Bleach Drabble (403-405)
I AM SO LAME.
But whatever. This is what I came up with over the weekend, yes? XD
403.
Title: A Simple Hello
Rating: PG
Pairing/Character/s: Yoruichi, Byakuya, Urahara
Word Count: 970
Warning/s: Spoilers by relation for the SS arc.
Summary: related to #365 (Simple Forgiveness)- Yoruichi drags Byakuya into the human realm.
Dedication: Sophiap- you are a better person than I, madam. ^^
A/N: Figured I should do something with Byakuya since he’s occupying more and more of my thoughts lately, oddly enough. Charming bastard. XD
He wants to glare at her because this is ludicrous, because there’s no point to this and the clothes he’s wearing feel funny and kind of scratch and really, it’s not that big a deal that they need to do this, go traipsing around unannounced after all this time and…
…and…
…he doesn’t know what to say.
They’re minutes, maybe seconds away, and he has no clue as to what he’s going to say.
She tugs him along by the hand and laughs at him with her eyes-you big baby-as they move, he adjusting the collar of his shirt-type garment- they called it a polo or something earlier, though he thought that that was the name of sport and not clothes-pulling it away from his throat in an awkward manner every few minutes and wondering why everything in this world seems to need to fit much tighter than it does back in seireitei.
He tries his best to glare back at Yoruichi when she throws those smug looks over her shoulder at him, but he has a feeling it comes across as more profoundly huffy than intimidating- really, when did he start acting like he was two years old? He hadn’t even done that when he was two- and after he realizes that he’s not scaring her into giving up her crazy idea, he sighs and follows in a resigned manner, the denim on his legs scratching in a way much stranger than the flowing hakama he’s used to feeling against his skin.
Everything about this is strange and uncomfortable, he thinks. If Yoruichi wasn’t the one who was pulling him quite forcibly by the wrist, he probably would have retreated full out, popped in a piece of Soul Candy and been done with this ridiculous gigai in these ridiculous clothes-done with this whole ridiculous world.
Whether Urahara is here or not-it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?
Their ties had been cut long ago, when his friend disappeared without a word, a hundred years gone and not even a letter, a clue for Byakuya to hold in his hand and say goodbye with.
A century without a word doesn’t mean barging into someone’s home unannounced and acting like nothing happened at all, though Yoruichi might think otherwise.
Granted, it worked for her. But still.
Byakuya’s not quite as… charming as she is, he supposes.
Besides, isn’t this sort of thing very much different for men? There can’t be hugging and easy laughter, can’t be slipping into conversation like nothing’s changed and an immediate picking-up-from-where-we-left-off.
Men, Byakuya thinks, are much more easily wounded creatures. Pride might have something to do with it.
He foresees lots of awkward silences and maybe polite conversation about how the weather’s been in seireitei if it gets that desperate.
Kisuke can’t possibly have a thing to say to him after a hundred years, after all. Byakuya can barely think of what he’s going to say himself, when he sees his old friend.
“Yoruichi…maybe this isn’t a good idea…” he starts again, hating that he sounds so ridiculous when he talks to her about it.
She snorts. “Che. Too late, Byakuya-bo, we’re already here, hmm?” she declares, stopping short in front of a small building, in front of which stands a large man wearing a blue apron and rather single-mindedly moving rather heavy looking boxes.
Byakuya blinks and looks up to read the sign.
Urahara Shoten.
And there it is.
The thing that Urahara left everything else behind for- without a backwards glance.
He finds himself resenting the tiny shop a bit when he looks at it as it is here, even though a rational part of himself says that there’s more to Kisuke’s leaving than this rickety little business, that there has to be.
But then again, Kisuke has always been very frivolous, perhaps as an offset to his impressive brilliance.
Swallowing, the sixth division captain looks at Yoruichi out of the corner of his eye. She looks back and winks, before waving at the man in the apron. “Yo, Tessai!”
“Ah, Yoruichi-dono!” the man exclaims, straightening immediately when he sees them. “Welcome back, Yoruichi-dono!”
“Ah, good to be back,” she responds pleasantly, before putting her hands on her hips. “Kisuke around?”
“I’ll fetch him immediately,” Tessai responds, adjusting his glasses before bowing and ducking into the store.
Yoruichi turns to Byakuya then, hands still on hips. “Well?” she asks, looking him over critically (and making him feel very young in the process). “You ready?”
“No,” he says, honestly.
She grins. “Too bad.”
“Yoruichi-saaaan!!!”
The sound of a cheerful voice from the doorway makes his head spin up towards the shop’s little porch immediately, and for a moment, he forgets everything.
Even his trepidation.
It really is Kisuke.
The shop-owner pauses two steps out the door himself, blinking from under the brim of his ridiculous hat when he sees that Yoruichi isn’t alone.
The two men stare at each other from across the expanse for a moment, and all is silent.
Dread wells up in the sixth division shinigami’s stomach at that, and swallowing, he almost sputters something about the pleasant weather.
Luckily, Urahara speaks first.
Face stretching into a slow grin, the blonde removes his hat, touching it to his chest.
“Well I’ll be damned. Byaku-bo!”
And then it’s a flash, a fragment of a second really, before Byakuya is suddenly in a fierce headlock, his hair being ruffled within an inch of its life as Kisuke whoops and laughs and gives him no quarter. “Byaku-bo, how are ya?!”
Wide-eyed and disbelieving at the sudden turn of events, no one is more surprised than Kuchiki Byakuya when he feels his mouth start to quirk into a small, breathless smile at his friend’s enthusiastic-and more importantly, familiar-- greeting.
“Hello, Kisuke.”
END
404.
Title: Squeaky Clean
Rating: G
Pairing/Character/s: Yuzu, Kon
Word Count: 487
Warning/s: No major spoilers I can imagine…
Summary: More frightening than Hollows or even the Arrankar- prepubescent girls.
Dedication: Requested by wrekar. Also, for Yoshi, for getting me my Kon plushie. XD
A/N: Another prompt from my lj. I didn’t get to this one when I should have though, because it got me SO STUCK. The request was: “Kon - Soap”. Um. The results are SUCKY! ;_; I had no clue what to write, I think it shows. At least it’s DONE tho. -_-;;
The soap had been bad.
Horrible.
Ichigo’s crazy sister had taken a look at him in dismay one day, fretting over the dirt that had gathered on his fur and wondering how it possibly could have gotten there, when Postaff had been sitting in her room doing nothing else for weeks.
She’d promptly decided to wash him.
Soap in his ears, his mouth, his…well. There had been soap everywhere, in short.
He’d choked on it, gotten it in his eyes, cried a little as she’d scrubbed him mercilessly clean.
No torture on this earth could be greater than a bath, he thinks, the stuffed lion currently sitting, wet and miserable, atop the washer while she goes off in search of a towel to dry his surface off with.
He thinks about moving to escape when she disappears farther into the washroom for a moment, humming to herself as she grabs a fresh towel from a cabinet.
But it’s too late, and he’s really too heavy to move at a respectable speed like this, wet and soaked through to the point that it’s hard to even sit up.
Head drooping to the side, Kon allows two lonely tears to fall from his eyes as Yuzu returns triumphant, towel in hand.
“Postaff, don’t you love feeling nice and clean?” she asks sweetly, before wrapping him in an evil towel of doom and drying him like she’s trying to kill him.
He’d been wrong. He knows that now.
Towel drying is far worse an evil to have to endure than a simple bath as it involves friction and the feeling of burning to death as she rubs at him, all the while humming like it’s the most normal thing in the world to attempt to flay him alive.
Luckily it ends a few minutes later, and while his fur is sticking up on end he’s survived the ordeal (miraculously), and that has to count for something.
Tossing the towel into the hamper, Yuzu pauses and stands back, examining her freshly cleaned stuffed lion critically. Seemingly satisfied, she picks Kon up with the intention of dressing him up in something pretty and putting him back on her windowsill.
He breathes a silent sigh of relief at that. The horror has finally ended.
Except Yuzu stops once she has him in arm, frowns when she discovers he’s still dripping, some of the water having leaked into his very stuffing and making her toy weigh twice as much as it should.
“Oh no, Postaff!” she exclaims, worriedly. “You’re not all dry yet.”
Kon has a bad feeling about this.
Sighing, Yuzu pats his head in an apologetic manner before opening the dryer door. “Ah, this should help!” she exclaims cheerfully, throwing him in a dark, metal hole of some sort.
Kon bites his lip and tells himself that whatever it is, it can’t be as bad as the towel dry.
It can’t.
Right?
END
405.
Title: Traffic
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Character/s: Ichigo, Rukia, Isshin
Word Count: 620
Warning/s: Vague spoilers for the post SS arc, lots of OOCness and crack.
Summary: The Kurosaki family and Rukia go to Disneyland! Or try to.
Dedication: Jen, Yoshi, Issei, Beck, Greg, and all our other drivers. You are amazing. XD
A/N: In honor of the 405 freeway here in LA. DEVIL!!!
“ARGH STOPPIT.”
Isshin pauses at beer bottle number 56, right before taking it down and passing it around.
Ichigo, hands wound in his hair and pulling just a little bit, twitches when there’s finally silence in the car.
Isshin pouts. “I was almost done!”
Ichigo twitches again, probably due to the fact that his father’s voice-after having to listen to the man sing all the way down from 99 bottles of beer on the wall-has kind of been grating on his last nerve.
“You were on fifty-six, you bastard,” Ichigo snarls, wishing his walkman hadn’t run out of batteries on the plane.
In the backseat, Yuzu is dozing and Karin is listening to music. And right in the middle of it all, Rukia sits, too busy enjoying Ichigo’s torment to say anything and not tired enough to nap. When he cranes his neck a little bit he can see her smug face in the rear-view mirror, and he swears if he could reach back there without dislocating his shoulder he’d choke her a little bit.
She probably knows it too, because that just increases her amusement.
Even more than throwing peanuts at the back of his head during the entirety of the trip from the plane ride across the ocean, apparently.
He thinks he’d be more excited about a trip to America if the traffic didn’t suck so bad and he had no interest whatsoever in visiting Disneyland.
There’s a Disneyland in Tokyo for god’s sake. The hell are they out in California for?
And how long have they been in this fucking traffic?
He swears that they’ve been sitting for two hours and have gone just as many miles, the small rental car packed with Kurosakis (and one Kuchiki) moving so slowly they might as well be parked.
How do Americans travel in this shit?
No wonder they’re always so damned angry.
Ichigo thinks that if he’d started running an hour and a half ago, he would already be at the damned Disneyland hotel by now.
And he would have done it too.
If the people here weren’t so damn scary.
In the span of their short, short time in California traffic, the family had thus far experienced one near-death car crash that involved a woman on her cell phone in an SUV the size of Japan, barreling down the road at them thirty miles over the speed limit as the lady was trying to do her make-up with her other hand. Driving with her knees.
In addition to that, there had been the crazy man with his windows all rolled down, pumping country music through his speakers loudly enough that Isshin started singing along using a random mash of all the English words he knew, until he’d ended up saying something offensive in combination and the other driver had pulled a pistol and taken a shot at the psychotic doctor, screaming “Yee-haww!!” the entire time.
Luckily enough his dad had thought it was some sort of great American greeting and flashed a V-sign before shouting “Yee-haww!” back, which had creeped the other man out enough that he’d decided to leave the family alone, gun or no.
That didn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t going to get shot again though, and intensely wary, Ichigo had decided that staying in the car instead of running might be his best bet.
But to be fair, that had been before Isshin started with his ninety-nine bottles of beer.
Thirty minutes later, when they’re still essentially in the same spot, Isshin starts singing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.”
Rukia happily joins him, despite not knowing the words.
Ichigo, eye twitching, pops the door open and makes a run for it.
END
EDITS PLZ.
But whatever. This is what I came up with over the weekend, yes? XD
403.
Title: A Simple Hello
Rating: PG
Pairing/Character/s: Yoruichi, Byakuya, Urahara
Word Count: 970
Warning/s: Spoilers by relation for the SS arc.
Summary: related to #365 (Simple Forgiveness)- Yoruichi drags Byakuya into the human realm.
Dedication: Sophiap- you are a better person than I, madam. ^^
A/N: Figured I should do something with Byakuya since he’s occupying more and more of my thoughts lately, oddly enough. Charming bastard. XD
He wants to glare at her because this is ludicrous, because there’s no point to this and the clothes he’s wearing feel funny and kind of scratch and really, it’s not that big a deal that they need to do this, go traipsing around unannounced after all this time and…
…and…
…he doesn’t know what to say.
They’re minutes, maybe seconds away, and he has no clue as to what he’s going to say.
She tugs him along by the hand and laughs at him with her eyes-you big baby-as they move, he adjusting the collar of his shirt-type garment- they called it a polo or something earlier, though he thought that that was the name of sport and not clothes-pulling it away from his throat in an awkward manner every few minutes and wondering why everything in this world seems to need to fit much tighter than it does back in seireitei.
He tries his best to glare back at Yoruichi when she throws those smug looks over her shoulder at him, but he has a feeling it comes across as more profoundly huffy than intimidating- really, when did he start acting like he was two years old? He hadn’t even done that when he was two- and after he realizes that he’s not scaring her into giving up her crazy idea, he sighs and follows in a resigned manner, the denim on his legs scratching in a way much stranger than the flowing hakama he’s used to feeling against his skin.
Everything about this is strange and uncomfortable, he thinks. If Yoruichi wasn’t the one who was pulling him quite forcibly by the wrist, he probably would have retreated full out, popped in a piece of Soul Candy and been done with this ridiculous gigai in these ridiculous clothes-done with this whole ridiculous world.
Whether Urahara is here or not-it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?
Their ties had been cut long ago, when his friend disappeared without a word, a hundred years gone and not even a letter, a clue for Byakuya to hold in his hand and say goodbye with.
A century without a word doesn’t mean barging into someone’s home unannounced and acting like nothing happened at all, though Yoruichi might think otherwise.
Granted, it worked for her. But still.
Byakuya’s not quite as… charming as she is, he supposes.
Besides, isn’t this sort of thing very much different for men? There can’t be hugging and easy laughter, can’t be slipping into conversation like nothing’s changed and an immediate picking-up-from-where-we-left-off.
Men, Byakuya thinks, are much more easily wounded creatures. Pride might have something to do with it.
He foresees lots of awkward silences and maybe polite conversation about how the weather’s been in seireitei if it gets that desperate.
Kisuke can’t possibly have a thing to say to him after a hundred years, after all. Byakuya can barely think of what he’s going to say himself, when he sees his old friend.
“Yoruichi…maybe this isn’t a good idea…” he starts again, hating that he sounds so ridiculous when he talks to her about it.
She snorts. “Che. Too late, Byakuya-bo, we’re already here, hmm?” she declares, stopping short in front of a small building, in front of which stands a large man wearing a blue apron and rather single-mindedly moving rather heavy looking boxes.
Byakuya blinks and looks up to read the sign.
Urahara Shoten.
And there it is.
The thing that Urahara left everything else behind for- without a backwards glance.
He finds himself resenting the tiny shop a bit when he looks at it as it is here, even though a rational part of himself says that there’s more to Kisuke’s leaving than this rickety little business, that there has to be.
But then again, Kisuke has always been very frivolous, perhaps as an offset to his impressive brilliance.
Swallowing, the sixth division captain looks at Yoruichi out of the corner of his eye. She looks back and winks, before waving at the man in the apron. “Yo, Tessai!”
“Ah, Yoruichi-dono!” the man exclaims, straightening immediately when he sees them. “Welcome back, Yoruichi-dono!”
“Ah, good to be back,” she responds pleasantly, before putting her hands on her hips. “Kisuke around?”
“I’ll fetch him immediately,” Tessai responds, adjusting his glasses before bowing and ducking into the store.
Yoruichi turns to Byakuya then, hands still on hips. “Well?” she asks, looking him over critically (and making him feel very young in the process). “You ready?”
“No,” he says, honestly.
She grins. “Too bad.”
“Yoruichi-saaaan!!!”
The sound of a cheerful voice from the doorway makes his head spin up towards the shop’s little porch immediately, and for a moment, he forgets everything.
Even his trepidation.
It really is Kisuke.
The shop-owner pauses two steps out the door himself, blinking from under the brim of his ridiculous hat when he sees that Yoruichi isn’t alone.
The two men stare at each other from across the expanse for a moment, and all is silent.
Dread wells up in the sixth division shinigami’s stomach at that, and swallowing, he almost sputters something about the pleasant weather.
Luckily, Urahara speaks first.
Face stretching into a slow grin, the blonde removes his hat, touching it to his chest.
“Well I’ll be damned. Byaku-bo!”
And then it’s a flash, a fragment of a second really, before Byakuya is suddenly in a fierce headlock, his hair being ruffled within an inch of its life as Kisuke whoops and laughs and gives him no quarter. “Byaku-bo, how are ya?!”
Wide-eyed and disbelieving at the sudden turn of events, no one is more surprised than Kuchiki Byakuya when he feels his mouth start to quirk into a small, breathless smile at his friend’s enthusiastic-and more importantly, familiar-- greeting.
“Hello, Kisuke.”
END
404.
Title: Squeaky Clean
Rating: G
Pairing/Character/s: Yuzu, Kon
Word Count: 487
Warning/s: No major spoilers I can imagine…
Summary: More frightening than Hollows or even the Arrankar- prepubescent girls.
Dedication: Requested by wrekar. Also, for Yoshi, for getting me my Kon plushie. XD
A/N: Another prompt from my lj. I didn’t get to this one when I should have though, because it got me SO STUCK. The request was: “Kon - Soap”. Um. The results are SUCKY! ;_; I had no clue what to write, I think it shows. At least it’s DONE tho. -_-;;
The soap had been bad.
Horrible.
Ichigo’s crazy sister had taken a look at him in dismay one day, fretting over the dirt that had gathered on his fur and wondering how it possibly could have gotten there, when Postaff had been sitting in her room doing nothing else for weeks.
She’d promptly decided to wash him.
Soap in his ears, his mouth, his…well. There had been soap everywhere, in short.
He’d choked on it, gotten it in his eyes, cried a little as she’d scrubbed him mercilessly clean.
No torture on this earth could be greater than a bath, he thinks, the stuffed lion currently sitting, wet and miserable, atop the washer while she goes off in search of a towel to dry his surface off with.
He thinks about moving to escape when she disappears farther into the washroom for a moment, humming to herself as she grabs a fresh towel from a cabinet.
But it’s too late, and he’s really too heavy to move at a respectable speed like this, wet and soaked through to the point that it’s hard to even sit up.
Head drooping to the side, Kon allows two lonely tears to fall from his eyes as Yuzu returns triumphant, towel in hand.
“Postaff, don’t you love feeling nice and clean?” she asks sweetly, before wrapping him in an evil towel of doom and drying him like she’s trying to kill him.
He’d been wrong. He knows that now.
Towel drying is far worse an evil to have to endure than a simple bath as it involves friction and the feeling of burning to death as she rubs at him, all the while humming like it’s the most normal thing in the world to attempt to flay him alive.
Luckily it ends a few minutes later, and while his fur is sticking up on end he’s survived the ordeal (miraculously), and that has to count for something.
Tossing the towel into the hamper, Yuzu pauses and stands back, examining her freshly cleaned stuffed lion critically. Seemingly satisfied, she picks Kon up with the intention of dressing him up in something pretty and putting him back on her windowsill.
He breathes a silent sigh of relief at that. The horror has finally ended.
Except Yuzu stops once she has him in arm, frowns when she discovers he’s still dripping, some of the water having leaked into his very stuffing and making her toy weigh twice as much as it should.
“Oh no, Postaff!” she exclaims, worriedly. “You’re not all dry yet.”
Kon has a bad feeling about this.
Sighing, Yuzu pats his head in an apologetic manner before opening the dryer door. “Ah, this should help!” she exclaims cheerfully, throwing him in a dark, metal hole of some sort.
Kon bites his lip and tells himself that whatever it is, it can’t be as bad as the towel dry.
It can’t.
Right?
END
405.
Title: Traffic
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Character/s: Ichigo, Rukia, Isshin
Word Count: 620
Warning/s: Vague spoilers for the post SS arc, lots of OOCness and crack.
Summary: The Kurosaki family and Rukia go to Disneyland! Or try to.
Dedication: Jen, Yoshi, Issei, Beck, Greg, and all our other drivers. You are amazing. XD
A/N: In honor of the 405 freeway here in LA. DEVIL!!!
“ARGH STOPPIT.”
Isshin pauses at beer bottle number 56, right before taking it down and passing it around.
Ichigo, hands wound in his hair and pulling just a little bit, twitches when there’s finally silence in the car.
Isshin pouts. “I was almost done!”
Ichigo twitches again, probably due to the fact that his father’s voice-after having to listen to the man sing all the way down from 99 bottles of beer on the wall-has kind of been grating on his last nerve.
“You were on fifty-six, you bastard,” Ichigo snarls, wishing his walkman hadn’t run out of batteries on the plane.
In the backseat, Yuzu is dozing and Karin is listening to music. And right in the middle of it all, Rukia sits, too busy enjoying Ichigo’s torment to say anything and not tired enough to nap. When he cranes his neck a little bit he can see her smug face in the rear-view mirror, and he swears if he could reach back there without dislocating his shoulder he’d choke her a little bit.
She probably knows it too, because that just increases her amusement.
Even more than throwing peanuts at the back of his head during the entirety of the trip from the plane ride across the ocean, apparently.
He thinks he’d be more excited about a trip to America if the traffic didn’t suck so bad and he had no interest whatsoever in visiting Disneyland.
There’s a Disneyland in Tokyo for god’s sake. The hell are they out in California for?
And how long have they been in this fucking traffic?
He swears that they’ve been sitting for two hours and have gone just as many miles, the small rental car packed with Kurosakis (and one Kuchiki) moving so slowly they might as well be parked.
How do Americans travel in this shit?
No wonder they’re always so damned angry.
Ichigo thinks that if he’d started running an hour and a half ago, he would already be at the damned Disneyland hotel by now.
And he would have done it too.
If the people here weren’t so damn scary.
In the span of their short, short time in California traffic, the family had thus far experienced one near-death car crash that involved a woman on her cell phone in an SUV the size of Japan, barreling down the road at them thirty miles over the speed limit as the lady was trying to do her make-up with her other hand. Driving with her knees.
In addition to that, there had been the crazy man with his windows all rolled down, pumping country music through his speakers loudly enough that Isshin started singing along using a random mash of all the English words he knew, until he’d ended up saying something offensive in combination and the other driver had pulled a pistol and taken a shot at the psychotic doctor, screaming “Yee-haww!!” the entire time.
Luckily enough his dad had thought it was some sort of great American greeting and flashed a V-sign before shouting “Yee-haww!” back, which had creeped the other man out enough that he’d decided to leave the family alone, gun or no.
That didn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t going to get shot again though, and intensely wary, Ichigo had decided that staying in the car instead of running might be his best bet.
But to be fair, that had been before Isshin started with his ninety-nine bottles of beer.
Thirty minutes later, when they’re still essentially in the same spot, Isshin starts singing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.”
Rukia happily joins him, despite not knowing the words.
Ichigo, eye twitching, pops the door open and makes a run for it.
END
EDITS PLZ.