Chapter Text
Bells echoed around the school grounds of Karakura High, the trilling sound rising into an impatient blare, their deafening crescendo reverberating across pavements and walls.
The shrill ringing steadily became lost over the accompanying rumble of feet moving and voices yelling, students rushing to and fro to ensure they made it to their classes on time.
Arguments started within the corridors, fights ensuing over who would enter rooms first quickly escalating into angered brawls.
Teachers called for quiet, some moving to pull apart the rabble and others hurriedly shuffling along to their homerooms so they could prepare for the lesson.
Sighing and letting out a faint grunt of annoyance at the noise, his hand moving to raise the cup of coffee to his lips so he could take a sip of the welcoming liquid, the English teacher of Karakura High School, Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, made his sluggish way towards class 1-3B.
Not particularly a morning person on the best of occasions, Grimmjow sighed again as he downed some more of his coffee, turning a corridor to head up the stairs and passing a group of senior students as he did so. He gave a nod of recognition to the students as they waved at him, otherwise continuing straight on his way without further interruption. A faint irate "tch…" passed his lips when a clamour of excited squeals nearly blew his eardrums out – a group of girls hugging and screeching ecstatically as they read off of the class lists to discover that they were in the same lessons for the term.
All these loud noises so early on in the morning were not doing wonders for his headache. Groaning faintly, he finished off his coffee and debated whether or not to take half the morning off to go back home and nurse what was quickly becoming a first-class migraine.
Honestly, whoever the idiot was who decided school has to start so goddamn early really needs his ass kicked, he thought as he eyed a bin nearby. Raising his hand he angled his wrist and tossed the empty styrofoam cup dead into the centre of the garbage bag, the cup landing soundly inside with expert precision. Sticking his now free hand into his jeans pocket, he slouched his shoulders as he turned yet another corridor. He bit back a heavy groan when the door plaque reading 'Room 1-3B' came into view along the right-hand side.
The first day of term was always a drain on the mind. He loved his job, after all he was often regarded as one of the best English teachers the school had ever employed, but those few days at the start of each new study period straight after the holidays always ran on his nerves.
I wish they'd get more holidays. No one should be up this time of day, he grumbled in his mind as he reached out a hand, sliding open the wooden door and bracing himself for the inevitable strain on his aching brain that would follow. Sure enough, the chatter and laughter that flooded the hallway as soon as the door opened was enough to wake the dead as he stepped through.
Heads lifted up, some conversations quietening down as he walked towards the teacher's desk, the students scrutinising him carefully as he placed his textbooks down upon the wooden surface.
"Alright, wrap it up people. Sit down, shut up, and pay attention." He called out, his rough-edged tone loud and clear over the voices of students who had yet to cease their talking. Sighing and pulling out a piece of chalk from his pocket, Grimmjow turned his back and made to write his name on the blackboard. When he had finished, he threw the chalk on the table and lifted his head to gaze at the new students he had for this second half of the year.
Some students were looking at him with eyebrows raised faintly, others turning their heads to murmur to one another.
Grimmjow brushed this off subconsciously like he did every semester; having been a teacher for five years, he was used to these types of reactions when he met new students. Standing tall at six foot one, his physique well-toned and his skin tanned, his hair an unruly tousled mass of blue coloured locks which accentuated the cyan blue of his irises along with the teal coloured tattoos lining his bottom eyelids, Grimmjow often had glances thrown his way whenever he walked into rooms.
He was quite a handsome man, 'deliciously so' as some of his female colleagues often noted to him, never failing to say in passing that he had a seductive appearance and voice to match which could most likely get any girl just by him standing there. Indeed, at 28 years old, he was referred to around the staff room and the remainder of the school by female teachers and students alike as Karakura High's most veritable 'Teacher I'd Like to Fuck'.
He brushed these comments off every year, simply ignoring them as mere background noise. It was amusing at first, but as his gaze briefly swept over the group in front of him and past the tables of girls in the front who were gazing at him with ogling eyes, it really did start to get more than annoying after a while.
"So, you're the new group, eh? I recognise a couple of ya from last semester." He continued as he noted some repeating students from the previous class sitting in the back row. He ignored once more the girls in the front who let loose delighted sighs as he spoke. "I don't even know why you'd fail last semester anyway, I mean it's not like you have to try hard to pass. It's just English for Christ's sake, not Kurotsuchi-sensei's Chemistry class." He grinned a little, his smile matching the wild appearance of his features as snorts of laughter rang out throughout the classroom.
It was an in-joke with the teachers and students of Karakura High that the teacher of Chemistry, Kurotsuchi Mayuri, was the resident 'Mad Scientist' and had succeeded in almost blowing up the laboratory on more than one occasion when students complained that his methods were far too complex to understand.
Reaching down to pick up his teacher's diary, Grimmjow flipped through the criteria pages to find the roll for this semester's class.
"Asano, put yer phone away." He called out as he found the page, taking it out and picking up a nearby pen.
One of the repeating boys from last semester seated in the middle row, Asano Keigo, lifted his head – his mouth comically wide in a large 'o' shape as he gaped at the teacher. The rest of the students turned their heads to look at him.
"S-sensei?" He stammered.
Grimmjow lifted his head, a blue eyebrow raised in amusement and a smirk on his lips.
"If you wanna text yer boyfriend, that's fine by me, but don't do it in class. It's painfully obvious you have your phone on ya. No one looks down at their crotch in class and smiles." He replied casually.
Asano Keigo's face went a humorous shade of red as the rest of the class broke out into fits of laughter. Keigo quickly turned his phone off and muttered a faint 'it's not my boyfriend' before bowing his head and avoiding the rest of the room's gaze. Grimmjow chuckled, moving to seat himself down on the teacher's desk and propping his feet up on a vacated chair in front of him. He was a very laid-back teacher, his street-style clothes and his sense of humour and the way he spoke instantly making him easy for his students to get along with.
"Ok, the sooner we do the roll, the sooner we can go over all the introductory shit and then the sooner we can get the hell out of here." He spoke louder, leaning back and placing pen to paper. He marked off the names of the students whom he had repeating his class and only focused on the newcomers.
"Abarai Renji?"
A male at the back with spiked red hair and the faintest hint of tribal tattoos on his forehead under a white sweatband raised his hand.
"Arisawa Tatsuki?"
An athletic looking girl with short spiked hair gave a faint grunt of acknowledgment. Grimmjow continued down the roll, receiving similar reactions to the first two students as he called out their names.
"Inoue Orihime?"
A busty girl with long orange hair sitting next to Arisawa waved excitedly, letting out a gasp as she accidentally knocked her entire set of textbooks and some of her bento box for lunch off of her desk. The girl flushed a bright shade of red in the face, fussing and giving a somewhat forced smile when the students around her picked the objects up and handed them back to her.
Grimmjow snorted a barely audible laugh.
Freaking klutz.
"Ishida Uryuu?"
A boy with navy black hair and deep blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses nodded his head from where he was sitting in the front row. Grimmjow looked back at the list. There were no students listed under 'J', so he moved on to the 'K's.
"Kuchiki Rukia?"
A petite woman with black hair and indigo eyes seated near the window looked up from where she was studying her textbook. Three more names after hers were called out. He read the next name on the paper.
"Kurosaki Ichigo?"
Grimmjow raised an eyebrow in amusement.
'Strawberry', eh? Well, I've heard worse names.
There was no reply from the class. Grimmjow lifted his head from the roll, gazing around the room.
"Kurosaki Ichigo?" He called out again, slightly louder in case the student hadn't heard him. Some of the class turned their heads and pointed to a teen who was sitting next to the window, beside Kuchiki Rukia. The girl flicked him on the shoulder, the youth stirring and shifting his attention from where he had been gazing outside. He frowned slightly at his friend before turning his head and looking at the teacher.
Grimmjow continued to have his eyebrow raised as he looked at the teen. The boy had bright orange spiked hair, boyish handsome features for what the teacher assumed to be a teen around the age of eighteen or nineteen, and warm brown eyes which were gazing into his with a thoroughly bored expression.
Grimmjow inwardly sighed. He could tell just by looking at this Kurosaki Ichigo kid that he had a difficult student to handle in his class.
"Kurosaki Ichigo, yeah? Or are you slightly deaf in one ear?" He drawled out, firing an equally bored look back at the teen. Two could play at this game.
Kurosaki gave a snorted laugh of annoyance, leaning back in his chair and lacing his arms behind his neck as his eyes continued to lock with the teacher's.
"I heard you the first two times, sensei." The boy replied.
Grimmjow smirked.
"You didn't reply. Normally that's customary here in a classroom, Strawberry." He reprimanded, ticking off the teen's name from the list.
"The name's 'Ichigo'. Normally it's customary in a classroom to get student's names right, unless you have trouble reading. Which I find slightly ironic for an English teacher." Came the quiet reply.
Grimmjow's eye twitched, his head shooting up to glare darkly at the orange haired teen who was leaning back in his chair, a faint smile quirking at the corners of the youth's lips.
The classroom was silent, the students glancing between the two and not daring to speak. The tension could be felt rising in the room.
Grimmjow continued to gaze with narrowed eyes at the teen.
Oh? You think you're somethin' funny, do ya?
Grimmjow was known to have a short fuse at the best of times, and it was taking him a great deal of self-control at this point in time to keep from retaliating at that smart-aleck remark. He had a definite problem child here, alright. He considered giving Kurosaki a week's worth of detention right then and there, but he held in the urge as he placed the cap back on his pen, standing up from the desk and heading back towards the blackboard after calling out the remainder of the names on the list, the last student, Sado Yasutora, giving a brief nod of his head when his name was ticked off.
He would see just how smart the kid thought he was when he received that night's homework.
"Piss-poor retorts aside, everyone open up your textbooks. The headmaster wants us to learn Shakespeare, but I think I say fer all of us that that guy's work is boring as shit. So we're gonna start with narrative." Grimmjow spoke up loudly, beginning to write down on the blackboard his notes for the class.
The rustling of paper and chairs shuffling sounded in the classroom as the students made to rule up new pages, copying down the topic and guidelines that their teacher was currently outlining for them.
The lesson began.
It was only an hour, yet those sixty minutes dragged on for what felt like an eternity.
Grimmjow had encountered his fair share of troublemakers and negligent students in class during his five years of teaching, even having been one of those very same types of students when he himself was in high school, yet never before had he encountered a student quite like Kurosaki Ichigo.
The orange haired boy remained a constant enigma to him throughout the entire lesson.
Grimmjow found that he couldn't exactly articulate the correct group of words to accurately describe the youth sitting next to the window. Throughout the study period, the blue haired teacher had been carefully observing the teen when the class were silently answering questions from the textbook.
The boy was attentive when doing work; even now, his head was bowed and his hand was sliding back and forth across his notebook, his pen scribbling away as he studiously completed his writing task. Yet when the class was called to attention, the boy would go back to gazing out at the window or, to Grimmjow's steadily growing irritation, he would keep a steady glance on Grimmjow himself for an extended period of time. When the blue haired male had lifted his head after reading out a section from his textbook to the class, he had found warm brown eyes staring at him as if assessing him in some fashion.
Grimmjow had simply returned the look, raising a blue eyebrow in expectation that the youth was about to say something, yet the teen had merely raised his own eyebrow in response and folded his arms across his chest.
When questioned if there was anything he needed to say out loud to the class, Kurosaki had only quipped back another of his smart-aleck replies.
Grimmjow sighed faintly as he ran a hand through his messy blue locks. His gaze flickered back over to Kurosaki, who was still leaning over his books and concentrating on his work.
The kid was a tough one to figure out, alright.
Turning his cyan blue gaze towards the clock at the back of the wall, Grimmjow noted that mercifully the lesson was due to end in a little under five minutes. He yawned slightly as he pushed away from the wall he was leaning against, stretching his arms above his head and ignoring the soft sighs of delight that issued from the female students when he arched his back a little in doing so.
He walked over to the teacher's desk, clearing his throat and drawing everyone's attention back to him.
"Ok everyone, you can stop straining yerselves now. Class is almost over, thank God. Right, those questions all done? I'm assumin' you all actually know how to write a narrative properly now, yeah? Fairly straightforward, simplest way to put it: introduction, climax and resolution. Or in other words, you introduce the poor little sods you're gonna be torturin', include people who come fuck shit up, and then you get yer happy ending 'cos everyone loves a tear-jerker." Grimmjow continued, grinning as his explanation was met with scoffs and snorts of laughter from the class.
He lifted up a stack of papers from the teacher's desk, taking off the paper clip and passing around a sheet to each student.
"These are your narrative plans. Get 'em filled out tonight, I'll be checking them tomorrow's lesson. The narratives themselves will be due next Monday. So you have the weekend to work on 'em and yes, I am aware that you may have things planned but honestly I don't give a crap. It's the damn school's fault for makin' the holidays end so quickly. You're not the only one's who're missin' out on their sleep right now, ya know." He continued, passing around the sheets of paper and pausing as he stood next to Kurosaki.
Grimmjow handed the last remaining paper he had to the teen, the orange haired youth gazing once more up at the teacher before taking the paper with a slight scoff.
Grimmjow continued to stand there for a moment, his eyes challenging and silently daring the boy to make a smart remark this time around as the youth looked back up at him with his brown eyed gaze.
The orangette merely held his glance steadily with that of Grimmjow's, making no sign that he was going to comment on anything.
Grinning inwardly in triumph, being one to fully relish in having the last say in matters, Grimmjow nodded and made his way back to the front of the class.
"Alright, get out of here. Class dismissed." He spoke loudly once more, sitting down on the chair and kicking his legs up on the table as the bells blared once more over the speakers. He sighed and rubbed his forehead when the raucous clamour of chairs and voices filled the room, excitable chatter once more ensuing as the students gathered and pooled outside, their loud presence soon fading as they disappeared down the corridor.
Grimmjow let his head tilt back against the chair, gazing up at the ceiling as he ran a hand once more through his untidy mane of blue hair. It was then that he noticed that he wasn't the only one in the classroom.
Lowering his cyan blue gaze to the window, he frowned slightly when he saw Kurosaki Ichigo remaining standing, glancing over the paper in his hand with a look of careful consideration on his features.
Grimmjow sighed, checking his watch before turning his gaze back to the youth.
"Class is over, you know…" He pointed out, breaking the silence.
The teen lifted his head, turning to look at the teacher.
"Yeah, I know." He replied, adjusting his satchel over his shoulder before moving forwards to stand in front of the teacher's desk.
Grimmjow raised an eyebrow at him.
"Well, normally that means you leave the class? As in skedaddle … shoo… fuck off? That kind of thing?"
The teen snorted a laugh.
"I can't believe you're a teacher." He mused quietly, his lips twitching with amusement.
Grimmjow scoffed, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Me either. Anyway is there some reason why you're bothering me right now, Strawberry?"
Ichigo looked back to the narrative plan.
"When you say on here we can choose a topic of our own choice… there's no limitation to that, is there? We can write about anything we want to?"
Grimmjow blinked.
"That's what it says, doesn't it?" He questioned, his tone amused.
The teen rolled his eyes.
"I know it does, believe it or not I'm actually not stupid. I just wanted to make sure that was ok."
Grimmjow leant back a bit more in his chair.
"It's fine by me, Kurosaki. What'd ya have in mind?" He asked.
A faint smile formed on the teen's lips.
"Nothing important. Thanks for that, sensei. See you tomorrow." He answered, placing the paper in his bag and giving a wave as he headed off towards the door.
Grimmjow eyed the teen carefully as he made to exit, wondering vaguely in the back of his mind what Kurosaki could possibly be planning on writing, and also marvelling faintly at the lack of witticism this time around on behalf of the orange haired youth. He shook his head, leaning forwards to gather his papers off the desk.
The blue haired male sighed, rubbing his forehead again.
He's a definite enigma alright.
Resting his hands behind his head, his satchel clenched in his fists as he made his quiet way through the school hallway, Kurosaki Ichigo's brows were creased in deep thought.
His mind was filled with the events that had just occurred in his first English class of the new semester.
He hadn't meant to start off his day in such a shitty manner, by all means. But he couldn't help it. It wasn't something he did intentionally – on the contrary, every morning when he forced himself to wake up, he promised that he would try his best to embrace the new opportunities he was presented with. A new day was a new slate, a chance for him to try his hardest in all that he did so he could finally feel the sense of satisfaction that he was lacking in his life. A sense that he could finally do something which made him feel happy.
He worked the hardest he could in school. He obtained good grades each semester. But no matter what his achievements, he could never escape the harsh cruelty of what was reality.
He sighed heavily, beginning his descent down the stairs and turning the corridor at the end to make his weary way towards his next class.
That morning, he had been feeling particularly disheartened. He had even taken it out on his new teacher, though he had no intention of doing so in the first place.
Sighing again, Ichigo stretched his back a little to relieve some of the strain on his muscles.
He allowed his thoughts to turn towards the blue haired male who would be his new sensei for the rest of the year. His laidback attitude and the careless way he spoke, determined and brash in his opinions and actions, and his rather wild appearance – the markings under his eyes, his unusual choice of hair colour and his casual clothing giving the man an undeniably ruggedly handsome and boisterous air – was certainly an odd combination for what made one of the best English teachers of Karakura High.
In fact, the man could be likened most aptly towards one of the students, instead of one of the members of the teaching staff.
Ichigo allowed a faint smile to quirk on his lips.
He liked this new teacher, and some part of him actually enjoyed the bickering conversations that had made up their introductions to one another during that past hour. For the first time in a long time, Ichigo felt as if he could connect to someone on some degree, even if it was largely through smart retorts.
Absentmindedly reaching into the opened zip of his satchel, Ichigo's fingers brushed against the slip of paper which contained his narrative plan homework task for the night.
He chewed his lip in thought.
I can write about anything, huh?
His warm brown eyes slid to glance out one of the windows as he passed them by, his sight taking in the field of grass of the school's oval, and how the rays of golden sunlight reflected off of the crisp greenness of the leaves of trees with an almost poetic finesse.
He turned his head back to face the corridor.
Thank God for that, he thought, a softened smile forming on his lips.
He walked into his next class, his mind filled with gratitude for his new sensei.
He didn't care that the blue haired male obviously had no high expectations for him to succeed in this writing task.
Writing was his passion, and he was determined to prove that to his teacher.