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The door of the shop slid open, and Tessai looked up from the ledger to find Yoruichi mid-stretch as she strolled in, the full-body unspooling of someone arriving home at the end of a long day. She glanced at him with a smile, kicking off her sandals by the door without even looking where they landed.
"Hi, Tessai. Where's Kisuke?"
He inclined his head, warm. Then his gaze travelled past her shoulder to the small figure in her wake and stopped there, flat and unwelcoming, silently asking why that one kept coming back to a place she so plainly despised. Soifon held it with the rigid dignity of someone too proud to back down. "In the lab, Yoruichi-dono," Tessai supplied, not looking away from the other woman. "He's been there since this morning."
"Of course he has," Yoruichi said in fond exasperation, already moving toward the back.
She dropped her beach bag on the low table in the next room as she passed it and opened the trap door leading to the underground cavern. "Come on, Soifon," she called over her shoulder, promptly putting an end to the glaring contest.
Soifon obediently followed Yoruichi down the ladder and to a remote corner of the underground chamber, where the rocky and blue cavern gave way to white, and there stood the entrance to Urahara's laboratory.
Inside, the lab was a dense sprawl of all kinds of machines and shelves crammed with parts. Cables snaked across the floor in every direction, taped down in a few conscientious places and left to tangle everywhere else.
At the threshold of the lab, Yoruichi stopped, and her reiatsu snuffed out like a candle - so cleanly it caught Soifon off guard.
"Stay here," Yoruichi breathed, her grin sharpening into something predatory, her attention already through the doorway and on the man inside. "Hide yours too."
Soifon flattened her own spiritual pressure, though why they were sneaking up on Urahara at all was beyond her. Yoruichi slipped through the doorway and was gone before she could ask.
There was a pause.
Then a thud, the unmistakable sound of a body meeting another body, a startled yelp, and a crash of furniture going down hard.
Soifon was moving before she'd decided to, drawn, despite Yoruichi's specific instructions, by the appealing prospect of watching Urahara being put in his place.
She got three steps into the lab before a cable caught her ankle, then a second, and whatever grace she'd started with did not survive the trip. She clutched at a storage rack, hidden from view, expecting to find him sprawled and humiliated. What she found instead stopped her cold.
Urahara was on his back on the floor. His chair had gone over with him and lay on its side a little way off, one of its small wheels still spinning lazily in the air, ticking down. And astride him, settled across his hips with the loose comfort of long habit, was Yoruichi, still in her swimsuit, her laugh so carefree and unguarded that Soifon almost didn't believe it was hers.
Beneath her, Urahara looked perfectly at ease for a man who had just been tackled to the floor. His hat had come off somewhere. His hands rested on her hips as naturally as if they belonged there, and he was chuckling up at her, low and real, nothing like the affected foolishness he wore in front of everyone else.
"You're getting slow," Yoruichi informed him, entirely too pleased with herself.
"Oh, I could have dodged," Urahara assured her, bending his knees so she could lean back on his thighs. "I just didn't want to."
She snorted. "Keep telling yourself that, old man."
He chuckled and refrained from pointing out that she was, at most, ten minutes younger than him.
Instead, his thumb moved against her hip, gaze dragging over her body. "Hello, Yoruichi-san. You look particularly fetching this evening," he said, voice dropping.
She arched her back, unhurried, smirking down at him. "Enjoying the view?"
His eyes never left her. "Immensely."
She shifted her weight, a small deliberate wiggle, and whatever she felt beneath her was enough to make her grin widen. Urahara's expression flickered, barely, and he took it with the composure of a man who had no intention of reacting now to something he fully meant to address later.
Behind a bank of humming machines, Soifon knew she should leave. Whatever this was, it was not meant for her eyes. Leaving, unfortunately, required movement, and movement had so far gone poorly.
So she stayed where she was, held less by the cables than by a curiosity she wasn't proud of, if she was being honest about it.
And the longer she looked, the more it grated - the ease of them, the shameless flirting, the thumb that had not, she noted with rising distress, stopped its small idle stroking once. None of it seemed remarkable to them. This was simply how they were when no one was watching - and that, more than anything, was what she couldn't stand.
"How was the beach?" Urahara asked, as though he were not currently being used as furniture.
"Good." Yoruichi retrieved his credit card from somewhere about her person and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jinbei, her fingers very deliberately brushing the bare skin of his chest on the way. "We smashed watermelons. Hunted sharks."
"Hmm. Sounds like fun. I assume Tessai is thrilled. He's been in a bit of an adventurous culinary mood lately. And I believe the kids have never had shark."
"What are you talking about? I didn't bring them back."
"You said you hunted them."
She rolled her eyes. "For fun. Not for dinner."
His entire face fell dramatically at that. Yoruichi snorted at his antics, not fooled for a second.
"Anyway," she said, stretching. "I'm off to train with Soifon. Anything you need delivered to the Gotei 13 while I'm there? More of those special war items the Captain Commander wanted?"
Something in him sobered at that and he sat up without dislodging her, reaching for the desk. "Not this time, but I have something for you."
"It's not your portable gigai again, right?" she said lightly, hoping to coax the ease back into him. "Because the last time I took one of those to the Soul Society, a certain Captain nearly had a heart attack, and as much as I'd love to do it again-"
The words died on her lips as he produced the bulky thing, pale and ridged, tapering like a claw to a blunt heavy head. Her eyes narrowed as he turned it over in his hands to show her how it would fit, and there was nothing of the shopkeeper on his face anymore.
"For Aizen," he said. "There are four - arms and legs, one apiece." He nodded at the desk, where the others sat stacked. "I'd like you to train with them for a while. Get used to them, so they're second nature by the time we face him."
Yoruichi wrinkled her nose at the armour. "You're kidding, right? They're enormous."
"They're a lot lighter than they look. A special synthetic material I created, derived from Arrancar hierro."
She took the gauntlet from his hands and weighed it in one palm. It was, irritatingly, exactly as light as he claimed. She scowled at it anyway.
"They look bothersome, Kisuke. They'll slow me down."
"You fought Yammy. You know how hard their hierro is."
"Yammy? I walked all over that guy, Kisuke."
He heard the bravado in it for exactly what it was. "You did," he allowed. "For two minutes."
"Two minutes was all it took." She tossed the gauntlet from one hand to the other, already bored of the argument.
They both knew it wasn't true, but he let her have it anyway. "Against Yammy. Aizen will be a different matter entirely."
"I've faced worse."
He didn't answer right away. "You haven't. Neither of us have."
She bristled, chin coming up. "I'm still-"
"Yoruichi."
Just her name. She stopped.
"The thought of you going at him barehanded... It doesn't sit well with me," he said quietly.
The lab hummed on around them, indifferent. She searched his face for the joke, for the way out he built into everything he said. He didn't have one. He was not performing worry. He was simply worried, and had let her see it, which he did approximately never.
Something in her gave. She held his gaze a moment longer, then let out a breath. "Fine. I'll train with them."
He tipped his forehead to hers. "Thank you."
For a moment, neither of them moved.
That was more than Soifon could stand to watch.
It wasn't the closeness of it, or not only that. It was that he'd argued with Yoruichi-sama and held his ground and she'd let him, had taken him seriously, met him as an equal - and now this, foreheads bent together like it was nothing. Soifon had spent decades reaching for that kind of standing and never once closed the distance. The stupid shopkeeper had it without even trying.
She turned to go.
And it was at this point - the precise worst point - that Soifon, who had been attempting with infinite care to extract herself and retreat to the corridor before either of them realised she was there, put her foot down on the one stretch of floor she had believed to be clear, and discovered it wasn't.
The sound she made was small. It was not small enough.
Two heads turned.
"Soifon," said Yoruichi, with the delight of someone who had known her protégée was there watching them and had simply been content to let her marinate. "I told you to stay at the entrance. Come out of there. Quit lurking."
Soifon obeyed with as much dignity as the cables had left her, and stood very straight, arms at her sides, chin level, in the parade posture of a soldier presenting herself for an inspection she had not requested and did not want.
Urahara looked at her, and if he was surprised to see her, he didn't show it. He shifted Yoruichi back an inch on his thighs, as though that could undo everything Soifon had already seen today.
"Well, hello there, Captain Soifon. I see you've been exploring my lab."
Soifon's jaw tightened. She had been doing no such thing, and besides, it was hardly her fault the deathtrap he called a laboratory was strewn with cables.
"Well?" Yoruichi asked him. "What do you think of her swimsuit?"
She froze as he took in the swimsuit. That childish, garish thing Soifon had endured all afternoon and prayed no one would ever comment on. Something worked in his face, the look of a man biting back the first three things he wanted to say.
"Errr…" He stopped. Started again, picking his way carefully. "It's very-" A pause. "- a bold choice," he managed at last, and the sheer effort of everything he'd left unsaid was almost audible.
"I picked it," Yoruichi announced proudly, almost wicked about it, as though claiming credit for a prize-winning vegetable.
Urahara looked back at her with open incredulity, careful words be damned. "Yoruichi-san. She looks like an overgrown five-year-old."
"She looks cute."
"She's the captain of the Onmitsukidō." He gestured at Soifon with the flat of his hand, presenting Exhibit A. "She is one of the most dangerous people in Soul Society and you have dressed her like a child who has wandered away from a sandcastle."
Soifon stood rigid under the gesture, refusing to dignify it with a reaction.
"She can be dangerous and cute. They're not mutually exclusive, Kisuke, you're being very narrow about this."
"There is nothing narrow about observing that a woman who could decimate an army of menos without breaking a sweat should not be wearing a pattern designed for an infant."
And they were off, the two of them, so wrapped up in each other you'd think they'd forgotten she was still in the room.
Soifon stood very still in the middle of it and confronted a horror she had not been braced for.
She agreed with him.
She agreed with him completely. The swimsuit was idiotic. She had known it from the moment Yoruichi had brandished it at her with that particular gleam, and she had worn it anyway because she could refuse Yoruichi-sama almost nothing. And here at last was a voice saying the thing she had not allowed herself to say, and because the universe hated her, the voice belonged to Urahara Kisuke.
And it got worse.
Because underneath the agreement sat a small, unwelcome warmth she could only identify, with mounting dismay, as gratitude. He'd looked at her in the ridiculous thing and what rose in him was not amusement but something like indignation on her behalf.
"-and besides," Yoruichi was finishing, with the air of someone who had already won the argument, "I wouldn't take fashion advice from a man who dresses like a homeless beach vendor."
"My clothes are comfortable and mysterious, which is exactly the intended effect."
"Sorry to burst your bubble, Mister Genius, but your clothes look ridiculous and unhygienic, and if they weren't conveniently acting as a repellent for literally every woman in existence, I'd have burnt them a long time ago."
Urahara gasped, one hand flying to his chest as though she'd run him through. He stood, lifting her with him, and Yoruichi made a low, pleased sound at the friction involved, well aware he was doing it on purpose.
He made no hurry of the short distance to the desk, letting every inch of the movement register, their eyes locked in a way that had stopped being about the argument entirely. Then he set her on the edge of it and stepped back at once, putting a full, decisive foot of air between them.
He retrieved his hat and rearranged his rumpled jinbei with great moody ceremony, looking at her pointedly the entire time - the picture of wounded dignity.
She grinned at him, unrepentant.
His gaze moved past her to Soifon, still snared where the cables had left her, and something in his manner shifted back to courtesy. He crossed to help her work them free.
"Captain Soifon. I apologise for my associate's horrendous taste. Should you ever require a swimsuit that complements your form, I am entirely at your disposal."
Yoruichi let out a peal of laughter, delighted. "Don't trust him, Soifon. His idea of women's clothing is three scraps of fabric and no shame whatsoever."
The gratitude Soifon had been so unwillingly nursing evaporated on the spot, replaced by something far more familiar and far more comfortable.
"The only way that's happening is with your eyes gouged clean out of your skull," she sneered down at him.
A pause. She made a show of looking around her. "This place is an absolute disgrace, by the way."
He lifted her foot with surprising care to unhook the last cable and straightened up to answer her. "I'm doing science here. Not interior design. If-"
He stopped, eyes narrowing at a point on the top of her head, and reached out.
Soifon went rigid, every inch of her braced to remove the offending hand at the wrist if it came any closer - but before she could commit to it, he simply plucked the thing free, and held it up: a small twist of copper wire. He frowned at it, thoughtful, turning it once in the light, then looked past her shoulder toward the path that led to the door with the trailing cables, visibly attempting to reconstruct the sequence of events by which this had ended up there.
"If some people don't want to trip over every little thing," he went on, "they should just watch their step. Quite simple, really."
Her eyes flashed in anger, and before she could resort to violence, Yoruichi's voice rang out.
"Alright, cut it out, you two. Soifon, grab the armor and head out, I'll be right with you."
Kisuke gathered the four pieces of armour off the desk, bound them into two neat pairs, and handed them across to her.
Soifon turned for the door while Yoruichi and Kisuke talked in hushed voices behind her, too low for her to hear.
She caught a flicker of movement at the edge of her vision and glanced back, and would have sworn on her command that in the half-second before Yoruichi flickered away from the desk and reappeared at her side, the two of them had been kissing.
Yoruichi took the armour out of her hands as though it had never been in question that she would carry it.
"I'll be back tomorrow evening," Yoruichi called over her shoulder. "Keep dessert for me, will you?"
"I will keep exactly all of it for you, Yoruichi-san," he replied cheerfully as he sat back at his desk, making her chuckle in delight.
Soifon assured herself they were talking about actual food and hurried to the exit.
Even watching her step carefully, she kept tripping over the cables, and began to suspect the whole lab was just one elaborate booby trap. Behind her, she was almost certain she heard Urahara make a small, satisfied sound - the sound of a man whose work was performing exactly as designed.
Each time, before she could so much as begin to fall, Yoruichi's hand was there at her elbow, setting her right. She said nothing about it, steering her former student out of the lab and up toward the world above with the ease of someone showing a guest through a house she could navigate in the dark.