Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach or any of its characters. They belong to Tite Kubo and whoever else actually owns it and I make no money from writing this. This story however is mine and is not to be replicated, reposted, or copied in any way without my consent. Thank you.
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What The Eyes Can See
.
After a while of the shopkeeper moaning and groaning over his face, they had finally sat down at his low-standing table. Much like a criminal negotiation, Ichigo and Tatsuki were sitting on one end while the enigmatic ex-captain sat casually at the other end with his precious cane cradled on the ends of his knees.
It was slightly disturbing—to Tatsuki especially—that even with the relaxed posture Urahara held, he held it with more poise and confidence than nearly anyone she'd ever met before. She could tell he was purposely hiding his reiatsu but for some strange reason she felt herself get lightheaded the more she thought about it. She could almost sense his eyes on her as she fell more and more into her daydream-like state and suddenly she could sense the red spirit ribbon dangling in front of him like it was a part of his attire. The sheer volume of pressure she felt from him was enough to make her choke in her spiritual realm. While not as strong as Ichigo's, it seemed to hold much more ability. It was as if…his reiatsu was gauging something.
This was as controlled as they came.
Ichigo's was rampant and disorderly, but since he had come back he had almost complete reign of his ability to tap into it, though compressing it was still something he lacked. Urahara's though…his was calm and concise. It was perfectly maintained at the level he wanted it even though through some strange ability she was able to determine his true value. There was no doubt in her mind that this was a captain in front of her, ex or no, he was still a captain.
She heard a sigh come from said captain and snapped out of her reverie in surprise. When he raised his head she could actually
feel his gaze on her and the man beside her. Her question from before had been answered. She knew without a doubt now that this man was capable of normal speech. In fact, she would bet her life on his ability of understanding and seriousness right about now.
"So Arisawa-san, I see you've been treading into some very unknown territory for yourself lately. I have to admit that your skill in sensing reiatsu is very uncommon, especially for a regular human soul," Kisuke stated, much to her non-surprise, seriously.
"What are you blathering on about, Hat-and-Clogs!" Ichigo broke in indignantly. "We haven't said anything since we came in here!"
Urahara smiled brightly at the clueless Vizard. "Young Arisawa-san here has just seen through my reiatsu control. In fact," he continued on passionately, "I may even go as far as to suggest that she can even see spirit ribbons! If not subconsciously of course." He ended his statement with another flamboyant fan-wave towards himself as he held his finger up into the air like his idea was the first of its kind.
Ichigo's eyebrow twitched but Tatsuki could only sit there in shock.
"How did you…?" She really wanted to finish her question but her mouth would only make the movements, no sound could come out. This was the second time she had been struck dumb in one day, let alone one hour. Ichigo shared her sentiment.
"She can sense reiraku! I thought you had lost it before but now I'm sure!" He was suddenly pulled by the collar angrily to stare down a very angry Tatsuki.
He swallowed nervously.
"And why do you think that I
can't do that?" she growled.
She had him there. Honestly he couldn't think of a single reason why she shouldn't be able to. Hell, he had been able to sense them within days of his first encounters as a Soul Reaper and Uryuu had been so damn arrogant with his advanced knowledge of them. If the Quincy brat could sense them, why not any other highly developed human soul?
That, and of course his proximity to the lips he had just been kissing mere moments before had him at a loss for words. He tried to look away from her piercing gaze only to find himself looking down to where his chest was so closely meshed against hers, and the soft flesh that resided there.
"Um…"
Oh God, please let there be a Hollow somewhere right now! He prayed desperately. Anything to get him out of this situation. Anything at all!
"Should I leave you two alone?" Urahara asked with a sly smile forming on his scruffy cheeks.
Anything but that! He groaned hopelessly.
Too late.
It suddenly seemed to occur to Tatsuki that the position she had pulled them into
was rather compromising, and between Ichigo's flushed cheeks and her own heavy breathing, she had to admit even
she would have gotten the wrong idea. She was all too eager to quickly push Ichigo's body away from hers. She still needed to get some answers. There was one question that had been eating away at her for a long time.
"Will I ever get a power like Orihime or Chad!" she rushed out quickly, embarrassed that she could come up with no other way to ask the question without a huge dose of some kind of false courage. Under Urahara's questioning eyes however she felt even that resolve shatter into a bleak eternity and however much she wanted to wilt back under the seemingly powerful gaze, her pride wouldn't allow her to back down. "I mean, I've been training the sense for a while but I can never seem to do anything with it. All I can do is sense people! I want to be able to fight like Ichigo!"
Said orange-haired teen certainly hadn't been expecting this and he nearly fell on his face right there. "What!"
Tatsuki glared at him. "You heard me! You and the others are always skipping class and fighting together like one big happy group of psychopaths and I'm always left out even though I can see you! Do you know how frustrating that is!" She cried, "To be able to
see what's going on and not being able to
do a damn thing! You're all leaping ahead of me, sharing things I'll never be able to have a part in even though I can see it! I've seen how you've grown farther away from Keigo and Mizuiro ever since you started this damn 'Soul Reaper' thing and began hanging out with all the people that had powers! I can see it! I'm being left behind and I hate it!" She was nearly crying now, but the shopkeeper's presence kept those at bay simply out of her sense of pride.
Once again, Ichigo didn't know what to do. Put a Hollow in front of him and he could beat it ten ways from Sunday. Put a distraught woman in front of him…and he was screwed. "Tatsuki…"
"Hey! Kisuke, you didn't tell me we had company!" A feminine voice suddenly exclaimed, throwing them all off rudely, and suddenly Tatsuki felt her head be poked to the side by a slender finger. It was as if the person it was attached to was trying to see into her head through her ear. She slapped the hand away and when she looked over she saw one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen in her life standing over her with only white undergarments covering her smooth chocolate skin.
"Ah! Yoruichi! I didn't think you'd be up yet so I thought I'd talk to Kurosaki-san and his friend by myself!"
Oh no, another weirdo…And what does he mean not up yet? It's almost four o'clock! Tatsuki thought as she brought her palm up to her forehead to hit it with a heavy
thud. She looked over at Ichigo just out of curiosity, since he had been rather quiet for a good while now, and saw he was doing his best to burn a hole in the wall behind them with his averted eyes…and his face was redder than Chizuru's hair.
Don't tell me he's never…. That line of thought brought her to what was likely causing his embarrassment, and thus caused her anger—and
jealousy, of all things—to spike to monumental proportions.
"Put on some clothes!" She shrieked. Their host only gave a slight chuckle but the mocha-skinned woman beside him, apparently named Yoruichi, only rolled her eyes and walked back to the room she had come out of, muttering something about "I love doing that to that kid."
"Ahem," Urahara coughed to try and get their attention back. "As you can see, Yoruichi has been staying here since your exploits in Hueco Mundo. Now as for your question: it may never develop into an ability like Inoue-san's or Sado-san's. Thanks to Kurosaki-san here and his terrible ability to control his reiatsu, their powers were tapped into, but that's only because it was laying dormant inside them and his power unknowingly pulled it out of the deepest depths of their souls. It may simply be the case that you don't have any latent ability lying inside you and Kurosaki-san's reiatsu is only strengthening your soul's natural awareness to the pressures around it."
This was not what Tatsuki wanted to hear.
"What do you mean:
never! You mean I'll never get to fight with him!
Never!" This time she wasn't able to stop the tears from falling in her hurt fury. She knew she was crying even as she screamed at him but she couldn't stop. This news was too much for even
her to handle stoically.
Her reiatsu burst forth unexpectedly and instead of heading for Ichigo's out of blind lust, this time it headed straight for Urahara's out of mindless rage.
The platinum-blonde shopkeeper hadn't anticipated this in the least and he was even more surprised when her reiatsu latched onto his in what could only be described as a chokehold. It was like it was trying to take his power but kill it at the same time.
Well, she certainly is stronger than I expected. Kurosaki…just what do you pull out of people? He thought seriously before returning to the matter at hand. In response to her out-of-control anger, Kisuke did something he hadn't done in a long time. Well, it hadn't been
that long, but anytime he did it was always cause for trepidation. With a flick of his fan, his reiatsu flared and pushed back Tatsuki's powerful, but not powerful enough, spirit force with very little effort. The girl slumped back onto her cushion, looking at him in both shock and a well-deserved amount of awe.
"What was that all about!" Ichigo asked, finally making himself known again since Yoruichi's grand entrance.
Tatsuki couldn't take anymore, even if it was out of her friend's ignorance. "It's all about me being useless you moron! I'm about as useful as Chizuru at a male model convention! I'm gonna be spending the rest of my
life watching you without being able to be there beside you!" She was venting, that much was certain, but she didn't want to stop. She didn't even think she could have if she wanted to. "You get to fight all the big bad Hollows and I get to sit on my ass twiddling my thumbs while you have fun
really fighting! Even Orihime gets to be by your side and that shorty, Rukia for goodness sake! Meanwhile I'm stuck watching at the sidelines wishing I could be of some use to you while knowing I'd only slow you down if I tried the way I am now!
"I want to go back to when we could fight in Karate and I'd beat you in one punch. I want to go back to the time when I knew nothing about Soul Reapers, or Hollows, or Arrancars. I want to go back to the time when we could all hang out and I actually felt good about being one of the few people who could fight you on even ground! I want to go back to the time when I knew who you were! You selfish prick, why can't you understand I want to be with you!"
Uh oh.
If there is a god, please, please
kill me now, Tatsuki prayed silently.
Now Ichigo, normally he was denser than Orihime's head when it came to anything romantic, or even in the
least bit insinuating to anything of the sexual realm, but even
he couldn't miss the blatant truth in the frantic crying of the desperate young woman. She had just had her hopes pulled out from under her and in the frenzied craze that followed, she'd just unwittingly told him that the reason she didn't punch him somewhere over next Tuesday when he kissed her was because she had
wanted it to happen.
For some reason he expected to wake up any minute now.
"T-Tatsuki…did you just say… what I think you just said?" he asked numbly.
"Nooo, I just decided to yell out that I want to be with you out of some stupid notion that you might actually like me back!" She was still hysterical and it didn't look like this was going to be the end of it any time soon.
Ichigo's mind had blown a fuse somewhere around four sentences ago, but somehow his fried brain was still able to conceptualize the image Tatsuki had just put in his head, and also reignite the memory of what he had been doing with her in the alley.
I…I didn't stop kissing her, even though I knew I should have. Dammit why can't someone else be put in this position? I hate this kind of stuff! Still, even as he thought that, Zangetsu's advice to him when he had first released his sword suddenly came back to him. It seemed odd that such advice be put into use in this kind of situation, but hey, love and war were closer than most people thought. He took Zangetsu's advice.
How to gauge her.
He grabbed her face and he kissed her.
Tatsuki's swollen red eyes widened considerably before they rolled back in her head at the feel of his mouth on hers again. It was exactly like she had remembered it and God help her, she couldn't stop herself from wanting more, even though she was acutely aware of the stunned shopkeeper trying to look away from the scene and whistling nervously.
When he finally pulled away the verdict was in.
Ah, damn it all, Ichigo thought, though his usual scowl wouldn't come. He
had felt something when he kissed her, and it wasn't just the twitch in his pants either. This one came from his heart and soul. And of course, she hadn't pushed him away or punched him.
She had reciprocated.
The angriest, scariest, most boyish young woman in school had
reciprocated in a
kiss initiated by
him. And he had
liked it.
That was a lie. He had downright, enthusiastically, and very
uncharacteristically…
loved it. He had
loved it.
So why don't I care? He thought to himself as he stared into her endless black eyes. He honestly didn't care. He had just kissed Tatsuki in a fully conscious, functional mind, and he couldn't care less that he had enjoyed it and actually felt something from it.
It felt
right. It felt good. He had thought he had forgotten all about love since his mother had died, and yet it was this woman to bring that hazardous emotion back into his mind. And he didn't even care. It felt natural.
From the content look in her eyes, she had felt the exact same thing.
"Ahhh, don't tell me I missed something good!" Yoruichi whined as she reentered the room to find the two teens staring into each other's eyes like a pair of lovesick puppies while her lover was looking away uncomfortably, trying in vain to hide his face with his fan. She chuckled; she hadn't seen Kisuke look
that flustered since the last time they had made love.
Ah, sweet memories of yesterday… She thought ruefully.
Ichigo and Tatsuki all but jumped out of their skins as they quickly re-seated themselves on their cushions as the purple-haired woman sat down beside Urahara. "Now Kisuke, I heard crying while I was changing. You didn't go and say something stupid did you?"
"Yoruichi! You pain me! I would
never say something to hurt our young friends here!" Urahara explained, in his usual exaggerated tones, to aforementioned friends' dismay.
"He said…my reiatsu may never develop into any power," Tatsuki restated sadly as she hung her head. Yoruichi perked up instantly.
"Is that all? Well then you have nothing to worry about!" She laughed out. "What Kisuke meant was your spirit energy may not develop into any kind of power,
BUT, that's because you've been training your soul to be able to become a Shinigami!"
For nearly two minutes nothing but silence reigned over the teens.
"WHAAAAAAAAT!"
…
Author's Notes: Same as last time. It sucks that I've deleted the review responses doing this, but then again this story has been done for a while, LOL. Thanks to everyone who reads this regardless!
