"Tell me about your sisters", Menoly asked, and once upon a time Ichigo would have scowled at the implied threat of a Hollow showing interest in his family. Or, failing that, scowled at the implied social obligation of another person talking to him. But the substitute Reaper had matured a lot in these past few months, so instead his brow just creased as he gave her a flat stare. It wasn't a scowl. Honest. Menoly could tell; living with Loly meant learning to interpret a whole spectrum of ill-tempered looks. This particular frown was actually quite cute, like a ginger Neanderthal suspiciously puzzling out the first wheel. Eventually, he settled on an appropriately teenage non-answer.
"...why do you want to know?"
She felt him shift his weight on the bed, looking her over. At first he hadn't even wanted to let her in his room, but she'd pointed out that imprisonment didn't work like that and he'd folded like a spirit ribbon. A few days later and now they were sat on the bed, chatting with only partly forced casualness. Let's see what her sister would have to say about that!
...she'd probably sneer something about how they both still had all their clothes on, Menoly realized with a flush, but it was still progress! Lento pero seguro! Loly was just jealous, though of who she wasn't quite sure yet. She zoned back in from a half-imagined argument to hear Ichigo pressing on.
"You've got a sister, too, you should know what it's like. I still don't get how you two work, but-"
Menoly let herself flop back onto the mattress with a groan. "It's totally different, trust me. Plus, I told you I don't want to talk about it. Plus, stop changing the subject! This is about you."
He stared down at her for a moment, and Menoly quietly basked in his attention. It was a foreign feeling, to be so close to a soul like his without being utterly terrified. It was as though she was warming her hands on a star, or being cradled by a mountain. Even Aizen only permitted their presence, he'd never welcomed it. It was a difference she hadn't understood until recently. All that power hanging high overhead like an ocean suspended in a cloud, refusing to rain down just because it liked her.
Did Lilinette feel this way around Starrk? Probably not. Menoly had babysat the Primera's Fraccion on more than one occasion (sorry, called her away for an "important private discussion" that somehow always needed to happen right in the middle of Espada councils), and she had some inkling that she and Starrk were... different. More like Loly and Menoly than Tesla and the Quinta. Or Tesla and the Quattro, nowadays. On the one hand, that made her one of the very few who could empathize with a split soul like Lilinette. On the other hand, the thought of Loly seizing the bulk of their power like Starrk apparently had made her skin prick into nervous goosepimples. On the third hand, the thought of Lilinette running around with a full half of Starrk's power made her kind of nauseous.
No, this was probably more like Elcorbuzzier and the Thunderwitch. A little rain beetle pining after the storm. Menoly still wanted to hear the full story behind that, someday. Loly did, too, she just refused to admit anything of the sort. Her rough-and-tumble dumbass of a sister was more romantic than she was, at the core. The core just happened to be coated in poison spikes.
Eventually the corner of her host's mouth twitched in exasperation, and he sighed.
"Ugh. Fine."
Menoly looked up at Ichigo expectantly. Ichigo looked down at Menoly blankly. She tried for a coquettish look, which would have been easier if she had any idea what a coquette was. Her audience mostly just looked puzzled until she let out a frustrated huff.
"Well?"
"Well what? What do you want me to tell you?"
"Everything, you dumbass!"
Menoly threw her arms skyward, and oh, now he was paying attention. It was nice to be able to show frustration for a change, instead of acting as a constant counterbalance to Loly's suicidal levels of open contempt. She probably shouldn't get used to venting, though. Outside this room it was still business as usual. A treacherous voice in her hindbrain suggested that hey, he'd probably pay even more attention to her flailing if she dressed like Loly, too, instead of looking like she'd taken Grimmjow's hand-me-downs, and she strangled it into silence before continuing.
"I've never been to the living world! Adjuchas are born in Hueco Mundo, remember? Reborn, whatever. The point is we don't have anything from... before. Lord Aizen built a sun and a sky, but I don't even know if it's realistic. The actual sun could be, like, red for all I know!"
"Only when it sets", he mumbled, and Menoly rolled onto her belly, hands clasped together.
"See! I don't even know what that means. Just tell me about your world. From, like, the basics. Act like I'm stupid or something." His eyes narrowed for a moment, in a way that was totally distinct from his usual scowl. Okay, so maybe she was playing up the whole naive foreign girl angle a bit too much, but Sung-Sun said guys liked to explain things to girls, and she had to know what she was talking about. She was the only arrancar Menoly knew with an actual boyfriend. Other than Luppi, but he was a slimy rotten asshole and he and Jaegerjacques deserved each other. Nope, the smug smirking snake-witch was clearly the best well of advice to draw from.
The sad part was, she wasn't even being sarcastic.
"Do you know why the big brother is born first? It's to protect all the little brothers and sisters that come after him." There was a sing-song quality to Ichigo's words, as though he'd said them by rote in the past. "That's how it is for me and my sisters, I guess. I protect them. From Hollows, sure, but before they showed up there were bullies and brats and... themselves, even. When they beat themselves up, you have to get in the way. And we had days when we all beat ourselves up..."
Ichigo trailed off. His eyes tended to focus on her estigma when he was distracted, she'd noticed. Did it gross him out? Maybe she should start wearing an eyepatch? Elcorbuzzier could probably- wait, but maybe he liked it? Was the mask fragment some kind of exotic charm point, for him? Did he want to... like, stick his tongue in the hole, or something? Should she ask?
"Mom died when I was pretty young." He said, at last, bringing that train of thought to a sharp halt. "And you don't- Dad loved her. We all did. And you don't realize how much you rely on that until it's not there. It was like a wall got taken out of the house. And suddenly everything had to lean onto everything else, or it'd all fall down. And eventually that became our 'normal'. Our family. But there's still a hole. There's always going to be. You just have to live around it."
"And that's what family does?" Said Menoly, thinking of long, fragile nights filled with empty noise like so much pillow stuffing. "Like, keep each other away from the hole?"
"For me? Yeah."
There was silence, for a little while.
Combining a degree of subterfuge that would have done the Stealth Corps proud with an almost yoga-like combination of shuffles, rolls, and curls, Menoly dumped her head onto Ichigo's lap. His muscles tensed inmediately, and he glared down at her, but made no move to shove her off. She held his gaze. A moment later he coughed and looked away, legs shuffling beneath her head as he rearranged himself. Unseen, Menoly smiled.
"So enough about you, anyway. I asked about Yoyo and Marin."
"Yuzu... pretty much took over the family after mom died", Ichigo admitted, not entirely releasing the tension in his legs. "Took over a lot of the housework. She's a really sweet girl. Level-headed and responsible. A total worrywart. She only ever got into trouble when she was chasing after Karin to stop her from getting into trouble. Sometimes I wish she'd be a little bit more selfish, but we'd probably implode if she did."
Menoly let out a quiet giggle, allowing her neck to relax as her head settled back into its new cushion. It amazed her how easily this kind of talk came to him. You'd need pliers, booze, and some of Szayel's special tools to get most arrancar to even admit that someone they'd trust with their life wasn't, maybe, a complete waste of bones. Even if they wanted to (and they never did), they wouldn't know how to articulate it. She'd heard the cannibal nomads of the deep desert had a thousand words for sand. Maybe that was like love for the human world?
"She sounds like she's good to have around. What does she look like? Is she cute?"
"Well, they're both pretty short and slim. Yuzu's got blonde hair. We both got our hair from mom, but she's more blonde, less str- less ginger. She keeps it short, says it gets dirty when she's cleaning or cooking. I mean, I help out, but I've kind of had... stuff I need to do, lately."
Menoly frowned. That sounded a bit too familiar, actually.
"Karin's sporty. And a brat. She's always getting into fights. I guess I do, too, but at least I win all of mine. Karin's got a real mouth on her, and she's always biting off more than she can chew." He paused for a moment, frowning at something Menoly couldn't see. "No, that wasn't a pun. Anyway, Karin's the older one. She protected Yuzu a lot, after mom died. I wasn't in the right place, and the old man's never been in the right place, so Karin stepped up. Shouted down teachers, kicked the crap out of bullies, kicked the crap out of kids with crushes... Went overboard a lot, but it all came from a good place. I got into fights just because I liked it, but Karin's a softy deep down. Real deep down."
Menoly stared with one eye, mind clicking like a centipede treadmill. "And, uh, what does she look like? Your other sister?"
"Karin? She's got longer hair. Black, like the old man, with darker eyes than Yuzu. A bit less puppy fat because of the sports, but they're both kids. Ties her hair up into a ponytail for sports, but she used to have these two pigtails, and she hates it when Dad shows off photos from before..."
Menoly's stare intensified. Ichigo trailed off at the expression on her face, eyes widening as he assembled the same mental jigsaw pieces. He started to say something, then stopped. Silence perched over the pair for several long, awkward moments. Menoly tried to catch his gaze, a quest made considerably more difficult by the fact that he was staring determinedly at the ceiling. He made no move to push her away, but a few times she caught the whisper of a mutter, snatches of curses and phrases like "no, it's just a coincidence" and "I didn't even know she had a sister at first" and something that might have been "even Keigo isn't into that kind of-".
Then he twitched, and glanced down at her. His eyes were painted with inky blackness and mad laughter. He grinned, an expression so foreign on Ichigo's pout-plastered face that Loly almost flinched.
"Well, this got considerably more fucked up."
Oh. Oh! So this was... the other one?
"I mean, I'm into it-"
At which point Loly kicked down the door with a feral screech of sisterly outrage, and things got very complicated for about thirty seconds.
****
An indeterminate distance away, Kurosaki Karin twitched, and turned to her brother.
"Hey, Kon? Is there a ghost on me?"
The idiot wearing the face of a different idiot looked up from his magazine and gave her a once-over.
"No, why?"
"It's nothing. Just got chills, that's all."
