Bleach Fan Fiction ❯ Reminiscence ❯ 07 -- Gift ( Chapter 7 )

Title: Reminiscence

Memory: 07 -- Gift

Author: La Loba de Mibu

Rating: PG-13

Characters: Ikkaku and Yumichika

Warnings: Waff?

Summary: All souls remembered their birthdays; it was an odd fact of soul society. It was said that souls were reborn repeatedly on the same date, thus it remained in their memory even after death. But that didn't mean that all souls recalled another's birthday after only being told once, nearly a year beforehand at that.

Note: The number of the chapter does not reflect the chronological order of the present storyline, rather the flashback portrayed therein.

Disclaimer: Tite Kubo owns all things Bleach.

 

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~Series Timeline~

 

Previous Memories:

::Memory 01::Memory 02::Memory 03::Memory 04::Memory 05::Memory 06::

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A Little Bit About Kimono and Obi:

The pattern of a kimono varies depending on its rank in formality. The most informal are Komon, always consisting of repetitive nature (like floral or koi) or geometric patterns. The next rank up is Tsukesage, this is what most people visualize when they think kimono. The design only covers the bottom, the front fold, the sleeves, and one shoulder of the kimono, and may have a motif running throughout the base color.

An obi, I think most know, is the sash used to tie a kimono closed. The most beautiful type is called a maru obi, every inch of it is embroidered with stunning designs; and they are EXPENSIVE, as much as the kimono itself and sometimes more. Traditional women's obi, like the maru obi, are an essential part of the kimono aesthetic, however this aesthetic only applies to women. I think that Yumichika would definitely appreciate their design, but would never actually wear one because these obi are very constrictive, restricting movement, and impossible to put on by yourself. Not just as a fighter, but simply as a man, I don't think Yumichika would like that at all. I may characterize him as liking feminine kimono, but the buck stops there. So, in short, he wears your regular manly kaku obi as seen in the flashback in episode 119 . . . though the bow in the back was an undeniably feminine way to tie it; but that's Yumichika for you, ne?

. . . This long-ass ramble has been brought to you by: ~Loba =D

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Yumichika sat on the veranda of the 11th Division compound just outside his room, sipping some warm tea, watching the bright colors of sunset slowly conquer the sky as the sun made its slow descent towards the horizon. Ikkaku was away on mission with Iba, and wouldn't be back until the next evening, so Yumichika would be alone tonight; and he planned on stalling his journey to a cold bed for as long as possible.

 

He sighed to himself, swinging his feet idly where they hung over the edge of the porch, racking his brain for something to take his mind off of the loneliness he wouldn't admit to before the night was through. Maybe he'd indulge Yachiru in some finger painting, the company of his cheery little vice-captain was always a great, if slightly irritating, distraction.

 

Had Yumichika's tea cup had anything in it, it would have spilled all over his lap when a pair of strong arms suddenly encircled his waist and a voice breathed in his ear.

 

“I'm home.”

 

It was Ikkaku's voice; and Yumichika absolutely hated it when the other man snuck up on him like that.

 

“Dammit! How many times have I . . . have I told you, hmm . . . not to . . .” Yumichika found it hard to stay mad or even concentrate on what he was saying when soft opened mouthed kisses were trailing up his neck like that; he turned and met the Ikkaku's lips briefly with his own, “Welcome back. I thought you'd be gone for another day?”

 

“I wanted to surprise you,” Ikkaku grinned, “Did it work?”

 

“Conniving jerk,” Yumichika smacked him upside the head for his troubles, before adding begrudgingly, “Yes.”

 

Ikkaku chuckled, and sat down beside him, and Yumichika could feel his eyes studying him in the light of the setting sun. He'd changed out of his uniform, and slipped into a kimono, an old comfort mechanism he used while Ikkaku was away. Ikkaku had long figured out that Yumichika found solace in wearing old things that Ikkaku had given him when they were apart for long.

 

“You still have that old thing?” Ikkaku smirked as he said the same thing he always did when he caught Yumichika in the act.

 

“I like it, and it's not that old,” Yumichika gave the customary reply, the last part of which, in this case, was a blatant lie.

 

The particular kimono he chose to wear that evening was the very first one he'd ever received from Ikkaku . . .

 

 

Yumichika felt unkempt, grubby and travel weary. As they finally entered a town for the first time in a week, he couldn't be more grateful that they had the money for an inn that night. The evenings were beginning to take on a biting chill as autumn rolled in, steadily tinting the landscape around them in gold and vermillion beauty, but making camping out in the open almost unbearable.

 

“Oi, Yumichika. Go on ahead and book us a room at the inn, I'm gonna see to some business,” Ikkaku tossed him the coin purse, and left without so much as a nod in parting.

 

The week had been a quiet one as far as fights went, as they'd been traveling through sparsely populated region. Ikkaku was probably going to go find himself one. Yumichika took the out gratefully; having had his heart set on a bath and a real bed for some days now, though Ikkaku was practically twitchy for a brawl. Normally, he wouldn't mind trudging along behind him, but today Yumichika gladly headed toward the inn.

 

People were staring oddly at him, and he just knew he looked like some vagabond; few things irked Yumichika more then that. His kimono was truly worse for wear, stained from their travels, torn along the hems, and one of the sleeves was even coming loose. There was little he could do anymore to make the tattered thing look better, but Yumichika had long learned to prioritize their budget, and with winter coming, every extra coin they came upon had to be saved for buying them shelter on the coming cold nights. There simply wasn't money to be indulging in his frivolous fancies. It soured his mood indubitably.

 

He booked them the cheapest room on ground level, and changed immediately into the complimentary yukata heading straight for the attached bathhouse. He spent a good hour and half there, not satisfied until every knot was washed from his hair, and his skin was a rosy pink from its thorough scrubbing. Feeling much better, his mood lightened and he paused at the caretaker's desk to ask for a few items to be brought to his room along with his meal.

 

He ate quickly, the task boring and mechanical without company to enjoy the food with. When he finished, he slung his dirty kimono over his shoulder, gather the items he'd asked for, a sewing kit, and laundry tub with soap, and filled the tub with water from the courtyard's well. He set about cautiously taking his kimono apart. The edges of the panels were already exhausted after years of the unavoidable process; a rough hand now would tear a hole in the fabric that would require a patch. His once beautiful kimono already looked like it belonged on a bum, Yumichika would be damned before he was forced to place an ugly mismatched cotton patch on the once lustrous silk threads.

 

When all the panels were separated, he set about gently scrubbing at the delicate material between his knuckles to work out the stains. The material had thinned rather badly in the last three years, so he had to work carefully. The sun was beginning to set, yet Ikkaku had not returned. He hoped it wasn't because the brute had actually gotten himself hurt.

 

He regretted not having gone with him then. Sitting idly by watching Ikkaku be wounded in a fight was difficult, but sitting idly by himself thinking about Ikkaku getting hurt with an overzealous imagination to provide images several times more gruesome then anything he had yet to see in real life, was much much much more difficult.

 

With his mind far away worrying over his friend, Yumichika ceased paying attention to what he was doing, and was only brought back to the task at hand when the skin of his raw knuckles met. He stopped scrubbing abruptly and looked down with a sinking feeling at the panel in his hands. Stretching it out and lifting it slowly to eye level, Yumichika looked straight through the three inch gape at the brilliant colors of the sunset before him. Dammit it all to hell.

 

Yumichika slammed the panel down with a cry of enraged frustration only to end up splashing cold soapy water in his face. As he sputtered wildly, flailing and spitting, he heard a very familiar and distinctive laugh behind him. Of course Ikkaku would arrive at the worst of moments. He wiped his face with his sleeves and glared.

 

“Hoi, don't look so scary!” Ikkaku only laughed harder, “Besides, it's about time you got a new one anyway. Don't know how you got that shit to last so long.”

 

“Not everyone is as reckless with their appearance as you,” Yumichika couldn't help the barb; he also couldn't afford a new one, “There's no choice, I'll have to patch it.”

 

He sighed dejectedly, his face unconsciously pulling into a pout as he picked up the panel again and rubbed his thumbs gently over the once beautiful material; a tender yellow, with soft blue butterflies and sweet pink peonies, such a shame. Ikkaku tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned, noticing absently that the man had also bathed and changed into a yukata, but his real focus drawn to the kimono box he held out towards him. He stared dumbly.

 

“Here,” Ikkaku said waving the box a little and pushing it closer to him, “Take it, it's yours.”

 

Hesitantly, he folded a hand around each side, but made no move to draw it closer, even as Ikkaku let go of it. He blinked and looked at Ikkaku, expression clearly confused.

 

“What's with that face?” Ikkaku jutted his lower lip out in what Yumichika had come to learn over the years was irritation, but he was far too puzzled by the situation to care.

 

“What?” Yumichika could barely articulate through the inner turmoil building in his head.

 

“Just open it would you,” under the usual gruffness, Yumichika heard a faint note of nervous anticipation and excitement that further plunged his mind through dark long forgotten routes.

 

With slightly trembling fingers, Yumichika set the box down beside him, removed the lid, and swept aside the paper wrapping. As his fingers brushed against silk cloth, his suspicions were confirmed; Yumichika looked down at the box but didn't really see the kimono. He was too lost in the rapid visions flashing across his mind as images unbidden and unwelcome returned in all their vividness to Yumichika's shocked mind.

 

Forced to wait on a veranda, so similar to this one, for his next client, hated faces of various men he never wanted to recall smiling beguilingly as they presented him a new kimono in a box, being paraded around by said men like a new toy in front of what seemed back then like the world, returning to his room afterwards and being shoved onto a futon, and having the gifted kimono ripped off against his will . . .

 

Yumichika closed his eyes and shook his head hard, before taking a deep breath. He curtly replaced the lid and slid the box across the floor back towards Ikkaku.

 

“I can't accept this,” his voice was cold and he looked at Ikkaku with dead eyes. Ikkaku for his part was looking back in perplexed concern.

 

“Why not?” Ikkaku asked, sounding confused and something else.

 

Yumichika could almost say it sounded like hurt; but he'd never heard that kind of tone come from him before, so he couldn't be sure. Still, it was alarming enough to shake some of the gloom and dread from his mind and clear his thoughts.

 

Wait a minute. This was Ikkaku. He was no longer enslaved to a brothel, and surely, this man, who had inadvertently freed him from such a plight, could not mean by this action the same thing that the others had. Surely, it was something else. It had to be something. Please, he prayed to whatever omniscient being had created the universe, let it be something else. Yumichika swallowed thickly.

 

“I-I don't know what it's for . . .” he didn't want to give anymore detail then that.

 

Ikkaku frowned at his uncharacteristic stutter and Yumichika could feel his stomach tightening in knots of dreadful anticipation.

 

“Are you kidding me?” Ikkaku pulled a face, then blinked suddenly and became uncertain, “Wait . . . Today is your birthday, isn't it?”

 

Yumichika blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it, and blinked again. His birthday? When he thought about it, he realized that indeed it was the 19th of September. His birthday . . . It was his birthday; and the box before him, he recognized belatedly, was a birthday present. A relief so strong flooded Yumichika that he almost felt faint.

 

“Yes, it is, but—” Yumichika furrowed his brow, “But I never told you about it . . . Did I?”

 

“Sure ya did. Last year, on my birthday, I asked ya when yours was and you told me,” Ikkaku replied.

 

All souls remembered their birthdays; it was an odd fact of soul society. It was said that souls were reborn repeatedly on the same date, thus it remained in their memory even after death. But that didn't mean that all souls recalled another's birthday after only being told once, nearly a year beforehand at that.

 

“But Ikkaku that was last November, it's almost . . . been . . . a year . . . ” Yumichika trailed off as he found himself being overcome by a strange emotion at the thought, “You still remembered?”

 

“Yea, so?” Ikkaku said defensively, looking away before he mumbled, “Are you gonna open it or what?”

 

Yumichika looked at the box again, and pulled it close, but hesitated when the associated dread automatically returned. He cleared his throat and stalled.

 

“But, I didn't get you a present then . . . ” he paused uncertain, then continued, needing say what he'd never been permitted too, “And I don't have anything to give you in return now.”

 

He regretted it immediately as the sudden look of comprehension that dawned on Ikkaku's face; the practice he'd ambiguously referred to was no secret of the trade. He stared down at the box feeling his face flame up.

 

“Yumi,” the shortened named and dead serious tone caught his attention immediately, “I'm not asking for anything at all . . . Now will ya open it already?”

 

He didn't look up, instead he tucked his hair behind his ear before removing the lid, and brushing aside the paper once more. He'd been too lost in the flood of past memories to really get a look at the contents earlier, and now that he did he was stunned. They were so unlike anything he'd ever gotten before, the polar opposite of the prestigious silk-woven extravaganzas he'd received in the past.

 

No, inside this box, the first thing he laid eyes on was a plain solid colored cotton kaku obi. Below the neatly folded obi, lay an equally unextravagant komon kimono. Normally, Yumichika would not have hesitated to scoff at the very idea of the wearing one of those plain uninspired kimono, but this one was different.

 

The pattern was a typical komon design, a two-toned violet checkerboard, but the lighter violet squares almost perfectly matched Yumichika's eyes, and sprinkled randomly across the checkerboard were tiny stenciled red and purple flowers. It was so odd to see such a pretty accent on the normally drab kimonos; and Yumichika couldn't help but notice how the red flowers were perfectly matched by the red of the kaku obi, a color which was an incredibly rare find.

 

He was speechless. There had been quite some thought put into this; Yumichika could tell, which surprised him even more because he didn't think Ikkaku had any notion of kimono aesthetics since he'd always refused to accompany Yumi into the kimono shops he'd stop at along their travels. Though their class put the items way below the price tag of his usual kimono, Yumichika knew that their uniqueness must have raised the cost enough to be more than Ikkaku could really have afforded. He sat in stunned silence staring at his gift while Ikkaku fidgeted. Finally the other broke the silence.

 

“Che, you don't like. I knew I should have gotten a new kodachi instead. The hell was I thinking?” he complained, “But the kimono shop was next door, and you needed a new one anyway. I know it's not as nice as yer used to, but the color kinda reminded me of you, and it had flowers so . . . I dunno, I thought you'd look pretty in it . . .”

 

Ikkaku trailed off after his ramble, scratching the his bald head a little too casually. Ikkaku had rambled, nervously at that. The whole thing was so endearing Yumichika thought his smile would split his face in half.

 

“Ikkaku,” he waited until the other looked at him, “Thank you. It's beautiful.”

 

Ikkaku knew from the warmth of his smile and the uncharacteristic shine in his eyes that Yumichika had meant it . . .

 

 

That same smile took over his face again as Ikkaku presented him with a kimono box once more.

 

“Happy birthday,” he kissed Yumichika's forehead as the shorter man grabbed the box excitedly and placed it before him on the veranda.

 

After impatiently pulling off the ribbon tying it closed, Yumichika lifted the lid with the same fervor, but parted the paper wrappings much more reverently. Ikkaku had taken to gifting him with a kimono on his birthday every few decades or so. The kimono Ikkaku had last brought him was at least three decades old, making him all the more eager to see the new addition to his collection. He gasped in delight as the tsukesage came into view.

 

“Oh it's beautiful . . .” Yumichika breathed in awe.

 

It was a delicate spring green, woven throughout with a plum blossom motif, painted with a design of elegant plum branches covered in white and green blossoms, with a stencil of vibrant strips of color topping the branch on the center fold. As Yumichika pulled it fully out of the box, a kaku obi toppled out of the folds and onto his lap. He set the kimono down carefully and picked up the obi to stare in shock.

 

“Ikkaku . . . this is . . .”

 

“Made from a maru obi, yea,” Ikkaku grinned when Yumichika's eyes widened comically at his confirmation.

 

“Ikkaku,” Yumichika struggled to articulate through the shock, elation, and resignation, “Ikkaku, no. Take it back, this is too much. Honestly, it must have cost you a year's salary between the two!”

 

Even so Yumichika held the creamy golden silk woven sash gorgeously embroidered with red chrysanthemums and pink peony in a death grip, feeling high from just holding a kaku tailored out of a maru, the most ornate and atrociously expensive of all obi.

 

“Nah,” Ikkaku scratched his head and mumbled quickly, “It was only about eight months really . . . ”

 

“Ikkaku!” Yumichika cried scandalized to hear he hadn't been off his mark by far.

 

“Yumi!” he replied mocking his tone, before jabbing a thumb towards Yumi's room, “Shaddup and go try it on.”

 

“But—mmph,” Yumichika found himself silenced when Ikkaku's lips covered his own.

 

Well then, that was that. He wrapped his arms around Ikkaku's neck, pulling him closer and deepening their kiss, pulling away slowly after long moments with a little nip to the other's lower lip.

 

“Thank you,” he said, nipping again before hurrying into his room to slip on the new gift.

 

Ikkaku entered several minutes later, an impatient look on his face that clearly demanded what was taking so long. As Yumi finished tying off the obi, he walked up behind Yumi as he stood mesmerized by his own vision in the mirror.

 

“Worth the wait?” Yumichika asked eventually, meeting Ikkaku's eyes in the mirror.

 

“Hell yea,” Ikkaku agreed, placing his hands on Yumi's hips pulling him closer as he started nibbling on his ear. Yumichika shivered at the contact, and sighed softly.

 

“Wanna help me take it off?”

 

“Hell yea.”

 

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~*Owari*~