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The summer heat muffles the whine of the cicadas, the only other sound besides the soft swish-swish of Ichigo's shinigami uniform. He moves through the thick, heavy air with a thin line of sweat constantly dripping from his chin, appearing for split seconds at a time on the roofs of succeeding houses. Karakura Town is blanketed in both silence and humidity, and when Ichigo pauses at the edge of a shingled roof, he surveys the pale buildings baking in the sun. At the edge of town, thunder clouds gather.
He closes his eyes and sucks in a deep breath through his mouth, lets it out through his nose.
"WHERE THE HELL IS THIS HOLLOW?!"
Panting heavily, a vein pulsing at his temple, Ichigo wipes the sweat off his forehead, only to be disgusted by the clinging of his uniform to his skin. Black, why does it have to be black? he thinks, frustrated. Doesn't it ever get hot in Soul Society? Are all shinigamis immune to heat or something, that they're all walking around in full-fledged shihakushos no matter how high the damn temperature gets? Rukia has never seemed cooler these days, not one frizzy hair, not one bead of sweat dropping from her pale skin. In fact, she seems like a cold drink of water beside the sweltering Ichigo. Glancing at the street below, he wonders if she's found anything while searching on the ground.
Beyond pissed, Ichigo sets off at an even faster pace, because oh, is this goddamn Hollow gonna get it. It won't even see him coming.
He does eventually find it, while the sun is still high in the sky and the cicadas haven't even stopped singing, but it does, unfortunately, see him coming.
Right for its fucking face, that is.
With a yell and a sword clean through its head, the hollow disappears, and Ichigo wipes his brow, grinning. Man, why couldn't Rukia see that? She's always there for the hard fights, when he walks away with cuts and bruises, why can't she see him take out a hollow this easily? Simple fights like this don't make her worry. He hates making her worry.
Straightening up, he smiles even more at how little trace the hollow left behind: merely a few disrupted roof shingles and scratches on the side of the house next to him. Rukia always scolds him for destroying public property, and, smirking to himself, Ichigo wonders how she'll react when he proudly tells her how well he did today. Getting that woman to praise him is like pulling teeth from a kid, but to him, it's always worth it.
Ichigo peers closer at the black scratches on the tan wall of the apartment building, trying to decide whether he can just wipe them off. He runs his fingers along them until they run laterally into an open window on his right, where they created cracks in the glass.
He's just about to curse when he sees who is sitting in the window.
"—Tatsuki-chan came over last night, and we had custard and shrimp for dinner. Then we watched The Terminator together, and Tatsuki-chan was so funny! She got really excited about all those cool fighting scenes, and all the—ka-boom! Pa-show! Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch—"
Orihime Inoue drops her imaginary machine gun and collapses back onto the floor, crossing her legs, giggling. Her auburn hair takes on a burned tinge in the afternoon light, which catches the metal of the picture frame placed just underneath the window inside her apartment. Without it facing him, Ichigo knows it's a picture of Inoue's brother.
The girl perks up again and goes on, "I told Tatsuki-chan that we would definitely watch the sequel this Friday after school, but did you know it's supposed to rain that day? I don't even have an umbrella to call my own! Kurosaki-kun lent me one last time, but—" She reaches up to pat her hair and twirl a strand around her finger, a soft pink hue overcoming her cheeks that may or may not have been a trick of the light. "—but, of course, since it will rain, I have to give it back to him, right? I would much rather get rained on than watch Kurosaki-kun get rained on, but, you know, he's so—noble—that he'd probably just...just...hand it back..." Her voice trails off as the blush creeps down her neck and to the tips of her ears.
She throws her hands up to cover her face suddenly, messing up her hair, grinning madly. "Oh, Nii-chan, what do I doooo?" she squeals through her fingers, and just like that, she slaps her hands down on her lap and sucks in a deep breath, her eyes closed.
Inoue sighs. "Kurosaki-kun is a very nice boy, Nii-chan."
She pauses, and before she opens her eyes, she lets a smile melt onto her lips, as slowly as a pleasant memory comes back, as softly as the afternoon light, and Ichigo is at a complete loss for words, he feels like he's going into shock or something, and for a moment, he feels bad, because such a pretty girl shouldn't smile like that for him, especially a girl like Inoue, the blush reddening her cheeks is nothing but wasted on him, because—
Inoue looks up at the picture of her brother.
"I think I'm in love with him."
He flees. He goddamn fucking flees, he runs away faster than he ever has in his life, through the window and across hundreds of rooftops and over so many blocks until frankly, he's lost track of where he is.
But when he catches a glimpse of a familiar dark head of hair, he immediately drops to the ground and just looks at her.
She pulls up short, surprised, skidding to a stop in front of him. "Did you kill the hollow?" she asks, folding her arms across her chest. "And where did you go, anyway?"
"She—she—" he stutters, the shock wearing off, his composure fading. His blush makes his face a ruddy pink, reaching all the way to his ears, and he tries pointing back in the direction he came from, only to throw his hands up in the air, at a loss.
Rukia arches her eyebrow. "Well, Ichigo? Out with it!"
"She—she's in love with me!"
Rukia's eyes widen, and she opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again.
"Ichigo," she says reluctantly, sliding her dark blue gaze away from him, "if you mean Inoue, then I..."
"Did you know?" he asks incredulously.
"Well, not in so many words, but, you know, it's..." Now she's blushing, fidgeting and avoiding his eyes.
"It's what, Rukia?" he wants to know, and she detects just a hint of anger in his voice.
After a moment, she shuts her eyes and sighs deeply. "Look, Ichigo," she says and meets his gaze again. "Most of us think it's pretty obvious that Inoue is in love with you."
"'Most of us'?"
"You fool, it's not our fault you didn't notice! How could we know you were that unobservant?"
"You could've told me!" he suddenly yells, throwing open his hands, charging forward. Breathing heavily, Ichigo and Rukia glare at each other, faces merely a foot apart, before Ichigo whips around, growling exasperatedly. "Now I feel like an idiot!" He sinks to the ground, crouching down on his toes, his hands covering his face.
After a pause, Rukia sighs, one hand cocked on her hip. She walks around to stand in front of him, then crosses her arms. "Ichigo," she says quietly, "we didn't tell you because we respect Inoue's feelings. She is our friend, and we could not betray her by telling you about her feelings for you. It isn't just. How do you think she would feel, especially with the way you just reacted?"
He doesn't respond, and Rukia smirks a bit. There is something she likes about Ichigo crouching in front of her, the very tips of his ears a vivid pink, meek and embarrassed. This view of him is completely different from the angry, vehemently uncaring attitude he usually shows the world. Tilting her head, the thought of a child caught doing something wrong crosses her mind, and she almost laughs.
"Rukia."
She arches her eyebrows as he stands up. She backs up instinctively, but he only steps forward, keeping the distance between them constant.
"I just thought of something."
He keeps stepping forward, and, her eyes widening, Rukia keeps backing up, until her back bumps against the fence lining the street. "Ichigo, what are you—"
"How do you feel about Inoue being in love with me?"
"What? I—"
She looks up at him, and the words vanish from her mouth. His gaze is golden brown and his mouth is tight, completely serious, and the blush is beginning to disappear from his cheeks. She hadn't noticed, but maybe all these days spent outside chasing hollows had given him a slight tan, a warm tone to his skin that went well with his vividly orange hair. His eyes are fixed on hers, and all too late, she realizes that he has slowly been closing the gap between them, his hands splayed out on the fence above either side of her head, the tips of his hair just barely grazing her forehead.
Rukia inhales sharply. "Ichigo," she mutters, trying in vain to plant her gaze anywhere that isn't his face, "the hollow. We need to find it."
"I did," he says, and the way it sounds so much like a growl raises the hair on her arms. "Answer the question, Rukia."
Rukia thinks it's strange. He must say her name over a million times over the course of a day, but it isn't until this one instance, this one breath, does Rukia hear the way it slides past his teeth, and it spreads a red hue across her cheeks.
"I..."
And what is there to say? she thinks, suddenly exasperated. It is a human girl in love with a human boy, it is a high school boy's confusion about his own feelings. This isn't Rukia's territory, not in the least, and finally, she looks at him, his clear brown eyes meeting her dark blue gaze, each other reflected into them. He has been giving her this look for weeks, those dark eyes from underneath his furrowed brow, and she has been avoiding it, knowing what it means, knowing that it was building inside him.
Frustrated, he leans closer and closer and closer, because for him, this is easy. This is just what teenage boys do; for him, this is a crush on a girl he thinks he knows better than the entire world. For her, this is her slippered feet on cold, bare floors, the silence that occupies her room, the silhouette of her brother behind a closed screen. This is the black of her sweat-soaked uniform. This is her clenched fists, the sun on her back, her shadow thrown over a grave.
Without thinking, she takes a fistful of his shihakusho and pulls him down, because for Rukia, nothing is easy.
Their teeth clack against each other, and it surprises them both. Rukia pulls her head back, about to say "Ow," when Ichigo kisses the 'O' out of her mouth, his lips rough and chapped. She lets her eyes fall closed, smothering her guilt and her confusion in the clumsy, hungry workings of her mouth against his, because he's Ichigo and she's Rukia, and they've only known each other for four months, but all the same, he tastes inevitable. He tastes like a long time coming, and he smells like sweat and metal and the summer night. He smells human, and Rukia hasn't touched somebody in so long, hasn't even thought about it in years, not since Kaien, and Kaien was so, astronomically different from this teenager's rough hands on her arms. Kaien was the smooth, placid ocean, and here, in this moment, Ichigo is the riptide, the hurricane, the typhoon. Suddenly, he pushes Rukia up against the wall so hard that, past the salt of his mouth and the raking of her fingers through his hair, she envisions purple bruises blooming across her scapulae like Hell butterflies.
She pulls him closer.
On the way home, Rukia thinks of what her brother says about emotions and a shinigami's duty, and she rolls the taste of Ichigo around in her mouth. Thunder rumbles in the distance.