After Five Lifetimes
5. Evening Odds
Orihime passed on the Handcrafts Club the next few days. She felt guilty about it, but she wasn’t the only one whose interest was dimmed in the trio of dresses they were making for the fall festival competition. She’d noticed Uryuu’s absences more frequently after school, his usually quiet nature even more somber
lately. He wasn’t particularly moody, she decided as she gathered her books and bag together after class had let out for the day. He’d been less outgoing since the War had ended, and he wasn’t telling anyone why.
“Will you be there tomorrow?” he asked as she arranged her school books in the bag, standing at his desk two rows away.
She nodded, returning a smile to his pensive look. “Are you?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” He looked back to where Kon was possessing Ichigo’s body, sending a derisive scowl to the stand-in. His attention turned back to Orihime. “Are you finished with the beading?”
“Almost,” she said, pulling the bag strap over her shoulder, untucking her hair from under it. She hoped her next words wouldn’t sound intrusive, but she really wanted to know, believing it to be the reason for his dour moods the past months. “How is Dr. Ishida?”
Uryuu’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses, darting away from her to his own books in his arm. “He’s well, thank you, Inoue-san. He’s very dedicated to his work, and a good example of what I should aspire to.”
She frowned as he said it. He’d said similar things before, and more often now, and every time he did it seemed to take something out of him. Something Quincy out of him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ishida-san,” she said as he moved through the rows of desks.
“Bye, Inoue-san.”
He left out the classroom, and she sighed, hitching her bag strap higher over her shoulder as she followed out the door. She’d only taken a few steps into the hall when Kon caught up to her.
“Hi, Inoue-san,” he said, putting a lax, goofy smile on Ichigo’s face.
“Hi.” She moved quicker down the hall as he sped up to her.
“Ichigo’s been gone a lot, and Nee-san is gone too much, too,” he said, his steps jaunty when compared to Ichigo’s.
She didn’t like when Kon accompanied her at school, which he was apt to do whenever he had the chance. He wasn’t opportunistically grabby like he used to be, but he did have a tendency to bump into her shoulder and knock her with his elbow when he scratched his head, which he did a lot.
“They’re busy with Soul Society matters,” she said, refusing to call him any name at all as they moved down the hall and out the building into the late summer’s warm day. She turned onto the sidewalk and walked quicker as he easily set pace with her.
“I could walk you home, Inoue-san,” he said with another grin.
“Tatsuki’s coming over for dinner tonight, so I have to get my schoolwork done early. But thank you anyway.” She smiled hopefully, pulling her bag from her shoulder and hugging it to her chest as his gaze settled on her with more interest.
“Oh? Dinner? That would be nice. Maybe you could have enough for two guests? I wouldn’t eat much,” he added, his shoulder bumping her temple.
She laughed nervously. “Maybe another time, okay?”
“Oh? When?”
She shook her head, feeling a sudden coldness on her back. “Not today.”
“Tomorrow?”
The coldness seemed to be underneath her skin, and Orihime turned to look behind her. Nothing. She paused walking, feeling the chill on her back still despite the new direction. Her eyes moved over the sidewalk and street, seeing nothing amiss, no one else looking at her, the other students on the walk going about their usual chatter.
“No,” she said to Kon’s question about dinner. She turned back to face forward, her steps quickening, fingers tightening over her books.
He continued to try to make plans with her as they walked on, his tone varying from inquisitive to slyly suggestive to pleading.
“But I want to walk you home,” he insisted when she turned and backed away from him at the corner leading to the street her apartment was on.
“That’s okay,” she said, smiling and waving him away. “I’m fine.”
“But I don’t mind.”
She shook her head, holding up a hand as she backtracked, a painful smile forced onto her face. She hated what Kon did to Ichigo’s body when he was in it, making facial contortions severely out of place, saying things that would get Ichigo slapped, proving to her how much it was Ichigo that made Ichigo himself and not merely his physical appearance.
“Not today. Bye!” She turned and all but sprinted down the sidewalk. To her relief Kon took the hint and remained at the corner.
By the time she got home her heart was pounding, and not from the run or Kon’s attentions. She was warm from the jog and the day’s weather, but her spine was cold still. Not as cold as it had been, she decided as she deposited her books in her small bedroom on the bed, but not warm as she knew she should be.
She stood to the corner of her room where she wasn’t visible from the window to the street and changed out of her uniform and into a pink knit top and lavender skirt with small white flowers on it. She pulled her hair out of the collar, listening to the pop music from the next apartment. It had taken a while to get used to the nearly twenty-four hour a day music spree her neighbor was on, but fortunately it wasn’t too loud, and at least it was a genre of music she could appreciate. Most of the time. Some of the tunes were catchy, and she’d begun to listen to the station on her own radio near the futon in her living room.
“It’s just a stray breeze that followed me home,” she said to no one, trying to dismiss the chill. “That’s all.”
She hugged her arms across her chest, hoping a quick shiver would dispel the cold at her back. After a few moments it did, and she breathed easier.
She went back into the living room and then to the kitchenette and glanced at the clock. She had enough time for schoolwork before she had to call in dinner for her and Tatsuki. It would be a little late for dinner on a school night, but Tatsuki was having extended karate practices, and Orihime was willing to take the wait if it meant having someone to eat dinner with.
For a few moments she sang along slightly out of key with the music from the next apartment, and then plopped onto her stomach on the futon to tune her own radio to the pop station. It took a moment of fine tuning the station, and by then the song was almost over, and then there was a timid knock on the door.
She stood up quickly, alert eyes on the door, thoughts volleying between Kon and anyone else it could be. Tatsuki didn’t have timid knocks.
She went to the door and stood at it for a moment, making sure the chain was across the door to the doorframe. She sensed nothing; not Ichigo, not Renji, whom she had shocked herself by identifying when he’d returned her book bag a few days before. She unlocked the door and opened it a few inches, and looked with surprise at Ururu.
The little dark-haired girl looked up at her with soulful eyes. “Hello, Miss Inoue-san.”
Across town other high schools had let out classes for the day and the students were taking their walks home. At one large school the sidewalks were packed, boys and girls shifting amongst each other in pent up energy coupled with the mourning of the end of summer. None were aware of the two figures dressed in junior high schoolgirl uniforms on top the building overlooking the school grounds.
From their vantage height, Loly’s pink eyes darted with rabid eagerness from student to student below, crouched at the building’s edge, her half-mask hiding part of her vindictive study of the students. Her gray skirt was one she’d taken from the dead schoolgirl the week before, the white blouse unbuttoned but tied between her breasts, the untied pink bowtie loose and hanging from the blouse collar around her neck, tangled at times with her long black ponytails. Her stare zeroed in on a particular girl with large breasts that was walking with another girl at ground level. Loly frowned, trying to remember exactly what her enemy looked like.
“They can see right up your skirt,” Menoly said from where she stood behind the black-haired girl. She leaned against the smoke stack of the building’s sixth floor roof. “You should have taken her shorts, too, bonehead.”
“Shut up,” Loly snapped, glaring at the girl below in the schoolyard.
Menoly sighed. She was outfitted with a similar uniform, except she’d ripped the short sleeves off her blouse, and buttoned and tucked the blouse’s hem into her skirt, and retied her pink bowtie at her throat, covering most of her bone choker. “They weren’t even worth killing,” she said without any emotion, looking at her fingernails, green eyes going back to the other girl momentarily. “Not for the amount of spiritual power we got from them. Not even for decent clothes,” she muttered.
“It’s better than what we had.” Loly’s eyes narrowed on the girl as she studied her in the schoolyard, watching her laugh with the other student. “It’s better than walking around naked.”
“No one can see us,” Menoly reminded her.
“Those junior high girls did,” Loly said, growling a little as she realized the girl below was not the one she was looking for.
“The last thing they saw,” Menoly added.
Loly sighed and hopped down from the buildings edge and joined Menoly, crossing her arms as she stared at her.
“This is worse than being an Arrancar, even at the bottom under the Espada,” Loly said for the fifth time that afternoon. “What’s the sense of surviving the War if we’re powerless?”
“We’re not powerless,” Menoly told her. “So it’s starting over. At least we’re alive.”
Loly cackled at this. “And always will be, thanks to that monster. And it puts us up there with him. That should count for something,” she muttered, thoughts turning to whom they always did.
Menoly knew the look on Loly’s face. “Yeah, well it isn’t going to matter if you don’t collect enough spiritual power to pull anything more than a low cero. You want to sit princess at the top of the ladder you better prove yourself.” She grinned with maniacal enthusiasm. “I want to see him fall, Loly. I want to see him lower than Six, lower than Ten, lower than any of us.”
Loly had little appreciation for her colleague’s aspirations, and the feeling was mutual most of the time, but they’d found they were stronger working together. “We can bury him if you want, but I want to sit alongside Aizen-sama.” A licentious sneer curved her lips. “I want to be princess of this Realm. Not that idiot Living girl.”
Menoly rolled her eyes, blowing a short blue strand of hair out of her face. “Aizen-sama hasn’t said he wants her back. We’re only here --”
“I want to make sure she can’t come back!” Loly spat. “She can’t heal herself! Then we can build up our own powers. Then you can bury Grimmjow.”
Menoly didn’t like to hear the name aloud, not when she wasn’t the one saying it. He was the only one who posed a real threat to their achieving the top echelon of the surviving Arrancars, and with him gone, Aizen had little choice than to place them highest.
“I’ll rip her apart, Menoly,” the black-haired girl promised. “I’ll pull out her eyes and deliver them to ... that ...” She ended in a screech, hands balled into fists. “If I could remember the name of that wretched bastard with the orange hair! I’d send her eyes to him!”
Menoly laughed shrilly, nodding to the tanto tucked in a small holster at the other girl’s skirt waist. “Not with just a poisoned pin you won’t.”
Loly put her hands on her hips and looked back across the town’s buildings. “Come on. You know Grimmjow’s not loitering around killing time.”
Menoly stiffened at the name. “No. Not killing time.”
It was late afternoon by the time Renji returned from delivering the two members of Thirteenth Division to their squad compound in Soul Society. Captain Ukitake had declined Urahara’s request, something Renji wholeheartedly agreed with, and had sent word back via Rukia earlier that he wanted all his troops returned without examination, should the circumstances arise.
The decision surprised Renji. Captain Ukitake wasn’t noted for being one of the more inflexible captains, but something about the nature of Urahara’s request had struck him as alarming or at least jarringly unorthodox, and it rattled a nerve in him. He wasn’t the only captain to feel that way, but there were others among the Gotei 13 that held other views.
With permission, Captain Kurotsuchi had dispatched four members from Division Twelve to the Living World to hunt out Hollows. Four newly appointed probationaries with little Hollow fighting experience, Renji had discovered. Captain Kurotsuchi had also sent a message to Urahara that Renji was not privy to, but he could imagine what it contained.
Like minds, he reminded himself as he changed back into his gigai in his apartment neighboring Urahara’s shop.
“Damn nuisance,” he muttered as he retied the unsettled head rag around his hair. “Worse than the old ones to get into and out of.” It wasn’t the only problem with the newer gigai models. They were more flexible, faster to move around in in human form, but they dulled the spiritual senses, making low presence lower, making him focus all the more on any minute fluctuations in the spiritual fields around him.
From the second floor apartment below his came a woman’s voice singing enka music, willowy strands that were played on the loud side by Mrs. Tanaka. She’d shared the apartment with her husband of thirty-two years, Renji had learned, and kept it after his death despite the flight of stairs it demanded for entry. It was always enka or traditional folk music, and he didn’t mind it so much after the first week, and was starting to be able to tell the songs apart. The volume, however, occasionally got on his nerves.
A thumping sound came from his bedroom on the Urahara side of the apartment, and Renji left the small bathroom to go into the nearly as small bedroom across from it. Another thump came, and he looked out the narrow window that faced Urahara’s shop.
Thirty feet away he saw Jinta sitting atop the bamboo fence, a rock in each hand. Another rock hit the wall near the open window.
“Hey, I’m right here! I see you, Jinta!” he yelled to the boy. Another rock hit. “Cut it out!”
Jinta screwed his face into a scowl. “You wanted to know when she’s here.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Renji left the third floor apartment by the wooden staircases that switch-backed at the rear of the apartment house and went around the fence to the sidewalk and through the back door of Urahara’s shop, where he was confronted by a surely Jinta.
The boy stuck his hand out, barring Renji’s passage down the back hall. “You owe me.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Renji found a wad of yen notes in his pocket and gave the boy two. “Get an ice cream for Ururu, too.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal,” the boy said curtly, pocketing the money.
“It is now,” Renji told him as Ururu suddenly emerged from a corner doorway along the hall. “See? She’s ready.”
Jinta shot the girl a look and sprung out the back door. Ururu gave Renji a small bow and dashed out to catch up with the boy.
Renji made his way down the back of the shop, hearing Urahara’s low easy-going tone from one of the back rooms, a sound that was beginning to make him wary of the shopkeeper. Especially since his request had been denied by Captain Ukitake and Captain Kurotsuchi had dispatched several members of his division.
He looked in the half open doorway of what Urahara called an office, which was more cluttered storeroom than anything else. A small desk loaded with the paperwork, the most important mostly likely buried at the bottom, a stack of defunct gigais in one corner looking more like an obscure orgy of corpses half covered by a tarp, shelves lining the walls in opaque jars with no labels -- in wasn’t an welcoming room, and Renji wondered how the man could invite anyone into it without warning.
But there sat Orihime in a chair before the desk with Urahara behind it, both in conversation. Renji remained at the doorway, for a moment watching her nod at something the shopkeeper said, her posture erect as she listened, voice soft and low.
Far too compassionate to have witnessed some of the things he knew she had in Hueco Mundo, he thought.
Urahara looked up to see him, and sat back a bit from the desk, the light from the ceiling fixture shaded more by the brim of his hat. Renji leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms and remaining silent.
Urahara decided to acknowledge him. “As I was telling Miss Inoue here, Renji,” he said drawlingly, “I appreciate her contribution to our cause, and would like to study Shun Shun Rikka in-depth.”
Orihime turned to see Renji in the doorway. She smiled a bit, but her expression belied her apprehension at the topic before her. He nodded and she turned back to Urahara.
“Yours is a unique power, Orihime, as I am sure you know,” the shopkeeper continued, “and with your permission, I’d like a closer look at it.”
“How much closer?” she asked, her fingers automatically going to the hairpin at one temple.
Urahara smiled, resisting the temptation to reach for the fan on top one of the lower stacks of paper before him. “As I understand it, you’ve three distinct powers. One for healing, another for protecting. With limited fighting, however.”
She nodded, hand still at her hair. “I don’t know, Urahara-san. I’ve never been apart from them, and they mean a lot to me.”
“Of course they do.”
“They’re all I have left from my brother.”
He nodded. “Their power lies within you, not in the physical hairpins themselves, Orihime,” he said gently, leaning over the table more, not looking to Renji as he watched from the doorway. “I think this would be a study in an observatory capacity, not actual lab work.”
She nodded slowly, hand dropping from her hair into her lap where its fingers laced together with the other hand. “I, I’d like to think about it, Urahara-san.”
The answer surprised him, making his eyes open wider at her hesitancy. “Oh? Well, of course we wouldn’t be able to do much studying anyway, not without a reason to be healing, would we now?”
She nodded slightly.
“Then how about we wait until the need arises?” His gaze shifted to Renji, his grin crooking one corner of his mouth. “How about I send Lieutenant Abarai around to you if the occasion arises that we need a healer? How’s that?”
“Oh, uh, well ...” Her fingers tightened on each other.
“You don’t have to say yes,” Renji reminded her, eyes on the shopkeeper.
She nodded, glancing to him before turning again to Urahara. “I suppose that would be all right. If you were to observe while I healed.”
“Nothing to make you nervous,” Urahara added.
She nodded.
“Tell him you’ll think about it,” Renji suggested, watching her posture slouch.
Urahara sighed. “Very well, Miss Inoue. I’ll await your answer. Soon?”
She nodded, sitting straighter, working up a small smile. “Soon, Urahara-san.”
Orihime breathed easier as she left Urahara’s shop, not so much because of what the man had asked of her, but partly from what she could sense of Renji’s suspicions about the proposition and partly from the idea of anyone wanting to pay attention to Tsubaki. The male spirit certainly would not like it one bit, and she wasn’t sure how he could be studied at all.
She looked up to Renji still at her side, relieved she had someone to sound off about Urahara’s request. Since they’d left the shop a block away he’d let her talk, and all she’d managed so far was musings on Tsubaki. After exhausting the male spirit’s probable take on the issue, she sighed and wanted another opinion.
“What do you think, Renji?”
He looked down at her, seeing more than the usual inquisitiveness in her eyes. This time there was a vulnerability he’d seen only a few times in her. “He told you about the other two shinigami deaths?”
She nodded, looking back down at her steps as they passed a section of broken sidewalk. “He admitted the man was dead, and that he took a sample,” she frowned, “of my healing powers. I don’t see how that can be sampled.”
“He’s got his ways, I guess.”
“He apologized for not asking my permission.” She put her hands behind her back and took a deep breath. “I didn’t like that he took that test sample without telling me, but I guess its okay.”
“I would be easiest to observe your healing powers, if the situation arose, but the others, those would be more demanding. I don’t think they could be arranged,” he said honestly.
They passed a section of apartments and neither spoke until they’d reached her building. They stopped and he looked up at the window that he knew to be hers, the center of her three windows that overlooked the sidewalk. When his attention went back to her she was watching him intently, the toes of her shoes nudging toward each other, fidgeting.
“Tatsuki’s coming over soon for dinner,” she said, bracing herself for her next query. “Would you like to come in? Stay for dinner?”
“Sounds like you’ve got enough company,” he said, unsure how much of her invitation was gracious and how much her newfound nervousness over Urahara’s proposition.
She took a deep breath, smiling a little. “I wouldn’t mind.”
He grinned at the subtle flash that caught her eyes, enough to nearly make him change his mind. “Your friend might.”
She shook her head, fighting a bit of a blush. “Maybe another time?”
“Definitely another time, Orihime.”
She smiled. “Good.” She nodded and opened the door to the apartment building. “Bye, Renji.”
He turned down the sidewalk after she’d gone in. Definitely another time.