Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ichigo looked around carefully. It wasn’t like anyone else would be in the area, it was just natural reflex.

The long white halls, large three metre high ceiling and the complete and utter silence was getting to him.

The room he was in was large, white and filled with large, labelled portals. The portals were all two metres diameter, and a deep purple colour. The room must have been filled with thousands of portals, all leading to a different part of the living world.

Ichigo dropped all pretence of being quiet. After all, what was the use of a flashy exit if no one was there to see it?

He grinned evilly. This was gonna be so much fun!

He walked to one of the fire alarm switches and flicked it. Immediately, a loud wail echoed out of the basement, continuing to fill Soul Society.

Now all he had to do was wait.

He chose a random portal, and after reading the sign saying ‘AMERICA’, he deduced that the portal lead to America. Logic. Good thing that he knew how to speak English.

As the sound of running feet reached him, he walked until he was standing in front of the portal.

He smiled as the footsteps drew ever closer. Then, the trade mark sound of Shunpo reached his ears, and the captains arrived in the usual swish of clothes and whoosh of air.

Shunsui stood at the point of the triangle formation. He stepped forwards threateningly. “Kurosaki, Why are you here?” He questioned, his voice full of authority.

Ichigo grinned. “I’m gonna take a vacation, and you can’t stop me.”

Shunsui took another step forwards. “What?”

But he was too late to grab Ichigo. Ichigo had already jumped through the portal.

“Bye, Bitches!”

Then he was gone.

Hitsugaya summed up the entire situation with one word.

“Fuck.”

Chapter Text

Tony Stark sighed as he flipped through the pile of paper, completely consisting of job applications for his tower that was nearly complete.

Why oh why did Pepper give him THIS job? He was meant to sign off paperwork, not look through applications sent by stuck-up bigots. This was so boring! There weren’t even any electronic copies! At least some of the applications were slightly interesting; it seemed that Stark Industries attracted way too many strange people.

He flipped through more applications; insane scientist, weird scientist, creepy paedophile, tentacle monster/mutant, crazy stalker, freaky fangirl, freaky fanboy, Japanese delinquent, Pastafarian priest, ninj-

Wait a minute. He flipped back a few pages, and came face to face with the picture of a Japanese-looking young man with bright orange hair. Tony blinked at the picture for a few seconds, his shock causing him to stare.

He shook his head to clear it. At last he had (finally!) found someone interesting to occupy his time. He pulled the application from the pile and rifled through it. The guy wanted to be a janitor, huh? Not like he had the skills to be anything else, from the crappy-looking English translations. Thank you, non-existent god, for giving Delinquent Guy the sense to leave the original Japanese version of the resume with his shit translations.

He put it onto the pile for potential candidates, leaving the translation up to JARVIS. Translating’s boring anyway, and his basic Japanese was too shoddy to do much. He was too busy to waste his time when he had a computerised butler that could do it for him. He let out a big sigh, and mentally prepared to look at more potential applicants.

Kurosaki Ichigo…

Interesting indeed.

Behind a bench in a park located near the soon-to-be-completed Stark Tower, Ichigo Kurosaki was wondering how the homeless people depicted in American movies managed to stay warm with only newspaper blankets to huddle in.

The actors were probably freezing their balls off, the poor bastards. Ichigo grumbled as he tried to shift into a comfier ball, trying not to shift his pathetic attempt of a newspaper blanket off his body. Either way, he was fucking freezing.

He couldn’t even put on more layers, as he’d been stupid enough to bring only what he could fit on his body i.e. a shirt, a jumper, pants, socks and boots, his wallet, and a small, mostly useless Japanese-English dictionary and phrasebook. Even he wasn’t idiotic enough to try and start a fire, though. He didn’t want his frozen ass to be arrested, even if it would be warmer in a police cell…

His line of thought was thankfully interrupted by a beep from his iPhone. Well, it wasn’t his, per say, but it wasn’t like the original owner needed it anyway… He had expensive looking sunglasses, was wearing an expensive looking suit, and was speaking into another phone anyway, so it wasn’t like he was depriving the obviously rich man of anything. Besides, Ichigo was only borrowing it, he was totally going to return it… Who was he kidding? There was no way in fucking hell he was going to return an expensive phone to some corporate or government looking bastard.

On that note, what the hell was a S.H.E.I.L.D. anyway? There was a picture of an eagle on the logo, so it was obviously some kind of government thing or whatever. He felt a flash of worry that the owner (some P.C. person, according to the initials printed on the case) would find him, and then brushed them off. It’s not like it would cause an alien invasion or anything. That was just stupid.

He shook his head to clear away the thoughts of fucking rich government agents, and shifted carefully out of his crappily moulded cocoon of blankets to grab his (he stole it, it belonged to him now) phone.

He felt a growing feeling of both anxiety and anticipation as he saw 1 new message from an unknown number appear on the screen. He knew it had to be from a potential employer, seeing as they were the only ones with his phone number. Well, except for the people that knew the phone’s previous owner, but if it was then they would be in the phones contact list, wouldn’t they.

Therefore it was logical for a potential employer to reply; after all, he had sent his resume to all the places that had an advertisement in the newspaper, looking for staff. Said newspaper was now failing to keep him warm, and some pages had even flown away in the wind.

Ichigo screwed up his courage, and opened the unread message. It read, in an easy to read font:

Ichigo blinked, only understanding every few words. God damned Americans, with their fancy English, and their fancy, incomprehensible sentences. He frowned even deeper than usual, and opened Google Translate. Google didn’t help much. Eventually, after a lot of hard work translating the fucking message, Ichigo finally understood basically what it was saying.

He was not looking forward to Monday. On the upside, he was being given somewhere to say. With heating. Hopefully. And also he had a huge fucking pay. On the down side, he was going to have to do so much fucking work it wasn’t even funny. He was literally going to be worked to death.

At least he wasn’t going to cold anymore.