More Ichigo Time Travel Ideas

[tozette]

This is cut from a fic concept roughly related to the "In Progress" setting. This segment is scrapped for being too much exposition which should probably just be shown in amusing little scenes between characters instead of drily explained. Shrug!

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Shiba Ichigo was a puzzle to his captain.

Generally speaking, he was a prickly and quick-tempered man. He was direct to the point of rudeness and sincere to the point of causing abject mortification among bystanders, both rare traits for aristocracy. Completely contrary to this character, he was also lying, relentlessly, to everyone. Shinji could not say about what he was lying, only that, through a series of evasions and meaningless interjections, he was getting out of sharing any amount of personal information, repeating only a handful of facts that required very little work for him to remember.

That, he supposed, was the point: someone in his life had at some point taught this earnest and direct man how to lie about himself, and had known him well enough to work around the fact that he was actually a shitty, shitty liar.

Shinji was great with liars and assholes — since like recognised like — but he had not yet caught him out.

He was gonna, though.

Eventually.

Shiba Ichigo's resting facial expression was a scowl so ferocious that he frequently scared his own squad mates, despite his apparently irresistible protective urges. He held everyone at arm's length, which helped with all the lying, and he seemed to consider authority of the Gotei-13 more or less secondary to his own feelings.

Shiba Ichigo's academy transcripts were full of unfortunate phrases like 'talented but obstinate,' and he was what one highly diplomatic teacher had termed 'slightly too free a thinker' and what another had called 'stubborn in his excessive self regard; disobedient, intractable.'

At time of his recruitment, Shinji had simply assumed that he'd be a spoiled little shit who would argue with him and Shinji'd just have to put him in his place a couple of times. You saw that kinda thing with noble brats all the time, and the Shiba clan didn't tend to meddle. He had thought it would be annoying, but ultimately fine. And Sōsuke had been so annoyingly set on him, after all.

And yet he had instead discovered that Shiba Ichigo had a baffling personal loyalty to exactly three people, as far as Shinji had noticed: Kyōraku Shunsui, a captain and veteran warrior of amusingly dissolute personal habits; Urahara Kisuke, a too-clever and suspiciously self-effacing assassin currently under consideration for promotion out of obscurity in the Second to the captaincy of the Twelfth; and, lastly, to Hirako Shinji himself.

Given that Shinji was ultimately the guy giving him orders, that last was as convenient as it was suspect. He had no idea what he'd done to land himself on that short list.

Poor Sōsuke hadn't made it onto it, anyway. Despite being the driving force behind his recruitment, and coming up on twenty months of having Ichigo as a direct subordinate, he still seemed wildly put off by his inability to charm him. In fact, when Sōsuke gave Shiba orders — at least when Shinji was there to see it — there tended to be a second's hesitation, like no matter how reasonable the order was, Ichigo was pausing just in case Shinji to countermanded them.

Since he was constitutionally incapable of leaving a mystery alone once he'd noticed it, Shinji tested that out a couple of times. Calling out, "Nah, don't do that yet," to Shiba made his shoulders relax, like he was deeply relieved Shinji had put a stop to Aizen's dastardly plan to, y'know, get their squad requisitions sorted on time.

Adorable.

Also, weird.

Sōsuke had a real good poker face, Shinji'd give him that. Unless you'd been, say, watching him like a hawk for years, it would have been pretty hard to tell how bad Shiba's unaccountable, irrational distrust incensed him.

Funny, though.

Shinji was this close to promoting him for the fun of it.

Maybe they'd kill each other.

... Although Sōsuke might win. That'd be disappointing. Shinji had decided he kinda liked Shiba Ichigo, suspect and bizarre as he was. He was a young, amusing mystery, and probably one much less dangerous than Shinji suspected Sōsuke might be.

"I like him," he declared while the was out with a few of the other captains, tipping his chair back onto two legs and staring at the ceiling of the izakaya.

"Who?" Love spun his mostly-empty bottle around, deft fingers flicking as it twirled.

The unfortunate truth about mostly making friends through work was that you ended up talking shop even after two bottles of sake.

"Ichigo-kun. I wasn't sure about it at first. But he annoys Sōsuke so much. Think I'll promote him."

This engendered a deep, hearty sigh from Love.

"Well." Rose eyed him over his dish. "...My deepest condolences to Shiba Ichigo, then."