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The Suit	By : yaoiismyantidrug Category: Bleach > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 9061 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: The Bleach universe and characters belong to Kubo Tite. I do not own any of it, nor do I make any money from this fanfiction.

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Chapter 6

I'll swallow until I burst

Until I burst

Until I*

A week after the wedding, Uryuu received a telephone call. He leaned back in his desk chair, fanning his face with a file folder as he considered Ichigo's invitation to meet him and Chad at the park for Ichigo's sister's ball game, and then maybe dinner later. The invitation had been delivered casually, as if Ichigo didn't care whether Uryuu showed up or not... but Uryuu thought that it might do him some good to get out of his stifling apartment, where he'd been cooped up studying for a week. Fresh air and company sounded good, as did the chance to possibly follow through on his urge to get to know Chad a bit better.

Pulling a clean shirt on over his belted jeans, Uryuu's mind circled around the quiet hours spent in a hotel bed in another city. He'd decided that that was likely nothing more than... a friendly gesture, drawn out and exaggerated by alcohol. Aside from his own, unnecessary arousal--probably also the effects of the alcohol--it had simply been a pleasant experience. One that didn't necessarily mean anything, except that he was physically attracted to Chad.

The air outside his apartment was warm, but after a week of sweating at his desk it was refreshing to feel his hair lifted away from his face by a breeze.

He saw them before they saw him: Chad's large frame next to Ichigo's bright hair was a sight he'd seen hundreds of times, and the familiarity of it made him smile even as a cold, heavy weight sank in his stomach. Two children walked in front of them, looking tiny next to Chad. Uryuu raised his hand in a greeting.

"Oy, Ishida!" Ichigo called, and Chad's face brightened in a smile under his shaggy hair. Uryuu's smile widened as he took in the garish blue shirt Chad was wearing. It was nearly the color of the cloudless summer sky, and the coin at his throat glinted, a tiny sun resting between Chad's collarbones.

Uryuu joined them for the remainder of the walk to the ball-field, hanging off to the side. He found that he liked watching Chad with the kids; the littler one, Yuzu, treated him like a brother, and she laughed when Chad pulled on her pigtails, smiling. It was interesting to see Ichigo with his sisters, as well. Around these two girls, who obviously loved him and trusted him, Ichigo was much less the moody, argumentative badass. It was almost surreal to see Ichigo in the role of the dopey older brother.

Shrugging off Ichigo's and Chad's good luck wishes, Karin broke away to join her team. The rest of them took their seats in the stands.

Chad's arms seemed to glow in the bright sun, and his hair curling around his face looked terribly soft, and sitting next to him, Uryuu finally faced the dread he'd felt since the moment he first saw Chad today. Behind the dread was a certainty; the attraction hadn't gone away, and it wasn't going to. It wasn't just a crush. Uryuu knew this now. It wasn't just one of those little sparks that died down; it was something else entirely.

Now, seated next to Chad in the summer sun, Uryuu stewed in indecision. He had no experience with this, and no clue what to do about it. If there was anything he could do. Chad liked him, he was certain of that... but he had no way of knowing if it was a purely friendly affection, or if there was more to it for him, too.

After all, Chad hadn't invited him here today; Ichigo had. Come to think of it, the invitations had always come from Ichigo.

Chad's proximity and Uryuu's tangled thoughts distracted him enough that he didn't mind the fact that he really had no clue what was happening down there, on the dusty diamond. He clapped politely when his friends cheered, and raised his voice with them when Ichigo's sister's team won their game.

The smell of popcorn floated along over the thick, green smell of grass, and the skin of Uryuu's face felt tight and overwarm when they met Karin at the gate. Her arms and face were pink with sunburn, and Uryuu smiled despite himself at the expression on her face. She looked as if she were trying her hardest to not show how completely pleased and proud she was.

She crammed her hat in her backpack, and once she did, Chad reached out and ruffled her hair with a smile. "Good game," he said.

"Quit it, dumbass," she said, shoving at his hand and ducking away, her smile finally breaking free.

"You've got a sunburn," Chad told her, putting his finger to her chin to lift her face.

She batted his hand away again good-humouredly and walked off. "So we won. Who's buying me ice cream?" she asked over her shoulder.

They fell in behind her, and Uryuu walked at Chad's side for nearly a minute before he felt Chad looking at him. Really looking, his eyes not leaving Uryuu's face. Uryuu took a deep breath, his stomach doing a little flip.

"You've got a sunburn, too," Chad observed, and when Uryuu turned to face him, Chad grinned and dropped his hand onto the top of Uryuu's head, mussing his hair.

Exactly as he'd mussed Karin's.

Uryuu's stomach went sour, and he cringed away from the touch, frowning. "Don't," he said. He forced his face into a neutral expression as he patted his hair down, but Chad was still watching him, with concern now.

Of course Chad only liked him as a friend. Or maybe worse! Maybe Chad saw him as a kind of kid brother. Uryuu felt stupid for thinking Chad might feel more, and he felt frustrated and disappointed with himself, for allowing himself to think otherwise. For letting himself get all mixed up.

I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it, Ichigo had said on the bus. And now, much as it vexed Uryuu to have Ichigo's voice in his head, well... it seemed that he was right.

They'd fallen slightly behind Ichigo and his sisters, and Uryuu stopped. "I need to go home," he said.

"Are you okay?" Chad asked, and the worry threaded through his low voice made Uryuu clench his fists.

"I... I'm probably just dehydrated. Too much sun," Uryuu said, not meeting Chad's eyes. "I'll go home and lie down." That might have even been true, but he would have said anything that would get him out from under the weight of Chad's concerned gaze and into the privacy of his own room, where he could rake himself over the coals at his own leisure.

"Do you want me to--" Chad got out, before Uryuu interrupted him.

"No. I'll be fine. I just need to go."

The Kurosakis had stopped several yards away and were watching this interaction. Uryuu took a deep breath. "Thank you for your concern, and for the invitation," he said, and he turned to leave.

And that, it seemed, was that.

All the way home, the heavy weight in his stomach and the memory of Chad ruffling his hair in such a brotherly way reminded him that whatever his plans were involving Chad... well, they were never actually going to involve Chad.

When things start splitting at the seams and now

The whole thing's tumbling down**

It worked like a bucket of ice-cold water to the face. With the ever-looming question of which way Chad's feelings lie out of the way, the mental mire in which he'd been entangled melted away, and Uryuu's head was clear for the first time in over a month.

Once school was back in session, he carefully steered clear of Chad. It was the easiest thing in the world to avoid a conversation with Chad; all he had to do was not start one. And Chad did have other friends, after all, and he thought it would be the height of arrogance to assume that his friendship was so valuable that its absense could cause Chad pain.

It was equally easy to fall back into his old habits, the same ones he'd fallen back into after the end of the tumultuous Winter Wars. In those days, the closeness that had been kindled on the battlefield had faded as the weeks of normalcy passed into months, and the threads that bound them all together had unraveled. Just as he'd done then, Uryuu reverted to his solitary ways almost without effort: taking his lunches in unused classrooms, or in the yard when the weather was nice, and filling his evenings with the seemingly endless work of studying, projects, training.

Time passed, and Ishida Uryuu went on with his life.

***

Uryuu jammed his hands into his coat pockets and shifted on the bench, shivering. Summer had turned to fall, and the day was unseasonably cold for late September. He looked up and down the street, frowning when there was still no sight of the bus. As he cast his eyes about, a spot of color several blocks away caught his eyes, bright red against the deep browns and yellows of the leaves. He tilted his head, squinting.

It was a kite, one of those cheap plastic affairs you could find at a grocery store, and it was stuck in one of the trees that bordered a little pocket park. His brow relaxed, and he smiled, struck by a sudden memory: when he was very young, he'd spent most of one spring at that park, crouched under one of those old trees. He remembered the spiral notebook, divided into notepaper and graph paper, and the painstaking--but not very good--sketches he'd made that spring. His brief fascination with bugs had fizzled out, but he could still recall how much he'd enjoyed filling pages with drawings of dragonflies and beetles and bumblebees, and how important he'd felt doing it.

He'd never shown his father what was in his notebook. He wondered if Ryuuken had ever looked.

Probably not, he thought, without any particular feeling at all.

The kite thrashed in a strong wind that threatened to rip Uryuu's scarf away. For a brief moment Uryuu thought that in that wind he smelled growing grass and dirt and the heavy, wet smell of a spring storm front moving in, and he saw, clear as day, his own small hand drawing a careful curve.

The memory was obliterated by the stink of diesel fuel and the squeal of brakes as his bus finally pulled in to the stop. He stood and leaned into the wind, and as he boarded the bus, movement caught his eye again, and he looked up to see the kite rip free of the branches and swoop up into the grey sky.

Later, in the quiet, lonely hours of that night, he wondered if he had misunderstood Chad's actions, that day at the ball park. Or if he had meant to misunderstand them--if he had taken any excuse to extricate himself from that sticky situation, to ensure that he'd be left alone.

He'd always thought he'd escape from high school without the entanglements and distractions of romance. That he'd go off to university by his own means, finally cutting the last tattered ties that still linked Ryuuken to him. He'd stay gone, he'd begin his new life, and he'd never look back.

He wondered now if that was really the best plan.

Finally, nearing two in the morning, he scrubbed his palms against his dry, aching eyes, dismissed this entire mental process as unnecessarily emotional and self-indulgent, and he turned his thoughts to the next morning's exam. Within moments, he was asleep.

TBC...

A/N: Oh jeez XD OKAY, SO, I think i said before that large chunks of this story played out in my head like movies. When it got to this part, I was like NOOOO, NOT THE SAD PART! Because you see, I see this fic as kind of a popcorn-movie of a fic, and in those kinds of romcoms, there's always THE SAD PART, you know, the part where someone is lonely and they play moody indie music. When I sat down to write the fic, I thought about getting rid of this part completely, but that didn't feel right... it felt like if I did that, the story would just dry up, and I wouldn't be able to finish it. So, I left it in.

Also, this was originally two chapters? I'm not really sure how it was, though, lol. But that's why there are two lyric parts. Speaking of lyrics, all the lyrics I've used, and in some cases the whole songs, are meant to be Chad's POV. I know it's not obvious, but it was fun picking them out that way :) And I like the idea - he's a quiet guy, kind of hard to read, but he is a music kind of guy, so I know he's got songs that he listens to for different moods and situations :)

I'll have the next chapter up soon :) I need to give it a bit of an edit. I'm also going to try to get the last chapter posted on V-Day, and that looks do-able, at the moment - it needs a few hundred words filled in now, and a good edit, but it's almost done now :D

Now I'mma end this A/N before it gets longer than the chapter, ha ha. Thanks for reading! <3

*Lyrics (c) Radiohead - Idioteque

**Lyrics (c) Band of Horses - No One's Gonna Love You
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The Suit