brass pt 8

[convault]

Brass
Series: Bleach
Characters: Ikkaku/Tatsuki; lots of others
notes

"This," Tatsuki muttered through clenched teeth, "sucks!" She sat cross-legged on the grass, hands plucking at the grass near her knees. Ikkaku hadn't bothered correcting her position, and just lounged on the grass; she was probably the kind of person who worked better on her own time, and would resist correction unless she asked for it. "It'd be easier if you stopped messin' around." "Why aren't you teaching Asano Keigo this? He has. Spiritual pressure or whatever too, right? Besides, you're staying with him. So." Ikkaku laughed, and stretched. It was definitely getting colder, but he wasn't bothered by it enough to actually wear the jacket Yumichika forced on him. "Keigo's different. Or maybe I should say, he's normal." "I'm not?" "When he's in a pinch, he pulls in his reiatsu on instinct. Like normal people. You flare up. That's good an' all when you're tryin' to scare a hollow off, but not if they're stronger'n you." She hadn't expected him to be so analytical. He didn't look it, for sure, but what he said also made sense. That, somehow, made it even worse. Tatsuki frowned, settled down a bit, and pulled her reiatsu inward. It wasn't working, as far as she could tell. If anything, she had just concentrated it all into a smaller space, slipping around outside of her skin. Ikkaku made a quiet, disapproving sound, as if he was about to correct her, but when he didn't offer any advice it just pissed her off more. Think like a faucet. A faucet. Just turn it off. Turn the faucet. Why is this faucet notturningoffgoddamnit-- "Need help yet?" "No." Ikkaku bit his lip and tried not to look smug. "Here's a hint: ya can't stuff water back up a faucet. Gotta pull the plug first, right?" Something clicked in Tatsuki's mind and she nodded once, then dispersed her reiatsu. Admittedly, there were some people who could pull their reiatsu back in to conserve it, instead of just letting it leak away before clamping down on it. They had amazing control, were careful and deliberate and were always at least a little bit cowardly. Tatsuki was not one of those people. By the time Ikkaku was satisfied with her progress, she was able to leave a trace of her reiatsu in one place, completely suppress it and move to another. Anyone who fought mostly dependent on sensing reiatsu, like hollows chasing down a soul, could be easily misdirected. The idea of seeing and helping to develop that sort of ability piqued Ikkaku's interest and he pulled a strip of cloth out of his pocket. "Circle around me. If I can still tell where you're standin', you're not good enough. Get five consecutive hits in an' I'll show you Hoozukimaru's shikai. Sound good?" Tatsuki grinned. A while later, Ikkaku smacked Tatsuki hard across her upper arm with his wooden sword for the umpteenth time while she closed in for an attack. He was deliberately working her up; it was one thing to be able to quell your reiatsu after sitting around relaxing for ten minutes. It was another to do the same thing while you were half-blind with rage. Tatsuki wasn't half-blind with rage yet, but she was pretty damn pissed. Ikkaku had his sword at her neck the next time she circled around to his back, face infuriatingly calm even beneath the blindfold. "You got the technique down, but your killin' intent's giving away your position." "Maybe it wouldn't if I didn't want to kill you." He swallowed a grin. Pissing Tatsuki off was fun as hell. She had, up until recently, been pretty distant and composed, but he had figured out her rage buttons pretty fast. She hated: when her friends didn't confide in her, not being able to grasp a reiatsu concept and spending hours working at it unsuccessfully, being parried and blocked in a spar (although receiving hits didn't seem to bother her at all), and being patronized. Ikkaku pulled the last one off surprisingly well, especially when she was having trouble with reiatsu. Tatsuki knew on an intellectual level that he only did it to motivate her (read: piss her off so she'll try harder), but it was so hard to take it reasonably when he was being so smug about it all. It probably didn't help that he liked to see her angry and flustered, because that meant progress. Even if you hit a wall, you had to have been moving to be stopped, right? (Tatsuki later asked Yumichika what Ikkaku liked, and the reply had been (besides alcohol and fighting): daruma. And potential. If he saw someone with the potential to improve their destructive capacity, he wanted to be there, to see it develop and then, someday, fight it. As for daruma, something about always popping back up after being knocked over meant that Ikkaku always stopped to play with the daruma if he saw one in stores. Tatsuki laughed, because they always sort of reminded her of Ichigo.) Tatsuki slipped into the same sort of mode that big cats stalking prey took on. Completely suppressed reiatsu, all killing intent smothered beneath a layer of icy-cold calculation. Ikkaku stopped taunting her and relaxed every muscle in his body; the better to react when she finally decided to move. She circled around behind him, and-- he caught her hand before it had a chance to connect with the back of his head. "What is it now?" "Stepped on a dry leaf." Tatsuki glanced at the grass and almost screamed in frustration. Ikkaku flashed her a sympathetic grin. "Counts as one. You would'a gotten me otherwise." "No. It doesn't count unless I hit you." "That's what I like ta hear. C'mon, just five." Tatsuki smacked him on the back of the head and shouted, "Four!" "Four," Ikkaku echoed, and lowered into a stance. Tatsuki slipped around to his front, and socked him hard in the stomach. He pulled the blindfold off his face and blinked a few times. Tatsuki grinned at him. "Five!" Ikkaku nodded, and massaged his abs. He had been expecting a hit from the back, like the other four, so the punch hurt more than he expected. But he grinned back. "Five." "Can I see your soul cutter now?" He fished a soul candy dispenser out of his pocket and popped one into his mouth. Tatsuki had seen a similar thing happen to Ichigo in the classroom, so it didn't bother her as much as it might have if she had seen it for the first time when Ikkaku popped out of his body. Still. He suddenly had a sword in his hand, drew it, slammed the hilt into the scabbard and Tatsuki watched while the whole length of the sword and scabbard warped to become a spear. Ikkaku spun it in his left hand, sent it still whirling to the right and flipped it behind his back and over his shoulder a few times before swinging it forward and catching it in his left. It occured to Tatsuki that he fought her on par with her specialty, and he was probably a whole hell of a lot better with spears than he was at hand-to-hand. His body fell on its ass and scooted backwards. Ikkaku snapped his fingers in front of Tatsuki's face to get her attention again while her mind was too busy being blown to function. "Can you teach me how to use that?" "Not really the teaching type." "Then can I play with it?" "Wow." "What?" "No." "Why not?" "No one touches Hoozukimaru but me." Ikkaku dismissed his shikai and resheathed his sword, then squeezed himself back into his body. Artificial body. Whatever. "Can you teach me how to use a spear anyway?" "Yeah, sure. I'll find ya somethin' to practice with. Maybe next week." "After school tomorrow." "I have patrol tomorrow. Day after?" "Sure." "Time's it now?" Tatsuki checked her phone. "Four." "Huh. Early." "Yeah. Wanna go do something else?" "What else?" "Arcade?" "Nah." "You like billiards?" "There a place around here?" "Yeah." "Think you can get Ichigo or Orihime-chan?" "I think they're both busy. I'll text them." "Callin' Yumichika." "Ichigo's free." "Yumichika's pretty close. You wanna wait for 'em?" "Ichigo's gonna meet us there." "Just him then." "Ready ta get your ass kicked?" "Yo, Ikkaku. Only way I'd lose is if I mistook your head for the cueball." "Bastard, I've been playin' since before you were born." They punched each other hard on the arm and then clasped hands. Yumichika sighed, tossed them both cue sticks and settled on one of the benches against a nearby wall. Tatsuki swept the triangle up from under the table and racked up while Ikkaku and Ichigo hefted their cues in their hands and made a few practice air shots. Ikkaku frowned. "Yumichika, you're playin'." "I'd rather watch. Besides, I only vaguely know the rules." "That's why I keep tellin' you ta play. 'S a game that makes everyone look good." Yumichika watched Tatsuki splay her fingers out on the table, index finger bent tightly, cue cradled securely between her knuckle and thumb. She leaned close to the table, eyes narrowed, feet planted, and bent forward to get within reach of the cueball. Ikkaku snuck a sideways glance at Yumichika, who had a small, approving smile on his face. Ichigo snorted. "Now we all know Ikkaku's favorite place to take a girl." "Yeah, lotta cute ones bent over tables." Yumichika choked on his own spit. "Ikkaku!" Tatsuki grinned at Yumichika and carefully removed the rack from the table. "We'll teach you. Besides, guys look good playing, too. All concentrated and intense." "Yeah, even Mizuiro ends up looking pretty tough. Ikkaku breaks." "Two on two. We'll switch up next game. Cutthroat if Yumichika wants ta be bored for the next couple hours." Yumichika cracked like a dry twig. Tatsuki looked really good. Ikkaku and Ichigo's practice shots had also been fairly impressive. "Fine, I'll play. What's cutthroat? It sounds interesting." "Three player. I'll explain the rules later." Ikkaku grinned and placed the cueball, braced his right hand on the table and set the stick between thumb and index finger. "Callin' shots?" "Nah. It's not like it's a tournament." Ikkaku's breakshot sank three balls, and was loud enough to make Tatsuki jump. "Heh. Your funeral." The first game ended with Ichigo chewing on his lip and gaping at the table. "You can't figure out pre-wrapped onigiri but suddenly you're a pro at pool?" Ikkaku slapped him on the back. "Game's been around a pretty long time, Ichigo. You oughta play with Renji." His favorite thing about pool was the insane advantage of being long-armed and ambidextrous. He could pull off a decent shot from any angle, anywhere on the table without having to twist himself into any strange shapes. Ikkaku decided to play right-handed for the rest of the day anyway; if he could draw out the games by handicapping himself, that was fine with him. Yumichika frowned. "It might have gone faster if you hadn't started messing around at the end." "Nah, last ball always takes me forever." Ikkaku chalked up his cue, picked balls out of the return trough and rolled them across the table to Ichigo while he racked up again. When he finished, Ikkaku set the cueball and Yumichika gracefully backed out of the game. He headed outside to buy a drink from a vending machine and came back to sit on the bench with a can of coffee and a pocketful of change. Tatsuki dropped her cue back into the holder and joined Yumichika. "Think I'll let those two fight the next game out." "I thought you were better than Ichigo." Yumichika smiled and offered her the rest of his can. "I mean, it sure seemed that way." "I am. At most games." Tatsuki finished the coffee and crunched the can flat before dropping it into a recycling bin. "Just don't wanna get caught in the pissing contest crossfire." Yumichika snickered silently into his hand. Ikkaku broke off from his trash-talking with Ichigo to glare at him before turning back around. Tatsuki pulled a knee up and wrapped her arms around it. "You guys know each other really well, huh?" "He's my associate." "You're partners, right? With that Gotei-13 thing." "Oh. He told you." "Yeah." "You seem to be taking it awfully well." "I try not to sweat the small stuff." "No wonder he likes Tatsuki-chan so much!" "I-- what?" Yumichika fiddled with the cue he held balanced in between his knees and watched Ichigo sink two balls while Ikkaku agitatedly paced around the table. "Ikkaku hates spending time around people he's not interested in." "I don't think it's anything like that." "Don't think about it too much. Did you have fun today?" Yumichika looked thoughtful, and a little sad. Sort of like someone who got picked last for a softball game. And his expression was kinda familiar-- something clicked in Tatsuki's head. That was Orihime's talking-about-Ichigo-though-I-should-probably-give-up expression. She hissed, "You like him?" "I asked if you had fun today." "Oh. Yeah, I did." Yumichika slipped off the bench and breezed over to Ikkaku. "Tatsuki-chan and I are heading out for a bit. Ikkaku, you need to...?" "Yeah. I do." "Don't break anything!" "Won't." "Is it really alright to let them go?" Ikkaku used his cue to check an angle and then braced his hand against the table before setting the cue between his thumb and index finger. "Not worried about Yumichika." Ichigo leaned against the edge of the table and chalked up his cue. He was losing pretty badly, but the one good thing about being so far behind was that he had more balls on the table, and Ikkaku would have a harder time sinking his own. At some point, Ikkaku had started trying to jump the cueball over Ichigo's stripes in order to hit his own without scratching and he had already had to catch the ball several times as it sailed off the table. "So you always hold the stick like that?" Ikkaku sent the cueball into a cluster in a corner of the table and snorted as one of Ichigo's balls dropped into the pocket. "Yep. Get more power like that." "That's why you don't have any--" Ichigo easily sunk one of his own and then moved to the other end of the table to sink another-- "accuracy." "Yeah, I'm still kickin' your ass."

« back ↔ next »

Comments

[incandescens]

Awww. You're making me feel quite sorry for Yumichika. Lovely chapter.

[convault]

(((: thanks! glad you're still enjoying, haha

[silawen.livejournal.com]

Pwew, I finally managed to catch up! This story really is a lot of fun to read. I'm a fan of both Ikkaku and Tatsuki, so it's always fun to see them in a fic. (Especially together!) Tatsuki really doesn't get enough attention in fandom.

Anyway, so far it's been a pleasant surprise, so keep up the good work! ^^

[convault]

(: thanks! glad you like, haha. and yeah-- i was like, i like ikkaku, and i like tatsuki, so...........

[naughty-gurrl.livejournal.com]

Poor Yumi. I do hope it is a platonic kind of love or the fear of being a third wheel. This was another wonderful chapter. I am enjoying this story.

[convault]

glad you're enjoying! and-- i guess it's mostly platonic? like if you crush on your best friend and don't expect anything to happen 'cause they're into someone else and you eventually just get over it but never really do. /bad at explaining ksjfkds