Chapter Text
This is how it starts: Ichigo is standing at the school gate, watching his last class of the day pour out past him. Twelve year old kids are brats, but fun too, and most of them wave goodbye at him. It's a contented day, satisfying and warm. A pleasantly mundane peace.
Then there's a snort to the side -- derisive, hostile. "Fucking figures."
He turns, and past the flow of carelessly happy kids there's a face he saw twice in his life and never managed to forget.
--
This is how it starts: Ichigo, all of sixteen, bleeding, forearms slashed -- defensive wounds. Lip busted, ribs black and blue. Ichigo climbing back to his feet somehow. Before him there's a feral bastard with wild furious eyes and bared white teeth, holding a butterfly knife that looks more red than steel.
"Fucking stay down already!" said feral bastard snarls.
The world is a whirl of pain and danger-threat-move, the edges of things too sharp in his vision, too contrasted, heartbeat swamping out the other guy's voice.
Ichigo takes a step forward. His legs shake.
"Think I won't slash your fucking neck?!"
Ichigo does think that. Huh.
The guy could. The guy might, if he gets pushed too far. But he doesn't want to. It's something in the curl of his lip, desperate and sickened.
"Why are you even doing this?!"
Why.
Inoue.
"She's not even your anything."
She's Inoue.
--
(The man stabs out toward his neck -- flash-fast, snarling -- then gets him in the temple with a roundhouse kick while Ichigo was shielding himself. Curtains.)
--
"A fucking teacher. 'Tch. Spare me."
He wasn't yet a man back then, Ichigo knew that intellectually, but he can see it better now. His shoulders were already that wide, or almost, but his chest wasn't done filling out to match; his arms weren't so thick, so defined. They're bare to the shoulders now -- tanktop -- the left shoulder tattooed with some kind of beast crawling down it with its maw wide open.
He was just a slightly older teenager, just as furiously desperate as Ichigo was.
Doesn't mean Ichigo's heart doesn't shoot up to his throat, seeing that sneer only a few steps away, hearing that voice.
Doesn't mean that, but this is his school and these are his students, the last of them trickling out past the gates. He shifts his feet, just in case, and then the woman standing behind the man sighs and backhands his tattooed shoulder with her knuckles.
She smiles, just a little awkward. Ichigo realizes he knows her too -- though he's only seen her once, and not... Not that closely. "Hey," she says, "Just passing by."
They both have backpacks on and bulging shopping bags strung along their arms and the man is, Ichigo finally notices, dragging a beat-up old suitcase.
And she has three different pullovers knotted around her hips.
They probably didn't fit in the suitcase.
The man's pale eyes skitter away from Ichigo's face, jaw rolling. The woman grins, but it's unconvincing. "Anyway!"
"Anyway," Ichigo echoes, mind entirely empty of conversational gambits. The woman's gray-green eyes are kind over the scar running down from the space between her eyebrows, and tired. Her belly curves out under the knotted sleeves.
"Let's just go, Nelliel," the man mutters, oddly short eyebrows mulishly scrunched down. His ferocious aura is all curled inwards, like meeting Ichigo was just that last dollop of shame on a catastrophic day. The universe rubbing it in.
Ichigo is still lagging behind with shock, this meeting too unexpected. A burst of alarm makes him open his mouth when the man takes a step forward; he snorts in disdain and looks away, like he thought Ichigo felt threatened and no, that's not it, but--
"--Wait," the woman says, digging her heels in, and when she looks at Ichigo it's not with awkward neighborliness anymore but something like urgency. "Are -- are you guys still in touch? Is she doing okay?"
"We got married," he replies without thought. "Yeah, she's... She's fine now."
A beat of silence, and then the woman smiles, a tiny one, eyes welling up.
"Well," the man says as she's still searching for words -- he's standing right in front of the school gate now, in front of Ichigo, hands stuffed deep in pockets. Angry to beat out sad. "That's cute."
"Thank you, we're damn well adorable," Ichigo replies, biting, and then makes the decision he was probably always going to make.
--
Orihime knows her husband is home because her son can pick up the specific way he turns a key in a lock at fifty paces, and takes off at a gallop. Guiltily, she wonders if he'll free her up some time to keep perusing patisserie schools online, and then shakes her head and stands up.
Never mind baking, she can't even keep working as a sales clerk; her salary would go right back out into daycare. More schooling is for now nothing but a pipe dream. But it's okay, Kazui is still little. Once he goes to school, once they have more of a nest egg... No, she's not going to ask Ichigo for anything. He must be tired. He worked all day. She worked, too, but she was having fun with their son at the same time; it's not the same. She shouldn't be selfish.
"I'm home! Orihime?" he calls out, and then makes a little oof of noise as Kazui probably tackles his legs.
Laughing, she replies, "Welcome home!" and waits for him to come find her in the laundry room.
But he doesn't.
"We've got guests," he calls back, and he doesn't sound relaxed or happy.
She puts the laundry down and goes.
--
This is how it starts: Orihime had a brother, but he died. Orihime had parents, but they were worse than dead. Orihime had a methhead prostitute mother and an alcoholic pimp father who never even bothered to report his child missing when the night he hit eighteen her brother took her and left. She was Kazui's age or thereabout.
Orihime had an aunt, who was quite rich, and her only living relative, and felt obligated to pay for someplace for Orihime to live brotherless until she hit eighteen in turn and could be left to manage on her own.
Orihime's aunt did not feel obligated to provide a single dime more than that. The criminals who had kidnapped her didn't believe her much.
So at the start, there is Orihime, chin trembling but eyes bone-dry, all of sixteen year old and still a normal high school girl despite it all, and in a single day she has witnessed three stabbings and been eyed up and down by the men who committed them in a way she deeply, deeply understands.
She doesn't bother to tell any of them that if they make good on their implicit threats that's just going to convince her aunt that she's just as much of a whore as her mother was and is plotting with them to extort the lady.
She doesn't know where her aunt does her banking, or keeps her valuables, she doesn't have a key to the main house, doesn't have the alarm code, doesn't even have a banking account she can take more than a grocery run's worth of money from.
She sits in this sordid little place and tries to look expressionless and she thinks that only Tatsuki-chan saw her being taken and the police will not find her for days, if her aunt even bothers telling them instead of just trashing the ransom note and leaving a tongue-lashing on Orihime's answering machine. The door is not locked, but everybody wanders around through the building and she can't figure out a pattern. Sometimes they peek in on her. She knows karate but that's in a safe little dojo, that's not street fights and knuckle-dusters and knives, and that girl Loly already punched her in the stomach so hard she vomited.
They said they'd go back for Tatsuki-chan, if Orihime caused them too much trouble, and then they laughed.
So here Orihime is; sitting. The couch is mildewed and the halogen lamp flickers. Flickers. Flickers. Her neck still feels tight where the longhaired man caught her, her tongue still feels gross where he shoved his fingers in her mouth. Her scalp stings.
"Are you hungry?" a voice asks gently from the door. "I've got... Some kind of cheese and pancakes."
It's a girl, a couple years older than her, with hair dyed a bold teal, and magenta eyeshadow.
When Orihime cries over her cheese, she sits next to her on the gross couch and hugs her to her side, and says she will make it okay.
--
"Nel-chan?" Orihime asks, unsure, but the hair is still dyed the same shade even if there is no eyeshadow, and the eyes are still kind and hazel-gray.
"Nel-chan," she repeats, moving around the kitchen table without looking at it, because there is a scar now going down between her eyes and to her cheek, and there was so much blood. There's a scar in the middle of the woman's pretty face and Orihime knows she's crying when she takes her hands and cannot make herself stop, because, "You're alive."
Nel-chan frees her hands and Orihime lets go with a spasm of embarrassment but it turns out it was to hug her, so that's fine. That's fine.
"I'll get Kazui a snack," she hears her husband say, quiet and understanding, and then the front door closes and feet shuffle around, and she's crying, crying. It's been almost ten years but it grabs her by the throat anyway, a wound not healed but forcefully forgotten about.
"You escaped," Nel-chan says back, and squeezes so hard Orihime's backbone pops. "See, you did it! You got running and you found a way out and you went back to school and you forgot all about it. I told you you could." She pulls back to grin. "And you have a house and a cute son and you married that guy!"
She beams. She's pregnant, belly blooming outwards on her slender frame, and her face is scarred where the long-haired man hit her from the back, where she fell silent and boneless just as she was showing Orihime the way out.
Orihime squeezes back.
She didn't even notice the other guest, so when he speaks, she jumps straight out of Nel-chan's arms.
"A right little fairytale, huh? Even got your knight dragging you straight out of a dungeon."
She remembers that man, too. All that eye-catching blue. She remembers him roughhousing and throwing friendly arms around her other captors' necks, just another one of them -- snappish and coarse, disdainful. When the long-haired one had made the gross comments he'd rolled his eyes, but then he had looked at her trembling chin and sneered.
He's leaning back against the doorjamb and his arms are crossed loosely as he watches her past Nel-chan's shoulder. Body stance saying casual and voice saying bitter and the fact that he didn't even step fully out of the entrance saying he wishes he could leave. Run.
She remembers him landing on the long-haired one like a ton of bricks, she remembers him screaming -- then the sirens, then.
--
"He could have killed you!" he's snarling as he runs, Nel-chan's head bobbing as he hauls her across his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Orihime's wrist is caught tight in Kurosaki-kun's hand as he tows her along and she's glad, so glad she doesn't have to pay attention to where they're going, because if she looks away from Nel-chan then Nel-chan will die.
She doesn't even think to ask why Kurosaki-kun is following him. Why they're not waiting for the police. (It's because the man with the blue hair didn't hit the man with the long hair hard enough, she'll think later on. Because he was already wobbling back up, and he was angry.) She just scrambles to stay on her feet and refuses to look away.
She doesn't see the wire fence coming until Kurosaki-kun brakes hard and yanks on her arm to stop her momentum, and she almost flies off her feet.
The man with the blue hair starts pacing, looking for a way up. The police sirens echo through the backstreet. Kurosaki-kun pushes Orihime behind his back, wary of him.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck-- what the fuck were you thinking, you stupid bitch, what do you do now--"
"Was thinking," Nel-chan rasps, head barely lifted but venom all through her voice, "that I'd rather die than live crawling like this."
Orihime flinches. Kurosaki-kun hisses between his teeth. They don't -- they don't want to have to watch the look on the blue haired man's face at that.
A single set of running footsteps echoes between the walls.
Kurosaki-kun is up on the fence in a second, holding out his hand for her. Orihime takes it without thought, lets him haul her up, monkeys her way down the other side. It's the long-haired man, she knows it. He will kill them this time.
Kurosaki-kun sits on the fence. Looks down. Far away there are voices yelling 'police!'.
He holds out his hand.
The blue-haired man doesn't take it.
--
Later when they ran into the police cordon neither Orihime nor Kurosaki-kun said a thing about the two of them.
She couldn't forget the way that teal head had dropped when the blue-haired man turned away with a snarl to race right back where they'd come from. She couldn't forget her first good look at red splatters on the ground, the obvious trail leading straight to a girl emptying herself out.
Her hands on Nel-chan's shoulders, she looks at the blue-haired man -- at his sneering wariness and the tight rolling muscles in his jaw -- and she says, "Thank you."
When he goes "What? For what?", caught flatfooted, she just laughs and shrugs and pulls away, and she goes to see what is taking her husband so long with the tea tray.
--
Ichigo and Grimmjow -- his name's Grimmjow; they never knew -- almost come to blows three times in a single evening.
First time's over the tea -- if he doesn't want to drink it, he could also wear it. Second time is 'eat the fucking cake' -- 'daddy what's fucking' -- 'Kazui go to bed and you shut the fuck up.' Third time is 'you guys are staying' -- 'no we're not,' and that one keeps going round and round until Orihime says gently, "You'll wake up Kazui," and Nel-chan says "I would really enjoy having a bathroom available for the five times I'm going to have to pee tonight," and Grimmjow-san grits his teeth and deflates in a huff and they stay.
None of the arguments were because Orihime and Ichigo pressed too much for information, either current or from back then. It's not hard to guess what recently happened. Out of money and now homeless; the rest can wait. The rest can wait until tomorrow, where Orihime will make breakfast and ask Grimmjow-san to help her with the cracked screen door since it's so obvious he can't stand feeling like he's freeloading and then ask Nel-chan about everything she can think of.
It's just for the night, they all agree, until the two of them figure out where to go.
It's just for the night, they all say, but Orihime doesn't know who believes that.