My Favorite Person

                                                    My Favorite Person

     “My favorite person is gorgeous! I’m going to marry a model, and she’ll cook me dinner wearing only an apron—”
     “Yes, thank you, Asano-san. You can sit down now. Next.”
     “What? But, Sensei, I wasn’t finished!”
     “Oh, you’re finished. Next.” Keigo visibly wilted while his classmates snickered. Ghostlike, he drifted back to his seat, sitting down with his script, crumpled into a ball, in front of him. He’d written such a great speech, too! The teacher had stopped him right before his favorite part, where he talked about his and his future wife’s billion-dollar mecha-anime robot-cosplay-making company! He’d stayed up all night trying to figure out how to say that in English!
     From the next desk over, Mizuiro prodded his shoulder with the eraser on his mechanical pencil. Keigo looked up and Mizuiro flicked a note onto his lap. Unfolding it, Keigo read,
     Sensei’s just jealous because she knows anyone who saw her wearing only an apron would claw their eyes out.
     Keigo unsuccessfully tried to hide a grin.
     “Like Keigo, my favorite person will also wear only an apron. She’ll also have a huge chest, like this…” Chizuru shoved her hands out in front of her in display of her future lover’s inevitable assets. The teacher sank her chin into her hand with a sigh.
     “Next.” Chizuru merely grinned, pushing up her glasses and swinging one of her arms out before her, pointing directly at Orihime, who merely stared at the other girl with wide eyes.
     “My favorite person also has long red hair and wears blue barrettes!”
     “Next.”
     “And her name’s Inoue Orihime!”
     From the back of the room, Tatsuki jumped up and slammed her fist into her desk.
     “Chizuru!” she growled warningly.
     “Next!” the teacher said again.
     For their English lesson that week, all the students in Ichigo’s class had had to write a one paragraph report on their “favorite person,” meaning specifically the type of person they were attracted to, or whom they would end up marrying. Ichigo thought it was a waste of time. Who knew that sort of thing until they met that person, anyway? His father had once told him that when he met his mother, he felt like he’d finally found something he hadn’t known he’d been waiting for his entire life.
     “That’s it, I’m taking volunteers. Who wants to go next?” The teacher seemed to be tiring quickly of her own assignment. Never before had she had so many perverts in one class.
     As if to prove her point, Mizuiro raised his hand. She stared at him blankly for a long moment. Then, finally, wondering if she could just give them all A’s—or fail them—and let them go home early, she gave an exasperated, stern, and weary,
     “Absolutely not. Next.”
     Inoue hopped to her feet, skirt whirling around pale thighs. Light from the windows caught her hair, combing through it in dusty rays.
     “I’ll go next!”
     “Go ahead, Inoue-san.” She skipped to the front of the room and twirled around, proudly beginning her presentation. Her English was softly accented, and all her R’s turned into L’s. Chizuru looked ready to have a nosebleed. Tatsuki looked ready to knock Chizuru into the next room.
     “My favorite person! By, Inoue Orihime!” She grinned winningly. “My favorite person will appreciate my cooking! He will ask me to make him many strange dinners and I’ll surprise him every morning with a new type of obento for him to take to work! I’ll be a firefighter right here in Karakura, so he’ll call me all the time to make sure I’m okay, but he’ll pretend he’s not checking up on me and tell me that he loved my spinach and curry pie instead!”
     As she continued, Ichigo and Sado exchanged amused glances. When Orihime found her ‘favorite person,’ they’d pay to meet him. Maybe he’d secretly have no taste buds.
     Sado decided to present after Orihime sat down. She excelled in grammar and vocabulary, but her accent needed serious work. Of course, she got away with it because of how cute she sounded. Sado had the opposite problem. His accent was flawless—even though he spoke both Spanish and Japanese fluently—but he sometimes confused English grammar with Spanish grammar, and so he often had curious mistakes in his speeches.
     “My favorite person thinks that the family is the most important thing in the world. Together, we will make a shrine for my grandfather and for any family that person has lost…” He stopped, and for a minute there, Ichigo thought the big guy’s natural straightforwardness had stopped him from making his speech any longer than he wanted it to be. But then he remembered what he’d told him before school that day—that he didn’t care about his future favorite person, at least until they met, and so he’d made up most of his speech.
     He grinned and leaned forward at his desk, ready to watch the teacher’s reaction.
     “…My favorite person also has amazing strength, and lifts one hundred of the elephants at zoos with one hand. On the other hand, this person does not fight, so I will protect a lot. Think of any typical boxing manga.” He held up one giant fist. “Except the main character doesn’t wear gloves.” He grinned and the class erupted into cheers. The teacher’s eyebrow twitched.
     “S-Sado-kun… I’d been depending on you…”
     “My apologies,” he said with a deep bow, and then returned to his seat. With a heavy sigh, she called for the next volunteer. Ichigo had gone first, so he had the pleasure of watching his classmates squirm. He’d confessed that he didn’t have a favorite person, and that he wouldn’t know what he was looking for until he found it, just like his own parents. But he had added that he wanted his favorite person to know everything about him. And by that, very few of his classmates knew, he meant that he wanted his future “favorite person” to know about his life as a substitute Shinigami.
     A quietness settled over the room as the remaining students glanced around at each other. No one else wanted to go; either they didn’t think their English was up to it, or they simply didn’t feel like describing their “type” to a roomful of other people.
     Amidst this uneasy silence, and just before the teacher opened her mouth to call on someone at random, Ishida Uryuu stood. The one boy for whom none of them could imagine a perfect match, the one boy for whom this speech about having a “favorite person” seemed really out of place, the room watched him, wide-eyed. His footsteps seemed to echo in their sharp click, clacks as he made his way to the front of the class. Then he turned around to face them, and even though he pushed up his glasses, he stared at the floor. His right hand slid around his chest, and his left elbow rested against his opposite wrist. Dangling there for all to see was the cross that marked him as a Quincy.
     “I have no desire to get married.” He had no accent. Not even a hint of his German peeked through. “Dating is not my thing.” He spoke English as well as any native speaker. “But I do believe that every person has a soul mate, somewhere.” His voice remained soft and steady as he poured his heart out on his classmates’ desks. Perhaps, Ichigo thought, he was depending on the fact that he was naturally smarter than all of them to get him through this. After all, it didn’t look like many other people could even understand what he was saying.
     Even Ichigo had trouble following some of it. His father bombarded him with English at home, and he practiced with his sisters, who wanted to learn it early so as to be ahead later on. As such, he had a leg up on people like Keigo, who could hardly speak English to save his life, or Chizuru, who’d clearly been confused by the colloquial expression “not my thing.”
     “My soul mate…” The term ‘soul mate’ was also not one many of them knew. Ishida’s slow pause let it sink in for Ichigo. “My soul mate walks home with a set of house keys in hand. Usually lost deep in thought, that person has a permanent scowl that can’t be helped. Trudging along sidewalks, my soul mate has a tendency to flip those keys up into an open palm in a steady rhythm. With hair that goes without brushing falling into eyes that I wish would meet mine every once in awhile, my soul mate never used to seem all that gorgeous to me. But now I don’t think I could find anyone else whom I’d rather waste time watching.
     “My soul mate rubs a calloused thumb over each key on that key ring, small though it is, before unlocking the front door. Invariably, that person’s keys go missing for the evening, because a rather overambitious, generously loving family tends to serve as a distraction from putting those keys in a safe place after using them.”
     As awkward a silence as preceded his speech followed it. Ishida walked back to his seat, eyes still on the floor, and once he was seated, the teacher said,
     “Next.”

     Ichigo ran his right hand through his hair, forcing chunks of bright orange to swerve in every direction. The moment he pulled his fingers away, his hair flared back up into a jungle of spikes. Untamable, it jutted back down in front of his eyes. He sighed, and the ends fluttered just a bit.
     He was sure that Ishida had missed the point of the assignment. Even though he hadn’t understood a lot of what the Quincy boy had said, he’d gotten the gist of it. But “My Favorite Person” wasn’t supposed to be about the person you liked at the moment.
     Short red hair, glasses, and a pair of grabby-hands suddenly came to mind, and Ichigo smiled grimly. Well, Chizuru was probably an exception. She’d always like Orihime because no one, other than maybe Rangiku, could ever be so well endowed.
     Clink.
     But really, thinking about it, Ishida seemed a bit like the type who’d turn out to be a hopeless romantic. Maybe he would be in love with the same person forever.
     Clink. The wrinkle in Ichigo’s brow tightened. What was he saying? That was ridiculous—they were only fifteen; of course Ishida wouldn’t be stuck with the same feelings his whole life.
     Well, what if the person Ishida had talked about turned out to be someone who could love him in return? Wasn’t requited love always easier to hold onto?
     And he’d said soul mate.
     Clink. Ichigo’s keys fell in an arc from his fingers and he swung them up again. Clink. And he’d sounded pretty certain.
     Any guy who was dead set on hating Shinigami even though his best friend was one sure had a lot of determination. Clink. So maybe he would just stay in love with this mystery person.
     Ichigo turned down the walkway to his house. Who was it, anyway?
     What had Ishida said? Which parts had Ichigo understood? Apparently, this person never used a hairbrush. And had a loving family, and… what was that word he’d used over and over again?
     Key.
     Clink.
     Ichigo stopped in front of his door and thumbed through each key, one at a time, and finally stuck the right one in the lock. Listening carefully, he heard his sister Karin say,
     “Dad, don’t be an idiot. He’s not going to fall for it. He never does.” His father shushed her while giggling to himself. Ichigo merely shook his head. Opening the door, he sidestepped, and watched his father tumble headfirst through the doorway.
     “I~chi~goooo-aahh!” With a crash, he landed on the walkway. Ichigo tugged his keys out of the door and stepped inside, only to be accosted by Yuzu, who jumped to hug him so firmly that his keys flew from his hand and clattered into the corner of the room.
     And it was then, seeing his keys lying there in a small, glittering pile, that he realized the true identity of Ishida’s soul mate.

     Ishida blew a sigh into the pages of his textbook. Who could possibly be at his door twenty minutes after class ended? And who would be so dumb as to keep knocking after five minutes of no one answering?
     Not that that was really knocking—it was more like an unyielding pounding, loud enough to summon Hollows out of Hueco Mundo. At first, he’d thought that if he ignored his visitor, he or she would eventually just leave. But apparently, that’s not how things worked.
     Grinding his teeth together, he tried to wait it out, but as the pounding continued and his aggravation mounted, he finally shut his textbook firmly and set it aside, climbing to his feet with his delicate hands balled into fists. Storming downstairs and over to the front door, he pulled it open with an irate expression.
     Only to be met by his favorite scowl.
     “I-Ichigo!” he gasped. Ichigo, cheeks softly reddened, brows furrowed, lightly panting from banging on Ishida’s door for six minutes without pause, grabbed Ishida by his tie and yanked him forward.
     Their lips met firmly, Ichigo’s forceful and hot; Ishida’s soft, supple, and moist, partly open in surprise. Ichigo lightly touched the other’s lips with his tongue, using his opposite hand to pull Ishida’s hips against his own.
     When Ichigo finally released the other boy, Ishida thirstily gulped down a breath of air in a noisy gasp. With a brilliant blush, he shoved his hands against Ichigo’s chest, meaning to push him away, meaning to get him off his front steps, but Ichigo merely clasped his hands around Ishida’s wrists and slowly strung their fingers together.
     “And for your information,” he said with that scowl that Ishida wished he could capture forever, “I do brush my hair.”