Title: Oh, But It Escapes You (Bookmark)
Author: Lys
Characters/Pairing: Kurosaki Ichigo/Ishida Uryuu, Ishida Uryuu/Kon, Rukia
Rating/Warnings: R for language and sexual themes.
Status: Bookmark 9/20, 1535 words.

a/n: again, a chapter where no hanky-panky happens. Starting to follow a mixture of the manga and anime storylines here, but obviously changing a bit, with only more major changes on the horizon. oh well. this chapter was necessary to move things ahead, however. the next chapter makes it worth it for me. hooray, kinky sex.


01: Bookmark
02: I Tell Ya What, Man
03: Low-Down Dirty Thief
04: They Also Mourn, Who Don't Wear Black
05: And Take It All Off
06: No Heart-Warming Stories
07: Let The Idiot Speak
08: Pick 'Til It Bleeds






Ichigo watched Ishida Uryuu walk away with Kon in his pocket, disappearing into the growing late-night summer fog with a small but noticeable limp. He shook his head, falling forward into his body without so much as a wince, feeling his soul seal itself back into its shell of meat like a healing scab. Ichigo sighed against the ground, feeling the damp of his freshly-washed hair and the smooth clay of the playground’s dirt.

He smelled like orange and crème. There was a knot already gathered at the base of his neck.

Standing, Ichigo walked home in the dark in nothing but his pyjamas.

He ghosted up the sidewalk to his house, quietly. His father was nowhere to be seen, and Ichigo was silently glad for it. He grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator before sneaking up the stairs and opening his bedroom door slowly. He was not immediately aware of the draft. Ichigo reached behind himself, locking the door. He reached under his oversized shirt, lifting it with a scowl on his face.

“Ichigo,” a deep, smooth voice called from the window. He stopped, frozen, staring at the windowsill. “I’m glad you’re so happy to see me, but I didn’t think we were so close. Where are your pants?”

“R—“ Ichigo stuttered. “Rukia.”

“Ichigo,” she sighed, as if glad to be forming the boy’s name on her lips. She lept daintily down from the window, rushing over to Ichigo. He held out his long arms, gathering up and lifting her. After a moment they nervously separated, a soft blush on Ichigo’s face, clashing with his hair. Rukia smoothed down the familiar school seifuku she was wearing, staring at Ichigo with a small, coy smile. Ichigo shook his head.

All that and now this.

“I missed you,” he said, “I thought you were never coming back.”

“So did I,” Rukia said, strong and honest. “Seireitei is a mess. But there were things that were important to me here that needed attending.”

“Ah,” said Ichigo, moving around her to shut the window with a soft tap. A paper flew off of Ichigo’s desk, floating slowly to the floor. Rukia cleared her throat behind him, before sitting at the edge of his bed, knees held together tightly, hands crossed over her chest.

“Ichigo,” she said with a sharp edge, “I’m not an idiot, and I’m way too old to be brushed off, so don’t try to do it. I know you’ve been having problems lately. Byakuya-nii-sama told me what happened, that day on the Hill. You’re stupid, if you think you could just keep it to yourself, and even more stupid if you thought the problem would just…unmake itself.”

She stared at him, blue eyes proud, not a black hair in the wrong place. He sat down on the bed beside her, dipping it deeply next to Rukia’s slight weight. Ichigo held his head in his hands again, he’d stopped counting the times that night.

“You’re not doing this alone. You’ve got people who care about you, and keeping information like this to yourself can only hurt those people in the long run.”

“Rukia, I never—“

“Shut up!” Rukia growled, delicate nostrils flaring, voice hushed because of the hour but still displaying every bit of worry and anger she intended. “You’re going to have to get over your hang-ups and deal with this, Ichigo. Sooner rather than later.” She stared him down.

Ichigo conceded. “Fine. I understand, but just…not tonight. I’ve had a really bad night, and now I want to sleep. I’ve got class tomorrow.”

“Speaking of class, where’s Kon hiding? Is he plotting something?”

Ichigo bit his lip, blush returning. He had absolutely no intentions of getting into detail about the situation with Kon and Ishida with Rukia. Not anytime soon. “Not tonight. Tomorrow. Rukia, please.”

“Fine,” Rukia said at length. “You don’t look very good, so I guess it’s better to wait until tomorrow to deal with this.” She glanced out the window, face finally relaxing as she reached up to loosen and toy with the red bow around her neck. “I don’t suppose the closet is still ready and outfitted. This isn’t a hotel, after all.”

“No,” Ichigo said, hand laying in the warmth of the sheets where Rukia had been sitting. “But don’t leave. Sleep with me tonight, Rukia.” He looked over at the small woman, eyebrows knit together, brown eyes soft but serious. She opened her pink mouth to speak, but closed it quickly, reconsidering. Ichigo winced, convinced that the answer was going to be a simple no, in a positive scenario.

Her canny eyes looked his form up and down, as if searching intently for some sort of ulterior motive or specious logic. Slowly, she pulled her red bow from her neck with deft little fingers, moving over to the bed. Ichigo stared up at her.

“Shove over,” she muttered. Ichigo did as he was told, sliding across the small bed until the cotton of his shirt pressed against the cool plaster wall of his bedroom. He lifted the thin summer blanket, letting Rukia slide in next to him. She didn’t bother to warn him about funny business. There wouldn’t be any.

It was an understanding, between people who loved one another very much in specific ways.

Rukia’s small weight settled in next to Ichigo’s side and he wrapped an arm over the shinigami’s shoulder, soft, porcelain skin cool against the heat of his own body temperature, being a human furnace.

He sighed deeply, shaking Rukia’s small form, and she made a small, feminine noise of complaint. “Tomorrow, Ichigo.”

“Tomorrow.”

Ichigo cupped her head under his chin chastely, her hair thin and feathery, tickling against a still-unshaven underside and neck. Ichigo denied himself the desire to bury his head in her inky hair and breath in deeply, memorizing the scent in case Rukia ever left him again. Instead, he listed to the quiet puff of her breath in the silence.

She was small, unexpectedly strong, pale and dark at the same time, face a mixture of inconspicuous Asian features, high cheekbones and small nose offset by bowed roseate lips and calculating blue eyes.

Ichigo thought of Ishida Uryuu.

~~*~~

Ishida returned to his silent, empty apartment an hour after leaving the park, breathing hard in the humid air with his injury, bruise slowly spreading across his torso in violent splashes of color. He stumbled into his small bathroom, removing some soft cotton bandaging and some triple-antibiotic ointment, slathering the ointment on thick as the house filled with the sterile scent, unattractively familiar. The smell of a hospital.

He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, inspecting it for any damage Kurosaki may have caused with his short temper. Seeing none readily evident, he flipped the steel blue Motorola open, eyeing the flashing messages on the screen. Two voicemails, both from Ryuuken.

What a bastard.

Ishida didn’t bother listening to them, didn’t want to even acknowledge them tonight.

“Tomorrow,” he muttered to himself, flicking the phone shut and slipping out of the bathroom after turning out the light. He set it on a nightstand by his bed. Ishida backtracked to the kitchen, opening the fridge and retrieving a bottle of spring water and a convenience store-packaged black container of rice, covered in some sort of furikake. He didn’t rightly care. He pulled a pair of chopsticks out of a small drawer of utensils in his kitchen, sitting heavily in a black barstool at the counter, moving the food slowly into his mouth.

And damn if it didn’t hurt to even chew just then. Even his ass hurt, but Ishida had a few guesses why (and his first two didn’t count).

It could have hurt a lot worse, though, he knew. He thought of the tiny green pill in his pocket, containing a dormant soul. What did it feel like, Ishida wondered, to be put in stasis like that. Neither existent nor non-existent. He should wake Kon up; put him in a china-doll or a stuffed animal he was fixing for the girls at school or somesuch. Ishida couldn’t bring himself to do it. He couldn’t imagine the horrific impotence of being a living creature stuck in a non-living body.

Kon was a person, even if he was a person without a proper name.

Ishida took the gikongan out of his pocket, set it gently on his stainless steel countertop. He stared at it for ten or twenty minutes, in and out of deep thought, sometimes just pondering the color of the damn thing. It started to roll, and Ishida reached out and stopped it, picking it up once again between thumb and forefinger.

He could get Kon’s plush off of Ichigo after school the next day. It would be the least harmful to both of their egos, assumedly. In the meantime, Ishida was feeling oddly adventurous. Maybe it was the looming threat of Ishida Ryuuken and his hard-ass life-advice. Maybe Kurosaki had knocked a few very important screws loose; either way.

In the meantime.

Ishida drank half of his bottle of spring water, moistening his mouth and enjoying the feeling of cold wetness lubricating his sore chest, hot and throbbing from the bruising.

He opened his mouth wide, pointed tongue sticking out into the air-conditioning of the kitchen. In the distance, a stray cat yowled.

Ishida dropped the soul candy onto his outstretched tongue, enjoying the sugar-taste, surprised it even had one.

It was one-oh-seven in the morning on a Tuesday night. Ishida swallowed.