Disclaimer: Yes, I own Bleach. I also have a very nice bridge that I'd love to sell you…

A/N: This has been gathering dust in my hard drive for at least half a year now. I'm not sure why I haven't posted it yet, but I'm doing so today to celebrate two things: the latest Bleach chapter, and FFnet's Bleach archive reaching a thousand pages. Great work, everyone!

In case anyone's wondering, I'm still suffering from major writers block when it comes to MdA. I know where I want the story to go, I'm just having trouble getting it there. I'm having a bit better luck with the story for the Tanabata contest at the Five Lifetimes, One Love, which is in such dire need of entries that the deadline's been postponed until late august. It's one of, if not the biggest Ichihime fanwork competitions around, assuming more people enter.

And no, I'm not hinting at anything, why would you think that? I'm certainly not implying that any of you should contribute to it and try to win the prizes that are being offered. If you don't, however, please be aware that I have pointy sticks and the insanity to not be afraid to use them.

I'm going back to college tomorrow for summer classes, so hopefully that'll kick-start my brain into gear. I usually write the best when I'm supposed to be taking notes, anyways.

This might be the least pairing-oriented thing I've ever written. But I love how characters interact when they aren't head over heels for each other, too, and there aren't enough fics about these two.

The Vaizord hideout was full of noise. The CLANG of clashing zanpaku-to, the clattering of whatever had been dropped by the one doing the dishes, the rhythmic squeaking of a bloody blade being wiped off, again and again and again—

"This is bullshit!" Sarugaki Hiyori finally shouted, fed up with it all.

They should have been fighting, laughing, bickering, taunting, screaming at each other! They should be firing off inane jokes, and there should be a snigger at even the worst of them. Rose should be grumbling about being stuck with dishwasher duty.

But none of them were even speaking.

For once, there were absolutely no examples of Lisa's beloved 'literature' to be seen. Love wasn't laughing like an idiot over the latest issue of Jump or shouting out the newest plot twists for everyone—namely, Rose—to hear. Even the usually irrepressible Mashiro was sitting slump-shouldered and serious-eyed, which was a sign of the apocalypse if there ever was one. And they were all gaping at Hiyori as though she had grown an extra pair of heads.

Although a stranger would have contributed their behavior to the fact that she had started swearing at the top of her lungs for no apparent reason, the blonde knew better. After a century of sparring and bathroom sharing, the others were never startled by her vocabulary, much less her use of it.

More importantly, they were never silent themselves. There was always talking, bickering, affectionate squabbling. They were a family; they drove each other insane as easily as they breathed. Mashiro even took it to the extreme of doing it in her sleep, which more often than not involved feeling herself up and accusing Kensei of being a pervert.

"You got out of there!" She yelled, a single accusatory finger stabbing through the air towards Shinji. "You got out of there, he didn't even see you fight!"

"That other one did, though." The taller blonde reminded her grimly. "And besides, he still saw me. With my mask on. There's no way Aizen won't hear about it."

"Then what the heck's the point of us sitting around down here like this?!" The shortest Vaizord glared up at her friends, her family, the idiots that she loved even while she was whapping them over their heads with her sandal… as she was extremely tempted to start doing. "Why are we hiding if we've already been found out?!"

Her voice echoed in the massive basement, and passed into silence. None of the others met her gaze, and after a minute she shook her head in disgust.

"Let me know when the Vaizords get back." She spat. "Because all I see here is a bunch of cowards."

When she stormed out, she didn't look back. And still, they said nothing. How could they, when they could feel the truth of her words still hanging heavily in the air?

"Damn them," she growled, "damn them, damn Aizen, and damn his Arrancar too, damnit!"

She punctuated that last word by kicking an unfortunate rock, sending it flying. However, she had forgotten the little fact that kicking a hard stone with practically bare feet isn't always, well…

"OW! DAMNIT!"

…Comfortable. And to add insult to injury, the pebble she had abused ricocheted off of the side of a building, smacking right into her forehead. She yelped and let off a torrent of words that made her earlier language seem like a Barney script in comparison.

"Hi-Hiyori-chan?"

She whirled around. "What?"

Narrowed eyes met wide ones, and the one she had been snarling at took a step back. The Vaizord felt a stab of guilt, and forced herself to calm down a bit. No point on taking it out on a girl… or rather, not on this girl. Any other human or shinigami would pretty much be fine, but Hacchi would probably get ticked if she killed her. And making her upset would probably be annoying.

"What?" She asked again, in a slightly quieter voice. She blinked when the human took another step away, her eyes growing yet wider. "What's wrong with you?"

"Y-you can see me?" A third step.

"No, I can't." Hiyori retorted, propping her hands on her hips. "I talk to thin air all the time. You want to make something of it?" Silence stretched the seconds into years, and she rolled her eyes. "You didn't actually think I was serious, did you?"

The brunette shook her head, but it seemed she was denying something other than the question. The blonde watched her with a raised eyebrow. "No wonder Hacchi likes you, you're as weird as he—hey! Where the heck are you going?! OI!"

She ran after the girl, only to almost trip over her own feet when her quarry suddenly stopped… and fell against the wall. "What the—"

The Vaizord stopped running, switching to shunpo just in time for the other girl to hit the ground. Even as Hiyori was reaching to shake her shoulder, to try and snap her out of—whatever it was that was wrong with her—she was curling her legs up to her chest. She wrapped her arms around her face and huddled in on herself, as if trying to hide.

"But you can't see me," Inoue Orihime wailed in between sobs, "you can't! If you do, they'll all be killed!"

It took the better part of an hour to coax her into spilling the entire story, and by the time they were halfway through the blonde was running through every unethical experiment that she had ever seen Mayuri do… with improvements just for Aizen, and another improvement on each of those improvements with every word the human spoke. She had never thought she could have hated the bastard more than she already did, but what she was hearing was proving her wrong.

That bastard had gone after another member of her family. He didn't even know that the she knew her—or at least, she hoped he didn't—and he still went after her!

Aizen. Would. Pay.

As the Vaizord was plotting exactly what price she would exact, Orihime gave one last hiccup and got to her feet, placing one hand on the wall to keep herself steady. After she had done so, she managed to give Hiyori a tremulous smile. "Thank you so much for listening, Hiyori-chan. But it's getting late, I don't have much time… I have to—"

"Don't say it." The blonde growled, and the human's eyes widened. "Don't you dare even think it!"

"But—"Hiyori took off her sandal and slapped it against her palm, slowly and repetitively. The brunette didn't take the hint. "—I can't let them die! I can't!"

She was crying again, but the pigtailed girl couldn't really bring herself to get angry about it—at least, not at her. It was Aizen-the-bastard, not the human teen, who she wanted to use her flip-flop to mash into a pulpy stain that was still twitching and writhing in agony as she stomped it gleefully into the dirt, laughing maniacally all the while.—the Vaizord, not the stain. The stain would be screaming, if she had let it keep its vocal cords.

However, she forcibly reminded herself that this was no time to be lost in her fantasies, no matter how satisfyingly graphically violent and squishy they were. She had to snap Orihime out of it, and fast—just in case that Arrancar went looking for her when she didn't show.

Hiyori was such an optimist; she didn't even think the word if. And she didn't bother imagining the way that the entire Vaizord family would howl with laughter if anyone ever tried to tell them that.

Anyways… "Yes. You. Can."

"But everyone—"

She'd heard the girl was hardheaded, but this was getting ridiculous. At this rate, they'd be stuck here arguing all night, and Orihime's rendezvous was supposed to be in ten minutes and counting. They didn't have time for this, they didn't have time at all.

She'd shout some sense into the human on the way.

"Just hold still so we can heal you!" Jinta yelled. Ikkaku, whose shoulders he was sitting on, just swore at the top of his lungs and kept on struggling instead. From the sidelines, Ururu glanced up from bandaging the other member of the Eleventh—who, much to his displeasure, had been restrained—

Until, of course, a certain blond Vaizord crashed through the ceiling and landed directly on top of him. For someone with such tiny feet, he thought as he went down, whoever had hit him weighed more than twice as much as they should have.

"Ikakku!" Yumichika shouted, trying to get to his partner only for Tessai to hold him back in a headlock. The large man barely glanced at his reluctant patient, too busy gaping at the newcomer.

"Sarugaki-san!" He called, causing the girl to glance over at him. "It has certainly been a while, hasn't it? What brings you to our humble shop?"

"Where's the idiot?" Hiyori growled. Tessai hadn't seen her too often during the last century, but once you learned the warning signs you never forgot them. The fear of death that drove it into you didn't let you drive it out too easily.

"That way." He pointed and she stormed off.

"Who was that?" Ururu peeked out from behind him.

"An old friend of Urahara-dono's." Tessai told her. Jinta approached, dragging the unconscious bald man behind him.

"You mean like Yoruichi-san?" The redhead asked, earning a nod from the former captain of the kidou corps. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: our boss is so weird."

Ururu bobbed her head. "Yeah."

Thus, the diminutive duo of the Urahara Shoten filled their 'lump on the head' quota for the night. But that's a different story.

"OWOWOWOWOWOW!"

Or maybe not so different after all.

"You idiot!" The Vaizord yelled, smacking her former captain again and again with her feared sandal. "YOU STUPID, STUPID—!"

"Hiyori-san, I beg to differ. You know that my IQ is—YOWCH!"

"—STUPID BALDY!" How Hiyori managed to bellow insults as loudly as she did was a scientific mystery that Urahara Kisuke had been trying to solve—discreetly, of course—for the last century. But he'd gotten no farther with it than he had in his quest to uncover exactly what her sandals were made of. Such pain that they caused could not be brought by anything resembling a normal shoe, after all, let alone the seemingly light little bits of plastic she wore.

"I can't believe you!" She finally snapped, stepping back and watching her former captain twitch. "Seriously, even I didn't think you were that much of an idiot!"

"Oh, I'm not!" He hastily assured her, only to be given a nastily evil smile that warned of extremely painful things awaiting him. Oh dear. Could she have found the catnip?

"Then how do you explain this?!" She swept an arm to the side, indicating… empty air.

Kisuke blinked at it for several long moments before giving his ex-fukutaichou a bewildered look. She returned it for nearly a minute before slapping herself on the forehead. "Can't believe I forgot…"

Her hand flashed outward, and suddenly she was holding a thin length of silver dangled from her hand, a rather pretty bracelet if he'd been of the mind to examine it. But he was too busy gaping at the familiar caramel-haired girl who had appeared out of the aforementioned empty air.

"I-Inoue-san?" Could it be? Could something have gone right, beyond all of those painstakingly calculated odds and desperate hopes? Could his penchant for failing when it counted the most have vanished, just for this one night?

"OI!" It was then that the door was smashed inward, and a heavily bandaged third-seat stormed through the wreckage. "Where the heck did that reiatsu come from? It—Inoue-san?"

An almost-mummified Yumichika managed to stumble in from behind his friend. "Inoue-san? You're looking…" his eyes widened, the feathers bouncing slightly as they traveled upwards. "…Not as lovely as ever. Your eyes—so bloodshot! And that puffiness, it's not at all becoming. It's almost as though you were…" His eyes narrowed, and in a far more serious tone he spoke two simple words. "What happened?"

Orihime looked down, her gaze suspiciously watery. "I…"

"There's no time to explain," Urahara had managed to recover enough to try and figure that out. He fixed the two Eleventh Division officers with an 'Obey Me For I Am Smarter Than You' Look ™, the sort that always ticked a certain substitute off the most. "Please find Matsumoto-fukutaichou, Hitsugaya-taichou, and Kuchiki-san—at least one of them must have sensed her, and they'll be coming here. After that, see if Kurosaki-kun is awake. If he's still unconscious, carry him here—don't leave him alone under any circumstances. Avoid fighting if possible until you've found the others."

"Fighting?" Both perked up immediately, and the shopkeeper winced. He probably shouldn't have mentioned that in front of two of Zaraki's subordinates…

"Avoid it," he repeated firmly, "please. Rest assured that you will have your chance at battle, but you must bring the others here first. And wouldn't you be able to enjoy fighting more if you were healed?"

They hesitated briefly—he was formerly Twelfth, not Eleventh, but he'd sill earned their respect during his fight against Yammy, and this was clearly something important that could possibly lead to more and better fights than a scrap with some random Hollow in an alley—before vanishing in a flicker of shunpo. They couldn't go far in one step, he could feel them pausing to do another before they'd even left the basement, but they were still moving as quickly as they could.

"Thank you, Hiyori-san." The scientist turned to the other blonde, a smile on his face. Anyone else would have seen gratitude, old friendship and fondness. His former vice-captain, however, knew him better than that. There was calculation beneath the shadow of his hat as well, calculation and the barest beginnings of something she hadn't seen in those eyes for decades—the hope that maybe, just maybe, they had a chance. "You'll probably want to tell the others what happened."

"Gee, you think?" She muttered sarcastically, but without too much vehemence behind it.

Orihime, who still looked to be trying to keep her feet under her, to find some solid ground to stand on admist the changing world, raised her head as the Vaizord strode past her, as brusque a whirlwind as she had been the first time she had stormed into the lives of her and her nakama. "Hiyori-chan—"

After a moment of thought, Hiyori turned back to give the human girl one of those indefinable, indescribable looks that could lead to anything from a flurry of smacks from her sandal or her throwing herself in front of the receiver to take a killing blow. "Illegitimi non carborundum."

"That's not exactly accurate, Hiyori-san." Urahara commented, hiding a smile behind his fan while the teen blinked in confusion at the strange words. "It should be—"

"Screw you." The pigtailed girl flipped him off with a strangely amused glint in her eyes, and was gone. She had a few more heads to bash in before the night was out, after all.

A/N: I won't blame you for not reviewing if you contribute to the Tanabata contest. If not, could you at least spare a review? Please? Even if you can't see it, I'm using puppy dog eyes. You know that they're impossible to resist…

By the way, "illegitimi non carborundum" doesn't actually mean "don't let the bastards bring you down". It's mock-latin that is often taken to mean that phrase. Wiki it if you're curious, or just bored.