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Almost blandly he remarks, “Not as advertised.”
“No kidding,” Rukia grumbles, kicking at the rickety bed that would be hers for the next semester. Assuming she didn’t move into his apartment within the next three minutes.
“Let’s see the bathroom.” Almost hopeful, she turns for the other door in the room, and threw it open in a flourish only to be met with – “It’s a door…to a wall.”
Scratching at his cheek with his index finger, he muses, “I think it’s supposed to be a closet.”
She sniffs.
“Careful Kuchiki, that sounds very close to regret.”
“I have allergies,” she retorts, rubbing at her nose in demonstration. “Besides…it’s not like I’m going to live in the closet.”
“You’d probably fit though.”
“Shut up, Kurosaki.”
He shrugs, unaffected. “I’m just saying; you don’t take up much space; you could fit in it if you tried.”
“Well, I’m not trying.” Shutting the door with finality before turning towards her sparse dorm room with a determined nod and her hands at her hips, she says aloud to herself, “It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
Ichigo resists the urge to snort, but she lightly punches him in the gut as she walks past anyway because she knows him too well not to.
He can’t be faulted for his disbelief, though.
Kuchiki Rukia doesn’t look like she has the chops to slum it.
The only reason she is because of some weird bet she had going with her brother. Byakuya, the bastard, had even given her a cherry blossom plant as a “dorm” warming gift.
Ichigo would give her a week.
The door to her room opens with a bang as the handle collides with the wall, a ginger-haired woman sauntering in with a half-empty bottle in hand, abundant chest practically spilling out of her white blouse. Peering at them in befuddlement for a moment, as if they were the wrong ones for kicking doors down, she grins and raises her beverage in a toast, “Howdy neighbor!”
Rukia wouldn’t make it to tomorrow.
.
It annoys him that he’s wrong.
He shouldn’t have been. He knows Rukia as well as he knows himself. Everything from her favorite manga to the order of her favorite horror movies to the ranking of her guilty pleasures (Chappy and cheesy romance novels being the top of the list). Though, he supposes that being comfortable with his knowledge of her was the dangerous part.
No one could really claim to know Rukia.
Sure, everyone had heard of or had been acquainted with the person who shared her name: only sister to a successful, well-known and well-connected litigator; and on her own, a violin protégé, decorated scholar, gymnast, and kendo player; the all-rounder, head of the class, Ice Queen, Kuchiki Rukia.
But that isn’t the only Rukia; the Rukia that loved a cartoon mascot, who idolized her older brother’s questionable artistic talent, who didn’t like crowds or who had a tendency to adopt stray animals because Look at them looking at us, Ichigo, we have to! Somehow, she’s everything and more of everything, and Ichigo figured, he at least knew that one and while he did, he also still had a tendency to underestimate her.
It isn’t entirely his fault.
Rukia’s big eyes, small stature, and generally unassuming presence wouldn’t register an iota of intimidation unless she willed that pesky Kuchiki aura fourth like a vengeful spirit. People tended to overlook the fact that she had more determination in her manicured pinky finger than most people could have in their entire family line.
And that wasn’t even factoring a bet.
Ichigo doesn’t know the terms of it, something he’s still annoyed by, but Byakuya must have made it good to make his sister grit her teeth through the house parties Rukongai had.
He’d be jealous if it was his scene, and if it had affected the amount of time he saw Rukia.
Fortunately, that hadn’t changed; in fact, if anything he saw her more despite Rukongai being the opposite direction of where his apartment is.
“What’s the reason this time?” he poses as she shuts his front door with the back of her heel, dropping the emergency only keys he had given her last year, on the kitchen counter.
“I need to study, and the goddamn party won’t end.”
Moving his legs off the center table to let her pass, and then propping them back up as she did so. He snorted a little as she made herself comfortable beside him and propped her legs up in a mimic of his.
“When did it start?”
“What day is it?”
Raising a brow, he replies in a question, “Tuesday?”
“Friday.”
A baffled, “What?” passes his lips, and she grumbles her elaboration, “The party started on Tuesday last week.”
“How the f-”
“By Sunday, I hoped someone would have died of alcohol poisoning. It was not meant to be,” she interjects with a huff, zipping open the messenger bag at her side and grabbing one of the textbooks inside. “Now if you excuse me, I need to get through the first section of this subject or I’m going to fail the entire year.”
Not for the first time, he considers asking her to move in, but he tamps down on the words by asking instead, “Why don’t you just move out? Your house isn’t even that far from campus.” The distance was a relative thing, though. Byakuya had a private car to get her to and from the university from first through to second year, making a spectacle every time. “Or is that why you’re living at Rukongai now?”
“You’re fishing to find out about the bet, and I’m not biting,” she informs, not looking up from her notes.
“I still don’t get why you won’t tell me about it,” he complains, though making sure he sounded more annoyed then a tiny bit offended at being left out.
They’d been friends for barely two years. It was ridiculous to feel neglected.
“Because you don’t need to know.”
“What about the stakes,” he wheedles, “I can’t know those?”
“My pride.”
He snorts. “Boo-hoo, you want me to play you a song on the world’s tiniest violin?”
“You’re lucky I can’t beat you with this textbook, I won’t be able to study if there are bloodstains on it,” she says, scowling into the pages and he thinks for a moment he sees her blush but that’s not likely.
For all of Rukia’s pomp about being a respectable young debutante, she’d probably never blushed in her life. Go red in the face and threaten to kill someone (him, usually because he’s a little shit), sure, but –
Anyway, there was no winning with her. Clearly, she’d gotten more of the lawyer gene than she would have liked considering her work around with this bet with Byakuya led her older brother to leaving me the hell alone, thank god! so Ichigo resolved to say nothing further on the matter, even if Rukia kept showing up at his place.
(And maybe, because of it.)
“You want me to get some food for your study binge?”
She purses her lips in exaggerated thought even though he knows she’s going to say yes. With a roll of his eyes, he gets up, grabs his wallet and phone from the center table beside her foot before plopping a kiss on her head and telling her he’ll be right back.
“I want ice-cream too,” she tells him hurriedly, and he waves his hand in both agreement and good-bye.
By the time he gets back, his spot is still empty, her shoes are off, she’s dragged his blanket from his room onto the couch and has the television cued to The Matrix.
It's not a bad way to spend the night.
.
“Your damn cat doesn’t shut up.”
“Zangetsu is not my cat, he lives with you,” she says patiently, coming out of his room, hair wrapped in a towel turban and smelling like him thanks to the soap and shampoo she pilfered from his en-suite bathroom.
Ichigo scowls at her. “You’re the one that wanted to adopt him.”
“Yet you’re the one that feeds him and houses him and cleans up his litter box,” Rukia reminds in a sing-song voice. “You could have just given him away after I left, you know.”
“You would have killed me!”
“It isn’t my fault you fear me more than the cat annoys you.”
“Healthy fear,” he retorts, and from the corner of his eye, he catches her lazy smirk before he feels her arms wrap around his shoulders from behind the couch, her feathery black hair brushing his cheek; her voice a soft murmur against his ear, “I’m not saying your instincts are faulty, Ichigo. Besides, Zangetsu keeps you company.”
“He never comes when I call him,” is his petulant reply, even though despite everything – Rukia is right, damn her. It’s been three months since she’d moved to Rukongai and thanks to the semester reaching its inevitable and bloody end with exams, he hasn’t seen her for almost a month.
Sure, they’ve texted constantly since, but it isn’t the same.
He won’t tell her he’s been lonely without her constant annoying presence and that the cat helps. He won’t. He’ll never hear the end of it.
Uryuu already gave him shit for sulking about it.
It’s not like he needs more of a lecture on the many ways Rukia isn’t just his best friend and how Ichigo needs to get his head out of his ass and ask her (to move in with him) out. It isn’t like that, even if he feels his heart beat a little faster at how comfortable she is in his space – how she’s got keys to his apartment, how she has a favorite mug and how he picks up her favorite cereal – even though she hasn’t been around for weeks and there’d been no hint that she was coming over until he’d found her there.
“He’s a cat, by nature he’s an asshole.”
“What, you don’t think I deserve blind loyalty?” he asks, feigning offense.
“I think,” she begins slowly, pulling away to tug at her towel turban. “You would be the type to take the saying – be the person your dog looks up to – way too seriously. You’d probably give yourself anxiety with the pressure. A cat, on the other hand, you gotta work for the love and attention, and sometimes when you get it, you might not even want it.”
Throwing the black cat meowing at him for no goddamn reason a look of annoyance in a bid to give himself something else to think about other than his wandering thoughts of Rukia practically lives here, just ask her, he asks instead, “And that’s a good thing, how?”
“It makes me coming over and annoying you less annoying by comparison.”
“I knew you just got him for yourself,” putting just the right amount of bitterness to be believable even though as usual, she ignores his pain.
“Don’t listen to Daddy,” Rukia says to the cat as if she were contributing to whatever discussion the creature was having with himself with his meowing episodes. “We love you all the same even though we aren’t together.”
“We might as well be,” he retorts, ignoring the infinitesimal desire to recoil at her words. Right. We’re not a thing. We’re friends. We’re best friends. That’s all. That’s good. “What’s the reason for you being over this time? And commandeering my bathroom while you were at it?”
It isn’t the first time she’d used the shower at his place. That had been at least two months ago, but it had been the first time he came home to hear his shower running – the only reason he hadn’t immediately gotten out of there because lunatics are the only people that would break into your house just to use your bathroom – is because her jacket was hanging on the hook next to his.
“There’s no hot water,” Rukia replies with a scowl. “I swear I’m paying to stay in a dorm room and be irritated every hour I’m there.”
“Think Byakuya paid them off?” he asks with conspiratorial seriousness, though Rukia snorts and says, “I’m pretty sure they’re just annoying.”
She leaves the towel she used on her hair out to dry on the barstool by the breakfast nook as she opens the fridge, pauses and then says almost baffled, “You bought ice-cream?”
For a second, he’s confused.
He doesn’t even like ice-cream and – oh.
“You hate this flavor,” she tells him like it isn’t a fact. He only ever has in his fridge when he knew she’d be around and –
“What were you even going to do with this if I didn’t come over?” she continues, knowing exactly that, though asking in the same baffled tone as when she’d found the container on the shelf like she didn’t think he’d stock it because he’d never eat it otherwise.
And he can already hear her complaining about food-wastage and how his budget doesn’t need the hit because obviously her favorite ice-cream also happens to be the expensive kind so he says, a little defensively, “I’d have dropped by to give it to you.”
At that, he’s met with silence, and he adds, “Might as well, seeing as I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“…then why didn’t you?”
“Eh?” Ichigo frowns. He hadn’t realized she’d wanted him to, and he tells her as much, looking confused before saying, “I was going to visit you sooner, but I figured you were just busy. Not to mention the damned cat keeps fucking singing at the door every time he thinks it’s you – and I keep buying your cereal too anyway so –”
Promptly, she cuts him off by grumbling, “Idiot.”
“Oi!”
Though he’s the one that’s just been insulted, Rukia is the one that looks pissed as she turns to him with a scowl, “Are you serious, you couldn’t wait until next week to do this?”
“Do what?” God, he’s so confused.
With almost no warning, Rukia is stalking over, setting one knee between his on the couch and leaning over to kiss him and that’s – oh.
“One week, Ichigo, I swear to god, you so owe me for this,” she says despite the blush – an honest to God, blush – and the twitch at the corner of her lips, and he’s a little dazed and very confused, and his hands are full of her hips and her forehead is against his, and they’re so very close –
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Ichigo tells her hoarsely.
Though she rolls her eyes, Rukia’s full of affection as she pecks his lips again and pulls back, chuckling when he follows without any kind of orders to his body to do so.
“Were you aware we were dating, Kurosaki?”
“E-eh?” Of course, they aren’t – he hasn’t even asked her ou–
She cocks her brow at him, and he resists the urge to face-palm. “I was going to ask to move in with me. A couple of times.”
“Idiot,” she declares once more, balancing in her straddle of his thigh as she continues to ask, “And how many steps did we skip here?”
Ichigo winced. Oh, God, he really is never going to hear the end of this.
Shaking her head with a dramatic sigh, she says, “Nii-sama’s going to give me so much shit for this.”
“Wait, what?”
Rukia huffs. “The bet; he bet that we were dating and I bet we weren’t. Apparently, we’re both idiots.”
“That’s not – we aren’t exactly –”
“I have clothes here,” she interjects like he doesn’t know that; she’s had a drawer in his apartment practically since the day he moved in a year ago, “you buy my quote, unquote “gross food”, and we have a cat together.”
“Then why move into the Rukongai?”
“Nii-sama bet you’d ask me to move in with you if given the option, which I’ve honestly been hoping for even if we weren’t dating because the dorm is a shithole and I’m ready to commit arson.”
“But are we?” Ichigo asks, suddenly cautious, though she’s a pain in the ass, and asks instead, “About to commit arson?”
He scowls at her innocent smile before she’s leaning in again to kiss him – and so what if he cradles her head to keep her close, wraps his arm around her and tastes the mint of her toothpaste on her tongue, with all the steps they’ve skipped, he isn’t planning on skipping anymore.
“One week,” Rukia says, nose to nose with him. “Ask me out in one week.”
From behind his closed bedroom door, Zangetsu moans his protest, and Ichigo isn’t about to agree with his dumb cat except he does, “And what’s the protocol for you moving in?”
At that, Rukia smirks. “Who says I’m leaving?”