Here's a little lighthearted ficlet for you to enjoy. Again, it's AU. Everyone is human.

You know, I really love when Yoruichi is completely whipped. It's adorable and so strange.

Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach. Though if I owned Yoruichi, she'd totally be on my team for Capture the Flag.

Apples to Apples

It had been unexpected.

She considered it faulty, it had been beyond her radar and prediction. Calculations, logic; it simply didn't make sense that she hadn't dodged it. The speed was something she should have been able to avoid, though she considered herself agile enough to prevent herself from being in the wake of such danger in the first place.

Such was not the case.

And it wasn't as if the resulting pain had left her agitated, nor was it the mark that was left smothered like an abused crescent moon curved below her left eye. It was the contact itself, the fact that she had left herself vulnerable enough to be attacked, that she hadn't guarded her own skin.

So when a particularly large red apple went soaring through the air, it had no mercy and had collided with her eye, cracking against her high cheekbone before dropping to the ground and rolling a few inches away from her foot. Immediately, her body responded and she felt the sharp sting of a forming bruise beneath her skin as she knelt down slowly to pick the offending fruit from the floor. Squinting her left eye, her better functioning right eye scanned the grocery aisle and landed upon a toddler sitting in a shopping cart, sporting a smile with missing teeth. Heat rose from her skin in waves as her jaw locked and clenched, the two rows of teeth scraping against one another while her hand gripped threateningly onto the apple and her knuckles painted white from the pressure.

Her steely eyes did little to contain the storm raging and whirling in her irises, her glare causing the young boy to momentarily freeze. She took a deliberately slow step forward as her nails began digging into the hard skin of the apple and her blood caught fire within her veins. The boy's mother was, at the moment, away from the shopping cart, and she considered this the opportune moment to seek revenge upon her obvious enemy.

Until a gentle hand arrested her wrist, causing her death grip to fall limp and the apple to fall into a dark hand. Just like that, so quickly, her anger dissipated.

"What are you doing with this?" Yoruichi casually placed the apple back among the rest and piled a few pears into a plastic bag before slipping it into the shopping basket hanging from her left forearm. "Pears, not apples, goof," she murmured with an amused smile before threading her fingers through Soi's and leading them away from the fruit section.

Soifon shook off the surprise of Yoruichi returning the apple to the shelf as she turned her head to catch a glimpse of the toddler sticking out his tongue while making an obscene gesture at her. Her body tensed and Yoruichi felt the sudden change in Soi's posture, causing her to pause.

"Soi?" she asked, raising a brow as she caught sight of the child in the corner of her eye, a small smile playing on her lips.

"Hm? Oh," Soifon tugged on Yoruichi's hand, pulling her quickly down the rest of the aisle and disappearing around the corner, though not before turning at the last second and sticking her tongue out at the boy as well.

--x--

"Sit."

"No, I need to--"

"Sit down."

"Yoruichi, I'm fine--"

"Mhm, just sit down."

"I don't need--"

"I hope you know by now that I'm not afraid to use force, Soi," the tint in her golden eyes after that statement rose a blush on Soifon's pale cheeks and she looked away, dropping down onto the couch, eyes narrowed. "Good," the Shihouin chirped, sitting down next to her with one leg angled underneath herself, the other dangling over the edge of the couch.

Soifon remained silent with her arms crossed, glaring somewhere in the general direction of the kitchen.

"Not all fruits are evil," Yoruichi pressed her warm hand to Soi's forehead, easing her fingers through the ebony bangs. "You don't have to glare at them," she teased, withdrawing her hand to tip up the other girl's chin.

Soi grumbled something beneath her breath, now aiming her glare toward the window.

Yoruichi lifted the small ice pack wrapped in a thin cloth, touching it gingerly to Soi's blackened eye and when she winced, the older of the two's expression had grown concerned. It was rather swollen and the bruise was still in the process of forming, though dark and patchy blues, purples, and blacks were prominent in contrast with her pale skin.

"Mm, this is going to be sore for awhile," Yoruichi shook her head with the same expression adorned on her face, repositioning the ice pack to cover more of the bruise. Her free hand ran itself through Soi's silky black hair in a soothing motion, though it was more out of habit.

"It's not a big deal," the Chinese girl shrugged, flickering her eyes up to Yoruichi.

"Oh, don't act like it doesn't hurt," Yoruichi drew her free hand from Soi's hair to rest it on the other girl's cheek. "It's so swollen, I can barely see your eye," she pulled the ice pack away, blowing a stream of cool air onto the sensitive skin.

"You don't need to baby me over something as trivial as a black eye," Soi murmured, feeling the familiar knots tying beneath her stomach as Yoruichi leaned into her.

"You love it," Yoruichi winked, kissing the tip of Soi's nose.

She did, though admitting it was something she avoided.

Suddenly, Yoruichi found Soi crawling into her lap, her face pressed into the crook of the older girl's neck. Her arms instinctively wrapped around Soifon's waist, always protectively. She pressed a smile into her lover's hair, mumbling as she did so.

"Feeling cuddly, are we?"

"Children are monsters," Soi spoke against Yoruichi's skin, holding a little tighter onto the Shihouin's midsection.

Yoruichi thought back to earlier that day where she had seen a young boy sitting in a shopping cart, not all too far away from Soi. She figured it had been him who had thrown the apple, though she wasn't sure. However, now her theory had been proven.

"They aren't so bad, not all of them," she began rubbing her hand soothingly up and down Soifon's lower back.

Soi jolted back.

"What? You hate kids," her eyes were wide with shock; Yoruichi was not an avid lover of children and it was a known fact.

"I don't know," Yoruichi shrugged with a grin. "There are worse things."

"Like babies."

Yoruichi laughed, pulling Soi closer against her.

"Sometimes I think about it, don't you?"

"About what?"

"Having kids."

Beat.

Soifon felt her stomach drop to her feet and she barely kept her jaw from disconnecting. Receiving that answer was comparable to rebounding a watermelon from her chest and she had to double take what had been said. Again, Yoruichi only laughed as she dropped a hand from Soi's waist to fumble with one of the rings tied to the end of her clothed braids.

"I'm not saying I want any right now, or even ever," she felt her lover's body relax against her own. "But sometimes I think about what it would be like to have a little Soi or two running around."

An ebony eyebrow raised on a pale forehead.

"Little Soi? In these little day dreams of yours, you expect me to carry the demon within me for nine months?"

"Of course. I'm not throwing this body away for the sake of a child," she answered, motioning at herself.

Soifon's face scrunched up into a scowl.

"Kidding, only kidding," she grabbed the ice pack from the small table beside the couch, soothing it against Soi's eye and the younger girl rested her head against Yoruichi's chest. "But sometimes it's nice to think about."

Soifon supposed she could agree with that. Yoruichi was the only person she'd ever consider having a family with, if anyone at all.

"I guess so," she said quietly, snuggling against Yoruichi's warmth.

--x--

Soifon felt her mind being ripped from her dreams and a certain pressure on her hips as her eyes snapped open, the room dark and silent. Sleep hazed the corners of her vision and her body was groggy as she attempted to piece together what was happening. Dragging her gaze lower, she found Yoruichi straddling her with an unreadable expression on her face. She exhaled a sigh of relief.

"My God, Yoruichi, what time is it?" she rubbed the sleep from her eyes with a fisted hand, propping her upper body up on an elbow.

"I changed my mind," she said quickly. "Don't want kids, just you."

Soifon paused, dropping her hand from her eyes as she glanced at the clock, which read 2 A.M.

"Did you really wake me up for a pickup line? That wasn't even a good one, I hope you weren't up all night thinking of that."

She felt Yoruichi shift on top of her, then suddenly warm breath was fanning out onto her lips and golden eyes were gleaming only inches away. Her own body leaned back a bit due to the uneasiness in her stomach at the way those eyes were watching her.

"No," she breathed. "Bad dream," she inched slightly closer. "Kids are a no-go," she whispered before tilting her head to the side and pressing a bruising kiss to Soi's faintly parted lips.

It didn't take long for her tongue to slip into the younger girl's mouth, Soi was hardly resisting. Quite the opposite, in fact. She groaned quietly as Yoruichi's hand slipped beneath the hem of her shirt and her nails dragged in a slow and antagonizing motion up Soifon's sides before feathering along her ribcage. Breaking the kiss, Yoruichi pulled away and relocated to Soi's neck , biting lightly at the velvety skin there.

"Funny," Soi's head was angled so that she was staring rather starry eyed at the ceiling, her throat completely exposed. She tried to collect her thoughts as she inhaled heavy breaths, all induced by the body lying on top of her.

Yoruichi paused her work on Soi's neck.

"Hm?"

The younger of the two rubbed at her eyes again, though more her right than her left as the heat from Yoruichi's presence spread throughout her body, both comfortably and uncomfortably. After a few moments, she collapsed back down onto her pillow, Yoruichi still fitted against her hips.

"You had a bad dream about us with kids, yet the first thing you do when you wake up is the action which produces them in the first place," Soi answered with an amused smirk and her forearm now laying above her head.

Yoruichi thought about that for a moment.

Shifting on top of Soi, she pressed the full length of her body against the one beneath her in a comfortable position for both of them. An idle knee was barely grazing Soifon's inner thigh, though it was enough to keep her a little distracted while Yoruichi answered.

"It's not as if anything would come of it," her index finger traced Soi's hard jaw line. "Unless you're really good at keeping secrets from me," she gave a pointed look to the lower regions of the younger girl's body before bringing her particularly sultry eyes back to her lover's.

Soi chose to ignore it. Her mind had begun to focus on the sudden throbbing of her left eye as sleep was starting to completely wear off.

"Yoruichi, will you get me some ice?"

"Just stab my heart with an icicle and shove me into a cold shower, why don't you," she sat up, her knees on either side of Soi's hips and her weight on the Chinese girl's thighs. A slight pout was pulling at her bottom lip and her eyebrows faintly furrowed at Soi's ability to kill the mood.

"It hurts…" came the soft response as Soi held a hand over her bruised eye.

Yoruichi's expression softened instantly and she ran the back of her hand down Soifon's porcelain cheek, her gaze holding the kind of intensity that could only be fueled by love itself. They remained still for a few moments before she maneuvered off of Soi and grabbed a hair tie from the bedside table to gather her unruly locks into a makeshift ponytail.

"I'll be right back," Yoruichi murmured gently, letting her fingertips drag along a pale forearm before she walked out of the bedroom.

--x--

"Oi, Tessai," Kisuke waved over his assistant. "This here apple has a defect."

The large man pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose before taking the apple into his hand and inspecting it thoroughly, twisting and turning it in his grasp. There appeared to be small crescent markings along the curve of the fruit.

"I wonder what this could be from," he wondered aloud and Kisuke shrugged in response.

"Not sure. Do we have any other fruit?"

Tessai nodded, handing the apple back to his companion before making his way into another room of the Urahara Shoten, surely in search of a different healthy snack in place of the apple. Kisuke held the apple up to his face, getting a closer look at the markings, though still with no conclusion as to what could have imprinted them. With a final shrug, he tossed it over his shoulder and out of the window to leave for a scavenging animal of some sort. Fully intending to return to his reading, he reached for his book only to pause halfway through the action as he heard a disturbing commotion just outside of the shop.

--x--

Soifon held a firm hand over her right eye, pointing incredulously at the apple lying on the ground a few feet away.

"That damn thing is trying to kill me!" she shrieked, burying her other hand into her dark hair with frustration.

Yoruichi glanced at the apple, then at Soi, the apple once more before landing her gaze on Soi.

"It can't be the same one," she knelt down to pick it up and upon spotting the imprints from Soi's fingernails, she dropped the apple to the ground with an uneasy smile. "That's strange," she rubbed the back of her neck, making her way to the younger girl, who was well on her way to imploding.

"Where's that kid? Where is he? I swear to high heaven, I'll bury his gap-toothed face so far into the dirt he'll fu--"

"Shhh," Yoruichi pressed a finger to Soi's lips and removed the hand that was planted over her right eye so she could inspect the damage.

"You were the one who wanted to go to Urahara's today," Soi grumbled, her arms folding over her chest.

"I needed to pick some things up," Yoruichi responded, her fingertips ghosting over the injured area. "Yeah, you're going to have another bruise…"

"Fantastic."

"People are going to think I abuse you," Yoruichi slightly whined, while Soi made her way to the apple and reeled back her right leg, then brought it forward in a flash, kicking it out of sight. "Where did that even come from this time?"

Soi shrugged, jamming her hands into her pockets.

"I don't know, but like hell they're getting away with it," she answered with venom, though her cold words melted the moment Yoruichi hugged her from behind.

"Let's just get this over with so we can go home, your eye is going to need ice."

Meanwhile, Kisuke shrunk down from the window, having witnessed the ordeal and he jumped up from where he was to fish for his 'Out to Lunch, Do Not Disturb' sign.

Like hell he was going to get caught.