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Room 405, 8:25 a.m.
Hino Koichi was having a pretty terrible day. First his alarm clock hadn't gone off, so he had woken up half an hour late. Then he had arrived at the factory and received an earful from his boss for the aforementioned tardiness. And it really hadn't been his day at all, because then his fragile human arm had passed a little too close to the much sturdier metal arm of a machine and he had lost a whole chunk of skin.
So after a little more screeching from the boss about extra paperwork, he was shuttled off to the hospital by his co-workers with complete disregard for his verbally-expressed reluctance.
Now, Koichi didn't particularly like the hospital, because hospitals often had needles involved and he really hated needles. A lot. When it was time to get his vaccinations as a child, his mother had to physically yank him out of the car while he hung onto the back of the seat for dear life to resist being dragged in to see the doctor.
His experiences with needles hadn't improved much since then. He hated needles, and doctors, and hospitals, and anything even tangentially related to any of them. But despite his reservations, he was still shuffled along into a hospital room since he was actively bleeding beneath the towel he had pressed against his arm, and they promised that someone would hurry in to see him.
Kind of a young guy, the doctor. He introduced himself as Dr. Kurosaki and seemed nice enough (but that definitely didn't mean Koichi trusted him). He cleaned around the injury as best he could to take a better look at things and that was all good and fine up until he began discussing what the ensuing plan was. "We'll just give you a local anesthetic right here so that you don't feel anything and then I'll sew you up. Nice and easy."
Nice and easy? Sew. With a needle. Like Koichi was a shirt with a hole in the sleeve. Nothing about that sounded nice or easy.
His brow began to sweat as he nervously watched the doctor retrieve the appropriate tools from a cupboard on the side of the room. He saw the glimmer of the needle in the light right away, calling to him. He swallowed. Oh no. Hadn't he had enough metal jabbed in his skin for the day, back at the factory? "What if you just put a bandage on it? I promise I'll keep it clean."
The doctor turned back to him and frowned disagreeably at the suggestion. "That laceration is way too deep for a bandage. It would take a long time to heal and you would have a horrible scar."
"Scars make you look dangerous; maybe no one would mess with me. I'll take the scar," Koichi decided firmly.
That comment made Dr. Kurosaki's mouth quirk up a little. "I do know some people who like to hang onto scars. But they weren't my patients: you are. I can't let you walk out of here with only a bandage wrapped around that, it's a staph infection waiting to happen."
"But, I really don't think..." Koichi began, and felt more and more lightheaded with each step closer the doctor took with that needle until his eyes rolled up in his head and he felt himself collapse back into the chair.
When he finally floated back to awareness, he remembered in a rush where he was and why and decided it was probably best to keep his eyes closed, lest he see something that made him wish he was unconscious again. He even tried very hard to keep his breathing nice and even. Didn't they say something like that in yoga, that controlling the breathing controlled the mind, or some such? His sister followed along with those yoga videos sometimes and he had caught parts of it in the background while visiting.
"Shut up, I'm trying to focus," a voice said from beside him, and that was pretty unfair because he hadn't even said anything! And rude! He didn't feel anything sharp on his skin so the doctor had probably gone through with the local anesthetic he mentioned. Well Koichi certainly didn't want to distract him and make things worse, so he was going to stay quiet.
"Yeah, right. He'd be better off trying to stitch himself up than let you anywhere near him with this."
Wow. Koichi wouldn't have expected a doctor to make a comment like that. Whatever nurse came in to help must have really sucked at her job.
"Opening bodies up definitely isn't the same as stitching them back together." Uh, what? He was wary of hospitals by default but this one in particular was becoming more suspicious by the second. "Why are you hovering over my shoulder that way? Back up, I need room to work here. Why don't you go cause chaos somewhere else for a while?" There was no response, but Dr. Kurosaki continued as if there had been, "That's a good point. I take it back: stay here with me. I shouldn't encourage you to run amok amongst my colleagues. They don't deserve that." A startled inhale. "Don't hit me while I'm doing sutures, you're going to fuck them up!"
Koichi was growing more nervous by the second. When he finally heard the sound of someone standing up and walking away, he decided it was finally safe to open his eyes. With trepidation, he glanced down to see his arm and only felt a little queasiness. The skin was woven closed and the stitches actually looked pretty nice and neat despite the rambling commentary from the doctor suggesting they might turn out otherwise.
There was no nurse in the room now, just his doctor who had turned back from the counter to face him. "Hey, you'll be happy to hear that you're done. You stayed passed out for the whole thing and you're all patched up."
"I woke up a little towards the end there but kept my eyes shut because I was too anxious to watch. Must have still been a little out of it though. I didn't even hear the nurse leave."
"What nurse?" Dr. Kurosaki asked.
"Uh..."
Things were a little awkward after that and while the doctor was amiable enough and didn't do anything else weird, Koichi only responded with one word answers before thanking the man and bolting from the room at the first opportunity.
The hallway was oddly silent and so despite being a few steps away from the door, Koichi still heard a muttered: "...You might make a cute nurse, though. Do you want me to go look for scrubs that will fit you?" from back in the room, followed by a pause and then a laugh.
Koichi was never coming to a hospital again. He would just bandage himself at home next time.
Room 419, 10:27 a.m.
Generally speaking, Asakura Kasumi considered herself to be pretty healthy and as such didn't make many trips to the hospital. But her company encouraged and had a monetary incentive for employees to go and have a routine annual exam done, and who would say no to some more yen in exchange for an hour or two of her afternoon?
A nurse came in and took her vitals and collected her medical history, and then she waited a little impatiently for the physician to show. Why did they always take so long?
When he came in, he did curry a little favor back from Kasumi by apologizing for her wait. That made the guy seem a little more a-okay thus far.
He went over her chart, asked whether she was having problems ("I'm actually here because my employer gives us money if we go in for preventative care," she reported.
"That's pretty nice," the doctor conceded. "I'm a little jealous. They don't do that for me, and I work at a hospital").
"If we're just doing a routine exam, this might be the easiest thing you do all day," he assured her. "Alright, we'll just go through the basics. I'm going to use a tool that lets me see a little more clearly in your ears and nose." As soon as he finished his sentence, it was only his impressively quick reflexes that seemed to save him from getting clocked in the head with the instrument that flung itself from the counter into his intercepting hand. "This is- ... actually, I guess this is what I needed," he said quietly, eyebrows tilting in surprise.
Kasumi studied him carefully for a moment. Hmm.
When they finished with the otoscope and her ears and nose, a stethoscope clattered onto the small metal stand next to the doctor with perfect timing and he sort of scowled at it before he picked it up and cleaned off the disc to use.
Kasumi squinted and studied him closely again. Hmmmmm!
With all of those routine pieces of the examination complete, the doctor picked up her chart and began subtly demonstrating the signs of someone who was missing something, complete with patting his pockets to check whether he secretly did have it in his possession.
"Is something wrong?"
"I need a pen," he admitted to Kasumi with some reluctance. "But let me," a little deliberate emphasis there, "Go grab one."
Before he could move, a pen bounced off his shoulder and to the ground. His facial expression jumped between a few different phases as if he couldn't decide whether to laugh or scream in frustration as he knelt down to retrieve it.
It all suddenly occurred to her what was going on. Kasumi was actually a little annoyed with herself that it had taken so long for it to click. "I get it; don't worry."
Kurosaki regarded her a little warily as he stood back up. "What was that?"
"It's okay. I know what's going on. No need to be concerned about me," she assured with a thumbs up.
"You see-" He sort of trailed off and when she just winked at him, he glanced off to his left for only an instant before finishing his thought with, "Okay. Let's finish this up so that you aren't stuck here all afternoon."
When they were through with the exam, Kasumi offered a small bow. "Thank you, doctor!" she said sincerely. "This has been a really important day for me."
He stared at her blankly again and half-smiled. "Great. I'm glad it all worked out. Uh, have a good afternoon."
"Thank you! You, too!"
Kasumi pulled her phone out of her bag before she even left the lobby and hit 'call.' "Reiko, listen. I know I've said something like this before, but this time I'm really sure. ... No, not about that. Listen, I saw concrete evidence and I can say for sure that I finally met someone with telekinesis. ... Oh, you never take me seriously! I really saw it! I'm going to start writing my book now, you just wait."
Staff Lounge, 1:11 p.m.
"Ready for lunch, Dr. Kurosaki?" Fujita Ami asked from where she was sitting and enjoying her own meal.
"Hi, Fujita." He continued walking towards the lockers and sighed as he opened the one with his name on it, which happened to be close to her current seat. "I think I'm headed to the cafeteria since I forgot mine at home this morning," he answered with palpable disappointment. Understandably so: the options in the hospital's built-in cafeteria often inspired that reaction.
"Maybe they'll have something really good today," she offered optimistically.
Kurosaki gave her a skeptical but amused smile. "I can only hope. I end up in this situation more often than I would like."
However - to what was apparently Kurosaki's surprise, judging by his expression - he opened his locker door to find a container sitting on the center of the shelf. He retrieved it and read what appeared to be a small note on top before he smiled a small but wholly genuine smile.
"You remembered after all," Ami observed.
He glanced up at her as if startled, then let out a short laugh. "Yeah, guess I grabbed it without thinking. Lucky, huh?"
And as he had turned to her, Kurosaki had unintentionally tilted his container slightly to the side such that Ami could clearly read 'forget something? dumbfuck' scrawled across the note from her vantage point. She was too polite to draw any attention to something like that, though, and simply told him that she hoped he enjoyed it.
Staff Lounge, 8:43 p.m.
Wakabayashi Fusae had been going back and forth in her mind about it for days.
Despite having been a nurse at Karakura General Hospital for seven months, she had only recently been on rotations such that her path crossed one Kurosaki Ichigo. And each time they interacted professionally, she found herself growing fonder and fonder.
There were subtle things about him that stood out over time. He was serious when it mattered and laidback when it didn't, and he always seemed to know the appropriate time for each of those demeanors. He didn't have a big ego like some doctors she had known and from what she could see, he also really cared about his patients, which she honestly felt was one of the most critical qualities a good doctor should have. And he was attractive and obviously had a great career, and in the current dating scene it was basically winning the lottery to find all of those qualities in one package.
She had told herself several times over the past week that she would just come right out and ask him, but then she lost her nerve at the last minute, or they weren't alone, or an emergency case came up and the opportunity slipped by.
It therefore felt like a stroke of serendipity that she ran into him alone in the lounge when they were nearing the end of second shift. "Dr. Kurosaki! You're here late today."
He looked up from his phone when his name was called and offered her a friendly nod. "Late one for you today too, I guess?"
"Yes, I'm doing a twelve today."
"Well things have slowed down a lot, so it probably won't be too busy for you in this last stretch." He was picking up his coat from the chair so he must have been on his way out. She didn't really want to hold him up but maybe she could make her proposal quickly while they were the only two around. Experience had shown that she wasn't likely to get many other chances to do this anytime soon.
"I've been wanting to tell you that I've really enjoyed working with you more often over the past few weeks," she said. "You're very talented."
"Uh, thank you." He looked a little frazzled and she thought it was sort of adorable that he didn't know how to take a compliment. "You too."
Fusae smiled. "I know you're probably trying to get home so I apologize for dropping this on you sort of suddenly, but I was wondering whether you would want to get dinner one night?"
"Dinner?" he repeated as it apparently took a moment to register.
Fusae jumped when a chair screeched behind her as its metal legs slid across the linoleum of the floor. She spun just in time to see it clatter inexplicably onto its side. "What happened?"
"I- not sure, I wasn't watching. Listen, Wakabayashi," he began as she turned to look at him again. "I know it isn't your fault because you didn't know this," the tone of his voice on those words seemed particularly pointed, as if directed to someone besides her, "But I have someone. We've been together for a while and even though he drives me crazy a lot of the time, he really means a lot to me."
The concern over the self-propelling chair quickly took a backseat to Fusae's abject mortification. "I'm so sorry. I really had no idea you were with someone or else I wouldn't have said anything." She bowed hastily in apology. "Forget I mentioned it at all!"
"No harm done." Kurosaki made an awkward conciliatory hand gesture. "You had no way of knowing, don't worry. I'm flattered and everything, so glad we... talked about this."
"Of course. I'm so sorry, again. Good night!" She couldn't get out of that room fast enough and was in the hall before he had even finished bidding her a good night in return.
It had always been a possibility that he had someone at home, but no one had ever heard about his partner! She had asked everyone (with some subtlety, of course) before even considering bringing it up and no one said a word about Dr. Kurosaki mentioning some sort of significant other!
"He really means a lot to me."
How embarrassing. Hopefully they wouldn't cross paths for a few days so that she had time to pull herself together and would be able to look him in the eye again after being turned down like that.
Front Lobby, a few days later, 9:40 a.m.
The morning had been particularly dull already, to the point that Fusae had actually volunteered to go down to the front desk and pick up the bulk order of gauze they had requested as an express delivery when they nearly ran out. Someone in this hospital was burning through gauze like it was about to be discontinued and she had a sneaking suspicion that a new nurse who had been loudly lamenting about moving apartments was sneaking a lot of it home to use as packing material. The girl had explicitly asked another nurse whether she thought gauze would protect her collector set of glasses from breaking during the move, and maybe that wouldn't hold up in court but it was pretty convincing evidence as far as Fusae was concerned.
After her disastrous attempt at asking Dr. Kurosaki out on a date, they had in fact crossed paths several times and even worked in the same room at one point. He was nothing but gracious and treated her as politely as he always had, obviously not holding onto any lingering awkwardness. He was such a nice man. Shame he was taken. And possibly not interested in women, judging by the male significant other he had mentioned. His partner was very lucky, she had thought mournfully. She wouldn't mind having luck like that once in a while.
All of that aside, she was currently letting a receptionist named Midori catch her up on what had happened in the latest episode of a K-drama that many of them had been watching when the sound of footsteps approaching the desk caught their attention and they both turned. A blond man was standing there, tall and broad but with a lazy slouched set to his shoulders as he tilted his head slightly back and regarded them.
Midori leapt into action pretty eagerly (and Fusae could make a few guesses as to why). "Good morning. Can I help you with something?"
"Yeah, maybe you can." He lifted his right arm to show that he was carrying a bag at his side. "My partner, he works here. He's always forgetting shit when he leaves in the morning. I was nearby so I decided I'd bring it for him. You wanna get this to him?" He set the bag on the desk without waiting for confirmation.
"Oh, yes. Of course," Midori agreed, taking the bag. "And whom does this need to reach?"
"That's for Kurosaki Ichigo," the man reported in the satisfied tone of someone who was pleased that he had something worth having and wanted everyone to know it. And when his blue eyes shifted over to where Fusae was standing, there was a hint of a smirk in the way one side of his mouth curled up knowingly. Something in his expression communicated, 'yeah, I know about that. Now you know better than to try it again,' as clearly as if he had said it out loud.
Fusae smiled politely before averting her gaze and pretending to be very busy with adjusting her hold on the dolly stacked with boxes of gauze. If she could have sunken into the floor, she would have.
"We'll definitely make sure he gets it. I'll run it up to the staff lounge right now," Midori assured him.
The man took a step backwards. "Appreciate the help," he said with a grin that would have been friendly were there not something slightly unpredictable lurking just beneath the surface. And with that, he turned on his rear foot and pocketed his hands as he strolled casually back towards the entrance.
The surprise visit from Dr. Kurosaki's 'partner' was of course the prime point of gossip for the rest of the day. When the situation and bag were relayed to the man himself, he huffed a dry half-laugh and accepted it. "How thoughtful of him," he mused with a hint of sarcasm.
Staff Lounge, 2:20 p.m.
Ogawa Masaharu was starving by the time 2 p.m. rolled around, as he hadn't had any opportunity to eat even so much as a snack. He was pretty sure he had a bag of crisps or something stashed in the lounge that would have to suffice for now, because he had another patient to get to in about 15 minutes. He would have to wolf something down as fast as he possibly could while he took the elevator back to the seventh floor.
He passed two nurses and overheard Kurosaki Ichigo's name for what must have been the tenth time that day.
News had travelled immediately throughout the departments about Kurosaki's previously unknown boyfriend/partner/whatever he was having shown up to play deliveryman. Part of the intensity of the spread seemed to be courtesy of the fact that the female staff who had seen him thought he was very handsome to the point that there may have been swooning in the lobby - no one could confirm or deny that last piece, but Masaharu had stopped himself from rolling his eyes at some of the commentary surrounding this event.
He couldn't say that he was particularly interested in the personal lives of his colleagues, especially those with whom he really didn't interact much. He saw Kurosaki fairly infrequently and when he had seen him, he had always found him a little difficult to pin down. It was almost as though there was something slightly off about him. He was very talented and good at his job, but had always given Masaharu the impression of having a short temper. The way that his face would begin to contort into a scowl and his hands would begin to clench in certain situations before he caught himself made Masaharu wonder whether he hadn't been quick to anger and violence for a long time in his life before learning to reel it in. It wasn't a common quality to see in someone who ended up in the medical field but as long as he did his job, it didn't really make much difference.
And Masaharu had heard a handful of anecdotes about the strange things that tended to happen around Kurosaki (hospital grape vines were incredibly wide-reaching, as evidenced even today by the near incessant talk about Kurosaki's boyfriend) but he had never seen anything odd himself. He had to admit there was an awful lot of talk about it, and he really hadn't realized they had so many superstitious people on staff here before the subject had come up.
But for all the talk about oddities reportedly happening around Kurosaki, he never seemed to make any mistakes or have any sort of bad luck or interference as a result. In fact, a few of the nurses had pointed out that they never witnessed any of the incidents happening while he was actively working on someone and needed a steady hand and concentration. That lent even more evidence to Masaharu's theory that there was just some kind of wild rumor mill Kurosaki apparently inspired amongst their colleagues.
He was nearly at the door to the lounge when his phone slipped right out of his pants pocket and bounced off the floor. He bent to retrieve it and heard someone speak up from in the lounge, the door to which was partially propped open as usual.
"Why don't you two just save everyone some trouble and hang signs around each other's necks that say, 'don't touch'?" That sounded like Ishida Uryuu. Masaharu was pretty sure that he was one of the surgeons, but most of the surgeons didn't regularly cross paths with the standard practitioners outside of the lounge so he wasn't too familiar with him.
"Don't give him any ideas," another voice warned sarcastically. And speak of the devil: that was Kurosaki. "My sisters called me laughing because he texted them to ask whether you could make someone wear a wedding ring without the wedding part and asked to borrow money. When I came home and told him that he was being ridiculous, he cussed me out and sulked for a while. I guess using the hospital gossip machine to his advantage was Plan B." The slamming sound indicated that he had closed his locker. "I almost don't want to go home after work tonight. He's going to have the smuggest grin on his face since it worked exactly how he wanted."
Now that Masaharu thought about it, he had heard it mentioned at one point that Ishida and Kurosaki attended the same high school, so it wasn't a surprise that they were friendly with each other.
"I don't want to hear you airing your grievances about your own poor choices. You complain that he's possessive and follows you around, then you turn around and encourage it." Perhaps sort of friendly with each other was a better description, Masaharu revised mentally.
There was the sound of a rather indignant huff. "I don't complain that much. That's just part of who he is; he's really calmed down over time, anyway. And if I didn't like having him around, we wouldn't live together. He doesn't like you either, you know."
"Good. The day Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez likes me is the day I reevaluate my choices in life, because I'll have obviously gone wrong somewhere."
"...So you're saying that if he pushes the wedding thing again, you want to be the one who helps him choose his outfit?"
"You're not funny, Kurosaki," Ishida reprimanded and the sound of another locker firmly closing echoed out into the hall. "I hope you get fired."
Kurosaki, on the other hand, seemed to think he was plenty funny because his mirth was audible in the way he called, "that's a lie!" after Ishida when the latter strode out of the room and made a sharp left, fortunately without looking in the opposite direction.
Masaharu had definitely forgotten to position himself to make it look like he was just approaching and hurried to remedy that before anyone else came by and saw him just standing there listening in the hallway like a bored housewife.
Kurosaki stepped out of the lounge just as he was stepping in and casually greeted him with a, "Hey, Dr. Ogawa," before carrying on his way.
Room 312, five days later, 6:09 p.m.
Truth be told, the impact was more or less the last thing Ono Kozo remembered. He had been running late as usual but still obeying the traffic laws - an on-time badge swipe at his office wasn't worth his life or the lives of anyone else on the road - when another car blew the light and came crashing into the driver's side door of his sedan.
He thought he may have flitted in and out of consciousness a few times in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but all he had in those moments was a sensation of pain.
The next thing he remembered was sitting up in a bed and much to his surprise, he was feeling pretty good.
...at least until he registered the steady high-pitched noise from the machine beside him and the attention it drew from the nurse at his bedside. She made an alarmed noise before hurriedly pressing a button on the wall. When he turned to watch her press it, he heard the clink from his own chest and looked down only to find that he had a chain attached to his torso and that he was in fact sitting on what looked like himself. It was all a little disorienting to piece together right away.
The nurse jotted down notes on a chart.
"Excuse me."
She still didn't respond and turned to briskly walk towards the door.
"Excuse me!" he tried again, calling after her.
"She ain't gonna hear you. You're dead," a voice from near the opposite side of the room informed him dispassionately. There was a man leaning back against the wall next to the door, watching him with some frustration. He looked... kind of like he had just been thrown out of an underground rock band, actually, but the animal teeth on the side of his face and sword on his hip were more of points of legitimate concern.
All of those details and the identity of a stranger were very much secondary to the matter at hand, however. "...Dead?"
The man continued to frown at him with no trace of empathy about Kozo's recent (and unfortunate, if he did say so himself - he was only 44 years old!) expiration, and seemingly ignored the question. "You really couldn't've held off for a few more hours?"
Kozo glanced down at the chain hanging from his chest and picked it up midway along the links. It didn't actually attach to anything, simply hung there off him. There were a lot of feelings about the situation rattling around in his head, and a few too many to focus on. And truth be told, he was a little offended by the callous reception he was getting upon receiving understandably shocking news. "I don't think I had much choice in that."
He really was dead. He could see his body still lying there in the bed, and the nurse couldn't see or hear him. But there was someone who could... He looked back up to the man. "And who are you?"
The man's lip curled unhappily. "Someone who has to sit through a whole lot of moping when one of you bites it."
That wasn't even slightly helpful to the present situation but this guy didn't seem especially inclined to be helpful in general. Kozo suspected he was on his own here.
The nurse rushed back in with several others including a dark-haired doctor with glasses, and Kozo instinctively leapt out of the way when they reached towards his body despite the fact that their hands went straight through the him-that-wasn't-on-the-bed. He stepped backward and watched them talk about his time of death and so on and so forth. "Now what?" he wondered aloud without expecting an answer.
A put upon, irritated scoff from the one person in the room who could see him preceded him speaking up again and straightening from his lean to take one step closer. "At this point you either go up to Soul Society or you turn into a hollow. Lucky for you, you're automatically gonna get the former, considering they got a shinigami on speed-dial here."
Shinigami? Like the religious kind? He was still very unclear on what the current guy was doing here but he wasn't describing it in a way that suggested he himself was the shinigami in question. "So what do I do?"
"You sit your ass down and wait for him to get here and send you up." His expression transitioned into a sort of narrow-eyed assessment before he added, "And on that note, when he does get here, you're gonna tell him that you know he did everything he could for you."
"What? Why?"
"'Cause he was also taking care of you before you kicked it. He's a doctor. And 'cause I fuckin' told you to, that's why. Stop asking questions: you're gonna do it or else you won't need a shinigami anyway." With that, he gave a grin that was probably very deliberately showing as many teeth as possible. "We clear?"
Well, that was a good enough argument for Kozo. "Totally clear."
His guest leaned back onto his heels and stuffed his hands in his pockets before blowing a displeased breath out through his nostrils. "Guess I should stick around and make sure nothing happens to you until Kurosaki's able to switch out..." he decided with audible reluctance.
Oh. For as uncharitable as he may have been until now, that was surprisingly nice of-
"If you end up getting eaten on my watch, I probably won't get laid for a week."
-him.
"...Do you think he's on his way?" Kozo asked for what definitely wasn't more than the second time.
"If you ask me that one more time, I'm gonna rip your tongue out. You don't have to be in one piece for this thing," his company warned. "Holy hell are you humans annoying. If mine was as bad as the rest of you, I'd've fuckin' offed myself just to get away from him."
After Kozo's body had been rolled out on a gurney - presumably towards the morgue - they continued to loiter in silence for a while in the room since the silence was preferable to losing a tongue.
Shortly after that, a man in a black robe with a sword strapped to his back appeared in the room without Kozo even having seen how he came in. "I couldn't find a chance to get away for a while," he explained in a rush before finally focusing more thoroughly on Kozo. He maintained what appeared to be a well-practiced stern expression, but there were little hints slipping in the lines around his eyes and mouth from time to time that he was genuinely dejected and remorseful, presumably (based on the information previously shared) about having tried to save Kozo's life but having had him die anyway.
The initial guest, the rock band cast-off, glared at Kozo and jerked his head sharply towards their new arrival.
Oh, right. The 'say what I told you or else' part. "I know you did everything you could for me."
Having obviously seen Kozo's eyes shift back and forth between them and picking up on the cue, the apparent doctor-shinigami turned to his side to look at the man with the animal teeth who was currently pretending to have been studying the ceiling in boredom all this time. When the latter noticed eyes on him, he twisted his neck to face the redhead and demanded, "What?" in a challenging tone.
The shinigami brightened. "Last week you were a nurse-in-training, this week you're an assistant shinigami. Any other side-jobs you have that I should know about?" he teased.
A withering glare was his reply. "Didn't realize you wanted me to beat the shit out of you today. Why didn't you say something sooner?"
The other man only laughed in response to that, then took a few steps towards Kozo in a drastically more contented mood than he had been mere minutes ago. "Sorry, I'm keeping you waiting. We can do the konsō now." He glanced back over his shoulder. "You don't have to wait up for me. I'll come home after this."
His roommate (?) gave a noise of acknowledgement. "I'll grab your skin suit on my way so that you won't take so fuckin' long." And he was gone faster than Kozo's eyes could follow.
The shinigami turned back to Kozo. "Ready to go?"
"I guess so. Is this like, standard procedure?"
Another laugh. "Grimmjow isn't a regular part of the process, no. I would get a lot of complaints if that were the case. I guess this was just his way of doing something nice for me." He seemed to ruminate on the thought for a moment, still smiling a little fondly. "He doesn't always know how to show that he cares, even after this long, so I have to admit it's kind of cute when he tries."
There was a lot of backstory happening here that Kozo didn't have and - although it was a little curious considering the personalities involved from what he had observed - he did have some higher priorities at the moment. Such as not being stuck as a ghost in the hospital all night. "So, konsō time?"
Apparently embarrassed that he had been caught up in waxing sentimental out loud about his underground rock band cast-off, the shinigami nodded enthusiastically. "Konsō time," he agreed.