It should have been raining, raining torrentially, and they should have been hidden away in some darkened
alley corner or a dirty side street inlet, out of the way, where no one would see them.
But it wasn’t raining, it was sunny and warm, mockingly for late summer with a few distinct
gray clouds in the distance, and they were under the maple tree around the corner from the Kurosaki clinic. Ichigo should
have been more awkward than he was, but it looked like he knew what he was doing, and Rukia was letting him do it.
“Damn half breed,” Renji muttered to himself.
The anger welled in him faster than a flame swallowed a moth. He paused on the sidewalk, ready to burst
his new gigai into spontaneous combustion on the concrete. He didn’t pause for more than a few moments that seemed an
eternity before moving on. He had relegated himself to an older brother figure to Rukia, and he was going to remain in that
role if it took an unholy strength to do it. He’d sorted through those emotions long ago, when he’d come to after
being beaten so soundly by Kurosaki in Soul Society as Rukia awaited her death sentence.
It still pained him, not so much as losing the prospects of becoming her future lover, but as stepping aside,
again, to let her move on to a better life. Or at least a happier one. He wasn’t being shoved aside as her adoption
into the Kuchiki family had done him; Kurosaki’s presence in Rukia’s life made him rethink them, he and she, and
Renji realized, all at once, that they were friends, not lovers, and friends on a level that Ichigo Kurosaki could never fathom.
He moved on, taking the turn in the sidewalk, barely aware of the snide looks the other passersby gave his
appearance. He’d gotten used to that.
Older brothers had depths of protection lovers and friends didn’t, and Renji had come to accept that
that was what he had for that exasperating midget he called Rukia.
He stopped by chance a few streets over, several blocks from the kissing couple whose image was still blazing
in his mind, looking around to get his bearings. The streets of Karakura were much the same. Noodle shops and boutiques, more
of the same, each trying to eek out a living among the Living.
The strands of a pink bow drifted down before his view, settling slowly onto the sidewalk before him. He
picked it up, turning the long shiny ribbon in his fingers. It had once been a bow, recently, given the curly spring it had,
pulled apart carefully so as not to split or wrinkle. He looked up, and then grinned at the back of thigh angled over an open
window four floors up where the figure sat on the ledge. The pleated hem of a schoolgirl’s skirt hung over the side,
her knee bent. It moved, not out of sight, and he suddenly knew who it belonged to.
He took the stairs two at a time inside the apartment building. Why Orihime Inoue had to live on the fourth
floor in one of the more twisting buildings he didn’t know. Not a straight staircase in the damn place, he
thought, taking yet another tight corner in the zigzag of staircases.
He got to the small fourth floor landing and found her door, hoping it was the right one. He’d only
been there a few times, with Rukia. He paused before knocking, the smell of warm cinnamon wafting from inside.
“Oh, shit, she’s cooking,” he mumbled as he knocked, looking to the ribbon in his hand.
There was a few footsteps inside, followed by a rattle of the lock at the doorknob, and then the door opened
a couple inches. One large hazel eye looked back at him, widening before the door was slammed shut.
He frowned and was wondering what he’d done already to get her ire up when the door flung open and
she looked back at him with a bigger smile than he thought he deserved.
“Abarai-san, what a surprise,” she said, wiping her face with her palm, pushing her hair back.
She looked past him.
“Rukia’s not with me,” he said as her eyes traveled the hall behind him. He held up the
ribbon. “You dropped this?”
Her face fell a little as she saw it, but perked back up immediately. “Oh, yes, in the window.”
She bit her lip and stood back into the room, smiling more. “Come in.”
