Bleach Fan Fiction ❯ Princess of Death ❯ Tragedy on the 17th ( Chapter 10 )

Date written: 13/06/09 - 17/06/09

Posted on FanFiction: 17/06/09

Posted on MediaMiner: 22/08/09

A/N: It's a short chapter but it's necessary. Most of what I write here is truthfully of my own creation. Whatever memories Tatsuki had told that was not a part or even coincide to the events in canon, it's all part of the AU situation. I tried my best in researching more on the relationship between Tatsuki and Ichigo, as well as their past together. Add that to some additional info inside the manga. Some places of info have inconsistencies with one another, which is already damn confusing enough. It's quite an interesting way of expressing a different childhood from what I went through, and sometimes I had to parallel their thoughts with my own childhood experiences. Now I don't know if children in general actually think and feel the same way I do around adults (you might call me the insane kid, the oddball of the group, the kid who sat on a bench upside down because he was bored, since, looking back on it, I was all those things), but I try to be slightly ambiguous. I'm no child psychologist, and unlike Stephen King, I didn't get the chance to keep the heart of my childhood in a jar on my desk.

--- CHAPTER 10 ---

Tragedy on the 17th

“We met in a karate dojo when we were five,” Tatsuki said, shifting into a nostalgic phase of emotions. “My first thought about him was that he was puny. He was always grinning like an idiot back then. That smile he had earlier at school,” she paused for a bit, “it resembled the innocent smile he once had. Both of those smiles were driven by one single source. One smile signified happiness and joy. The other was of grief and sadness. Yeah. Just one source.

“You might not believe it, but Ichigo had been a total crybaby. I was even the first one to make him cry in the dojo. Just one punch in the abdomen”—She punched the air for emphasis—“and he's down on the mat. Didn't even take thirty seconds. He'd always cry when he lost, but always stopped once he saw his mom. I took that as a sign of a spoiled brat. He clung to his mom like glue. He'd be holding his mother's hand before she would, actually.”

Orihime and Tatsuki were in the former's apartment, both sitting on the side of a single-sized bed wrapped neatly in an orange blanket. Tatsuki had said that before she would go on about the `family matter' concerning the Kurosakis, she wanted to first tell Orihime about how Ichigo and her first met. And that also included telling about the complexity of the things Ichigo had always gone through annually ever since the seventeenth of June six years before.

“What was her name?” Orihime asked.

“Masaki Kurosaki.” Tatsuki reminisced a bit, then chuckled. “I used to call her Aunt Saki-Saki after learning her full name. At the tender age of five I tended to make silly nicknames on a few people. Ichigo was the only one who didn't like it, though, so I only called her that when he's not around or in earshot. But damn, his intuition was amazing. He caught me saying that name every time.”

“Have you two always been close?”

“Me and Ichigo's mom?”

Orihime nodded.

“You could say that. She had this presence about her that just makes you instantly like her. Though I may have blundered on my first impression. After making Ichigo cry for the first time, his mom came to comfort him. I just stood by the side, sucking up the urge to say out loud that he was weak. Instead, I said `Crybaby,' and walked away. My memory is a little fuzzy—it has been ten years and I only saw a glance of it—but I could've sworn I saw Aunt Masaki smile playfully at me after I walked off.”

“But that didn't stop you from becoming friends with him, am I right?”

Tatsuki snorted. “He was the one who approached me. Back then, I wanted to do nothing with him, even going as far as to say that I don't hang out with crybaby losers. But do you know what his reaction was? He just smiled at me. No malice. No comebacks. Just an innocent five-year-old smile. I was an immature jerk at the time, so I was annoyed at his lack of intimidation or anger over my jab.” She looked down, as her hands joined each other with intertwining fingers. She rested her forearms on her knees, staring at her conjoined hands as both of her thumbs began fiddling its counterpart. It was a sign that Tatsuki was nervous about something.

“Tatsuki-chan?”

“Just three days after meeting Ichigo . . . I decided to make his life a living hell.”

Orihime found herself rubbing her left hand on the knuckles of her right. Either Tatsuki's nervousness was contagious or she was slightly dreading where this conversation was going. “You didn't . . . did you?”

“Nothing physically harmful, but I tried so hard to push him away every time I get. But each time I do so, he only got even closer to me. And not once did I see him angry at me. It didn't help me a bit that we became classmates on our first day of elementary school. I tried ignoring him, but he'd keep on talking until I yielded by yelling `Shut up!' right in his face. And the worst part is that I yelled that inside the classroom during lunch. Both of us got scolded by the teacher, but that Ichigo . . . he just smiled at me, saying that he's glad we were on talking levels again.”

Orihime giggled. “I never knew Kurosaki-kun had been that enthusiastic.”

“You don't know the half of it. He also put more priority on other people than himself. I'm not saying he's selfless; I guess it's just who he is. I remember an incident that happened shortly after the start of our elementary education. Most of the kids in the school were just packs of wolves serving under their alphas.”

“Bullies?” Orihime asked, trying to understand her friend's analogy.

“Yeah, and you know what they do to bright-haired kids?”

Orihime nodded, remembering the times where she was bullied because of her orange hair. The bullying had gotten so bad that she was forced to cut it chin-length just so that the frequency would lessen. It had, but the sudden change in hairstyle aroused suspicion from her brother. But that was all it was: suspicion. He didn't take action because she had been too afraid to tell him about the bullies. It was a sort of childhood logic stemmed from the childish belief that sometimes an adult shouldn't know about what goes on around all the time, either because they wouldn't understand or they'd just make things worse.

“I saw a group of older kids teasing Ichigo a few times,” Tatsuki said. There was sadness in her tone. “I didn't lift a finger to help him. I just walked by, thinking that this might be a big chance for him to get the message that I did not want to be his friend. But every time I'd reach home, I became angry of myself yet I didn't know why. The bullies always taunted him and Ichigo didn't fight back. That inaction was taken the wrong way by some of the `alphas' and he immediately began dealing blows.”

Orihime stiffened. Her experience with bullies was relatively mild—just mere words and taunts; sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. But to actually hear that Ichigo had worse experience was almost saddening. And as try as she might, she didn't want to pity him. She felt that what she went through may not be in the same level as to what Ichigo went through.

“I was shocked, to say the least,” Tatsuki continued, looking up from her hands to face Orihime. “I guess that was where my sense of defending an innocent kicked in. No matter the fact that I was alone and the bullies were bigger and outnumbered me and Ichigo, I still came to help.

“I exchanged blows left and right. If it weren't for my karate lessons, I might've ended up worse than only a couple of bruises. Some were appalled in hitting a girl, and they earned some slight respect from me, not because they won't join in on the fight but because they're respectful enough to know when not to deal blows. The rest didn't mind punching me in the face. It was painful and, at the same time, exhilarating. And in the end, they decided to let both of us go.

“What got me pissed right then was that I did all the work, while Ichigo sat in a corner crying his eyes out,” Tatsuki finished with a deadpan expression. “`What the heck is wrong with you?!' I yelled at him. `Why didn't you fight them back?' I was mad at him. I came to rescue him yet he didn't even lift a finger to help. If it was possible, my hate for him just increased after this. When I had calmed down somewhat, I grabbed both of his shoulders and lifted him up from his crybaby stance. `What's the point?!' I shouted right in his face. I remembered him blinking as he tried to remove the running tears from his eyes. They were puffy and red, but at least he didn't get a black eye. `What's the point in learning karate if you aren't even going to use it?!'

“He sobbed a few times before he hugged me. `Thank you, Tatsuki-chan,' he said to me, and that was all.”

Orihime didn't comment, but she was contemplating the tale in her imagination. This time, however, she wasn't making it into a very imaginative event that didn't necessarily go anywhere. Instead, she was seeing the faces of childhood friends who were just starting on a flourishing friendship. The past would always be behind them, but it was because of the past that they were molded into what they were now. If it were not for Tatsuki's defending Ichigo, the two may have never become close friends. Ichigo might have given up on her, then, though Orihime couldn't be sure. It was difficult to picture an Ichigo that was far, in terms of personality, from the one she was very familiar with.

“And I guess that was when our actual friendship started,” Tatsuki said, smiling. “Whenever those bullies would make fun of him, I was always there to keep him from getting a knuckle sandwich. Both of our parents were a little worried about the occasional bruises but we used our old excuse of karate roughhousing to direct their attention elsewhere. We still got a verbal bashing more often than not, but at least they were not aware of the bullies. We could've told them anytime, and I don't think Ichigo would really mind saying that I was the one doing the defending, a girl protecting a boy. How embarrassing could that be? But he wasn't a kid to mind that whole thing about masculinity or trying to prove that he was a man and not a boy. He said he thought of me as an older sister, even though, in actuality, I'm two days younger than him.”

Orihime had never heard of Ichigo's birthday, another one of the things he mostly kept to himself. So, to think about this mathematically, if Tatsuki's birthday was on the seventeenth next month, then Ichigo's birthday would be two days before that, which was the fifteenth. She stored the information for later.

“Now about Ichigo's mom, I'd have to fast forward it to a few years. Me and Ichigo were still taking karate lessons, and as always Aunt Masaki would always come by the dojo to pick him up. I said goodbye to Aunt Masaki for the last time that day. On some days, I wondered if what I hadn't been able to say to her was like the pebble that tilted the boulder down the mountain. Usually, I would say goodbye with a `see ya later' or a `meet ya at school' or whatever. Because if I were to say `Goodbye' only, it makes me feel like it was a final statement between both of us. And on that day, I was busy talking with another classmate when Ichigo announced that he and his mom were now leaving, so I only waved and said `Goodbye.' Nothing else.

“In hindsight, I never saw both of them again. When Aunt Masaki died, a part of Ichigo died along with her. His innocence, perhaps; I don't really know. He was never the same. And I'm sure that the rest of his family was the same way.”

“How did . . . Mrs. Kurosaki died?” Orihime asked.

“She drowned. It had been raining heavily that day. Ichigo wore a yellow raincoat that fitted him perfectly, while his mom held the umbrella large enough to accommodate both of them. He didn't say anything about what happened that day and I never forced him to. I only came across what happened from the words of another. The most informative one happened to be from Uncle Isshin.

“He told me that passers-by saw a kid in a yellow raincoat hugging a woman lying on the ground. They were found beside the canals, which was flooded with a rapid of rainwater. The ambulance was called but she was already gone. Now remember Ichigo never told anyone about what happened that day, so Uncle Isshin had to tell me a made-up version of what may have happened.

Ichigo might have slipped and tumbled on the downward slope of grass and mud beside the canal. Aunt Masaki must have tried to save him, so she followed him down towards the canal. Ichigo fell into the canal; Aunt Masaki followed soon after.”

Tatsuki paused there and took a slight breather. Her retelling of Masaki's death might have sprung up some old memories she needed to fight through. Orihime wanted to say that she shouldn't force herself to tell the story if it was too painful for her, but Tatsuki looked like she wanted to tell this particular portion to the end. If not to finish this, but to at least fend off the bad memories and not cower from them.

“The current of the water in the canal was strong and Aunt Masaki may have found difficulty in hoisting Ichigo back to the surface. She was able to save him but the same cannot be said for her. Ichigo was still conscious, though winded from all the water he swallowed, but nature was against him. Both were wet all over; his mom was wearing a slick raincoat, making it difficult to actually grab her; the heavy rain limited his vision. Neither of us could figure out how Ichigo could have carried a grown woman out of a strong current, but by the time he carried her up to the surface, she was no longer breathing.”

Tatsuki inhaled and sighed heavily through her nose before continuing. The tension in the room was sky-high, and Orihime decided to keep her mouth shut until the story was over. Tatsuki was somehow lost inside a world of memories that she couldn't see but only hear through narrating words. Disrupting that flow by asking the girl a question or easing the air of tension, the raven-haired girl might not have another chance in accessing the deeper portions of her mentality where the ghosts of the past linger in secret limbo.

“Ichigo didn't go to school or karate class for the next two days. It wasn't because he had been too struck with grief that he didn't even have the energy or the motivation to go out and learn, but because he would skip school for the whole day. In both of those days, I've seen him standing on the canal where his mom died in the morning and again when I was going home. He just stood there, watching the calm of the canal's river, witnessing the setting of the sun through the reflection of the water. He did nothing else. Whenever his legs got tired, he would sit down and continue silently watching what looked like nothing to others but an image of grief to Ichigo.

“He basically withdrew himself from the outside world, not really caring about how hungry or thirsty he was, not bothering to get into shade when the sun was high up during noon. It was a short phase in the process of coping with Aunt Masaki's death and I'm thankful that Ichigo was able to go back to school only after two days of skipping. But at the same time, I wish he hadn't.

“This new Ichigo that came into the classroom without the usual smile or aura of happiness that was often contagious by all of us in the class, he unnerved me a little. Nobody in class talked to Ichigo about his mother's death, and it stayed that way for the rest of the year. The topic even became taboo after Ichigo clobbered the bullies I've been defending him from, just because the alpha had to open his big, fat mouth. An idiom for that would have to be `Open mouth, insert foot,' right? Ichigo decided to take that idiom literally, and made the bully have a shoe for lunch. They never bothered Ichigo and me again. Of course, the teachers heard about the fight that might have gone a bit too far, but Ichigo was only guided to the principal's office, got an earful, and just walked back out with a scowl.

“He even stopped calling me `Tatsuki-chan.' Now, it's always `Hey, Tatsuki,' `Come on, Tatsuki,' and `Hurry it up already, Tatsuki.' By the time we entered Junior High, he finally beat me in a karate match, but left the class soon after. He didn't gloat in his victory like he promised he would back when we were six; he only said `That was a good match' to me as he lent a helping hand for me to stand up. It was . . . hard seeing him like that, but it was a while later did I realize that there was nothing I can do to wish back the old Ichigo. He became what he was because of what happened in his past. And in the end, I learned to adapt to this new Ichigo, one without hesitation, one without a smile, one without childish innocence.”

Tatsuki didn't say another word. A minute of silence between the two girls stretched into five until Tatsuki stood up from the bed and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Orihime sat where she was, processing everything what she learned today. It was during this little bout of deep pondering that she realized that she and Ichigo experienced similar problems in the past. Both experienced the grief of losing a person whom your whole world revolved in; both had to face the taunts and harassments from kids because of their unusually orange hairs; and both were given the burden of being shinigami.

Sounds of a groaning faucet echoed from the dark kitchen, along with the followed sound of running water impacting on the stainless steel surface of the sink.

Orihime didn't understand, but her senses were strangely acute tonight. It was like her body was trying to defend (or prepare) against an enemy, which won't even show up. The immense tension breezing around the room had already dissipated by the time Tatsuki finished with her story, but there was still some bits of tension left. It appeared probably a minute or so at the start of their silence as there was nothing left for either of them to say.

She was tense about something but she wasn't sure what. But there was this feeling in her gut that was pushing her thoughts into formulating a plan of proper action. There was no chance of evading this kind of threat (if there even is one), and the only solution she could think of was to confront it. But the mass of questions remained: Who or what is she confronting? Why does she need to fight it? How can she be sure that there is such a threat?

The questions found no answers except for one, though it was more of a hunch since there was no evidence for her to really back it up.

All these tensions and plan formulations must be the emotions of her alter-ego. That side of her was both cunning and very perceptive of her surroundings. She was the one who had given her the strength needed in eliminating the caterpillar Hollow, and Orihime followed her instructions right down to the letter without missing a heartbeat. That sudden moment of blind obedience saved her life and also made her feel mortified that she can be controlled so easily even though she was technically in control of the body. Of course, she didn't say anything about this to Ichigo and Rukia, believing that this was a problem she needed to face on her own. But maybe it was due to that small voice of her alter-ego that there was a slowly forming link between them. They still couldn't make any back-to-back conversations and Orihime wasn't rushing in that particular department. Along with that link was the connection to her alter-ego's emotions. And she finally understood something that had been bothering her for quite a while. Apparently, her alter-ego took Orihime's infatuation on Ichigo to a whole new level.

In other words, brown-eyed Orihime is lusting for Ichigo.

And that was worrying Orihime to no end. She was now fearing if there ever will be a time that she and her alter-ego would merge as one and she will inherit her other self's perverted thoughts.

But apart from the bad side, she found some useful quirks along with it. The enhanced perception was one of them. Orihime would've tried asking her alter-ego why she was so tense, but the connection between them was still very weak, so she received nothing in reply.

Her gut feeling, however, was a force different from her alter-ego. It was like a tension of her own body about something she was not fully aware of. She only somehow knew that something big was going to happen. It was like she felt a sudden change in the wind, a foreboding sign, a . . . a . . . a disturbance of sorts. And she was dreading it.

“Orihime,” Tatsuki called from the kitchen, prompting Orihime to stop her pondering and listen to her. “It's getting late, so I'll be going home now.”

“All right. I'll see you out at the door.” Orihime stood up, and felt a slithering shiver course down her spine. It was cold. Extremely cold. Her mouth let out a tiny gasp; too soft for Tatsuki to hear. She tried to get her convulsing body back in control but there was something about this sensation that felt unusually disturbing.

She could feel a presence entering this world through unconventional means. It felt familiar, like she had been attacked with this touch of anxiety before, but her cold-suffering mind was too foggy to think up something to fill in the many gaps. And after a span of ten seconds—which felt more like thirty minutes for Orihime—the convulsion stopped. The cold disintegrated into lukewarm air.

Even though she had been shivering because of the Alaskan cold only a few moments ago, Orihime was drenched in sweat.

And the presence she felt earlier was still there, albeit less acute than before. She didn't want to face an enemy with a presence like that. Was this the cause of her alter-ego's worries?

Before she could think about it thoroughly, the presence quivered and ultimately disappeared. Relief didn't come for her, only escalating worry.

Her gut feeling was forming another kind of forebode prediction for her and it involved both that dark presence and Ichigo. Her instincts guide her logical mind into the right track, and it usually doesn't let her down. The only presences she knew that could cause that kind of reaction were Hollows; that narrowed down the list of suspects, somewhat. But this presence disappeared almost as fast as it appeared so suddenly. And she now feared for Ichigo's safety. For now, he was safe but her gut was telling her that it will be back.

Thinking through this situation while Orihime headed for the front door, where her friend was patiently waiting for her, she immediately came to a decision.

“What took you so long?” Tatsuki asked.

Orihime didn't answer her. Instead, she said, “Tatsuki-chan, can you vouch for my absence tomorrow?”

“Absence? Tomorrow?” Tatsuki slightly narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“I felt . . . something. I don't really know what it was, but I feel something in my gut that it will be after Kurosaki-kun tomorrow.”

“Are you sure about this, Orihime?”

She nodded. “Positive.”

“Then I'm coming with you.”

She shook her head. “No. I need to do this alone.”

“I'm not—”

“Tatsuki-chan, please.”

Tatsuki paused, thought on it before sighing. “All right, I'll let you go this time. But you're not going to keep me completely out this time, okay. Do you have your cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Then take it with you. I'll call you around lunch and be sure to text me everything that happens while you're there. You promise?”

“I will.”

It was her turn to shake her head. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” Orihime said honestly.

The girls said their goodbyes, leaving Orihime to sit back onto her bed alone and worried. Standing back up, she brushed her teeth, slipped into her pajamas, and turned off the lights. Sleep didn't come easily to her as she lied down on her bed, but she needed it to be ready for tomorrow. With her newfound acute senses and natural ability to locate Ichigo anywhere by just her sense of smell, she won't be worrying about where and when she would have to go.

Sleep came for her an hour later.

She dreamed of a shadowy, human-shaped figure standing and staring at her with its wild yellow-brown eyes.