranky. So that meant that this time it was probably Ishida's fault, since Chizuru was being dealt with.
Something about Orihime was just plain unnerving lately. Aside from the fact that she seemed to think it was good to have something in her belly that writhed and kicked and shoved and generally acted like something out of the cast of Aliens. And aside from the fact that she'd just ordered seaweed-flavored ice cream with yakisoba sauce and red pickled ginger on the top. And aside from the fact that the slightly cowed-looking ice cream shop owner had actually made it for her. Aside from all that, there was still something even more unnerving about her. It had something to do with the way Ishida positively hovered. Like they were joined at the hip by some invisible six-inch leash, even in the group of them. Like she reacted to his presence the way flowers reacted to the sun. Like Ishida thought she needed him at fingertip's distance all the time, like they weren't good enough to take care of her... not good enough to protect her from what, the three eight-year-olds who were staring in a combination of horror and queasy awe at Orihime's seaweed ice cream?
It just made him cranky. He pulled out the notebook he kept in his pocket and added his name a few more times to the list of people who were authorized to kill Ishida if he made her cry. By now, it was three pages long. Ichigo's name was on there a few more times than was strictly permissible, but that was the benefit of being the keeper of the list.
What made Ichigo even crankier was that somehow, sometime during the ice cream run, Ishida and Chad had come to some silent-guy telepathic agreement or something. Ishida had looked up at him and adjusted his glasses, and Chad had shifted from one foot to another, and without a single word they had somehow negotiated some international peace treaty that meant that whenever Ishida had to move more than six inches away from Orihime, Chad was the only one authorized to take his hovering-spot; and Chad took his responsibilities far too seriously.
And now Ishida was walking towards him, with that particular glint in his glasses, while Chad saw to making sure that Orihime was comfortably settled in one of the restaurant's silly pink chairs and then took up a guard-dog post right behind her shoulder.
"What the hell is that?" Ichigo demanded, incredulous.
"'What the hell is' what?" the Quincy replied, without blinking.
"That!" Ichigo spluttered, waving a hand at Chad and Orihime. "It's like you've got some kind of dog-whistle Chad's the only one to hear and you're training him to be the Orihime Police Squad Junior or something--"
"I assure you, Kurosaki, I have no dog whistles anywhere on my person."
"Hmph." Ichigo scowled, because it seemed like the best available option.
Ishida took another step closer, further into his personal space. "Kurosaki," he said, low-pitched. "About my fiancee. I will ask politely this time: stop looking at her like that. Next time, I won't ask so politely."
"Like what?"
Ishida adjusted his glasses. Ichigo fought back the impulse to smack them off his face. "Like you think my efforts to protect her are insufficient. Like you should be at her side in my place. She chose me."
"I know she chose you!" Ichigo growled. "She also chose seaweed ice cream! I don't know how her brain works!"
"The point is that she did choose," Ishida replied. "You had your chance. You didn't take it. I did. Whatever rivalry you feel you have with me, leave her out of it--"
"What chance?" Ichigo asked, completely blank.
"She still loves you, in her own way," Ishida said, and it was clearly difficult for him to admit. "I try not to begrudge you that--"
"Of course she does," Ichigo muttered, digging a hand through his hair and looking off to one side. "I love her too. She's practically my third kid sister. What do you expect me to do, swear off worrying about her just because she's getting married--"
Then he stopped, and blinked, because there was something akin to an expression on Ishida's face. "What?" Ichigo asked suspiciously.
"Do you mean that?"
"Hell yeah I mean that," Ichigo said, indignant. "And if you get pissed off at everybody who cares about her, you're going to spend way too much of your life pissed off!"
"Not that part," Ishida said, with a strange note of strain in his voice, almost as though he were trying not to laugh. "The part about your third kid sister."
"Yeah," Ichigo said, deciding his shoes were a better target for the glower after all. "It's kind of weird. I mean, it's more than kind of weird. She was this cute little kid with flower pins in her hair, and now she's still this cute little kid with flower pins in her hair except now she's got a belly the size of a melon doing Aliens impressions at me and... it's just... weird, when they grow up..."
"I see," Ishida said quietly.
Ichigo heaved a sigh. "And Karin's going to be next, I just know it. The next thing I know, some snotfaced middle school punk is going to be asking her to go to the movies and I'm going to have to not pound his face in, and I don't know how I'm going to manage it--"
--and Ishida was smiling at him. Not smirking. SMILING.
That was way, waaaaay up there on the weirdness scale. Right alongside the alien life form kicking around in Orihime's belly. They were probably connected somehow, some way he didn't want to think about, like that six inch invisible leash thing.
"Stop doing that," Ichigo growled, unnerved.
Ishida adjusted his glasses again. "Doing what?"
Ichigo tried, several times, gesturing incoherently at Ishida's face, and then gave up and stalked over to the ice cream seller and growled, "Have you got anything with alcohol in it?"
"You know something, Kurosaki?" Ishida said from right behind his left shoulder, and that was definitely unholy glee lurking under the surface of his voice, and it made Ichigo's hands itch for holy water or something else to perform an exorcism with.
"What?" Ichigo snapped.
"If Orihime is your honorary younger sister," the Quincy told him, enjoying every syllable far too much, "then that makes the two of us nearly in-laws."
Ichigo grabbed the bottle of Irish cream straight out of the startled shop owner's hands, took a long swig of it, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, "Excuse me, I need to go finish getting drunk until I can wash that thought completely out of my head, thanks."
As he stalked out in search of higher-octane alcohol, he could practically feel Ishida's grin. Right between his shoulderblades. It itched. Ichigo bit back a snarl and stretched his legs, because the faster he got to the bar, the faster he could get Ishida's creepy-ass not-sarcastic-enough smile and Orihime's alien-inhabited belly and Karin's snotnosed-punk sweaty-palmed middle-school date-wannabe well and thoroughly out of his head.
Some days it just didn't pay to get out of bed, that was all there was to it.
ED: On to piece #2...