Title: So Simple At The Time, It Seemed (Bookmark 14)
Author: Lys
Characters/Pairing: Ishida Uryuu/Kon, Ishida Ryuuken
Rating/Warnings: PG-13.
Status: Bookmark 14/20, 1,602 words.

a/n: This is gonna be longer than planned. Again. I should just give up trying to put a number on it. It may never end. God only knows. But next chapter-- daddies. And v. soon, an entire chapter full of smut. CROSSDRESSING QUINCY SMUT.



Ishida rolled the small, green candy across the rough width of his tongue carefully, as to not swallow it. It would be the last thing Ishida Uryuu needed at the moment—his neighbors thinking he’d flipped his lid and his personality. It was another ten minutes before Ishida found his way home; by that time the sickly sweet taste of the gikongan was overwhelming. He shoved the key into the lock of his door, scratching the doorknob with the teeth.

Ishida slid inside, turning lights on as he went, shedding his tie as quickly as possible, tossed over the back of one of the second-hand black bar stools in his small kitchen. He had to swallow the damn thing. If he didn’t swallow the candy, he would get a cavity; though perhaps a cavity was less than he deserved, at the time. He rolled the gikongan down his throat, scratching the back of it on the way down.

They split, Kon coming back to consciousness, Ishida vaguely wanting to lose his. He wasn’t accustomed to the feeling of being violently wrenched out of one’s own body, having only done this sort of thing that once. He hoped he never would get accustomed to it—it was too similar to that feeling one got when they woke up in the middle of the night from some organic nightmare about falling. Too similar to the way every muscle in your body jerked as you finally hit the ground and woke back up. It made him nauseous.

Also, he still had no goddamn pants.

Kon stared over at him with a broad smile, waving Ishida’s own needlepoint-hand at Ishida. Ishida sighed, long and hard. He pulled himself into one of the nearby barstools, yanking it against the table and jumping at the way the air-conditioner-chilled, cracked leather bit at the sensitive skin of his thighs. Why were there never any goddamn pants? If Ishida wanted to spend any point of his life in period dress, he would have joined the drama club. He didn’t do theatre. He did bobbins.

His, rather Kon’s, stomach growled insistently, two feet to his left. Kon blushed attractively, and Ishida wondered if everyone thought the same thing when he did it. Strangely, he hoped not. Kon had a way of lighting a face up just by existing in it. Ishida hoped he never made a facial expression like the mod-soul did, because it would remove something special from both of them.

“You’re hungry,” Kon said.

“So I am. There’s stuff in the fridge. Pick out whatever you’d like.”

Kon arched Ishida’s delicate, dark eyebrow from under the glasses. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Ishida said, staring at the glasses with an irritated, considering expression. They didn’t suit Kon, the square-framed glasses, and so Ishida reached forward and plucked them off of the mod-soul’s face. He placed them onto his own thin nose as Kon walked over to the refrigerator and began rummaging around the contents inside, face dribbling between interest, disgust and appreciation. Eventually, he pulled out some leftover store-bought rice and pickles and some carob-flavored soymilk that Ishida bought, just because it was less sweet than the chocolate flavor and less disgusting than the natural stuff.

So they were both picky. Sue them.

Kon shut the refrigerator with a soft ‘tah,’ coming to sit in a stool next to Ishida’s, setting the plastic container of store-bought rice down on the scratched but spotless stainless steel top of the tiny kitchen-island.

“I ever tell you I like your furniture?” Kon said, speaking of the kitchen-island and the stools.

“No,” Ishida replied, “and I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment or doubt your sanity.”

“Nah,” said Kon, obviously meaning that Ishida was at least as sane as he was, brushing his long black bangs behind his ears before taking after the food with a pleasant, full voracity Ishida had only seen in Inoue Orihime and the starving, to that point. He was glad, vaguely that he had saved the mod soul the pleasure of eating dinner for him, however incidentally; even if Ishida mourned the lack of fish with the rice. Rice was fine and everything, but omega fatty acids were good for quick thinking.

Kon took advantage of Ishida’s momentary distraction, mulling over food item choices, to lean in and kiss Ishida on the lips. Ishida sighed, exhausted, against Kon’s mouth. Soft skin melted against softer skin, wet from the vinegar on the store-bought rice which stung at the tip of Ishida’s pointed tongue as Kon pushed his further into Ishida’s mouth, breathing harshly through his nose. It was fogging Ishida’s glasses, slightly.

They pulled apart. The fog-ring slowly crept away from Ishida’s field of vision. He wiped the remaining wetness off with the side of his thin wrist. Kon chuckled and resume eating, talking in nice words and with a full mouth.

“It’s handsome and unpresumptuous.”

“You’re very lucky,” Ishida said in reply, “That you’re not in Kurosaki’s body right now. Else I’d have had to kill myself out of sheer disbelief that words like unpresumptuous could come out of his fumbling mouth.”

It was the exact wrong thing to say at the time, he realized, so soon after Kurosaki’s mouth had been fumbling over his own. Ishida cleared his throat nervously. Kon did his best to pretend he didn’t notice, which was sadly not a very good job of pretending he didn’t notice at all. He just shrugged thin shoulders at Ishida, leaning over the black plastic and finishing the rice off with a confused smile on his pale face, pink little lips upturned in a polite invitation.

Ishida accepted, losing his will for the second time in one night to tell Kon that he’d been kissed by Kurosaki Ichigo (and that he’d honestly wanted it and liked it. He’d like it again if Kurosaki did it, because Kurosaki was Ishida’s type). Ishida stood, finally, moving behind Kon and sliding his own white button-up out of his black slacks, sliding his cool hands up the cool back in front of him, lingering over the curiously strong shoulders, the way the lineated muscles separated in the middle of the sprawl of his back; sinuous.

Ishida wondered if there was something slightly wrong about a world in which you could start to honestly want to have sex with yourself.

He decided there probably was, but he didn’t give a shit. There was already something slightly wrong with a world that could breed things like Quincies. That could involve situations that required them.

That could kill them all just as easily.

Kon groaned beneath the ministrations of Ishida’s hands, rubbing the archer’s muscles that played and twitched, unknotting under the skin. He leaned back against the circling, massaging touches, one arm reaching for the long tail of black hair that belonged to Ishida’s disembodied body. Kon curled the slick tail around his finger, nostrils flaring, smelling the ethereal, musky scent of vanilla ricemilk and wisteria that seemed to follow the form around.

Ishida pulled it away in irritation, tossing it back over his shoulder. He didn’t like the thing—it got in the way, and it didn’t make any sense. He didn’t like the way he felt like he’d just walked out of some shambara swordfight movie. He didn’t like the way it reminded him of them.

Halting this train of thought, knowing it was dangerous, Ishida cut in with:

“You know Inoue Orihime?”

Kon snickered lasciviously, confirming Ishida’s question and adding unspoken little details to the answer, as unverbalized as it was. Ishida bit him on the neck, warningly, and Kon yelped, skin dragging along Ishida’s small, pointed canine teeth. There would be a mark there the next day.

Well, whatever.

“Are you twelve or something, Kon? I meant, as a person. Not as a pair of tits, nice as they may be.”

“You like it,” Kon grinned, rubbing at the white little trails on his long, graceful neck. The hand came away with a few spots of blood, red on white like rose petals on a virgin wedding. Kon wrinkled his nose and licked the spots off.

Ishida liked it. “I told her today that we’re together. It, well, it came up in conversation when I was…walking her home for the evening. She’s a sweet girl. You may want to consider maturing your relationship with her at some near time, because I’m sure she’d enjoy your company just as well as I do.”

Kon rolled Ishida’s naked blue eyes. “As much as I honestly do want to suffocate myself in her cleavage, I don’t act that way around people because I really am an idiot. I just know people’s limits. It makes them uncomfortable, talking to a toy, Uryuu.”

“I know,” Ishida said, leaning his chest against the subtle warmth of Kon’s long back, silk pressed against cotton, sliding.

“I know you know. I just wish you, at least, would talk like it.”

“Uryuu.” Ishida’s eyes snapped behind him, at the sudden, velvet voice. The door to the refrigerator opened, bathing the room in cold light. Ishida froze. Kon’s head whirled, throwing Ishida off of his back with a jerk.

“Yes?” Kon answered, trying to act the part in the exact same way he always did in the Kurosaki household—pretending to really be Ishida Uryuu. Ishida would have tried to stop the futility of it all, had he not been teetering somewhere on the edge of shock and rage.

Ishida Ryuuken opened up the bottle of water in his hand, the most expensive one in Ishida’s refrigerator. The lid clicked, as Kon stood from the stool and pushed it in, eyes nervous and hunted.

“Not you,” Ryuuken waved Kon away. “The idiot beside you looking as if he’s honestly surprised I’m here, after all he’s done.”