Tension

There is a tension between them, one that they are both acutely aware of, but will never, ever try to articulate. Most of the time, it's barely noticeable, banished to the back of their minds. Sometimes, if she's angry enough at him, they can't feel it at all. Occasionally, very occasionally, something strikes it, and it thrums, cutting through all awareness and activity for hours afterwards. They both pretend to find this a mere annoyance.

But it's there. It's there, in the sudden, awkward silence in his bedroom after the mutual, sudden and awkward realisation that she is a (death god in the body of a) girl and he is a boy (and also a death god, but that's not the issue), and they are, to all intents and purposes, alone. In a room. With a bed.

It's there in the fraction of a second too long that he leaves his large, warm hand on her waist as he helps her clamber through his bedroom window (he never allows himself to wonder at this unusual clumsiness in these moments).

It's there in the tiny shiver she gets when he leans over to whisper in her ear, intentionally-unintentionally allowing his breath to curl into the delicate spiral of her ear and his arm to brush feather soft across her chest (because, well, he is a teenage boy, and they're always testing their boundaries).

It's there in the fact that she never sets these boundaries.

Or indeed, castrates him.

She knows it's ridiculous, because he's barely out of childhood, and she's been alive far longer than he has. She's decades older than him, old enough to be his mother, had she been living in the human world. She's wiser than him. She is. She knows. She hopes. She stops trying to fool herself. When he looks up at her from behind his latest comic book, his eyes are the wisest she's seen in a while. The fact that he's completely oblivious, and only of average intelligence is unimportant. And that, she decides, is what matters. Not age, not experience, not power (though he has her on that count, too, damn him). He's wiser than her, stronger than her, and she lives in fear of the day that he'll realise that he no longer needs her, and she'll have to face up to the fact that it's not a sense of obligation that's keeping her by his side, more the fact that they are perfectly made for each other.

These observations don't help to alleviate the whole tension thing.

It builds.

He talks to another girl at the school gate. She stalks off, flicking her hair. He smiles.

His palm cups her elbow to guide her away from the edge of the pavement.

She pauses slightly too long before grabbing his proffered hand as the rain starts to come down.

He doesn't allow himself to turn his head the slightest bit, just in case he glimpses her in her soaked through white shirt clinging to her body. This time, she smiles.

He would probably realise how stupid it was to try and help her climb through his bedroom window if he weren't so aware of her warm, pliant waist between his hands.

She would probably be laughing herself into spasms at him helping her with his eyes shut if she weren't aware of the fact that his fingers feel like brands on her body.

He stands outside the bedroom door for far too long (she keeps him waiting, just a little), dripping onto the carpet without complaint so that she can get into something warm and dry.

She opens his door and her mouth to tease him, but the words are stopped in her throat at the sight of his wise eyes looking through her. Not at the sight of his own white shirt, see-through and clinging to his torso with the rain.

She looks back at him, back straight, eyes unfathomable.

And he knows that it's laughable, really. She's a shinigami, a real one, a powerful one, and she doesn't need his protection, or his chivalry, or for him to hold her hand in the rain. He wonders if there is a difference between needing to have these things done for you, and wanting to have them done. He wonders if she hates this tension. He thinks she doesn't. He hopes she likes it, not as much as he does, but at least a little.

He decides to stop thinking and go back to watching her.

She's been watching him while he ponders, and she thinks she knows what's going on under that wild shock of hair, as she watches the wisdom of years in his eyes being slowly diluted by the earnestness of a teenage boy wondering if a girl likes him back.

It's this look that wrenches her heart.

And suddenly, right at this moment, she's too old for this, but also too young. She thinks, wherever it is that we are going (she has a pretty clear idea where), we'll get there. Maybe not soon. Very probably not soon. But we'll get there.

The tension eases.

Slightly.

She breathes out a sigh of relief, and it travels through the space between them and dances teasingly across his still wet skin.

The look in his eyes, the one of combined wisdom and earnestness, is replaced by the dazed look of a very aroused adolescent male.

She is surprised to find herself a little nervous. She edges around him in the doorway and tells herself, we'll get there, one day.

One day, something will push them over the edge, and this tension will snap like a frayed rope, and this will lead to a sequence of events that will make Kuchiki Byakuya a very displeased older brother indeed, but until then, until that day, this will be enough.

Found this floating around on my hard drive from about a year ago and was quite proud of myself for deviating from my habitual yaoi fangirl-ism. To be honest, it's been a while since I last saw/read Bleach (though I fully intend to start again at some point), and I'm not sure how far relations have developed, though it can't have been that far, Bleach isn't particularly big on the romance front. Any comments/criticism welcomed!