BLUE PILL, WHITE PILL, BLUE PILL

An Ichigo x Rukia Short Story

RATED M

(If reading an old guy & a young girl getting it on offends on, then this is not the story for you)

1.

"And how are we today, Kurosaki-san?"

"Normal, doctor."

When he returns to his cluttered apartment from his thrice-weekly appointments, he takes his pills and sits beside the window. He spends trying to block out the bloated sounds of his neighbour's television soaking his room from beyond the adjoining wall. He knows his Ojii-san neighbour is a little hard of hearing, but on some days the cackling, Dolby surround sound game-show voices are so loud he feels almost obliged cheer along with them.

Only in the early afternoon does the sunlight finally tilt through the marbled glass, melting into his skin. He creeps closer to it, like a prehistoric reptile needing its daily dose of warmth. Early afternoon is also the time when the effects of the pills kick in. Life, as a result, becomes a portrait of his condition: outside, a trunk clears its hoarse engine and takes off; birds stagger on the antenna of other buildings; clouds diagnose the sky with a sickly, overcast grey.

The subwoofers from his neighbour's entertainment set blurb and diminish. Then he hears voices in the corridor: it is time for his neighbour's daily visitation. The excited, low voice of his neighbour's greeting is reinforced by a wavy, girlish tongue. Ojii-san – ojii-san, she throws her voice around. Finally, the thin walls betray no sound except slices of living room conversation, cut short by muffled breathing.

He thinks there are a lot of things he and his neighbor have in common: their hanging bougainvilleas on their windows, their age, the game-shows they watch on television, probably their medication too – to name a few. And at four in the afternoon, when Rukia trickles her fingers gingerly on the door, the similarities extend to the apparent age of girls they are currently dating.

2.

"You should exercise more. Anything to keep your mind from your illness."

"I know, doctor. You don't have to keep telling me –"

Against his doctor's orders, he refuses to go to what he calls the Senile Station, a programme for the block's fellow grey-heads run by overenthusiastic social work graduates with university degrees. He finds no purpose seating through colouring sessions and watching high-school students from the city perform their mandatory community service for them, with the spirit of prisoners-of-war awaiting urgent rescue. He also avoids his peers at lift landings or in stairwells. Seeing replicas of himself painfully tackling the stairs does not make his condition any better.

Instead when the weather is good he strolls the adjacent streets after taking his medication, when he gets more alert. Everything, however, seems to copy the stark shades of his blue pill, white pill, blue pill doses. The colourless sweep of the sky loiters above. Lights at pedestrian crossings seem stripped of their tricolour. He sees his neighbour, unkempt grey locks like wild grass, walk hand-in-hand with the owner of that high-pitched voice: a girl young enough to be twenty.

When he returns from walks with Rukia, youthful in all the glory of her gigai, he accidentally meets his neighbor at the doorway. He gives him a thumbs-up, and his lower lip curls, as if conveying a secret message only the two of them understand.

3.

"Does the medication have any of the described side-effects, Kurosaki-san?"

"Headaches, tiredness. Sometimes I can't see things as they are –"

In the city he takes to holding her hand, partly because he wants to, partly because his legs begin to twitch with lactic after just thirty minutes of walking.

He knows that the sight of him – white-haired, wrinkle-splattered face, shuffling feet – allied with a young, feisty, mascara-ed young thing is a questionable arrangement to flaunt. Youngsters in their school uniforms lock their heads as they pass, their lips squared in envy or contempt or both. When some throw their whistling invitations at Rukia, it is he – not her – who retreats his coarse palm deeper into the sweaty cavity of their linking fingers.

He buys her a dress. She tries it on for him. His feet prickle and burn, so he has to sit down; but when she emerges from the dressing room, he smiles. He likes the patterns; it forces its hues into his fading ability to see variations of the same red. He likes the way the fabric glues itself to her hips, outlining the dark triangle of her crotch as she moves. When he pays for the dress with the lofty credit power his pension gives him, Rukia tiptoes and anoints his flaccid double-chin with a kiss.

The lady at the cashier delivers his change with brittle customer-service smile which is on the verge of fragmenting into disapproval.

4.

"See your friends regularly. Living alone at your age is not a good thing, Kurosaki-san."

At his doctor's final swab of advice he only says: "I know."

And was it Keigo who had once told him all women look the same in the dark? Or was it Chad? In the dark his memory is like a stone, sinking into the deep recesses of faces he cannot – will not – remember. Someone, too, had once told him he and Rukia would never survive in life or in death. In life, he would be murdered by age as her gigai maintained her youth; in death, he was several hundred years her infant, unfit for a daughter of the gentry.

But here in the dark, in his apartment post-shopping spree, he is, at last, Rukia's equal. He knows she does not bother with the dense strata of skin which has bloomed at his stomach like a compulsory burden he carries. Nor does she fuss with the brown spots which streak his shoulders and thighs, or the weedy grey hairs sprouting from his chest. In life, he is fifty-nine; but she is ageless, energetic, the deep hum of her breathing proves her stamina. She overtakes him, as he strains on the edge of fatigue.

Here, on this isolated shore of a bed, he drifts in between moist contact with skin and his own weariness. He feels like he is adrift under the shifting tug of her body. When he resurfaces he thinks his breath will be swept away into the dark. But then she attaches her lips into his mouth, and his lungs fill with willing water. He surrenders into the pure current of day-old perfume, hair and lubricating sweat. And he, a dead weight, wraps himself with her as she floats over him, weightless. If he doesn't, he knows he will be lost at sea forever.

5.

In the morning, he is prepared to renew his rehearsed banter with his useless doctor again when he notices a large volume of people perched along the stairs. Paramedics usher his neighbour's young girlfriend out in to the landing. She is sobbing. As if expected, a sagging stretcher smothered in white – too white –follows her.

He finds out that his neighbor has had a stroke, and his girlfriend discovered him, face planted into his morning cereal. When she sees the limp linen lines of his neighbour's body, his breathing begins to accelerate. He, a survivor of the Winter War, who once dealt death to the dead, is unnerved by the stabbing out of human life. He strains his vision to see if his neighbour's spirit still remains, but all he sees are faces dripping with life, solemn at death.

He has forgotten to take his morning dose. His hands begin to tremble as he hurriedly pops a blue pill, a white pill, a blue pill and chases them down with water. He thinks of himself – as the drugs kickstart his body's ailing defences – on a stretcher too, his face drained of life, blanked into anonymous watery surface under that white sheet. The shivering intensifies.

A shadow overtakes his shuddering form. Rukia's palm, washed clean with morning light, eases into his. He grasps her hand in return.

And the shaking, slowly, stops.

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Edited: 19.09.09

NOTES: Written for LJ's Bleach Contest in July. Just got down to editing it.

There was a while when I worked with some old folks. I tried to draw out that experience for this story.