A more than fortunate form of torture || For abaxrpg, NSFW BOY LOVE WITHIN!

[savior_n_black]

It had been a long day.

Hours ago, Ichigo had stumbled back to the store covered in his own blood, and meeting a furious hollow at the door. He'd had to use his mask just for the extra energy to push back the splintering pain of broken bones, broken face, and all the swallowed, impotent anger the injuries bore evidence of.
Shiro had reamed him up one side, down the other, and probably informed the whole damn store, and it's motley group of inhabitants what happened to Ichigo to cause him to look like some horror movie extra. Rukia's cold fury was just as bad, though she restrained herself from kicking him him in the face thanks to his already-broken nose. She didn't need to, anyway, Ichigo had kept his eyes pointed at the floor as he hissed, and clenched his teeth through the painful, acid-sensation of Shiro mending broken bones, and torn cartilage.

Rinzler aside, the stress, and worry of weeks, even a full month on end were piling up. Yukio's presence in the city, the tricks of chocolates, and strange behavior out of Madsen, the creepy way Bradley-san kept acting around Yori-san, and both the boys watching the older man with misgivings, and Lior constantly finding a way to find trouble, plus the flaw, or whatever-it-was in Ichigo, and Shiro's shared soul chain weighed heavily on Ichigo's mind. Byakuya's continued idiocy over the tangled relationship between human, hollow, and shinigami didn't help, and Ichigo was more than happy that the captain, and his wife were moving to a new space of their own. He felt bad for Rukia, because it was her family that was pulling her in so many directions, what with Hisana's unsettled place in Rukia's life, and Byakuya's outright disdain for Ichigo in general. He felt bad, but he also kept his damn mouth shut around Hisana because he didn't want to add his own ( less than complimentary ) opinions on any older sibling abandoning the younger in the ghetto as a baby to cause anymore trouble for Rukia than she already dealt with.
It was all piled up, all a mess in Ichigo's head, and he just...just needed to think for a while.

Think...and feel so incredibly lonely, that it was almost a physical ache.

It had been a few hours into the 'night' ( or so any of them reckoned 'night' when it was always dark in this place ) before Shiro had come back to the little alcove that served as their shared bedroom, too. There was silence, then, and that was so much worse.

But, Ichigo had purposefully kept his thoughts to himself. It was taking work, because he just wasn't very good at that level of control, but...he just needed a little quiet, a little bit of time without the censure of his loved ones to sort through his own head.

...And to dig out the little bottle of lube he'd carefully stashed after the last time that Rukia had taken him along to Cheetara-san's lingerie shop to find bras, and panties for Yori.

When Shiro came back, though, Ichigo was curled on his side, under the covers, with the blankets pulled up nearly to his face. He stared fixedly at the other wall, the hand under his pillow clutched around the incriminating little bottle, and waited in silence.