I don't own Bleach. If I did, I'd be paying Kubo to draw faster.

Rating: T, for teen.

Summary: It's said that if you let a camel shove its nose into your tent, the rest of it will soon follow. Tatsuki has never had a camel invade her personal space, but she's pretty sure she'd prefer the camel to this blue haired freak.

His tooth was gone.

To be precise, his left maxillary second premolar was gone and Grimmjaw was not sure what bothered him more: the fact that a scrawny little girl had actually damaged him or the fact that he seemed to have a thorough knowledge of dental anatomy despite never picking up a book on the subject. The most logical explanation for this was that he had been a dentist in his human life and that was just effing embarrassing.

("Hey, Grimmjaw! I was wondering if you remembered anything before being a hollow?"

"Yeah, I fixed teeth.")

Shit, that couldn't be right. It just couldn't.

The urge to kill something was rising with each flick of his tongue. It kept ghosting over the new gap between his molars and every time it did, he kept remembering how it had happened. Ordinarily, getting bloody wasn't something Grimmjaw had a problem with. However badass he was (and he totally was), a fight was still a fight – shit happened on both sides. What pissed him off was that he hadn't lost his tooth in a fight. He'd lost it to a sucker punch he should have seen coming a mile off from a girl who barely came up to his chest and however terrible knowing you'd been a pansy little dentist before becoming an Espada was, losing a tooth to a teenage human who didn't have enough power in her to charge a battery after you'd already become an Espada was worse.

So what if no one else knew about it? Grimmjaw knew about it and that was what mattered. He'd gotten gore and corpses up to his elbows reaching his rank and things like getting punched by a five foot tall she-bitch did not happen to him.

Except that it had happened, which made Grimmjaw want to kill something and which was why at 10:37 a.m., one week after Arisawa Tatsuki had made him eat dirt, Grimmjaw aimed a cero blast at Karakura High School and let it go with a jolly smile on his face.

There was a lot of screaming and a lot of explosions. Mustn't forget the explosions.

Tatsuki pressed herself up against the wall and waited for a space to appear in the flow of panicking high school students. She was part of the Disciplinary Committee and technically was supposed to be directing the students to the exits, but Tatsuki had a feeling that all of her schoolmates knew where the exits were. Looking through the window showed her a literal flood of teenagers swarming across the front yard. That just left her looking out for stragglers or, worse, people who got knocked down and trampled. Then she had to swoop in from her spot on the sidelines, yank them to their feet and get them moving with the flow again.

And where the hell was Orihime?

She had disappeared in the confusion, alongside Ishida, Ichigo, Rukia and Sado. The majority of Tatsuki wanted to go find her, but the minority (which happened to be most of her common sense) said that the odds of finding one girl in this stampede were slim to none. That weird… feeling, or radar, or whatever it was that she had always used in the past to find Orihime was unreliable at the moment. Every time the ground shook with another blast, it was like someone whistled inside her head and all she could feel was raw power driving itself into her skull.

Growling at the whole damn situation, Tatsuki wondered if it would really be so bad to just take her chances with charging into the crowd and forcing her way through. She was short, but she'd taken hard knocks before. And if she stayed close to the walls, out of the way of the bulk of the flood, maybe -

There was a sudden surge behind her.

Tatsuki didn't know what the energy was. Over the past few weeks, as she slowly began feeling new things and seeing stuff she would have - should have - written off as daydreams or her imagination, if it weren't for the way everyone else started acting when she pressed them about it, she realized that she wasn't having her senses sharpened so much as expanded and even added to. There was something new in her body now, something that let her feel a monster even before she heard it give that horrible wailing shriek from somewhere in Karakura.

That sense was telling her to move the fuck away from the wall.

Tatsuki jumped, surging into the writhing student body of Karakura High School, forcing her way to a classroom across the hall, where there would be cover from what was coming.

"Get out of the way!" Tatsuki screamed.

'Oh God, they can't see it, can't feel it coming!'

"Get down! Get -"

The wall exploded.

Plaster, steel, wood, glass and dust filled the hallway. Tatsuki blinked and realized she was on the floor. She had fallen down… no, she had been knocked down. Her ears were ringing. There was something pressing down on top of her. It wasn't heavy enough to hurt, but it was pinning her. Tatsuki grit her teeth and pushed. The weight was limp and reluctant to move, but as she got up on her hands and knees, it rolled off and Tatsuki saw the unmoving form of a girl she knew to belong to a classroom next to her own.

"Damn," Tatsuki hissed. "Damn."

"What? You think that was impressive?"

Tatsuki froze. That voice was...

The karate practitioner rolled over and sat on her butt, staring up at the tall man - not a man not a - who stared down at her, a look of bored arrogance on his face. He had blue hair that stood up in a wave on his skull and blue tattoes lining his eyes. An open white jacket and a bare chest, with a sword hanging at his hip. It didn't look like a fake either. His eyes were so blue that they almost glowed. There was something attached to his cheek, just where his jaw bone would be - it grew out of his skin what is he what - if you peeled away the skin.

But what really got her attention, apart from the fact that he was floating a few inches above the body riddled floor, was the huge fucking hole in his god damned chest.

The man - thing - smiled and Tatsuki felt very small and weak.

"Bitch, you ain' seen nuthin' yet."

Coming from anyone (anything) else, Tatsuki probably would have laughed, but this guy….

Just being around him hurt.

The air itself was pressing down on her skin. Every cut and scrape from the fall seemed to intensify. Breathing was hard, nearly impossible. Worst of all, a sudden paralysis gripped her body and it felt like she was sitting in a vat of concrete.

Grimmjaw saw all of this and smiled even wider.

"A lil' cero blast did this. You want to see something really cool?"

Tatsuki somehow didn't think he was actually giving her a choice.

The feeling was proven correct when the man with bizarre blue hair lifted his right hand and pointed it at her.

Grimmjaw had not been lying – by his standards, what he had aimed at Karakura High School was a little blast. It had only left behind a crater ten feet deep and twice as wide, not to mention that all of the students nearby were still breathing. By Grimmjaw standards that was being nice, although he hadn't done it out of any pity for the mindless meat bags wandering down below him. Being Grimmjaw, he didn't have pity.

No, it was more out of a twisted sense of honor that Grimmjaw had withheld his full power. However much of an insect the girl was, she had nonetheless managed to knock him down for moment. Being one of the rare few who had done so and walked away from it, she deserved to look him in the face while he reduced her entire being down to the last atom and then obliterated her spirit for good measure, because, seriously, there was no fucking way he was letting her tell anyone, alive or dead, why he had felt the urge to kill her.

"Don't feel bad," Grimmjaw said quietly, enjoying the way her eyes widened and her breathing hitched. She was trying to move, he knew she was, but the pressure of his unrestrained power kept her trapped like a fly on sticky paper.

"It's just survival of the fittest out here, shorty," Grimmjaw drawled, feeling the cero in his hand reach its max. "And you ain't got the –"

This was when Kurosaki motherfucking Ichigo blindsided him, business end of Zangetsu first.

Although his skin kept the worst of the blade from reaching anything important, the force of the attack knocked Grimmjaw off kilter and he released the blast into the ceiling, instead of into Tatsuki's face. There was not much time to curse the sudden change in plans – although Grimmjaw couldn't help thinking Two! Fucking! Seconds! And I would have been done, Kurosaki, you ill-timed shit – because Kurosaki was coming closer with another strike ready and, while smacking the fuck out of the brat never seemed to get old, he had three other people backing him up. Grimmjaw was insane, almost certainly, but he wasn't dumb.

Reality peeled around him like an old onion skin and the Espada slipped away to Hueco Mundo three inches ahead of Zangetsu.

Oh well. It wasn't like the girl was going anywhere and although having Kurosaki and the idiots around him hovering near the girl would probably make things more difficult (the reason he had tried ambushing her at that disgusting area called an educational facility, blargh), Grimmjaw had found that lately 'difficult' was almost always linked to 'interesting'.

Not hard, really, as anything beat out listening to another one of Aizen's speeches. They seemed tailor made to cure insomnia and that wasn't good because the last guy to be caught sleeping in the briefings had lost an eye. Aizen had just smiled and revealed a slightly chipped lower-left cuspid in need of a….

…God. Damn. It.

The first seven hollows Grimmjaw found in the desert were ripped to bloody shreds and after that, every living thing within a thousand miles ran from him before he got so much as a glimpse of them.

Bet you all thought this was on the back burner forever, huh? I made a promise to not post any more stories until I'd finished what I was working on. Then I realized I wasn't working on anything. I've spent the last few weeks blasting through my videogame collection instead of doing anything even slightly productive. So, hey, screw it. Take life as it comes, right? I'll do what I can, when I can. No more stressing.

Things I Should Have Been Doing

Job hunting

Dishes

Playing with the dog

Emptying the cat's litter box

Study biology/chemistry/anything

Work on stories I have already posted

Work on my drawing skills, which are near to nonexistence

End world hunger

Vacuum

Videogames I Beat Instead

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy IX

Metal Gear 2

Dragon Age: Origins

Shadow Hearts

Shadow Hearts: Covenant

Legaia 2

Prince of Persia 2008

Jericho

Final Fantasy Dissidia

Tomb Raider Anniversary

Final Fantasy II