Isshin's birthday
Title: In Volatile Company
Rating: G
Spoilers: Only if you haven't read chapter 184 and past.
Pairing: A bit of Isshin/Masaki.
Summary: Some of Isshin's more memorable birthday moments.
Notes: It's Isshin's birthday today, so I thought I'd contribute something for it. He doesn't seem to get much love, sadly. This isn't very good, but it's all I could come up with. ^^;
Disclaimer: Bleach and any characters mentioned here all belong to Kubo Tite.
It was a memorable affair.
There was something about fighting your very first hollow on the morning of your birthday that you really could not forget even if you tried. It might have been the thrill of the moment, or the adrenaline rush, or, as it was with Isshin, the irritation of having a giant chicken-like creature howling at you when you have a furiously hammering hangover. Whatever it was, there was a sense of satisfaction when you reaped that first hollow.
For Isshin, it was the relief of his pounding head. It did not last long. People around him were running aimlessly, shouting here and screaming there about hollows that did not deserve such attention. He could not see why everyone was making a big deal.
“Menos!” shouted a seated officer whom Isshin had never bothered to learn the name. He turned around and finally saw.
It was funny-looking. The thing did not look any less clown-like up close than the picture did in the textbook. It was ridiculously enormous, its nose was ridiculously long, the spikes on its neck were ridiculously dramatic--
But the beam of reddish purple light it suddenly fired from its mouth was certainly not ridiculous.
He yelped and flew through the air and landed headlong into a bush. There were thistles.
It was another fifteen minutes before reinforcements arrived in the form of an amused eighth division captain carrying a suspicious white jug. He shot several bolts of lightning at it, which was the equivalent of shooing away a stray animal. Isshin returned to the Court and was sent straight to the fourth division complex, where one of his drinking colleagues and current dropkicking target awaited him on the front steps. They stared at each other, each taking in the other’s bedraggled appearance. Isshin had twigs and thistles in his hair. Urahara had seaweed.
“A chicken. And a menos,” added Isshin.
“Squid.” He blinked and turned around for a moment. “Happy birthday?” he inquired, handing Isshin a suspicious white jug. Isshin took it, sniffed, and sat himself down beside the other man. He took a thoughtful swig of it’s contents.
“Good enough.”
-
It was a memorable affair.
Of the few things he wanted that day, being shot was not one of them.
Isshin had never felt so in need of a strong drink as he and Ukitake slashed open two shallow cuts in the earth. They did not stay long enough to watch the young, inexperienced Quincy tumble into the ditches and twist their ankles and break their bones. All of that was better than what they might have had to do.
He didn’t throw his sword down to kill, not unless someone decided to play hero and charged him recklessly. The problem was that many of them were just too bent on being heroes for their own good, especially the younger ones. People wondered why a handful of captains could not wipe out a few measly little Quincy and Isshin wished those people would shove it.
Just before they could dive at the gate, an onslaught of arrows bombarded them from above. The pair batted them away as they moved. Out of the corner of his eye, Isshin noticed an old man pointing an arrow at him. He could not raise his sword quickly enough so, reflexively, he jumped. He came back down on one foot and began to hop up and down angrily, biting back curses as he stared at the smoking hole in his other foot. Ukitake shoved him forward into the gate. He hopped frantically through and, as his good foot gave in to its aching muscles, dropped gracelessly beside a sleeping Urahara, whom cracked open an eye and stared at the foot.
Kyouraku was too occupied with staring mournfully at a porcelain handle in his hand to notice Isshin’s arrival. Urahara instinctively offered Isshin a roll of bandages. “Unohana is busy,” he said in response to Isshin’s raised eyebrow. “Don’t ask me to do it either. And he‘s grieving, so it’s probably best not to disturb him.” He pointed at the remains of a jug.
“It was new. And there was still half a bottle in it,” Kyouraku muttered dejectedly. Ukitake appeared through the gate as he spoke. Sighing with comprehension, he sat himself down next to Kyouraku and patted his shoulder comfortingly.
Together, the four men stayed there, leaning against the wall. One whom lamented, one whom patted, one whom slept, and the one whom bandaged his foot.
-
It was a memorable affair.
Actually, it was a drunken affair, and memorable only in disoriented pieces to those who had attempted to drink the entire bar dry. The bar was a small one, with very few occupants. Soon, only five people remained, the rest having returned home to recover what was left of their ears from the noises three of the five had called ‘singing.’ The barman stayed, only because he was used to it.
Those same three had managed to chug away a little less than half a storeroom, which wasn‘t saying too much, considering the storeroom was more like a store cupboard. They were having an engaging conversation about society and eggs while swaying dangerously in their chairs. The other two watched with genuine interest. The one who looked a little sickly shook his head disapprovingly, but smiled fondly despite himself. He couldn’t drink that night because his condition was acting up again, but he stayed in spite of it. The dark woman poured herself another glass of milk. She preferred it over alcohol, not to say she didn’t like a good drink now and then, but nothing beat milk.
Many years were passed like this, until one morning Isshin woke up on his first birthday away from Soul Society. He stayed in bed, recalling different bars they frequented, thought of the horrible mangling of perfectly good songs with their off key singing, remembering bits of fond drunken discussions about the meaning of life and cabbage. He missed it all, but he mostly missed the company. Good company was hard to find nowadays.
Only hard, though, not impossible.
Isshin wondered if he could persuade Ishida Ryuuken to have a drink with him. He hoped the man would not repeat what his ancestor had done; the shiny skin had remained as a reminder of the unfortunate incident with his foot.
-
It was a memorable affair.
He only had one glass of wine this time. It might have had something to do with the fact that chugging himself drunk was not the best way to stay in the good graces of the woman he finally had the courage to ask out.
As they stepped out into the frigid night, he lit a cigarette, taking a puff to calm his frayed nerves. It was a habit that had always been there, but in the past he only indulged it with the occasional pipe. Cigarettes weren’t as good as a pipe, but he had to make do.
The woman beside him half-heartedly flapped her hand in a vain effort to fan the suffocating fumes away, even though the breeze was taking care of it. She had a longsuffering look on her face.
“Sorry,” he said, not feeling too apologetic. “I forgot you hate it.”
She took hold of his hand and plucked the lit stick from his fingers. He didn’t protest when she dropped it and ground it under her heel. “I like the hand that holds the cigarette,” she said, entwining her fingers with his and tiptoeing up to kiss him, long and slow.
And just like that, he quit.
-
It was a memorable affair.
The first of the reasons of why he remembered was because she wasn’t there. Only months ago had she gone.
Her absence was easily noticeable. He wasn’t woken with little threats to get up or she’d smother him with a pillow, birthday or no. He wasn’t lured downstairs by the smell of a freshly baked cake. There were no laughing little brats latching themselves onto him and shouting happily.
He woke up sometime in the morning when he smelled something burning. He heard running and figured the kids could handle it and awoke again in the early afternoon. He might have considered it a sign of old age, if he hadn’t already passed the mark of Old Age and danced across the border of Ancient. If not Ancient, then at least the border of Damn Old.
The alarm clock was supposed to have blared him awake, but it was obviously tampered with. It wasn’t plugged in, which was a definite hint.
There was a brief scuffle with a pair of slippers that refused to let themselves be worn when he remembered that he didn’t have slippers in his room and realized that he had been trying to wear a carpet. He stood, tripped because he forgot to take his foot out from under the carpet, and stumbled into the bathroom.
He thought it pointless to open the clinic at this time of day, so he settled for going downstairs with every intent of making a cup of coffee. He never got around to it. This was the second of those memorable reasons.
On the kitchen table was a cake, a strangely oblong-shaped cake covered with an entire canister of whipped cream by amateur hands. A large, slightly leaning white candle that he normally used during blackouts was stuck through the top. Crusted on the pan in the sink were bits of burnt batter. A packet of matches laid beside the cake.
He lit the candle, thought slowly and carefully, and made a wish.
That night, they had cake for dinner. The children were surprised to find that it was actually good and didn‘t poison them after all. Yuzu was not sure if she put enough eggs and Ichigo thought he burnt it beyond salvation. It was Karin who went overboard with the whipped cream. When it was well into the night and he was sure everyone was asleep, he walked to a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of sake. He was about to close it when he took a look at the refrigerator and glanced down at the bottle in his hands. There was a brief internal struggle, but he eventually put the sake back.
He could do without it. At least cake didn’t give him a hangover.
End.
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yawninghat) wrote,
