A/N:

- English isn't my mother tongue. I apologize for any mistake I may have made.

- I don't have a beta reader - if anyone feels like volunteering...

- This is my first fic on this site. Please be nice, but don't be shy :-)

- I love the Ikkaku/Yumichika pair. Couple, not couple? I don't see the manga/anime as clearly stating either. I personally like them better as friends, but not just any kind of friends. The inspiration for this particular fic came from parallels I have seen made between Zaraki/Yachiru and Ikkaku/Yumichika. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I don't think it's actually all the way OOC.

- Rated T for sensitive themes.

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Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach, Tite Kubo does.

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Prologue: The Rumors

Ikkaku had heard them all, of course, all the rumors about how he and Yumichika had met, and what kind of relationship they had. Some were hilarious, some were ludicrous, some were plausible, some were offensive, but none of them were true, which he considered quite an achievement in itself, since the truth was literally staring them in the face (at least the face of those shinigami who belonged, or had at one time belonged, to the 11th Division).

Not that Ikkaku cared, of course. He'd heard it all many times over, long before he and Yumichika had joined the Gotei 13, it was never anything completely new, so it had stopped bothering him a very long time ago. Even when some particularly annoying new rumor would reach his ears and manage to irritate him, all it would take to calm him down was one look at Yumichika and his quiet smile, and the anger would evaporate on the spot - that smile had always worked miracles on Ikkaku, and he suspected that it always would. Even better were those rumours that actually made Yumichika laugh - not his ironic hard laugh, but the soft one, the real one : as far as Ikkaku was concerned, anything that made Yumichika laugh like that was a good thing, even if it was a rumour that presented him, Ikkaku, in a less than favourable light. He loved the kid's laugh that much.

The kid. Ikkaku would shake his head in wonder every time he caught himself thinking of Yumichika in those terms. Come on, Yumichika hadn't been a kid for many, many years now! Ikkaku wasn't quite sure he could call him "an adult" either (he often didn't look or act the part, for one), but he definitely was no kid anymore. He was... Well, to be frank, Ikkaku didn't really know what Yumichika was, exactly. Yumichika was Yumichika, he was his very own thing, like he had always been. Even back as a kid, he had never squarely fallen into any neat category, and this annoying tendency of his had only increased as he got older - so much so that he almost seemed to be doing it on purpose sometimes.

But even if Ikkaku didn't quite know what Yumichika was, he did know a few things that Yumichika most definitely wasn't. At the top of the list was "his lover". Those were the rumours that irritated Ikkaku the most, though he knew nobody would ever understand why, because nobody understood what sex meant - and didn't mean - to Yumichika. If people knew, many would be horrified by those rumours... But Yumichika didn't care and didn't feel like enlightening anyone, and Ikkaku was taking his lead from him. Let people think whatever they wanted, what did it matter in the end anyway?

Still though... Ikkaku just couldn't figure out why people had never even approached the truth in all their wild suppositions. After all, they had all seen Zaraki Kenpachi with Yachiru, hadn't they? What did people think their relationship was like?? Of course, Ikkaku could also remember that even in the case of the giant and the pink-haired little girl, some people had implied that maybe they were more than just father-figure/hero and daughter-cum-mascot. He had heard rumours about Zaraki kidnapping the little girl to raise her up as his future bride for example, and though those theories always made him roll under the table with laughter, they also, deep inside, hurt him pretty badly. Because if people could think that of Zaraki and Yachiru, then most definitely, they could never hope to understand his relationship with Yumichika.