Another day, another set of mad, heavily-revised drabbles from my last fic-bits challenge for my f-list. Beware much madness, genre mixing and shout-outs to Rukia's innate strangeness in the following below!

Fandom: Bleach

Characters/Pairings: Ichigo/Rukia, Hollow Ichigo/Rukia, Renji/Rukia, Byakuya, 10th and 11th Divisions

Rating: PG - R

Summary: Apparently, there's very little in life that isn't negotiable with an extremely shiny shikai at your side…

I. Hollow Ichigo, The King and I, for Raynos

In the end, it had taken nothing more than a few rented costumes, the sheer, malicious glee of Ichigo's hollow and a few innuedos about Rukia perhaps lending him a bit of the wisdom she'd gained over the years as a tutor of a very special sort to release the final form of her shikai.

Uruhara took all the credit, of course. Fan ever at work, he had twittered, "Why, if it hadn't been for my own foresight, Rukia-chan probably would never have--"

It had taken weeks to defrost the exterior of the Urahara Shop afterwards.

"For the last time," Rukia yelled at the top of her lungs, "I don't care about what Ichigo learned about in kindergarten! I am not sharing my quote-unquote 'coy, captivating Kuchiki kindness' with his goddamn hollow just because I let him at me this once!"

"What is stronger, love?" she always asks him in his dreams. "The family that you had from birth or the one you had to gather?"

His wife's eyes never meet his in the landscape of his thoughts, though he has spent hours while she yet lived peering at them, gazing into them, trying to decipher who he was and what she needed him to be within their silent mirrors. And when he cannot see her straight in the face-- merely glance at the curve of her cheek, the line of her nose, the soft strands of hair long since turned to ether-- he can never quite pin her down.

"What is stronger, nii-sama?" she asks, and her voice is not her own anymore. "The bonds that will always be there for you or the ones that you have almost severed?"

This is what it means to kill someone with kindness.

Before this month, Ichigo would never have thought Rukia capable of simple human decency. Practically as long as he's known her, she's existed in his mind as a spitting, shrieking, fighting, yelling harpy of epic proportions. To experience Rukia is to experience all the rough, tumbling, flailing craziness that goes on in her mind and, from long and frequently painful experience, he knows that behind her Kuchiki mannerisms, there is plenty of crazy.

But nowadays, Rukia isn't quite Rukia anymore, at least not to him. She's still rough and flailing, she's still fighting and crazy-- but something in her has been tamped down-- at least towards Ichigo-- as of late. When she speaks to him, she sometimes tries not to reflexively shout. When she fights, she sometimes tries not to aim for a hollow through him. And when they argue-- and no matter what, they'll always argue-- sometimes she'll concede that she's wrong about something... some of the time.

It's as though she's trying to make up for the fact that when she next leaves, she'll probably never again find herself fighting by his side.

It doesn't work, of course, and he doesn't think even she believed it would. But whenever she lets him sleep in the wake of a lesser hollow or makes a wild stab at preparing him a half-decent bento or passes him the salt at the dinner table without rolling her eyes at his apparent laziness, he accepts the gestures with as much sullen grace as he can muster.

If this is all he can have of her before she moves on, he'll take it. And even though she's slipping further away from him, day after fragile day, he knows that as long as he's still up and fighting, it doesn't necessarily have to end in this way.

"You want her too," it whispers into his ear, as insidious as smoke and as corrupting as ash, and it doesn't matter how Renji twists and turns, he cannot escape. Zabimaru is a world away and it's voice is in his ears, coating it like poison upon the sharpest, prettiest glass. "You want her too, just the way I want her. And it doesn't matter how many pretty words or fairy tales about childhood you spin... you want her just as much as I do. And if you could, if I gave you the chance, you'd use her just as hard as I ever have."

And it doesn't matter how much Renji spits and curses and bellows and denies everything it says. It doesn't matter if he has a history with Rukia in a way the hollow-- that goddamn hollow-- never would. It doesn't matter how many denials spring to his lips or how hard he fights back-- the dampness of his palms and the sweat that clings to his upper lips and the fantasies that race to his mind always reveal what he really feels.

In the end, all of his denials are as insignificant as ash.

He does. He would. If he can, he still will.

And in that, he is no better than the worst of the Rukongai trash.

In the end, it all comes to a head not in battle or in the bedroom but in front of a cradle in she has painstakingly compiled full of rabbit-themed blankets. In the end, it all comes down to a infant fast asleep in front of its silent mother, innocent to everything that had begotten him.

"Whose is he?" Ichigo-- or what could one day become Ichigo-- asked her.

Shivering, Rukia finds she has no real answer.

The first time he touches her, Zangetsu finds that Shirayuki's skin has not so much the consistency of ice as glass. She is chilled, yes, but more like a mirror left to the dusk than the shards of frost that her mistress commands. And despite the element she is formed of, she is sweeter than the springtime when they come together at last, when she lets him run his gnarled claws through her dark expanse of hair and whisper things that meant nothing and everything into her sweet, calloused hands.

In the distance, Zabimaru whimpers softly and Renji, fast asleep elsewhere, dreams a dream full of clenched fists and black locks and everything he loves still already slipping past.

"I know," Ikkaku said wryly, "that many in Soul Society think that our division went to the dogs a long time back. But is letting our Fukutaicho hit us on the nose with rolled-up newspapers as part of 'training' really helping matters?"

"...through the windows," an extremely drunk Matsumoto warbled, "oh yeah, that's where I'll be, if y'knowwhatImean! Oh tip toes through the tulips wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiith..."

But whatever she was planning on tip-toe-ing through the tulips with would have to remain a mystery, since the copious stream of vomit that came flying out of her mouth soon afterwards rather marred future lyrics. Sighing, Hitsugaya gingerly trampled around his vice-captain's body, prodding her with one toe to make sure she really wasn't dead. Having to break in a new Fukutaicho would be murder-- otherwise, he might have done just that to Matsumoto a while back.

"With me," he told her sullenly, after finding a vague pulse. "It's supposed to be with me!"

Even on her best days-- and, Ichigo sullenly reminded himself, even her best days tended to leave him severely bruised in places bruising really shouldn't take place-- Rukia wasn't the sort of girl you wanted to giggle at you. It was all right enough, if severely creepy, when she did it as part of her sparkly-cute-adorable-schoolgirl-who-didn't-hunt-monsters-or-boss-innocent-young-men-around-no-way-no-how act... but when it happened in her real persona... with the sound of Tatsuki's rather ominous laugh echoing it...

Well, that was just the sort of thing that made any sane, upstanding men such as himself decide now was as good a time to hunt hollows as any, damn whatever the cursedly silent Soul Society cell phone had to say. And though Kon would probably blunder around in his body and get Ichigo even more hurt than otherwise... well, at least he'd only have to deal with the aftermath and not whatever demonic forces of girliness that led them to giggle in tandem for the love of all that was even vaguely holy anyway.

Think of this as a sequel to an earlier fic, Betrayal.

Sometimes, Rukia wonders whether it's truly infidelity if you're cuckolding a man with his doppelganger.

Not that she should call it by those terms, anyway. It isn't as though she has any sort of control over Ichigo's hollow, has any sort of ability to regulate when she meets it, when it takes over control, when it comes and pins her down and makes her run cold and hot and hotter and hotter. It comes and go as it pleases, drifting over her lover at the oddest of moments, usually when Ichigo's own control was tissue thin. She'd lost count of how many times she had stirred in his embrace in the aftermath of his climax, only to find yellow eyes staring down at her and claws already digging into the skin of her neck.

What happens afterwards is not even sex so much as rape, even on those occasions when it lays not so much as a hand on her. Because even when it does not touch it, it has a way of flaying her bare that Ichigo could never manage.

"Rukia-chan," it will say in the aftermath, "don't try and pretend you didn't feel something from that... Don't even try and make me believe I can't give you something he'd never even believe worth the bother…"

She can't blame herself. She shouldn't blame herself. She will not be that weak, not in the face of this monster both she and Ichigo must live with. She does only what she must with it and, even though the word "victim" makes her seethe, it still sounds better than accomplice.

And still-- and still--

Still, every time it comes, she surrenders just a little more over to its control. And no matter how broken and bloody she becomes after it comes and goes, some part of her is always triumphant in the aftermath.