Reflection

Chapter 10

Rukia knocked on the door again and only yelps and wild scrambling came from inside. She had just returned from the Soul Society and decided to visit her friend…

And I felt a Hollow in here.

The reiatsu had been frighteningly powerful. When she had been shunpoing over to the Kurosaki Clinic that immense energy had increased in an unusual manner to then subside gradually and steadily. She had never felt anything like it. There had been something sexual about it; like the times both her and Ichigo were together. Their reiatsus would expand in the same way.

What had been most alarming was that she also sensed Orihime’s energy flaring violently.

Why is she taking so long?

Rukia was starting to panic.

Some anxious low giggles that obviously belonged to Inoue calmed her down. The girl seemed to be all right.

But what was that earlier? That reiatsu felt familiar…

For a moment, Rukia’s mind strayed on the thought of Orihime having a lover, but that was too farfetched. The girl was the perfect picture of innocence, more like a woman-child than the hottest girl in school everyone saw her as. Only people that knew her personally understood the ‘true Inoue’. There was no way she would have a lover. Ichigo and Sado practically scared away any boys that approached her with dishonorable intentions.

Still unable to shake off an ominous nagging feeling, she was startled when the door of the apartment abruptly slammed open, revealing a very changed Inoue.

“What the heck happened to you?!” Rukia burst out in amazement over the girl’s appearance.

Orihime’s eyes widened and her face immediately turned red. Water dripped on the carpet she was standing on; rivulets of it trailed down her legs, soaking her white knee-high socks. Her school skit was drenched, tuned into a dull dark grey and she had obviously sloppily piled on a dozen shirts. Rukia even saw that the last shirt on the layered mess was inside out and its tag was facing the front. Wet ginger hair stuck to the sides of her face and neck. From the manner in which her hair was draped messily on either sides of her neck, Orihime had arranged it to be that way.

“I-I had a… accident?” she supplied an answer to something she should have known, scrunching up her face cutely.

Shaking her head at her, Rukia asked dryly, “Did the showerhead attack you?”

A brilliant smile split Orihime’s face as she hopped up and down excitedly pointing at her with an eagerly wagging finger, “Yes! Yes! That’s what happened! The evil aliens possessed it while I was flushing the toilet and then SWOOSH!” she motioned an explosion with both hands to elaborate, “the showerhead started moving and got me and my clothes wet-Sorry I took so long on getting to the door, Kuchiki-san!”

Oh, dear… Rukia tried to not roll her eyes.

“Um-Want some tea?!” Orihime finally gasped, out of breath from her outburst seconds earlier.

She blinked. Her friend’s alien babble had almost made her forget the reason for visiting. Frowning, she nodded and Orihime grinned happily, stepping aside to let her in.

Once inside the small home, Rukia’s worry grew. The Hollow residual energy strengthened.

“Inoue… Did you have company?” she asked quietly, her eyes casually scanning the room before looking at the practically hyperventilating girl who had come to stand beside her.

“Ah-No! Let me get some dry clothes! Be right back!” suddenly, without missing a beat, Orihime ran off to the bathroom connected to her small kitchen and slammed the door behind her.

She’s really bad at lying…

Drawing in a deep breath, Rukia knew that with Orihime making a clumsy mess in the bathroom, she would have adequate time to track where the reiatsu was the strongest.

After shooting a quick glance at the closed bathroom door to make sure that her friend was still busy inside, she began to walk quietly around the living room. It didn’t take her long to figure out that the evil energy still sparked abnormally in the mostly unused bedroom.

Rukia had never seen the inside of that room and if felt wrong to go inside without permission so she opted to look inside from the small space between the doorframe and door. Orihime must have hastily tossed the door in a mad rush without completely closing it, leaving it ajar.

The first thing her gaze landed on was the nearly unmade twin bed. It looked like someone had wrestled violently on its homey quilt.

So I was right… Or am I?

Her eyes saw something piled up on the floor at the foot of the narrow bed.

Clothes. A discarded school blouse, what appeared to be a white lace bra and a pair of matching panties.

“Kuchiki-san!”

Ashamed of invading her friend’s privacy, she spun around to see a nervously twitching Orihime. No longer did she look like a mess, though her hair still purposely concealed her neck. She was wearing a sweatpant combination. Just tight long baby-pink pants and a tank-top that accentuated her curvy form.

Rukia felt a small flare of jealousy in spite of her fondness towards her. Inoue was too sweet a girl to hate. Any other girl would have loathed her instantly for being beautiful, but Rukia genuinely liked her and that explained her natural concern. If Orihime was romantically involved with a Hollow…

“Sorry, Inoue!” she blurted out awkwardly.

Orihime made a face and then fluttered a dismissive hand with a forced little laugh, “It’s okay! It’s just that its so messy in there!”

She could help but study how the other girl’s eyes shifted avoiding hers as soon as those words left her lips.

Something is going on…

“Inoue,” she began gravely and Orihime’s strained smile faltered“,did a Hollow… do things to you?”

“By… ‘doing things’… What do you mean?” she asked so softly that Rukia had a hard time hearing her.

Now it was Rukia’s turn to blush furiously. She wasn’t a virgin. Far from it. Before she had started a relationship with Ichigo, she’d had lovers, just not as many as other female shinigami. To tell the truth, she was rather limited in the subject called sex. Talking about it was something she had never contemplated in her life. If she had been like Rangiku, she would have blurted out ‘Who were you screwing before I came over?! Tell me all the details!’, but she was too reserved to do something of that nature.

“Well”, she gulped and looked at the floor. Nervous she rubbed one of her feet in small circles on the carpet, feeling as if she was standing in front of a firing squad. “Did you ha-have sexual things done to you by a Hollow?”

Orihime was silent for a while. So long that Rukia had to look at her to see what was stopping her from answering.

The girl looked as if someone had stabbed her in the gut. Her eyes were wide, her mouth agape, her shoulders trembling. It all made Rukia feel like a bitch for asking that. Who was she to ask something so intimate? Orihime had never showed any signs of being sexually active… well at least until that day with her strange behavior and reiatsu-laden sexually released aura. She wanted to kick herself for traumatizing the girl’s obvious sensitivity.

“Um… Is it that obvious?” Orihime asked weakly, unable to hide a wince.

Her jaw dropped.

Inoue had… with a Hollow?

“Yeah…” She had no idea how to proceed. The whole conversation had taken a turn to something overly delicate. The laws of the Soul Society considered consorting with a Hollow in any form other than that of exorcizing a crime. Orihime could even be executed due to being an associate of shinigami and turning ‘traitor’. She would receive the same treatment as any criminal shinigami.

I can’t tell anyone about this.

“You must think I’m stupid, don’t you?!” Orihime’s voice cracked and tears pooled in her grey eyes. “He just wouldn’t stop and I…!” she covered her mouth with a hand, silencing any future sobbing; her slender womanly form trembling at the contained crying, though tears still spilled out from her eyes.

To say she was stunned was little compared to what Rukia was feeling at that moment. Hollows were monsters, not exactly something to be seen as sexual partners. From the guilt in her friend’s teary eyes, Orihime had reciprocated the Hollow’s advances and the fact that she hadn’t been panicking and tried to hide the truth reinforced this belief.

“He didn’t hurt you or anything?” Pushing aside any disgust and pity, she took on a businesslike tone. This was her friend and in spite of the situation, the girl could be suffering from harassment by a deprived nonhuman predator.

Orihime shook her head, still holding a hand over her mouth, wrapping her free arm over her belly as if to hold herself in.

Good. Some relief was brought by the confirmation that Inoue wasn’t permanently scarred. But mentally was another matter…

“Are you… really okay?” she asked tentatively.

A nod was her reply. It seemed that it was true, because her friend had stopped whimpering behind her hand for a moment.

“Do you know a way to get in touch with him so he could be… exorcized?” that was the most important question. Whether Orihime wanted to or not, the deviant behavior of the Hollow needed to be stopped before things were too late. Orihime could even be consumed or turned into a Hollow herself if things weren’t cut off right in the beginning of that bizarre relationship.

Rukia couldn’t help but feel guilt thinking that perhaps it was her fault. She had known from the every start that Inoue had feelings for Ichigo and regardless of this, she herself had pursued him relentlessly when alone, especially after the end of the war.

She’s lonely. Always has been and this is the way she finds some closure… Why Orihime would want a Hollow rather than a real human male was beyond her. The girl was beautiful and had nearly all of the boys in Karakura halfway in love with her, so why a Hollow?

Removing her hand from her mouth, Orihime cleared her throat before speaking in a croaky small voice, “No… and I don’t want him to be… exorcized.”

What?!

“Inoue, do you know that you’re playing with fire here?!” she snapped and the girl started in surprise. “This is something serious and you can’t let your sentimentality get in the way-

“I don’t care! I don’t want to get rid of him and he didn’t do anything wrong! He can’t help it!” Orihime yelled with both fist clenched tightly at her sides, making Rukia take a step back.

Is she defending this creep? Can she honestly want him around?! She had never expected to see such a side on the docile Orihime. The girl was the word ‘pissed’ personified.

“Besides…”, sniffling loudly, Orihime relaxed her tense body, “He probably wont be able to do it again anyway”.

“What do you mean?”

Shaking her head with a sad little smile, Orihime then caught herself and feigned one of her cheerful tones, “It’s nothing! He’s just very busy! So he can’t come around anymore!”

That didn’t appear to be a lie.

“Oh…”, Rukia blinked.

I’ll still keep an eye out just in case… and tell Ichigo about this.

***

That had to be the top most ‘uncomfortable conversation’ Rukia had ever had. Going down the stairs in Inoue’s apartment building, the information she had just discovered kept running like a broken record inside her head.

Hollow and Inoue… Inoue and Hollow…

Shuddering, feeling somewhat ill, she finally reached the bottom step of the building only to hear some voices coming from an elderly human couple heading in her direction, probably not seeing her since she was in shinigami form. She would have ignored it, since the couple’s talking was rather loud, but when she heard ‘Inoue’ being mentioned she knew she had to stay.

Stepping aside to stand next to the staircase, she listened closely to the couple that was now headed to one of the apartments on the same floor she was on.

“Did you hear all that noise they were making?! Sheesh! High school kids nowadays have no respect and here I thought over the years that that girl would never be that slutty…,” the woman didn’t finish as she wagged her graying head in disapproval to search in her large worn brown leather purse for the apartment keys while her shorter rotund husband rolled his eyes.

“Youngsters are different now, Naoki,” her husband sighed tiredly, showing weariness of listening to his wife’s moral rant.

Glaring at him in outrage, the woman named Naoki gasped. “How could you say such a thing?! We had to leave our home until those two animals finished!” Rukia’s eyebrows flared in disbelief. “That Inoue girl was screaming like a banshee and then that boy had such a foul mouth on him that I will be mentally scarred for life! I wont be able to sleep in our apartment without hearing that damned bed banging on our ceiling! I should talk to the building manager about having her evicted for indecency!”

“For crying out loud, Naoki! This is the only time that girl has done anything wrong! Can’t you just leave her alone?! You’ve always had something against teenagers!”

“Why are you defending that little hypocritical slattern so much, eh?” Naoki narrowed her eyes into slits and leaned over her husband to intimidate him into confessing to something she assumed.

“Because worse things have happened in this building!” he argued. “And the boy she was with-

“Climbed out the window and ran down the street like a coward!” she finished heatedly, her hand finally pulling out a ring full of an impossible amount of keys from the poor purse that had been practically gutted with her skinny hand during the mostly one-sided conversation.

A boy…? Then its not a regular Hollow. He must be either Arrancar or Vizard. That would make things even more complicated.

“We ought to find out who that boy’s parents are to give them a piece of my mind!” the woman continued with her fit, literally stabbing the key to the apartment into the lock of the door.

“He did have an odd name… Maybe he’s American…,” the man said thoughtfully, looking vacantly at the exact spot Rukia was standing in soul form. “What was it? Howard? Helio?”

Hollow? Rukia supplied in her mind, finding it odd that a Hollow would have no name. All of them did, and if they didn’t have one due to being part of a Vizard, it would be logical to call out the Vizard’s name during sex.

Flushing for the hundredth time that day, she just hoped that whatever the rambling couple said would help her track down the Hollow in question. It was embarrassing to be standing there overhearing so many intimate details of her friend’s recently discovered sex life.

“Whatever his name was, it was sure strange that she added a san after it like he deserved some respect like one of those domino things! That girl had screamed it!” the woman made a disgruntled face and finally opened the door.

“Don’t you mean Dom? And wouldn’t it be ‘sama’ that would make it-?”

“Shut up! You’re too stupid to understand that our health is at risk!” the woman’s high-pitched voice volume lowered once she stomped into their apartment, her husband following behind with a bored tired expression.

After hearing everything she could probably hear, which wasn’t much to help her figure out who the ‘boy’ was, Rukia sighed heavily and left in direction of the clinic.

***

Author’s Note: Yeah. I thought of having Orihime going cowgirl for her first time since almost every fan fic depiction of ‘cherry-popping’ is done in missionary position. There’s just something sexy about being on top. Heheheh… (I like Ichi/Ruki and Ichi/Hime but this is straight-up Hichi/Hime so Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship will *insert stuff exploding and turning to ash*.) If people that ADORE Ichi/Ruki happen to read this, my gawd you’re totally gonna hate my guts if you keep on! I DO like all pairings, but it doesn’t hurt me to create conflicts for them. I’m not biased enough to stick with one pairing or smut style either. I really hate it when people go off saying: WHY THAT PAIRING?? WHY DID YOU DO THAT?? I HATE THIS FIC! YOU SUCK! Blah-ness. I’ve already dealt a with a ‘screamer’ on another site. N-ways! Since I have ‘scrambled cranial diarrhea’ regarding my other fic, chapters for this one will spurt out very suddenly until I get back in gear and recoup some balance of both fics. I hate brain freeze! I know the whole story by heart but its hard to put it in words! *bashes head against desk* (PS) If anyone is wondering why Orihime called Hichigo ‘Hollow-san’ while riding his *ahem*, its cos’ I thought it was kinky. (Weird thing to call a guy, huh? LOL. She might as well have been calling him ‘Mr. Hollow’! C’mon! Ain’t that so cute?! You guys have no sense of humor or freakiness if you think otherwise!) This chapt was written just because I wanted Rukia to start ‘suspecting’ already! Poor girl needs to KNOW!