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Serpentine hunger coils in his stomach, digging its claws in the walls of his guts and trying to climb up his throat. It makes him nauseous but he will not stoop to vomit.
Having a missing limb, Grimmjow learns, really fucks with his sense of balance. There's still the phantom sensation of his left arm beneath the bloody stump that remains, a cramping pain crawling up a bone that isn't there at all, the memory of Kurosaki's pulse engraved onto the tips of his missing fingers from when he'd had that hand wrapped around that boy's throat.
The boy's almost there, almost perfect— he just needs a little more fire, he just needs to burn a little more.
He can't shake the image of Kurosaki brought down to his knees on the asphalt, blood streaming down his face. A trickle of carmine from his nose, smeared over his lip. He had looked the inevitable right in the damn eyes, jaws clenched in staggering determination, fierce resolve and blatant challenge shining through the curtain of crimson.
Grimmjow shivers.
Kurosaki Ichigo.
The name rings inside his body, bouncing off his capillary beds, the lattice of his bones. Ulquiorra's reports couldn't have been further from the truth. Ulquiorra's scattered eyeball hadn't shown them how that boy burned.
How the inexorable force field of his fire drew everything closer to itself. Closer to madness.
“You poor thing.”
Grimmjow comes back to his surroundings with the infuriating lilt of Luppi's voice. It rubs him the wrong way. “Is your arm healing well, Grimmjow?” Luppi says, leaning against the wall.
Grimmjow clenches his jaw and doesn't say anything. He needs to preserve his energy, focus all of it into healing as fast as he can so he can go back and fight that boy again.
“Oh, did you hear?” Luppi says just as he's about to leave, like he's remembered something important, but Grimmjow knows damn well that all of this is for the drama. To rub the salt deeper into the wound, some way or the other. Luppi turns halfway towards him, chin resting over his shoulder. “Lord Aizen's sending another squadron to the Human World.”
Grimmjow dearly wants to rip that sickly sweet smile right off Luppi's face, and he would've done so, he would've done it without sparing a second thought if he was his self from two days in the past.
The problem is, he isn't.
The scar across his chest throbs.
There was a time when he used to think survival was the only purpose of this postmortem life of his.
He had to cling to this existence, biting his way through the flesh of his enemies. It was easy in a way, since every other being around him was his enemy. No time wasted in calculations. As he'd grown stronger, he'd found his aim: evolution. Climbing up every steep rung on the hierarchy of power meant he'd left behind those lower than him as prey, and he was yet to kill the ones still above him, the predators.
With Kurosaki, he has found his reason.
Or the lack of it, anyway, but he stands up and rips the bandages off his trunk.
“What the hell do you think you're doing, Grimmjow?” Luppi demands, taking a step back, the fear he's so desperately trying to suppress raising his voice three pitches in scale. Despicable.
Grimmjow doesn't owe anybody any explanations. He brushes past Luppi, and walks to the throne room of Las Noches.
Yammy is there, along with the most recent Arrancar that Aizen created. Grimmjow's forgotten his name, but the look in the kid's eyes doesn't sit right with him.
Aizen, for his part, curls the corner of his mouth upwards, mostly in idle amusement, partly in permission.
Grimmjow is out of the clusterfuck as soon as the Descorrer opens somewhere over Karakura Town. He has somewhere to be. Someone to kill.
Wind cuts across his face as he skims over the city. He won't have to go all the way after all, he realises in unadulterated delight, he's not the only one who's itching for another fight.
Kurosaki is looking for him too.
Grimmjow halts, and Kurosaki stops in front of him.
The daylight makes the amber of his eyes more devastating— the sight of them burning like a desert fire inside the hollow cavity of Grimmjow's chest, under his prickling skin, brushing a line of heat along the scar running across his body. Kurosaki stands in front, against the sun, the brilliant orange of his hair glowing like a halo around his head.
Kurosaki's armed with something that Grimmjow can't even see, much less defend himself against.
Inside his mind, Pantera howls.
Kurosaki's eyes are shining. Grimmjow will never be able to place that look, he doesn't have the right parts. He can't swallow past the feeling that's lodged itself in his windpipe, the cold dread breathing on his neck.
Kurosaki's reiatsu is fire-bright, a constant simmer under his skin, mimicking beats over his long dead pulse. It courses through him, through nerve and marrow and sinew and vein, pulsating behind his eyes, in his throat. He could never forget the taste of it, the signature that's been burned onto his very skin.
There will be no reprieve for him anywhere in all of Hueco Mundo or the Human World, as long as those eyes keep looking at him.
“I have one thing to ask,” Kurosaki says, “Grimmjow.”
There's a slight frown between his brows. Grimmjow watches those eyes dart over his body, and a whirlpool of heat rises inside his body, unbidden.
“What happened to your arm?”
What a fucking idiot.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Waking up feels like floating up to a dim surface from the depths of ink-black water.
Ichigo comes to a few seconds before his respiratory drive kicks in, and then his head is finally over the water and he's gasping for breath.
He opens his eyes to Inoue's tear-streaked face.
It takes a while for the world to slot back into axis, before he can fit all that his senses are perceiving into their respective places. Inoue looks alright, although her face is pale and she looks like she's about to burst into tears again. She's kneeling over him, and oh, oh, that's the light of her healing shield.
He's being healed.
What the hell had happened to him?
His mouth won't move. His vocal chords won't cooperate and he can't speak, all of his questions terminating as a weak twitch of his lips.
Something small and green wobbles into his field of vision, crying his name with a childish lisp.
Nel!
And then it hits him— the blaze of blue like an assault against his senses.
That is Grimmjow. Standing at the entryway of the ruins of the chamber. The light touches his body and curls around the sharp edges, his shadow falling slant across Ichigo's face.
“This isn't the time for tearful reunions.” Grimmjow says, “Save that shit. Get healed fast so I can—”
Another reiatsu appears at the doorway.
“What do you think you're doing, Grimmjow?” Ulquiorra's voice says, in that same uncanny monotone that's devoid of all inflection. “Why are you healing him when I have already defeated him?”
Grimmjow smirks, its feral edge splitting his face into two. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Ulquiorra?”
Ichigo can't move. From where he's lying on the ground, with Inoue kneeling right next to him, he can see that Grimmjow is walking forward, casually. Like he's taking an evening stroll.
When he stops, Ichigo realises that Grimmjow has placed himself between Ulquiorra and them. “Seeing that you've taken the trouble to visit me, I guess I should,” He charges forward with an animal growl and a cero glowing, growing scarlet at the tip of his index, “Welcome you!”
There's nothing Ichigo can do but watch, helpless and shrouded in a protective shield.
“Don't worry, Kurosaki-kun,” Inoue says, her fingers fisted so tight into the fabric of her skirt that Ichigo's worried she'll draw blood. The fight nearly drowns out her voice, but not quite. “I have a feeling he won't let Ulquiorra hurt us.”
“No one's hurting you.” Ichigo says, reflexively. “I'm here, aren't I?”
“No. I didn't mean that.” A small smile wavers over Inoue's mouth, like the shadow of smoke. “Grimmjow won't let me die because I'm useful to him. I will heal you. And as for you, he won't let anyone else touch a hair on your head.” She looks down at her lap. “I couldn't tell you why. But I know in my heart that I'm right.”
They watch Grimmjow as he taps a little shimmering polygon of purple into Ulquiorra's hollow hole, just below the dip of his collarbones. Space convolutes around Ulquiorra. A howling vacuum materialises out of thin air and sucks Ulquiorra into its dark womb.
Grimmjow descends onto the ground. The sand beneath his feet churns with the pressure of his reiryoku.
“What was that?” Inoue asks, her voice shaking only a little.
“Caja Negacìon.” Grimmjow replies, albeit sullenly. Ichigo draws a quick breath in surprise, because he didn't think Grimmjow would've deigned to reply at all. “It's something Aizen gave to all of us Espadas, in order to permanently banish any one lesser.”
“But—” Inoue begins.
“Yes. But.” Grimmjow grins, the tip of his sharp canine glinting in the light. “It can hold Ulquiorra for about four hours. Which is why I'm telling you to hurry the fuck up!”
“I'll heal faster if you rest yourself, Inoue.” Ichigo breaks through the conversation, mustering the strongest smile he can. “You've exerted yourself a lot. You can rest a little, Inoue.”
Inoue tries to smile back but her lip wobbles, and then her eyes well up again. She's exhausted, however much she tries to brave it, and Ichigo curses himself. If only he'd been stronger.
“Why did you bother to seal him?” Ichigo asks, once Inoue has clearly fallen into a doze beside him.
“I don't want any damn distractions when I'm fighting you.” Grimmjow says from where he's sitting over a flattened rock.
Ichigo looks up at him from the ground. Grimmjow took Ulquiorra's Cero point blank into his hand, and deflected it so it didn't come anywhere near where he and Inoue were. “Your arm needs to be healed too before we fight.”
“I don't need your fuckin' pity.” Grimmjow spits, even as smoke is still rising from his skin, fingers flexed painfully with the insult to the tendons.
It begins to click into place a little, Grimmjow's world runs on a very twisted definition of a barter system. It's all give and take. Everything comes with a price and nothing happens just because.
Ichigo's heart, not fully healed yet, twists inside his chest.
“It's not pity.” He says, and Grimmjow squints at him, “There's no point in defeating you when you're already at a disadvantage.”
He's said the right thing. Grimmjow's face splits into a feral grin, the depth of his blue eyes lighting up with vicious fire. This is Grimmjow's language.
Ichigo knows it. Because it's his too.
“Fine.” Grimmjow acquiesces, “You first. After the woman wakes up, I'll get mine healed too.”
Ichigo huffs in response, and relaxes his muscles to let his back rest a little.
“How did your arm heal?” He asks cautiously, because the part in his brain that promotes self-preservation doesn't function like it should.
“Why don't you ever shut the fuck up?” Grimmjow says, annoyance pulling his eyebrows closer together on his forehead.
Ichigo does shut the fuck up. His mind takes him back to a day burned into his memory, Karakura Town shining in the winter sunlight a mile beneath his feet.
I cut it off myself, Grimmjow had said, the smile on his face half amused, half dismissive, and wholly surprised.
“Stop thinking.” Grimmjow's sharp voice snaps Ichigo out of his thoughts. “It's painful from all the way over here.”
“What the fuck is your problem?” Ichigo retorts, “I haven't talked!”
“That woman.” Grimmjow grunts out begrudgingly after another few minutes of uncomfortable silence. “She healed it.”
“Inoue did?” Ichigo feels his eyebrows shoot upwards in consternation.
“Aizen ordered her to.” Grimmjow says, looking off into the distance, the angle of his jaws made sharper by clenched muscle.
“What happened to me?” Ichigo asks.
Grimmjow peels his lips back from his teeth. “You lost.”
“And you brought Inoue to heal me?” Ichigo can't hold himself back from asking. He knows that he would have died here, if he wasn't dead already, if Inoue hadn't arrived here in time. And it was Grimmjow who brought her here.
He won't let anyone else touch a hair on your head, Inoue's voice says in his mind. I couldn't tell why.
Ichigo remembers the feeling of touching Grimmjow's sword mid-fight, their second day in Karakura, right after Ichigo had brought out his hollow mask for the first time.
It had felt like getting swept off his feet in a storm. Except it was worse, because there was no beginning to it, no visible end. There was nothing but hunger, nothing but yearning so bone deep that it had translated to bloodthirst.
Everything was a muddle of grey. There were no directions, just violent vectors hurtling everywhere all at once, a dimension beyond form, beyond imagination, so deep that it felt like being turned inside out.
“Why do you think?” Grimmjow spits out, “Because I will kill you.”
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
The ground beneath his feet still carries the faint tremor from their fight not so long ago, the air quivering with the song of metal against metal, claw against skin. Grimmjow can't tell if that is because his ears are ringing, or because the dunes are still returning the sounds as echoes.
Hueco Mundo is more alive than it has ever been, thrumming with the vibrant signature of Kurosaki's spiritual power scattered everywhere, interlaced with Grimmjow's own.
Grimmjow cannot let himself die here.
He pushes himself up, gritting his teeth against the threat of his hamstrings about to give out any second. A little more, a little further, a little longer, Grimmjow thinks with such fervent desperation that in another life, he'd have called it a prayer.
Reiryoku blasts out of his exhausted body, wrung to its very limit, raising sand in a storm around him once again.
Kurosaki whips his head back, relief and colour draining from his face faster than the heaving of Grimmjow's own breaths, and that look in those widened amber eyes is why Grimmjow can still stand, still contract his muscles enough to take the next breath.
Good. That is how Kurosaki should always look at him.
Not like how he did minutes ago, when he held Grimmjow's wrist with such cruel tenderness while lowering him gently to the ground from a mid-air suspension.
It makes Grimmjow sick. It makes him ache.
His bone crown is crumbling, a crack down the very centre of it. It will not last much longer, nor will the breath in Grimmjow's lungs, but there's still enough to kill Kurosaki and make sure Kurosaki's eyes close with his near-simultaneously.
When did his priorities skew this far?
At the moment Grimmjow is incapable of thinking that far behind. His Resurrecíon is giving out, the plates over his body are dissolving into the supercharged atmosphere, his feet are getting heavier on the slipping sand beneath. Pantera returns to her sealed form in his hand, reconstructing from hilt to guard to finally the blade.
Something flashes across Kurosaki's eyes that Grimmjow can't identify. Like the shadow of a cloud against the sun, the corners of his eyes pinched as if he's pained by what he's seeing.
Grimmjow raises his sword. For once and for all, he will cut down everything that stands in his path.
Ever since one cold night over sunwarm asphalt, that has been Kurosaki, above all, above everything else.
Kurosaki's hand moves, a flick of his wrist swinging his sword in one graceful curve.
This is it. Grimmjow rushes forward, even as every fibre in his body screams at him not to, even as Pantera warns him, her clear voice ringing inside his head like a death toll, but he can't stop now, he can't stop— Kurosaki is looking at him with his brilliant amber eyes and his windswept hair. The strike will hit anytime, anytime now, once again metal against metal, music once again, that joy that exceeds every other—
But nothing happens.
Kurosaki's empty hand closes around Grimmjow's wrist. Kurosaki's sword is buried in the sand, diagonally across from both of them.
Then everything happens all at once.
Everything is compressed into the heart of a few seconds stretched so slow that nothing seems to be moving. An universe exploding from the singularity. There's excruciating light drowning everything, crackling down every raw nerve ending.
“If you hate me so much, then I'll fight you whenever you want.”
Kurosaki's hand is a burning ring around his wrist, Kurosaki's words bright in the space held by his cranium, Kurosaki's voice a forbidden warmth in the place below his throat and above his diaphragm.
Grimmjow can feel everything— every callus on Kurosaki's palm from the patterned hilt of his sword, the criminal warmth diffusing from Kurosaki's skin to his— there's too much detail, too much information to process and it's overwhelming even to his predator senses, input flooding his nerves and it feels like everything is on fire, a thousand bolts of lightning striking him over and over. It's going to kill him and it's exhilarating,
The moment passes. The pain withdraws, swift as it began.
In front of him, Kurosaki is breathing hard.
He still hasn't let go of Grimmjow's wrist, standing there like he's been struck dumb, looking at Grimmjow as if he's suddenly sprung two heads.
Grimmjow doesn't know how much time has passed, a second, a minute, an hour, there are no units of time that make sense except the before and after of Kurosaki's fingers around his wrist, before and after Kurosaki's promise.
Grimmjow realises that he can wrench his hand away.
He does.
Kurosaki looks pained. “Grimmjow, what—”
He doesn't get to finish that sentence.
A flash of metal reflects in his widened eyes and Grimmjow barely gets time to move a fraction of a centimetre to the right before the blow hits.
At first, there's nothing.
Then there's heat, a constricting semilunar band around his neck and he's falling. Then, the pain. The falling.
Grimmjow!
Kurosaki screams. He sounds genuinely scared for a second there, beyond alarm, beyond concern. Frantic, more frantic than he was before he took five explosives to his back.
If Kurosaki had looked away from him, Grimmjow wouldn't have been able to see the reflection.
And likewise, he hasn't looked away from Kurosaki either, not for a single breath, Kurosaki's face against the sun is burned onto the back of his retinas like Kurosaki's reiatsu is branded over his chest and inside it. He hasn't looked away from Kurosaki.
Kurosaki's voice is still ringing inside his head.
But Kurosaki has not spoken. Kurosaki has not moved a single muscle.
Kurosaki touched him. His wrist.
Grimmjow falls. Everything tilts slowly, the moment stretched in time not only from the pain of the blow, but also from the pain of realisation.
Oh. Shit—
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
His mind is still reeling from the shock, is what Ichigo tells himself.
There's a bone-deep exhaustion weighing him down, the ache spreading from inside him like thick, black tar. Pain like he's never known before, pain multiplied viciously by hunger, augmented cruelly by desperation. It makes him want to fall apart.
He recognises this feeling.
The Arrancar in front bares his teeth in a convoluted grin.
“Who the hell are you?” Ichigo asks. “An Espada?”
He cannot afford to let even the slightest shred of his consciousness slip from the present. Ichigo has to focus every atom of his being into the here and the now if he wants to get out of this one alive, but there's a feeling that he can't ignore— the feeling that there's something inside his head that isn't him.
This wouldn't be the first time this has happened to him, would it? Except this one is already familiar, somehow.
“Nnoitra, you bastard. . .” Grimmjow rasps from the ground.
“You're still not dead?” The Arrancar sneers, most likely he's an Espada too, and then he moves.
He's aiming for Grimmjow.
There's barely enough time to retrieve Zangetsu and block the swinging downstrike of the scythe.
He will not let Grimmjow die like this. He will not let anyone die like this in front of his eyes, but especially not Grimmjow. He's just made a promise.
Grimmjow doesn't deserve to die like this. He won't let Grimmjow die, not so fast.
The other feeling inside his mind is shocked into disbelieving silence. It feels like rudiments of bewilderment, of utter confusion.
Ichigo reasons that it is because he is surprised as well— this guy's skin over bones but he's shockingly strong.
But then again, he's more infuriated than he is surprised. It's the other something in his head that isn't quite him that's surprised.
At any rate, Ichigo can't spend any more time looking into what he's feeling. They can't fight here, because Grimmjow doesn't look like he's anywhere near a condition to remove himself from the field and even that is an overstatement. Grimmjow looks like he's about to pass out at any damn moment.
Helplessness settles at the bottom of Ichigo's spine, beginning to creep up with its cold slippery tendrils.
Away. The answer flashes in his mind, along with a wave of desperate determination, an ferocious yearning to survive, to get out of this alive at any cost: he has to lead this fight away from Grimmjow, somehow.
Ichigo pushes through the bone-breaking pain and it's working, it's working— he can push the scythe back. He has to synchronise the momenta perfectly.
“Getsuga Tenshō!” A jet of crimson-black surges out of Zangetsu, most of its explosive power focused into the single point of contact between Ichigo's sword and the Arrancar's scythe, and Ichigo puts all of his power in propelling himself forward, and the Arrancar has no choice but to withdraw his sword to defend.
The plan works.
The next time Ichigo can pause for a heartbeat to take a breath, he realises that the inside of his mind is quiet again.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow floats at the hazy margin between agony and oblivion.
Pain shoots through his body, unending pain exploding inside a closed chamber, the force of it shaking at the hinges of his skeleton, battering his eardrums open. He's screaming, he thinks, his howls concentrated in the hot air coagulated over him, carried by the air to the sand and returned ad nauseam.
He's screaming. He can't scream.
It feels like someone's crushing his ribs one by fucking one, and he's screaming his agony, his throat raw like its full of ground glass.
Everything dips into black. Again.
He wakes up. Again. He's hollower than he's ever been. He's senseless with it, trying to rip his own limbs open with pure scalar fury, his teeth bared in a bloody snarl.
He bites at the sand, at his own flesh. He's never wanted to kill so much, so dearly. His body is going to explode inside out from the spiritual pressure. A dim thought floats to the surface, a Vasto Lorde—
Blood mixes with drool from his slack mouth and seeps into the sand beneath.
He wakes up and he wakes up and he wakes up. He's underwater. He's delirious from the pain. He's filled with quiet resolve. He's making up his mind to walk into the fire knowing he will come out as scattered ashes.
No, no, goddamnit, no, he can't die, he has to live, he has to survive—
Unconsciousness anaesthetises him again.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
The dust is settling.
“Everyone is okay, Kurosaki-san,” Urahara says, a small reassuring smile on his clearly exhausted face, “Your friends have been returned safely.”
Ichigo feels relief envelop him like a warm, well worn blanket, tension seeping out from the taut muscles of his back slowly. All is well, then.
“The vessel sealing Aizen-san has also been delivered to the Court of Pure Souls without any untoward events. It's under the jurisdiction of the Central Forty-Six now.”
A strong breeze rustles through the trees that circumscribe this clearing, reaching all the way to Ichigo, brushing over the longer strands of hair at his nape, over his bare arms, around the tattered remains of the shihakushō covering him.
Eventually, even the wind stops. Leaves stop whispering and the quieter the surroundings become, the louder Ichigo can hear the whirlwind of chaos inside his mind.
“When I was finally able to fight Aizen's as an equal battle,” Ichigo says out loud for no one in particular, “I finally touched his sword.”
Urahara is quiet behind him, so still that Ichigo can't even hear him breathe. That's how he knows Urahara's listening to him.
“There was nothing inside his sword but solitude.”
A part of him feels like finally, he can understand Aizen a little better. The larger part of him is still trying to put the pieces of a separate puzzle together, a nagging thought that he cannot get out of his tired mind no matter how hard he tries to convince himself.
What was that feeling inside his head?
What was that feeling when he had touched Grimmjow?
“Urahara-san,” This time he really is asking, but this time he doesn't have the words for it. He doesn't even know what he wants to ask. “If you've fought a particular opponent for a long time, is it possible to keep feeling what you felt when you touched his sword, even a long time after the battle has ended?”
Even when you're a world apart, Ichigo wants to ask. He isn't feeling any of it now, but it was there, inside his mind undeniably there— Ichigo would never mistake it. He'd know it with all of his senses taken away from him.
The feeling inside Grimmjow's sword.
The hunger. The grim determination. The yearning for survival. For something more.
He had felt it while fighting Nnoitra. He had felt it when he was facing Ulquiorra, and he had felt it once while training in the Severed World, like the feeling wanted to tear him open.
It's not a trick his mind is playing on him, he's sure of it.
“Kurosaki-san,” Urahara is saying, his voice even and measured as always, “Could you perhaps elaborate on it a little?”
“Back in Hueco Mundo, when I—”
“Kurosaki-kun!”
Ichigo whips his head back at the sound of that voice. He has to guard his eyes against the sun to look at the people walking towards him— Inoue and Rukia walking in front, followed by Renji and Ishida, and then Chad behind all of them, leaning his weight on a crutch.
Everyone looks pretty beat up, but they're all patched equally well too, Rukia's arm in a sling and Renji covered in bandage from neck to navel.
“You guys!” Ichigo exclaims. He's on his feet immediately, walking towards them—
The ground slips from beneath.
The pain blindsides him, a sudden thundercrack splitting his skull open and never dissipating, like that one moment in time is playing on a loop over and over again.
He can hear himself screaming and there's someone else screaming along with him, inside, around him, everywhere, he's surrounded by agony. Chad is taking his head gently onto his lap, and these are Inoue's hands on his arm and that's Rukia's voice calling his name.
He's here and he isn't. A part of his soul feels like it's trying to rip itself free—
The screaming inside his head has finally stopped.
He can rest. He can rest.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow wakes up in two precise stages.
It's a quantum leap from unconsciousness to the waking world of infinite pain, pain that feels like it's been woven into the very fabric of his existence, right in between the seams of the patchwork of souls that makes him.
It takes a while for his eyes to adjust to the light, like his optic nerves haven't carried any sensory input for a while, and the muscles of accommodation are rusty and out of practice, both of which are bad news for a predator.
The roof over him isn't the bright artificial light of Las Noches, nor the unchanging blackness above the ceiling of it. It's a makeshift tarpaulin tent, the space inside it cramped by peculiar machines, random vials everywhere, a drip set, and . . . his cot.
Someone enters the tent, raising a flap near his foot-end, and harsh light fills the dim shadows. A man.
A Soul Reaper.
A strong external influence dulls the edge of his presence to a certain exten, like his huge spiritual pressure is concealed in a rusted sheath. But even that slightest scent of Soul Reaper power is enough to strike Grimmjow's olfaction.
“What have we here, oh my,” A merry voice exclaims, “Looks like you're awake!”
“Who the fuck are you?” Grimmjow says, his voice a hoarse rasp like he hasn't used it in a while. There's a lingering memory of violence etched into his vocal cords, leaving them feeling fragile, rusty.
“Me? I'm Urahara Kisuke, just a humble shop-keeper, at your service!” The man says, tipping his hat a little. Then he sobers up. “I'm sure you must have a lot of questions, but fret not! I have a lot of answers! Most of them, anyway. All in due time.”
Grimmjow grapples with the whisper thin edges of his memory, where it dissolves into the nothingness like gossamer blown on carelessly. The brightest supernova at the centre of everything is the touch of Kurosaki's hand around his wrist, its luminosity drowning everything else out, even the pain, even the hunger.
His mind is slower than usual, every thought taking a fraction of a second longer to travel through every synapse and arrive at coherence, but this man hasn't left him much room to suspect anything.
Pantera is right by his side, there aren't any ill-boding drug infusion drips like the one he remembers seeing in Szayel's laboratory, and last but not the least, he figures, if someone had to drag his near-carcass out of his grave of sand and run experiments on him, they'd at least have better equipment than a tarpaulin tent with holes in the fabric and a monitor that needs to be clapped on the head every two minutes to continue working.
Oh no, Grimmjow doesn't trust this man. He knows this man is after something, but he gives off the aura of less drastic and highly subtle felonies.
Kurosaki had touched him. And then Grimmjow had heard his voice, clear as a bell on a winter night, inside his own mind.
But it couldn't be.
A Soulbond.
Among the battery of reasons why it absolutely can not be a possibility, Grimmjow settles with the hardest one first. Formation of a soulbond requires direct contact, skin-to-skin, soul-to-soul.
Kurosaki has touched him many times before, blocking his hit, taking a roundhouse to the gut. Holding his hand to stop an attack. Holding his hand to deliver his limp body to the cradle of the sand.
He too has split his knuckles open punching Kurosaki's face, he has held the delicate column of Kurosaki's throat in the cup of his palm, but none of that should matter, none of that, because he will never touch anything with his own bare skin.
His skin is covered by a protective organ engineered to perfection—
Oh.
Oh. In that moment, when his Resurrecíon had crumbled away into the supercharged air around them, his hierro must have failed him too, leaving his skin bare, vulnerable, more naked than it had ever been.
And Kurosaki had touched him. Kurosaki had made him a promise.
“I believe what has happened here—” Urahara begins.
“I know what a Soulbond is.” Grimmjow says. His voice sounds like it's coming from very far away. “Cut the crap.”
By the look on Urahara's face, which is equal parts surprise mixed with disappointment, this bastard clearly wasn't counting on Grimmjow knowing anything about it. The disappointment, Grimmjow supposes, is because Urahara was gearing up in his mind for a nice, long speech about Soulbonds, and how great they are, how rare and precious, and how hollows can't have them.
Hollows aren't pure souls.
Well, too bad. Grimmjow already knows more about this pointless shit than he ever wanted to. Syazelapporo had a really bad case of verbal diarrhoea, he just happened to be one of those people who loved the sound of their own voices.
“Oh.” Urahara says. “So you know.”
“Question is, how the fuck do you know, Soul Reaper?”
“Ex-Soul Reaper, thank you very much!” The guy says with such a cheer so fake that it makes Grimmjow want to bash his teeth in. He would do that, if he could get his limbs to stop feeling like a dynamic equilibrium between hardened clay and viscous gel. “I'm just a humble shop owner at the moment, and you'd be very welcome to visit.”
“Stop beating around the bush or I gut you here and now.” Grimmjow warns, his voice low with the threat, but he's beginning to suspect that either this guy has a completely non-existent sense of danger, or he doesn't even need to consider Grimmjow as one. Either one. Bet's on the latter.
“A rather harsh way to speak to someone who stayed up night and day by your side making sure you made a swift and full recovery,” The man says, puttering about inside the tent, “Don't you think, Arrancar-san?”
“What do you want, a kiss on the mouth?” Grimmjow says, drier than the miles after unending miles of sprawling desert outside, and Urahara laughs behind his fan.
“I was a little suspicious when Kurosaki-san's spiritual pressure wasn't declining like I had predicted it would.” Urahara says, “The first half of it was unremarkable, but then, when Kurosaki-san was asleep for the month, I was monitoring his Spiritual Pressure levels. It stopped approaching zero after reaching one very stubborn baseline—”
“The fuck do you mean by approaching zero?” Grimmjow snarls. He's sitting up straight, every fibre of his body tense with a sudden cold rush of adrenaline, not the good kind. A horrible dread settles in his guts.
“There ends my streak of luck.” Urahara mutters to himself, and says, “I think it's best if you two would discuss the finer details yourselves!”
“You'll arrange it?” Grimmjow asks. The one good thing that can come out of this shitshow is that he will be able to see Kurosaki again.
“Why not!” Urahara exclaims, “As it happens, you two are s—”
Grimmjow's moving before he can check himself.
In the next second, he has Urahara pinned to the ground by his throat. His hand is engulfed in jet-black, so dark that it reflects next to no light at all. There are talons in place of his nails.
“Don't you ever,” He says, the tips of his thumb and index juxtaposed over the two points of pulsations on Urahara's throat, “dare say that word about me and him.”
He hasn't reached for the bond even once since it formed.
He had sworn to himself, in the lucid intervals since Kurosaki left him on the sand, wounded in body and wounded in pride, that he would never fall to that level.
But even before conscious thought can reach his forebrain, his frenzied mind is already reaching for the bond, searching for the bright flame that was Kurosaki's soul in the murky darkness of his mind—
— and there's nothing.
No trace of another mind inside his mind, no trace of a phantom heart contaminating his chest with its heartbeats.
Savage satisfaction floods through Grimmjow, so much and so fast that it leaves him feeling nauseous in its wake.
He was right. It wasn't a soulbond. It couldn't have been a soulbond. Hollows don't have soulbonds, and he's a Hollow too, if he ever had a soul he's left it in the life before death. He's a conglomerate of too many souls now, all the countless hollows his teeth and claws have sliced through in the past countless years.
It was an illusion, somehow. A temporary spark that has thankfully run its course. Good riddance, Grimmjow heaves a sigh of relief. He's back to being himself, unadulterated, uncontaminated.
Cold and empty and hollow.
What the hell did Kurosaki do to him in such a short time?
“I'm sorry to interrupt your thoughts, Arrancar-san,” Urahara says from under him, not looking the slightest bit perturbed. “I'm afraid you are wrong.”
“The hell does that mean?” The growl sounds a little fake to his own ears as well, but Grimmjow lets that slide just for now. He stands up, and lets Urahara go.
“I mean, it's true you possibly cannot feel a connection right now, but I can say this within a ninety-nine percent confidence interval, that it's simply because Kurosaki-san is sleeping at the moment. There's very little doubt that it's a soulbond,” Urahara dusts his robes, grey eyes bright in the pauci-darkness of the tent, “And there's absolutely no doubt that whatever it is, it's still there.”
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Ichigo sits down cross-legged at the little table in Urahara's living room.
It's been a week since he has regained consciousness from the month-long deep sleep he fell into after the War ended. Inoue, Chad, Ishida were all gathered around in his room when he woke up, their worried faces (yes, even Ishida's face, even if the idiot would rather die than admit it) blooming into brilliant relief.
For the lack of another word, everything has been normal. Extremely ordinary. He's been feeling fine physically, even though he's back to being as tall as he was before he trained in the Severed World. His hair is back to its original length too, and it's a shame, because Ichigo had really liked the feel of it on his nape.
Everything is normal, except for one thing.
Ichigo is pretty sure he saw a hollow yesterday. And one the day before, which Kon had repeatedly told him was just his 'wishful imagination', but then Ishida had appeared right where the hollow was, and as much as Ichigo hoped Ishida, after all this time, could hopefully turn out to be an element of his feverish nightmares— sadly he was not. Ishida was very much real, and so was the vague blue outline of his bow and arrow, pointed to exactly where Ichigo had seen the hollow.
“Urahara-san, I think I still haven't lost my powers.” He tells Urahara as his chief complaint. The other question remains in his mind like dormant ember, what did I feel inside my mind? What was there?
Or, more accurately, who?
“When you were training in the Severed World, I assume you had some conversations with your Zanpakutō.” Urahara says, looking at him across the table. “The cost of learning to use Final Getsuga Tenshō was that you would lose all your Soul Reaper powers. Orange?”
Ichigo nods. Yes.
Urahara holds out an orange towards him.
“Yes, for the Zanpakutō part. No, for the orange.” Ichigo confirms.
“It's a sweet orange! Fine, I'll take one for myself. Anyway, Kurosaki-san, as you might have noticed, you still haven't completely lost your spiritual awareness. Perhaps your remaining power isn't enough to manifest a Zanpakutō, but it is enough to let you see Hollows, am I right?”
Ichigo nods. Yes, again.
“Do you remember telling me,” Urahara pauses, like he's searching his memory for the words, “That you continued feeling what you felt like when you touched one particular opponent's sword in battle? Even after the fight was over?”
Ichigo feels himself stiffen. Is there a connection between the two? “Yes, I did.” He says.
“I think,” Urahara says. He is peeling his own orange slowly and by the sharp look in his grey eyes Ichigo can tell he's being serious, “There may be a chance that you have formed a Soulbond with someone.”
“A what?” Ichigo says, staring up blankly at Urahara.
“Oh.” Urahara blinks. “It wouldn't be unexpected for you to not know. It's a phenomenon— a rare phenomenon, observed in Spirit Beings. In human terms, I guess, the closest analogy I'd be able to find is,” He pauses, looking at Ichigo in a way that makes him brace for the next words, “Having a Soulmate.”
The world falls away swiftly around Ichigo.
Soulmate.
A soulmate. The word explodes next to his ears, pulsing against his skin with every booming heartbeat.
“There's no data of it being recorded in human beings, but you, Kurosaki-san, are as extraordinary as they come. I wouldn't be surprised.”
“What does a Soulbond do?” Ichigo asks. The pros of being hit with various magnitudes of bombshells on the regular is that after a point, it stops showing on your face.
“Very simply put, a Soulbond is a connection between two souls. Other than being a mark for souls who are meant to be connected, fate, destiny, whatever you'll call it— it's also a transfer of spiritual power,” Urahara says, scratching his stubble with the fan, “Mainly a transfer of spiritual power. In your case, at least. It's hard to tell the extent to which a Bond will connect two souls. Sometimes they carry pain, the stronger ones can even carry emotion. Feelings.”
Ichigo can hear his breath hitch at the height of inspiration.
When Nnoitra's scythe hit Grimmjow's neck, he could feel it in his own flesh. Pain.
Then it was no coincidence either, that hollow feeling inside him, like one piece of him was missing and nothing he ever did could bring it back. The way he continued to feel what he'd felt when he clashed swords against Grimmjow in battle, even until much later.
That foreign presence in his mind. That was Grimmjow.
Grimmjow.
Is his soulmate.
His first thought is, Is this how Grimmjow feels, always? And the second one, follows a little later, albeit appearing much less important, What the hell does all of this even mean.
“The strongest ones, however,” Urahara continues, looking thoughtful, nimble fingers pausing on the orange segment he's been picking at, “are also known to carry thoughts.”
“In all of the documented history of Soul Society, the number of Soulbonds which have been able to carry the soulmates' thoughts to each other, are less than the number of fingers in a hand. There's only one other living pair. It's a very rare thing indeed.”
“So you're saying,” Ichigo says very slowly, backtracking a lot in the conversation. He has to be careful with how he chooses every word, “That I haven't lost my powers yet, because I have formed a bond with Grimmjow, and his spiritual power is in me now?”
“Don't think too much of it, it goes both ways!” Urahara says, shaking his fan at Ichigo. “Grimmjow-san, too, is alive because you, his soulmate, were alive—”
“Don't,” Ichigo cuts through as soon as the words and their meaning register in his mind. “Don't ever say that in front of him.” Urahara's look is piercing over the edge of his fan. “You haven't met him yet, and you don't know what he's like, and I don't know what's going to happen in the future now, but if you do ever meet him—”
“I've met him.” Urahara says.
Ichigo forgets every one of his upcoming counter-arguments.
“I've met Grimmjow-san.” Urahara repeats, and Ichigo knows the man well enough to be able to tell that Urahara has interpreted the look of dumbfounded shock on his face as exactly what it is, he's just doing this for the theatrics.
And Urahara's standing here, apparently whole and very much alive, but Ichigo feels himself tense regardless. “When?” His voice comes out surprisingly calm. That is what takes him aback, given what he's feeling like on the inside.
“When you were unconscious during that one month,” Urahara says, scratching his head with the wooden end of the fan, “I made a little trip to Hueco Mundo. The welcome was less than warm, and I can't say that I like the air there much, it's too dense for my liking. Not to mention the faint stench of blood. Perhaps that place would benefit from an air-filtering system, equipped to—”
“You knew this?” Ichigo says, words failing him.
“You knew, all this— this?” There's no word that can encompass the magnitude of his feelings so he flails his hands about in the air, trying to create a space in which he can keep his bewilderment because his finite body is too small for it.
“I had my guesses. I just needed to make sure.” Urahara says, eyes bright over the edge of the fan. “Follow me, Kurosaki-san.” Urahara stands up, brushing the filaments of the orange and bits of the peel away from his green pajama. “We're going to Hueco Mundo.”
The next few minutes are a blur. Urahara maneuvers him down the steps to the underground bunker, injects him with something that will temporarily enhance his residual Spiritual Powers so he doesn't step into Hueco Mundo and immediately die, and the next thing Ichigo knows is that the Garganta is opening into the brilliant artificial light over endless sand.
Ichigo moves his hand to preemptively shield his unaccustomed eyes from the light.
Grimmjow appears in front of him. He's so fast that it doesn't even register as motion in Ichigo's brain. His hand remains suspended in the air.
Grimmjow looks much worse than Ichigo remembers.
His cheeks are gaunt, skin pulled too tight over the jut of his jawbones. He's much thinner than before, like his body consumed itself in order to heal— a gruesome form of self-sacrifice. The only thing that's unmistakably the same about him are his eyes, burning a brilliant azure in his sunken orbits.
“Kurosaki.” Grimmjow says, lips curling around the shape of his name.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
“So?” Grimmjow asks, “What the fuck did you do to yourself?”
Kurosaki looks different. The inside of his mind is filled with a resounding, resigned sadness.
“I lost my powers.” Kurosaki says, looking all wrong, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a sad, sad smile, his mind full of feelings that Grimmjow's kind should never ever feel.
“Hat 'n clogs bastard said you defeated Aizen.” Grimmjow asks.
Kurosaki chuckles in his mind, but there's nothing on his face, nothing except his skin drawn over his bones, lax and expressionless.
“No. I didn't defeat Aizen. I only weakened him a little, enough for the kidō that Urahara-san had implanted in his body to take effect and seal him.”
The cost of performing the Final Getsuga Tenshou, Grimmjow can see Kurosaki's pupils dilate with a blast of pain as the scar across his own chest throbs with the name, was sacrificing all of my powers.
I did that bargain. I had to.
So, Urahara was right, the bastard.
The stronger Kurosaki feels things, the more powerful the bond becomes. The more things it can transmit. It can convey thoughts.
What a fucking joke, He thinks to himself.
Kurosaki freezes in front of him. I can hear you in my head, He says slowly, like he's trying out if this new feature really does work. But Urahara-san said—
Shut up. Grimmjow says.
This isn't how Kurosaki's voice should sound like. Grimmjow's taken a sword to his gut, he's had his limbs severed and he's been restrained by shackles, he's stayed conscious through multiple ruptured organs, yet somehow this is the most excruciating torture he's ever had to put himself through.
“What I'm hearing is,” Is what Grimmjow ends up saying, “We're not really that much different. You and me.”
The knee-jerk reaction is predictable, and yet immensely delightful. Grimmjow finds himself bursting out in harsh laughter as the bond fills with blistering denial, an immediate retaliation at his gall to make such a preposterous suggestion.
“Don't look at me like that. Didn't your beloved Soul Society use you to win their battles and then cast you away when they were done with you?”
Ah, here's that sunshine bright feeling fizzing down his nerves again, that unmistakable joy of Kurosaki's righteous anger bursting through the haze of dull, lifeless grey.
Grimmjow savors the words in his mouth, the delicious feeling in his chest, under his skin, across the bond, that he can never get enough of. “Aizen sliced Hallibel down the moment she stopped being of any use to him. Li'l different than yours, I'll admit, but even with your enviable caliber for denial, you can't—”
“Shut the fuck up, Grimmjow,” Kurosaki says, his voice low with concentrated rage, but Grimmjow can feel it, doesn't Kurosaki know? Can't Kurosaki tell that Grimmjow can feel the sudden, sharp shock that just sliced through Kurosaki's mind?
They're soulmates, after all.
Ha. What a fucking joke.
“Now? What happens now?” Grimmjow can't stop himself from asking, Kurosaki is nearly there, nearly perfect, he can nearly taste the sun in his throat. This is how Kurosaki should feel like, if Grimmjow has to carry him in his own mind at all, more honest and less like a shadow.
One more spark and Kurosaki's eyes will catch fire again. “What happens to a Soul Reaper who's lost his powers?”
A mild surprise.
Kurosaki opens his mouth to say something, and then closes it. Finally, on the third attempt, he says, and he sounds so very tired, “Now I'm just a regular high school student.”
Grimmjow frowns. That doesn't make sense. Kurosaki's not even flaring up like he was supposed to, the spark dampened by a sudden rush of emotions Grimmjow hadn't predicted. “The fuck does that—”
There's a brief wave of confusion inside his mind, like Kurosaki doesn't understand why Grimmjow isn't understanding it— and then something clicks into a sad, shocked realisation.
“I was a Substitute Soul Reaper. I didn't know you never knew. Guess I never got to properly introduce myself.”
An empty ringing fills Grimmjow's ears.
“I was given my powers by another Soul Reaper. You've met her too, I don't know if you remember, she was with me the night we— you, well, anyway. Long story short.”
“I am human.”
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
The moment Ichigo finishes speaking, an avalanche of blind fury sweeps over him, a landslide, an explosion blowing his eardrums out.
There's no sound, no sensation, other than the feeling of his own words lodged inside Grimmjow's viscera like a rusted knife, churning and pushing deeper with every second that passes.
A human. Human.
Ichigo tries to reach for the bond inside his mind. He doesn't know what else to do. Everything is slipping away so fast.
Grimmjow pushes back with a vicious snarl, teeth bared. “Two things, Kurosaki.” He says. His voice is low with threat. Ichigo doesn't even have a sword.
“First. Whatever Urahara's told you is absolute bullshit. Hollows can't have anything like that.” There's a jagged edge of a familiar, forgotten, viciously repressed ache somewhere inside his words, but it's gone too fast, pushed back inside the infinite void Grimmjow keeps within himself. “Things like Soulbonds.”
“Second. Get back up on your feet. I'll get my fight, don't you worry,” He says, a half-smile curling the corner of his mouth up, eyes narrowing with delicious promise. Ichigo feels his heart speed up and hopes fervently that it doesn't translate to the other side, but he can't bring himself to care either It's the first time in a long while that he's felt something for himself.
“'S not gonna take long for this bond, or whatever, to shrivel and fall off.” Grimmjow shrugs, “But even without, I'll find you. Soulmate or not, you're my prey.”
The air distorts into the jaws of a Descorrer behind Ichigo.
“Now get the fuck out of here.” Grimmjow says, and then he's gone.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
“You don't have the full extent of your spiritual powers at the moment, Kurosaki-san,” Is Urahara's reasoning, “Therefore you should focus on physical training for combat.”
Ichigo acknowledges that. It's what he's made of himself, a body honed for battle, reflexes trained to supersonic reaction speed. It's taken a lot to build all this up and he doesn't want to let it all sit and rot away.
“And who better than our very own Grimmjow-sa— ough,” A cero rips through the landscape and Urahara side-steps exactly in the nick of time to avoid taking it to his head, but it still singes the corner of his hat.
Ichigo snickers, and then covers his mouth with a hand to be polite.
Grimmjow walks in a few seconds after the prelude to his entrance, footsteps a neat line over the dust. He stands with his hips cocked to a side and a hand resting on his waist, blue eyes narrowed like he's gauging the terrain, and then finally, it comes to rest over Ichigo.
The bond lights up with electricity so fierce that Ichigo has to remember how to breathe for a brief heartbeat.
“Right, I'll leave you to it!” Urahara says, and then promptly disappears.
From what Ichigo's heard, Urahara has reached some kind of agreement with Grimmjow for him to come train in the bunker below the shop, although it is beyond Ichigo's wildest imagination as to how the negotiations proceeded.
Grimmjow looks different from when Ichigo last saw him.
It's like something has shifted inside of him, but Ichigo can't tell if it's a loss or a gain. A piece falling out or falling in place. All he can tell is Grimmjow's diffuse rage feels more condensed, more contained by the precise margins of his lean muscles, his entire body sharpened into a weapon kept carefully away from the brink of detonation.
“I can see you.”
“Don't get too ahead of yourself.” Grimmjow stands with a hand still on his hip, his sword dangling from the holster on the belt, “You could barely keep your ground against me when you still had your powers and shit. I'm in a fake body.”
“A gigai?” The exclamation is involuntary and also genuinely heartfelt. He can feel his eyebrows rise. “Urahara-san got you one?”
“Gigai. Whatever. I asked for one. No fun killing you if you can't give me a decent fight.” Grimmjow says, the familiar feral grin splitting his face.
For the first time in a while, Ichigo can feel a distant, budding hope inside his chest, sunrays breaking through the fog after a long, cold night.
A spark runs down the bond, the unmistakable joy that is radiating from Grimmjow, simple, undiluted.
Ichigo smiles. At the very least, this hasn't changed. It's a strange thing to feel, but he's going to keep it nonetheless.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow doesn't know why he keeps coming back.
He doesn't know why he ever agreed to Urahara in the first place.
He means it as less of a trick question and more as an honest bafflement, a sensation that he's only ever felt around Kurosaki.
It's not because of the goddamn bond, Grimmjow knows that, but he doesn't think about it too much, because Kurosaki gets this odd feeling in his chest if he catches Grimmjow thinking of it. Surprisingly, it's not the emergence of the feeling that annoys him. It's the immediate, harsh repression of it. The subsequent howling vacuum.
Like Kurosaki is brushing it all off.
Kurosaki's not supposed to feel like this. Kurosaki's not supposed to feel like this to Grimmjow, about and for him.
Kurosaki's supposed to feel sunbright, a flare of cold-steel resolve, fiery orange hair glowing with challenge.
Ah.
So this is why, Grimmjow realises with a crooked smile, dodging Kurosaki's punch and landing one back right on his unguarded solar plexus, this is why he keeps coming back.
Pain explodes through his own abdomen as an immediate echo of his own hit— and this fake body of flesh is an absolute bitch, it weighs him down like lead and none of the joints will move as fast, as far as he wants them to, devoid of the hierro and stock full of every other disadvantage Grimmjow could imagine in his idlest hour— but, he pauses a second to catch a heaving breath, Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez has never stepped down from a challenge.
For as long as it lasts, Grimmjow figures he can deem the bond as useful in its own way, the most accurate meter of his own punches that he will ever be able to get. If both of them have to catch a breath after one punch— then he needs to get stronger. If neither of them do— then he needs to get stronger.
If Kurosaki staggers and he doesn't— then he's winning.
A simple calculation, but the not so simple part follows on the tails of it, an event which all of Grimmjow's analyses failed to anticipate: with every punch to his guts, Kurosaki's heart is filled with effervescent gratitude, an emotion so far removed from Grimmjow's usual repertoire that it seems like a hazard to even feel it for a second.
It doesn't seem likely to be a tactic, but if Kurosaki's willing to fight dirty, Grimmjow is too. He lets the bond open, lets it carry a little more than he usually allows it too, and he can see the effect taking root in Kurosaki's mind in real time. It hits him like a physical blow, leaves him with a hitch in his breath, a smile on his face and a spark in his eyes.
Kurosaki gets back up on his feet, digs his feet into the ground and tenses his abdomen. Whatever Kurosaki is feeling at the moment, a bizarre blend of quiet but powerful gratefulness, a bubbling joy and underneath it all, a current of awed respect, is too complicated for Grimmjow to bother with the processing, but he can let himself float in that for now.
“Come at me again.” Kurosaki says, tilting his head back a touch in an elegant, proud curve.
Grimmjow grins back and obliges.
It never gets boring, never with Kurosaki, not when neither of them are using their spiritual powers even. The bond glows in between their minds, oscillating as they move toward and away from each other with the rhythm of their punches. Grimmjow loves brawls more than the next person, but only Kurosaki can turn a fistfight into a dance.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Fighting with the bond proves to be a decent challenge. It barely gives Ichigo time to be miserable about the loss of his powers, because if he lets his thoughts stray for even a second, he's as good as dead.
Grimmjow picks up on it at astonishing speed, and becomes exponentially more ruthless.
“Thinking with your head again, Kurosaki,” Grimmjow warns, his singsong voice more than enough of a taunt already.
At this rate, Ichigo's never gonna be able to attack on the offensive. He's defending, parrying Grimmjow's blows one after the other, some of them cutting it a little too close.
Boring. Grimmjow comments, slashing clean through Ichigo's weak attempt of an attack, and within two more strikes of Grimmjow's sword, Ichigo finds his back flush on the uneven wall of rock behind. You're getting boring, Kurosaki.
He has to up his speed, run faster, hit faster, think faster, trust his instincts more, he has to become instinct. Ichigo may have lost his powers, but Grimmjow is right, the memory etched into muscle is never forgotten, the reflexes burned into his spinal arcs never lost.
When he feels Grimmjow's mind light up with a dazzling brightness, that's when he knows he's doing it right.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Kurosaki improves by leaps and bounds, seemingly out of nowhere, and along with him, the bond grows stronger.
They fight till the time Grimmjow can't distinguish if this heady feeling, that Grimmjow can best compare to the cleansing slice of whip-cold air in the middle of flight, the sudden, glowing realisation of freedom, is coming from Kurosaki or from himself.
A second later, he realises both of them are down and from how he's feeling, Kurosaki doesn't seem like he can move one step more either. He's sprawled on his back at a hand's distance from Grimmjow, arms spread by his sides, chest rising and falling as he pushes air into his gasping lungs.
Grimmjow pulls himself to his feet, wipes the blood on his face on the back of his sleeve and gets the stubborn slow trickle of warm carmine from his nose with the pad of a thumb. Kurosaki is still down on the ground, nostrils flaring with every harsh panting breath but it's music to Grimmjow's ears.
There's something akin to joy blooming inside Kurosaki's chest, hesitant but definitely there, and Grimmjow finds he isn't particularly averse to it either.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
They collapse on the ground at the same time.
Ichigo's chest feels like it's on fire, as if all the air in the world wouldn't be enough to inflate his lungs. His split lip smarts when he breathes in and out through his mouth.
Grimmjow gets up to his feet first, and Ichigo sees him sway for a singular moment before he's back to usual unshakeable, enviable equilibrium.
That's all the proof Ichigo gets to know that he's also given back at least some of what he's gotten from Grimmjow, because Grimmjow never lets the bond carry his pain.
He keeps his pain away, in the event horizon of the void inside, and it's a dangerous place to venture in all by itself, that is, if one can make it past the ferocious guard Grimmjow keeps there.
Ichigo snaps out of his thoughts.
He tries to get up, but immediately realises his ankle is really and truly fucked, and now that the adrenaline of the fight is subsiding, he can feel the true pain hit. Fuck. This is slightly bad.
Grimmjow snorts, both out loud and through the bond, and then holds his hand out.
It takes a while for the message to travel up, and to get deciphered inside Ichigo's mind.
It isn't untrue that they have gotten closer than before. Earlier, Grimmjow would heal and blast off to Hueco Mundo the moment he was done healing, but last month, Grimmjow stayed back in the bunker for about half an hour after both of them were done healing.
Ichigo remembers vividly, Grimmjow was cursing the food at Urahara's place to hell and back and Ichigo was laughing till he couldn't breathe.
Last week, they both went up for tea after their fight, and Tessai was so shocked that he nearly dropped the stack of trays he was carrying.
They touch each other all the time. More than they used to before, when there was still the edge of metal between them, but now that the last barrier too is gone, it's all come down to skin upon skin. They beat each other down to a pulp four days a week and heal side by side in the pool, and yet this is what Ichigo cannot bring himself to do.
This is different, this touch— there is no murderous intent behind it, and yet there is the invisible weight of having no reason, no clear necessity behind the action, no purpose.
Get your ass up already, Grimmjow grouses impatiently, Come on.
Ichigo reaches out and takes Grimmjow's hand.
The bond lights up immediately, a soft golden feeling, and behind that, there is that familiar feeling of muted confusion, as if Grimmjow can't really grasp this emotion.
Ichigo's face feels warm.
Grimmjow pulls him upwards and Ichigo stumbles to his feet, and they hobble to the hot spring together.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
It becomes routine.
Grimmjow loathes that word with everything he has, he can't stand the very concept of it. It doesn't exist in his world of kill or be killed. The hunt doesn't have forgiveness for enough comfort to blossom, so that it may bear the fruit of a repetitive pattern.
There's no guarantee in Grimmjow's world, and no promise of excitement in doing the same things over and over and over again. Change is his only constant, to be always on the run, always striving for a goal.
Kurosaki thinks there's nothing at stake here. He couldn't be more wrong.
Grimmjow breaks into a sprint, nowhere near as fast as his usual but considering he cannot apply the laws of motion to use the ambient reishi to propel him forward, this is good enough. Kurosaki is slower on his feet too, but the thing about reflexes is that they're etched onto the mind, and that doesn't change whether Kurosaki is in a body of flesh or spirit particles.
Kurosaki dodges and blocks the punch, and in that moment, Grimmjow lets the bond carry all of what he feels— a bright shock of pride, and Kurosaki reciprocates, a wavering shadow of his familiar steel burning right back.
But now the ball's in his court.
You're thinking too much. Grimmjow says, Guess you aren't just as good when you're not fighting for your life. Or someone else's.
He keeps his gaze even and steady over Kurosaki's face, not letting his thoughts flicker when hurt sluices over Kurosaki like frigid sleet.
Stop thinking, Kurosaki. He croons, lowering his voice so Kurosaki can effectively soak up the impact of the words that are about to come next, Are you forgetting? I'm your soulmate. And you're wondering why you can't land a single blow on me?”
There's that familiar hint of bitterness that seeps through Kurosaki's best efforts to contain it when Grimmjow says the word. That cursed word.
Grimmjow understands, he really and truly does, he wouldn't stoop to saying it unless he needed to, and he needs it now.
Kurosaki is fighting with his mind. He's analysing his steps and thinking about the trajectory of blows, calculating the power behind every thrust. All of these things are the ones that are guaranteed to kill him on a real battlefield.
There's no scope nor forgiveness for thought. There's only one thing that makes and unmakes: instinct.
And Grimmjow doesn't want Kurosaki to spend a single second with him without thinking they're on a real battlefield. Shame on him if he lets the bar slide down so low.
“You've lost your Soul Reaper powers? So what? That wasn't ever yours to begin with.” Grimmjow says, spitting on the ground beside. “What the hell did you do before you got your powers?”
A series of images materialises partially in the space of his mind, more of fleeting shadows through a lattice of memories than anything concrete.
A small child with a bruised knee, his face soaked with tears. There's no mistaking that color of the hair, that shade of orange that is burned into the back of Grimmjow's mind, but it's striking how different Kurosaki looks, and not only because he's smaller in size.
The child, a little grown up, sobbing over a busted nose. Grimmjow watches him grow up, years falling away like autumn leaves, and then one day, the kid hits back. The next day, he lands a punch on target and another day, no one raises a fist against him.
The images snap away, faster than they had appeared, and Grimmjow blinks himself back into the outline of his own mind. In that split second, Kurosaki's reiatsu explodes like a grenade, flaring up and enveloping them both in a cocoon of familiar warmth.
The bond is shining bright between them.
Kurosaki has figured it out. He can accept Grimmjow's reiatsu more freely, and he can let his own out as well in response to Grimmjow's.
A half-formed shadow of black envelopes Kurosaki, like a rudimentary Soul Reaper uniform, energy that has refused to condense itself fully into matter.
In Kurosaki's hand, a long sword gleams, its blade not as perfect as Zangetsu but it's good enough, good enough.
His powers are coming back.
Kurosaki gets back up on his feet. His jaw is set and his eyes are an unwavering liquid gold, smouldering with heat, with promise. Grimmjow feels the corners of his eyes soften, completely against his own volition, so he has to bare his teeth in a grin to offset that and leave the rest for Kurosaki to interpret. See? You haven't lost shit.
Yeah. Kurosaki smiles back. Think I haven't. Wanna go again?
Thought you'd never ask, Grimmjow says, and Kurosaki allows him barely a second to transfer out of this prison of a fake body and unsheath Pantera before he launches an attack.
He feels it the moment their blades clash for the first time in ages, the forbidden crawling of a foreign sensation under the scar tissue across his chest— comfort.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
“What the hell happened to you?”
Ichigo cracks an eye open and looks to his side, where Grimmjow's sitting with his arms spread by his side and head thrown back against the rocky circumference of the healing pool.
Now that Ichigo can manifest a sword and can maintain it for about fifteen minutes at most— he's working on it— Grimmjow is taking out his sword in battle too. Which means more injuries. More guts spilling, more joints sliced through.
More time spent in healing.
Usually, when Grimmjow's soaking in the water, he has his eyes closed, but today, he's looking up at the counterfeit sky in the bunker, the depth of his blue eyes somewhat meditative.
Back in Hueco Mundo, after you went to fight Nnoitra?
Couldn't you, Ichigo grapples for the word, feel it or something?
Don't give me that crap. I want the details.
And this is the thing: Grimmjow genuinely wants to know. There's a fierce, avid desire in his mind, so much so that the nearest synonym Ichigo can find for it is jealousy. There's hunger, at the centre of everything, so deep and dense that everything around is folding in on itself.
The water is halfway between Ichigo's chest and navel at this end.
I couldn't really get my ground against Nnoitra. He says, the admission still faintly bitter on his tongue. One of the Captains from Soul Society stepped in and saved me. Then I fought Ulquiorra again.
You couldn't take less hits? Grimmjow snits, It hurt like a motherfucker all the way across.
“I'm sorry.” Ichigo says immediately, because this is the one thing he can't joke about. “I hurt you because I wasn't—”
“Don't give me that crap.” Grimmjow bites back. The bond grows tense. “Do you think I feel very nice knowing I was nothing to you but a deadweight in all those fights? It cancels out. We're even.”
Give and take. Give and take.
“Yeah, but,” Ichigo pauses to swallow once and his throat is completely dry, “It's us.” He says, soft and cautious. “We don't need to always keep track of those. It needn't work that way between us.”
Grimmjow is still tense. He doesn't really trust Ichigo's words, doesn't know what to do with them. He turns the words around in his mind, trying to fit them inside his worldview.
“And then Ulquiorra went into Resurrecìon.” Ichigo continues. “Did you know he had two Releases?”
“That son of a bitch,” Grimmjow growls, and it does sound nice not being on the receiving end for it once. Ichigo lets himself bask in that comfort. “I fucking guessed he had one.”
“And then I got taken out, I think.” Ichigo concludes.
Incredible. He can hear Grimmjow snicker down the bond. Defeated by the same twig of a guy twice in a row.
“Shut it!” Ichigo says out aloud, the heat fleeing his voice to accumulate on his cheeks instead, and then he splashes some water on Grimmjow's face for good measure.
“You little—”
“It wasn't funny back then! Besides—” Ichigo pauses to really think. It's true that he hasn't given it much thought since it happened, and he's dealt with this like he's dealt with everything else he thinks any other person would deem as, perhaps, traumatic— repression.
But with Grimmjow, there's precious little that remains Ichigo's own.
I think I died. He thinks. Did I die the first time too?
The bond grows strained all of a sudden, saturated with a tense energy from Grimmjow's end.
Ichigo sinks a little deeper into the water, lets it take a little more of his weight. He tries not to think about it too much— but it wouldn't be the first time he's died. Or the last time, either. He does happen to a die a lot.
He glances to the side, over to the spot of sand just beside the low plateau of rocks and he can still remember the place where Tessai severed Ichigo's chain of fate, the place where the ground opened into a chasm, and how he had to try to climb up the ragged walls in the phases of relief between the fits of the corrosion of the chain.
“What the hell was that?” Grimmjow asks, sharply. He's sitting ramrod straight, every muscle of his body tensed, combat ready. What the hell did you just think?
“Something Urahara-san made me do for,” He has to pause to find the word, “Training.” I'd kinda lost my powers once again back then. The thought is tinged with wistfullness.
“Don't bullshit with me, Kurosaki,” Grimmjow's eyes are on fire, cold rage lighting up the depths of the blue, and Ichigo can feel his own chest ache with the intensity of whatever Grimmjow's feeling.
Grimmjow's emotions are seldom any different. It's always a hard mass of raw feeling, pure, unfiltered and undifferentiated, a throbbing mass of pluripotence that has never learnt to grow into much else. It's only intensity, only velocity, only vector, only violence, pure mind, so pure that Ichigo burns under its heat.
Grimmjow has never learnt to feel much else.
Answer me. Grimmjow says, his voice cool with contained rage. The bond is stretched taut between them. “What was that? How did you know that?
And then it strikes Ichigo. Of course. For Grimmjow too, it's a memory. A lived experience.
And for Grimmjow, it was far more painful. Far more lonely. There was nobody waiting for him with food and water when he must've been exhausted from the pain, nobody waiting for him with an explanation, kind or unkind. Nobody waiting for him at the end of the tunnel.
Nobody was there to intercept his destruction. Nobody was there when all the links turned to dust and he was consumed.
Let me answer your question then. Grimmjow says, and then there's a terrible acceleration.
When everything stops moving, Ichigo realises he's in Hueco Mundo.
He's in a memory.
It's a memory, the whisper-thin edges distorted like it was a difficult one to keep down. Even though everything else is hazy, he can see only one thing in excruciating detail— the body lying supine on the ground, over the rubble.
It's him. His eyes are open, palpebral fissures wide and the blood on his face has clotted. There's a hole in his chest, right over the sternum— the place where Ulquiorra's hand punched through.
But here, he isn't himself. He's outside his body, he's looking at the world through someone else's eyes. Grimmjow's.
He's Grimmjow, in this memory. Ichigo didn't know the bond could do this.
He's trembling, he realises, simply with the profound moving force of the emotions rising inside his chest, his hollow, hollow chest. Everything in and out is a swirling, roaring storm of nameless sensations, pure feeling, violent, inevitable— howling and screaming, clashing, grinding eroding each other— and Ichigo can't breathe, can't think, he has no capacity for any other emotion except for the most primordial, the most visceral one.
He aches, he aches, he aches.
There's that rapid acceleration again, this time in the opposite direction. Everything blurs into a morose gray.
Ichigo comes back to the present with a jerk— he's in the pool, steam from the water rising in a haze around them, he can move his own fingers— but the bond has never been this open between them, and despite every sensorimotor assurance, Ichigo can't shake the feeling that he's not entirely in his own skin.
There's your answer. Grimmjow says, and before Ichigo can find his voice, Grimmjow is gone.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Ichigo's Spiritual Power not only grows exponentially, it also stabilizes to the extent where he can manifest the sword for hours at end.
Grimmjow stays away for a few days at a stretch after the incident in the healing spring. There's no communication from the other end, except for the mere existence of the bond. Ichigo tries, but it's like taking a rubber bullet to a granite wall.
But Grimmjow comes back.
He comes back and keeps growing stronger out of nowhere, and doesn't let Ichigo cut the slightest bit of slack.
They don't talk about that, though.
Ichigo's fine with that. As long as Grimmjow's here, Ichigo realises that he's fine with anything.
Grimmjow flicks his forehead to break him out of his thoughts. Ichigo gasps back into the present, and Grimmjow is sitting right in front of him.
Stop thinking. Grimmjow says. Now it really is painful.
Ichigo is preparing for a perfect comeback, but the words get stuck against his palate— Grimmjow is sitting so close. His jacket is hanging open, soaked through with sweat from the second set of a hundred pushups. His collarbone gleams and his mouth is curled into a lopsided grin, and he is so achingly beautiful.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Yuzu and Karin somehow talk Grimmjow into coming over to their house.
Ichigo can't even begin to comprehend how that was even possible. He does ask once, in a high-pitched, nearly-panicked whisper, pulling both of the girls out from the living room where Grimmjow's sitting draped over a couch like he owns it.
Karin shrugs and says something like, “He tells really good stories, did you know how to carve a dagger, Ichi-nii,” and Yuzu clasps her hand excitedly and says, “He likes my curry better than Urahara-san's! So I called him over for dinner! He's your friend, isn't he, Onii-chan?”
Soulmate, Urahara's voice says inside his head, the memory of that fraction of a second so deep it doesn't feel like a memory at all.
Ichigo doesn't ask about it further. He's not opposed to the development, not at all.
A week later, they have progressed to watching movies together, the four of them. An honest to God miracle is what it is.
Grimmjow sits beside him, and from what Ichigo can tell, he doesn't really understand why he even agreed to it in the first place.
Welcome to the club. Ichigo laughs, as discreetly as he can so Yuzu and Karin don't catch him smiling to himself like a lunatic. Yuzu's persuasion skills are phenomenal.
I don't really, Grimmjow grumbles back, dislike it or anything. I just don't understand the point of all this.
There. . . isn't a point, Ichigo says. Does there always have to be?
Grimmjow's hand brushes against his.
It's purely by accident, they were just reaching for the popcorn bowl at the same time, but it happens regardless— a soft brush of his knuckles over the back of Ichigo's wrist.
The bond lights up with warmth.
Sunshine-bright joy frizzles inside Ichigo's mind, the sparks making the point of contact tingle even after Grimmjow has withdrawn his hand like a rigid clasp knife.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
The game of the afternoon is a weird mix between Scrabble and Uno. Ichigo, cast out from the group because he asked too many questions, has been punished with the duty of ferrying milk and cookies from the kitchen, and dropping the tray back in the sink.
On his way back, he leans his weight on the doorframe and watches Yuzu, Karin and Grimmjow from the threshold of the room. They're so engrossed in the game that they most likely don't notice him.
Yuzu's knee is touching Grimmjow's, and Karin is laughing at some snarky shit Grimmjow's no doubt said.
Realization settles inside him, a soft, pulsatile warmth radiating from his heart to the tips of his fingers, to the pores on his skin, to the roots of his hairs. It feels a little like flying.
He can taste it at the back of his mouth, where his tongue is stuck to the roof of his palate— it tastes blue, Grimmjow's happiness.
Blue, like the first cold morning in December, like the sea from a distance, like the touch of ice on an aching bruise.
That's not all that is there to it. Ichigo closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. There's blue in his mouth, under his skin. The edges of the blue fade into the greyish-white of bewildered confusion.
Grimmjow is happy, but he doesn't quite know what to do with that happiness, he doesn't realise his hands are meant to hold that. He approaches the feeling like a person would reach out for a flame, drawn to its light and still scared of the heat. Except Grimmjow's never been truly afraid of anything, Ichigo would have known. Ichigo would have known even without the soulbond.
Yet somehow, Grimmjow is so incredibly wary of this feeling. He cannot bring himself to trust this, and worse, he cannot bring himself to truth himself around this feeling.
He treads carefully, he's nearly not breathing and the feeling rises inside his chest with such violent intensity that it nearly chokes Ichigo.
Ichigo is helpless against the tidal wave of sudden sadness that washes over him.
Across the room, Grimmjow looks up at him. What's gotten into you, he asks.
Ichigo opens his mouth to tell them not to mind him, but he changes course at the last second. Give it to me straight, He says instead, is the reason why you won't play cards with me because I can see all the ones that you're holding?
Grimmjow grins. There's no sharp edge of ferocity within it.
The image hits Ichigo in the chest— Grimmjow and his sister sitting cross-legged on their living room floor, the slanted rays of the setting sun making Yuzu's hair glow, lighting up Karin's smiling face, the breeze through the open window tousling Grimmjow's hair till a few more strands slip out from behind his ear.
Oh.
Ichigo thinks.
Oh. I'm in—
An image swims into view. A memory of a feeling.
Five men. They're standing around Grimmjow. The tallest of them bows. There's laughter—
No. The anger in Grimmjow's voice slices through the bond.
Ichigo steps back immediately, and realises he's actually taken a step back from the threshold of the living room. His head is still reeling from the quiet, controlled intensity of Grimmjow's anger, and he knows he's gone too far, because if Grimmjow's rage was explosive, he could've still dealt with it.
But this, the precise pinpoint of his anger, the cold, hard steel edge of it— this is when Grimmjow is at his most dangerous.
Get the fuck out of my head. Grimmjow says, his voice low and burning with vitriol. You don't get to go here.
Grimmjow's Fraccion. Ichigo realizes a beat belatedly, the people he just saw were Grimmjow's Fraccion. Who were all killed the same night, the first night Grimmjow invaded Karakura Town.
The night they'd first met.
The people who had been with Grimmjow longer than anyone else had. The people, who in Grimmjow's very deficient knowledge of a family, were Grimmjow's family.
Ichigo opens his mouth to say something but his voice won't come out.
He excuses himself out of the room.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
It's evening when Grimmjow steps out.
Grimmjow knows where Kurosaki is, even if Kurosaki has done his level best to turn off every input from his end. There hasn't been so much as an iota of thought from the other side since Kurosaki vanished from the living room door like he'd seen a ghost, which is very unusual, considering Kurosaki rarely ever shuts up.
But what Kurosaki can't turn off is the feeling of consuming guilt that's been eating at him ever since. Grimmjow's tired of trading through that swamp.
The thing Kurosaki doesn't get is, Grimmjow would've found him even without this bond. Grimmjow would've found him.
They would've found each other.
The sun has tilted over the horizon by the time Grimmjow reaches the riverbank. And sure as shit, Kurosaki's there, lying on his back, head resting over his forearms, his hair spilling over the grass like the heart of a fire.
Kurosaki doesn't move when Grimmjow sits down beside, but Grimmjow can feel a lingering doubt being drowned under a giddy rush of relief inside Kurosaki's mind. Like Kurosaki thought Grimmjow wouldn't come for him, and perhaps, it wouldn't be untrue a few months back, but now even the thought of it is absurd to Grimmjow.
I'm sorry, no wait, that's a lousy apology, Kurosaki thinks in quick succession, and then he coughs to clear his throat. “I'm sorry.” He says, “I didn't mean to pry.”
Grimmjow shrugs. “'S no big deal.” To be honest with himself, he doesn't quite know why he thought of them, but there was something at the back of his mind telling him he had felt that feeling before, that feeling of being surrounded by safety.
Lemme try something, okay? Kurosaki says, and closes his eyes before he can see Grimmjow raise an eyebrow at him.
An image flickers into Grimmjow's mind. Kurosaki's brows are furrowed with concentration, his fists clenched on the grass between their bodies.
A woman.
Light brown hair tied into a loose bun at her nape. She's smiling. Grimmjow knows who that is, he's seen her picture hanging on the wall of the Kurosaki household.
It isn't until he sees her eyes light up with laughter, that he knows how similar those eyes are to Kurosaki's.
Sadness drifts down the bond. Quiet, voiceless sorrow, that has seeped into the marrow of Kurosaki's very bones after years and years of being carried around, nowhere to go and nowhere to stay. Longing. Guilt. Grief.
They're all familiar, if nothing else. Granted, they're far more refined, generally more thought out and reflected upon than Grimmjow's own, but that doesn't really change what they are at the very core, the same base components even if the assembly is a little different.
Perhaps, out of all the things Kurosaki feels, these are the most down Grimmjow's lane. These are things Grimmjow actually knows how to hold inside his ribcage.
You don't have to carry all of that by yourself. Grimmjow thinks before he can really think to stop himself.
Kurosaki looks up at him, the corner of his mouth curled upwards in a small, sad smile. The sunset lends another universe of depth to his eyes, the flecks of gold inside the radiating amber of his irises catching the slanted light of the sun and glowing.
Now we're even. Kurosaki says.
Dumbass. Grimmjow does his best impression of a laugh, the kind that seems to light up Kurosaki's whole body, and lies down on the slope beside Kurosaki, a blade of grass between his teeth. Thought it didn't work that way between us.
Us. Kurosaki repeats once, twice, rolling the word over his tongue, and Grimmjow feels all of the guilt and most of the sorrow evaporate from Kurosaki's mind.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
The ground trembles under the combined force of their attacks. The distant rocky ranges return the echoing song of metal against metal, claw against skin. Ichigo can finally fight the way he wants to. His feet are no longer holding him back and he's figured out the best swing for his sword.
Grimmjow cackles in utter delight and it sparkles down the bond.
Ichigo wouldn't have it any other way.
“C'mon, c'mon, Kurosaki! Is that all you got?” Grimmjow roars over the sound of his cero pulverising an entire column of rock into a smoking crater on the earth. Ichigo grins, retaliates with a Getsuga Tenshō.
Grimmjow's laughter sounds over the blast radius. In the snap of a finger, he switches from distant to close-range, now that he's able to harness his lanceolate ink-black claws even without being in Resurrección.
It's exhilarating, to say the least.
If Grimmjow breaks through the defense, then his claws guarantee immense damage, at least one punctured lung and most definitely internal hemorrhage. So Ichigo focuses on defense, strengthening it further in sacrifice of his offensive attacks for the moment, parrying every downswing of Grimmjow's blade with his own.
In the meanwhile, Grimmjow keeps raining blows and doesn't let him rest on his feet for even a moment.
Ichigo stops thinking. That's what he was doing wrong. He raises his sword with both hands and in the next strike, he levels everything in a radius of fifty feet around him. Behind the rising dust, Grimmjow laughs, sharp and unquestionably full of joy.
The fight ends in a stalemate.
They're swords are locked together, arms intertwined, the edge of Grimmjow's sword against Ichigo's throat and the tip of Ichigo's sword just touching the base of Grimmjow's neck.
They're both breathing hard.
Ichigo swallows. Pantera's edge digs a little sharper into his skin as his throat undulates.
He can feel his heart hammer inside him, each pulsing beat so loud that he can feel it spread from the roots of every hair to the tip of his nails. Grimmjow is shaken with the unfamiliar sensation, trying to adjust, to adapt to it.
If he would lean up a little—
The world falls away around them, swift and soundless, all colours evaporating till there's only white, the presence and absence of everything simultaneously.
— He could kiss Grimmjow.
Ichigo lets out the breath he was holding back, and feels the warm brush of it against Grimmjow's lips mirrored onto his own skin.
There's a dust of colour high on Grimmjow's cheeks, his hair mussed from their whirlwind fight and temple scarlet with clotted blood. At this distance, Ichigo can see the iridescence of his estigma, the fanning out of his lower lashes.
Grimmjow looks bewildered, a little lost, and inside him, along with all of this, there's a tentative feeling blooming, something that Ichigo can only call hope.
Grimmjow is aching with the force of it. It is eating him from the inside out, eroding through the fragile joints of his bone-cage, like it is unmaking him.
He glances down at Ichigo's mouth, a quick flicker of his gaze, and his lips part a little, a little more. He doesn't know what's about to happen, yet he wants this so viciously. He has bared his most vulnerable part to Ichigo, he's trusting Ichigo with it.
Ichigo can feel his throat tighten with a short, sharp twist of pain. The bond is full of desire, nothing but knife-sharp desire, raw yearning and it's consuming Grimmjow, consuming the both of them together.
He leans forward, tipping himself a little up on his toes, so close that he can nearly feel the touch out of sheer anticipation.
Kurosaki, I— Grimmjow says, his voice shaking a little.
Realisation ripples through the bond.
Ichigo, standing as close as he is, can see it hit Grimmjow, can see the pupils dilate with the impact of it.
The distance between them freezes, and then shatters.
Grimmjow leaps back from where he was standing and it feels like he's ripping away Ichigo's own skin from his body. The look in his blue eyes is wild, and the look on his face is what no amount of gashes on his belly could ever produce.
He looks wounded.
Ichigo isn't prepared for the storm of feeling inside Grimmjow's chest.
It feels like he's drowning in ice, the air inside his lungs freezing into crooked shards, piercing the vulnerable tissue open. He's so cold that it burns him, the agony rushing through his veins like blue fire.
What did you do to me? Grimmjow is saying, the sound of his voice through gritted teeth so low that it's almost an yell, each word booming against Ichigo's eardrums. What the fuck have you done to me?
A sword pierces through Ichigo's chest.
A sword, potent with the blue glow of reishi.
Ichigo turns his head around by stuttered arcs, all his movements horribly disjointed.
Standing behind him, holding the hilt of the sword with both hands, is Urahara, jaws clenched in something resembling an apology, his haori fluttering wildly with the reiatsu emanating from the sword.
The ground trembles, pebbles clattering on the dust as an abrupt and enormous pressure wave of reiryoku swirls up a storm and then—
A paradigm shifts.
Fluid black explodes, pouring out of Ichigo's skin, pure energy weaving itself into matter, tendrils of black spin into consolidated mass and settle into form. The heat of the reaction is enough to boil water, as steam hisses out of the cracks and pores on the ground.
It's a shihakushō.
The familiar weight on his back is Zangetsu.
He has gotten his Soul Reaper powers back.
“Forgive me, Kurosaki-san.” Urahara is saying, but his voice comes from further away than his distance from Ichigo.
“Your instincts have been forged through wars of the highest order, and that was one thing I couldn't overcome otherwise. So I asked a favour of Grimmjow-san. To distract you, while I could return your powers to you. You're finally strong enough to accept this Spiritual Power.”
Ichigo can feel his heart hammering in his chest. His heart feels like it wants to tear itself into two, and that is not because it was just pierced by a massive sword.
The first time he'd gotten his powers, it hadn't felt like this.
Every step Grimmjow takes away from him feels like another square inch of skin being ripped from his body.
Urahara lowers his eyes.
Grimmjow flicks his wrist and the air distorts into the jaws of a Descorrer. He's in as much pain as Ichigo is, Ichigo can fucking tell. The bond is swaying dangerously between them, crackling with electricity.
We're even now. Grimmjow says. He spits the words out like they're burning his mouth, Soul Reaper.
And then he's gone.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
“Kurosaki-kun, we're coming in!”
The door opens to Inoue's bright smile, closely followed by Ishida's face pulled into the expression of perpetual unwavering disapproval whenever he's in Ichigo's vicinity and Chad's calm presence.
It's been a week since Ichigo has gotten his Soul Reaper powers back.
A week since Grimmjow had left from Urahara's training hunker, and had taken a part of Ichigo with him.
It's not like Grimmjow didn't come back at all, after that. Ichigo could tell by the sway of the bond that Grimmjow was in Urahara's shop three days after that, but he hadn't checked in.
He hasn't dared to.
There has been absolute radio-silence from Grimmjow's end too, the end of the bond that connects to Grimmjow crushed into quietude. This is enough to let Ichigo know that Grimmjow has done everything he could to reduce the existence of the bond as much as possible, save for severing it completely.
He had asked Urahara, when he first came to know of it, if a Soulbond could be severed.
“No,” Urahara had said, “You know, like how when a nerve to a muscle is cut, that muscle not only gets paralysed, but with time it also shrivels up grossly? Because the nerve helps the muscle move, and the nerve also helps the muscle grow. A bond between souls cannot be cut, once formed.”
But Grimmjow says it isn't a real bond, even if Ichigo doesn't know why. So the only hope is that it will shrivel up and vanish by itself, but if it doesn't, Grimmjow will have a lifetime of being cursed by being bound to someone he doesn't want.
And Ichigo had tried to kiss Grimmjow.
What was Ichigo thinking?
“Kurosaki-kun! It's not gonna taste as good if it goes cold!” Inoue chides him, sliding the plate full of crossed sweet buns towards Ichigo, and Ichigo jerks out of his thoughts.
“A blatant disrespect to good food, is what it is.” Ishida says, waiting to speak till he's swallowed his mouthful like a heathen. Chad hums, nodding along, and Ichigo can't tell if it's in agreement or disagreement.
“My room, my rules,” Ichigo says, “Ishida, you—”
Everything goes white.
Ichigo can't see anything.
There's no sound, like he's been thrown into an infinite void of nothingness, suspended in a blankness devoid of even gravity. He's drowning.
“—saki-kun!”
The ringing in his ears is nauseatingly loud.
“Kurosaki!”
Ichigo's heart kickstarts back into action, hammering against his chest like it wants to tear out from the bone cage altogether. The warmth on his back is Chad's hand resting gently over a scapula, a line of worry creasing the surface of his calm exterior.
“Something's wrong,” Ichigo manages to gasp out. “Hueco Mundo—”
He doesn't get to finish that sentence.
The curtains flutter behind him. Someone with an incredibly strong spiritual presence is standing on the bed. An arrancar, Ichigo whips his head back and sees the mask, the definite hollow reiatsu, but something is different.
Something is wrong.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow blasts his sonido to the fullest the moment the Descorrer opens into Hueco Mundo.
He corrects himself on the way, this isn't Hueco Mundo, this is what remains of it. To his left, the horizon is dotted with scattered fires, billowing columns of smoke obscuring the sky above.
To his right, everything has been levelled as far as the eye can see, the far reaching devastation interrupted only by the heads of a rare few towers raised from the plateaus of debris.
Hallibel had built this entire place up from the ground after Aizen.
Grimmjow was there, in the time he spent away from fighting with Kurosaki, not fighting with Kurosaki. It was Grimmjow's job to ferry the machines between worlds, from Urahara's dingy low-lit storage room to the Border Security headquarters in Las Noches. Grimmjow was there when the upgraded plans for energy stabilisation were finalised, he had stayed awake many a night laying on Urahara's spare futon thinking how he could improve certain models, how he could introduce changes to the guard stations.
Everything has been crushed to oblivion.
He should've been here earlier. He should've been here before the massacre happened. Hollows don't have the same quality or quantity of emotion associated with Hueco Mundo as Soul Reapers do with Soul Society. It's less and more, in a sense— this is the place that has contained his screams. This is the place that has witnessed his tooth-and-nail fight to cling to life, to survive, to evolve.
This is the place he's going to rule.
Maybe this could've been prevented. Maybe this could've been foreseen if Grimmjow had been where he was fucking supposed to be.
Instead, he was there in the Human World, sleeping on soft mattresses on someone else's terms, soaking in a hot spring after mock fights, playing make-believe with a human.
Feeling things he was never supposed to feel.
He doesn't know what he felt when the distance between him and Kurosaki was only that of a single breath. They've been this close multiple times, mid-fight, their swords singing against each other and the song echoing in their blood, their bond— there was always joy.
But this was different, somehow. There was intent. There was heat.
This bond can't be true, can't be anything but a fluke, Grimmjow can swear that by the heart he doesn't have. A soulbond is the rarest of connections, the purest of unions, and none of this shit is for him.
He doesn't have a soul.
It's just a matter of time till whatever cosmic joke this is finally reveals the punchline, everyone laughs and goes home. But that still leaves one question— how the hell is all of this that he just felt a lie?
What the hell was the yearning that wailed inside Kurosaki?
The bond remains a gentle rug at the back of his mind. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Grimmjow, I'm at Urahara-san's shop. Kurosaki is saying. Where the fuck are you?
This is the first time he's hearing Kurosaki's voice after that. After Kurosaki's heart got pierced with a sword. It wasn't even his sword. It wasn't even his win.
After you ran, Pantera growls.
Whatever Kurosaki is feeling now is not good for him. Not for his not-heart.
Quit your yapping. Grimmjow sends back.
The bond floods with instant relief.
Kurosaki brushes that off. For a being that doesn't even have hierro, Kurosaki's skin is astonishingly thick, much like his skull, perhaps a compensatory survival mechanism for being weak by default. Grimmjow, He says, You're in Hueco Mundo. I can tell. What's happening? What's wrong?
At a distance, Grimmjow can see Las Noches. No. Fuck no, that's not—
Las Noches has been reduced to rubble.
The ground doesn't appear dark because of shadows from the eerie light, the ground is dark with clotted blood, the sand crimson with what it has soaked.
He must've been distracted for a moment. The bond opens soon as his painstakingly applied restriction around it slips, and what he's seeing floods Kurosaki's vision as well.
Grimmjow, what the fuck. Kurosaki whispers.
Stay the fuck out of this, Soul Reaper. Grimmjow spits, with as much venom as he can muster, and there's a lot of it, bubbling at the junction of his throat and chest. This is none of your business.
Hurt slices through Kurosaki, sharp as the edge of his sword. The feeling runs like a shock down the bond, and rises like bile at the back of Grimmjow's throat, a sick, heady pleasure.
Yes, good.
Don't distract me from my battle, Kurosaki.
He's had enough of it. He's had enough of being shackled down, he's had enough of feeling things he can't name, enough of being made to feel things that were never meant for him via a bond that's strung their minds together.
To hell with everything.
He's a Hollow. He doesn't have a soul, he cannot have a soul, much less a bond to another.
This bond is a fluke and sooner or later, Kurosaki's going to come to realise it.
Kurosaki's gone quiet inside his mind, his usually warm presence on the other end of the bond a little distant.
Before Grimmjow gets to worry about any of that, he skids to a halt in front of the western wing of Las Noches.
Hallibel. That's Hallibel.
Washed in blood, and brought to a corner against the granite wall behind her back, holding her sword in her slashed, trembling hands, aiming one last stroke at the enemy.
She's going to die.
Hollow carcasses— Gillians, Adjuchas, lesser hollows— are scattered in the devastation of a battlefield in front of her, everything lit by the gruesome greenish-blue fire of enemy torches. Grimmjow has no fucking clue what happened to the three of Hallibel's fraccions, not that he can identify the semblance of anybody in the mound of the dead below.
In all of the time Grimmjow's spent in Hueco Mundo after getting out of the Descorrer, he hasn't seen a single other Hollow alive.
Hueco Mundo was invaded. Hallibel didn't go down without a fight, and fight back her subjects did— Not soldiers anymore, Hallibel's stern, cool voice rings inside Grimmjow's mind— but this wasn't a war. This was a massacre.
When Aizen came to negotiate with Barragan, when Aizen started taking over Hueco Mundo, there wasn't a bloodbath like this.
A flicker of a movement catches Grimmjow's attention, all the way down below on the ground just beneath Hallibel. There are two hollows still standing.
Hallibel is telling them to run away, even her breathless request exuding enough elegance to command the response to a royal order.
Nelliel's Fraccions.
They begin to run, but not fast enough. Nowhere near fast enough. Somehow they manage to get behind a large boulder unnoticed, and now Grimmjow can see what he couldn't before. One of these guys is cradling Nelliel in his arms.
Nelliel has slipped from her adult form.
One side of her face is awash with blood.
Grimmjow has half a mind to leave them there to die, they're nothing but deadweight— but Kurosaki's face floats into his mind, there's a small smile curling the corner of his mouth upwards— and Grimmjow's heading towards that place because he has a fucking death wish.
It takes him three steps to reach there.
“Make a single sound and I'll kill all three of you before the sound even travels beyond this ledge,” He whispers, fierce enough for the Big Patterned one to swallow the bray he was about to let out.
“There's gonna be a gateway of three seconds, from when I open a Descorrer to when they notice us. Run. Fuck—”
A glowing arrow whips through the air and Grimmjow moves, not away, but towards its locus. It would've hit Nelliel otherwise.
Once all of this is over, Grimmjow tells himself, he's going to kill Kurosaki for ruining him.
The Descorrer is open behind them, but the Thin Purple one looks like he's about to pull his sword out or do something equally stupid, so Grimmjow does what he has to— he kicks them all of them down the mouth of the darkness.
The Descorrer vanishes into the air.
Grimmjow turns. It's time for the hunt. He plucks the arrow stuck in his shoulder out— it went in quite deep and it hurts like a bitch— rips the sleeve of his jacket open and wraps it on the wound, applying as much pressure as he can.
None of the bastards surrounding him take a step forward. Grimmjow unsheathes Pantera.
He needn't worry about Nel and the others anymore.
He's sent them to the safest place he knows.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
The rain hasn't stopped.
Time seems to have slipped away from all of them, somewhere in the middle, leaving a discordant hum in the ether in its stead. It feels like its flow has been fractured by a strong blow, turning time suddenly from discrete to continuous.
There's a before and an after, and nobody wants to talk about the during.
For Ichigo, time has always been like that.
He is adjusting quite well, he thinks. Rukia and Renji are stable in the Operating Theatre. There's been no communication from Hueco Mundo yet. Orihime and Chad had strongly insisted on going with him to Hueco Mundo after Nel, Pesche and Dondochakka came to them, and he had left from there alone.
Go. Grimmjow had said in his mind, firm, resolute, the moment their Garganta had opened into Hueco Mundo. This is my kingdom, I'll protect it myself.
Ichigo had to leave before he could even see Grimmjow once.
And he came to Soul Society and he could do nothing. He could protect nothing.
The bond is silent, but present, the only comfort he has for himself now, and he knows nothing will happen to Inoue or Chad as long as the bond is there. As long as Grimmjow is there.
Ichigo has faith. He can't remember if he's ever put so much of his trust in another person before.
Here in Soul Society, the smaller pieces slowly fall into place. The bigger picture is turning out to be more gruesome than anybody anticipated, exponentially exceeding everyone's calculations with every passing minute.
Along the streets of Seireitei, blood flows in turbid crimson rivulets, contrasting the heavy gray of the skies above.
Squad Four barracks are overcrowded, the air heavy with the cloying, ferric smell of blood, the sharp acidic tang of vomit, the acrid smell of burnt flesh.
The Captain Commander of the Gotei Thirteen is dead.
Ichigo stands with his back against a wall, so the trolleys can be wheeled around without him getting in the way of the wheels, and watches Hanatarō scurry from one makeshift bed to another.
He has to keep himself away from tapping into his own mind.
“Ichigo-kun.” A voice calls his name.
Ichigo turns around, and looks to see the Captain of the Eighth Division standing behind him.
Kyōraku Shunsui. Ichigo knows him. Right back from when he came to Soul Society to rescue Rukia. He's one of the most powerful Captains Ichigo knows.
The socket of his right eye is hollow. His signature flower-printed Kimono is stained darkly with blood, multiple gunshot wounds scattered throughout the fabric.
Ichigo feels his insides lurch.
“Thank you.” Kyōraku says. His usually jolly face is devastatingly grave. “For your help today, Ichigo-kun.”
Ichigo shudders. “I couldn't really do much.” He says, jaws clenched.
“You drove the enemy boss away, I'd say that's a pretty good reason to have your head held up high.” Kyōraku says. “However, at the moment, there is something else that only you can do.”
“I will do anything I can.” Ichigo says in a heartbeat.
“I would like you to maintain contact with Hueco Mundo. Due to massive failures in our power grids, communications aren't up and working yet. But you can do it without telephones too, can't you?”
Ichigo looks up, breath catching in his throat. What does this mean? Does this mean he knows? How does he—
“Dear me, I should've been gentler than dropping it on you like that.” Kyōraku says, shifting in his place. “Please don't look so shocked. Not everyone can tell. I can.”
“Yama-jii would never have asked this of you, but I am not as noble. I can't afford to be.” His chuckle is mirthless. “I would request you to maintain contact between these two worlds, as apologetic as I am to ask you to use something so personal for diplomatic advantage.”
Ichigo swallows. “We aren't exactly on talking terms.” His face heats with the admission, throat constricting around the words as he pushes them out with considerable effort. Saying it out loud somehow makes it more real. It occupies a space in the world now, outside of his own heart.
“Dear me, I can't offer you any advice there, sadly.” Kyōraku chuckles. “He's always been better than me at these kinds of things, you see? Ichigo-kun, I'll tell you a secret.” He says, lowering his voice into a whisper, a twinkle in the grey of his eye.
“I've been around for a really long time, I've had the bond for a really long time, but to this day, I have no idea what I should do.” Kyōraku rests a hand on his abdomen and laughs out, a short sound filled to the brim with fondness and affection, even through all the pain that is trying to drag everything down. “Bless my stitches. Nanao-chan will really kill me for good if I pop one.”
“All I know is,” Kyōraku sighs, a small smile twitching the corner of his mouth up, and in that one slow second, the imprint of the last few hours is vivid on his face, the crow's feet around the corners of his eyes appear a little more deep. Most of the generators are running on max to keep the Trauma Care running, so the rest of the area is lit dimly, and it might just be an illusion from the flickering lights and shadows, but there's no doubt that the heaviness of his voice is bone-deep exhaustion. “If he wasn't there to anchor me at that moment when I felt Yama-jii . . . I'd probably be under a shroud too.”
Ichigo feels a chill run down his spine, raising unpleasant goosebumps in its wake. “I will do my best.” He says.
“Kurosaki-sama!” An unknown Squad Member runs around a corner and bows down deeply in front of them. “Captain Kurotsuchi has requested your presence!”
Ichigo nods, and excuses himself out.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow wakes up to an ocean of pain.
He's immediately sure that none of it is coming from him, because the woman was here, Grimmjow can still sense the gentle presence of her reiatsu in the vicinity. She has healed him, he knows that without needing to look down at himself.
This pain is Kurosaki's.
It was a good idea that Grimmjow decided to get healed. If Kurosaki has too much of a Hero Complex to admit that he too needs to get healed, then Grimmjow is going to heal himself. There's nothing Grimmjow will not do to make sure he's the one to kill Kurosaki, hasn't he understood this yet?
A world apart, everything inside Kurosaki is filled with bleak despair. He's falling apart, like someone's taken an axe to the core of his being, like a bullet striking a mirror. A terrible guilt weighs the bond down, and it's inside Grimmjow as well, gnawing at his ribs with enough ferocity to make them cave in.
There's nothing Grimmjow can do but sit in Hueco Mundo and feel it, feel it suffocate the both of them.
Kurosaki is so preoccupied that he hasn't even noticed that he's been letting his thoughts slip. Even since Kurosaki got his powers back— ever since you ran, Pantera growls inside his mind— Kurosaki hasn't let his feelings transfer at all.
After months of feeling like he had swallowed the sun and kept it inside a chest, after months of feeling heartbeats resonate in his empty ribcage, Grimmjow's finally returned to being how he is supposed to be: hollow.
So he gets to work.
There's no apparent end to the mountain loads of work Urahara's dumping on him everyday— spectrometer this and spirit particle analysers that, making an artificial greenhouse in the barren heart of Hueco Mundo and planting weird looking seeds in the sand, assembling one machine after the other.
He has a good mind to say fuck it and get going on his own, but he doesn't. The more occupied he is, the less are the chances of him accidentally transmitting anything to Kurosaki. He's better at this game than Kurosaki is.
He can't kill Kurosaki if either of them are dead, so he has to keep himself alive and he has to keep Kurosaki alive, and he just has to keep reminding himself of that.
Then there's that woman, with her stupid fucking doe eyes and unending cheerfulness, and the quiet well-built guy, who's reiryoku tastes faintly of hollow. He moves without making a single sound and is equally as good at heavy lifting as he is at assembling miniscule machine parts.
Eighty hours pass. Somewhere in the middle of it, Kurosaki leaves him a message: I'm going to the Spirit Palace to get my sword back. Like he's leaving messages in an answering machine, but the odd part isn't that.
The odd part is that Kurosaki doesn't tack on a 'Take care of them' or shit like that at the end.
Grimmjow gets back to work.
He wakes up to Kurosaki pleading with someone.
I can still go. Kurosaki says. He's bleeding, and he's brought down onto the ground, worn out, exhausted. Please. He's saying. I can still fight.
Whatever the reply is, comes out garbled, like all of the words are reaching Kurosaki through a layer of water. But then, the bond is forced open wide between them, wider than it has allowed to have been in a long time, and there's a nauseating acceleration.
It stops.
Through Kurosaki's eyes, he can see the neon signs of the Kurosaki Clinic, shining through the hazy sheet of rain.
Kurosaki is back in the Human World.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Ichigo walks out of the clinic.
Inside his mind, the bond sparks alive. Grimmjow has woken up.
It almost makes Ichigo miss a step, all of him filled with a longing so vicious that he barely can keep standing on his two feet.
Grimmjow doesn't say anything. Ichigo knows that Grimmjow knows as well, there's nothing anymore that can remain only his. Grimmjow knows all of his hidden dark corners, all of the places where his seams aren't stitched tight, all of his failures and grief and fear and humiliation.
All of his joy.
I'm fine. Ichigo says.
You are. Grimmjow shoots back and an image flashes in front of his eyes. It's a vignette of his face.
Recognition sparks in Ichigo's mind. It's from when he looked up in the mirror in Ikumi-san's shower, fogged from the steam. He couldn't bear to look at his own face, so he'd looked away as soon as he'd wiped the condensation off the mirror on a whim.
His eyes are sunken so devastatingly from exhaustion that Ichigo almost staggers. There are lines etched in the thin skin below the lower lid, so deep and jagged that it almost looks like they've been permanently marked into the dermis.
The image flickers and then vanishes rapidly.
You're fine. Grimmjow says one more time just to be contrary, frigid now if he was cool before.
Fuck you. I'm not okay. Are you happy? I'm not okay! Ichigo snaps out before he can really catch himself. God, he is all over the place. This offered kindness feels like the surest proof of his ruin.
She was your mother. Grimmjow says, quietly.
Ichigo nearly forgets how to breathe. Grimmjow wades through the words carefully, like he doesn't know what they are or what they're supposed to mean. He has just held them gently in his memory because one evening, they laid side by side on the riverbank and Ichigo told him about her.
In his own stilted way, this is Grimmjow trying to comfort Ichigo.
“If he hadn't anchored me then,” Kyōraku's voice rings in his ears.
From the recollection of everything that happened in the span of a night, one of the things Isshin said is stuck in his mind.
Quincies have no natural resistance to Hollow spiritual power.
He can't really put a finger on why this, of all things, is still swirling in his mind. Oh. Perhaps this is why that Quincy-Arrancar guy couldn't steal his Bankai. He already has a hollow inside him, so it makes sense, it fits the puzzle. But there's something more important, something more pressing—
Do Hollows, Ichigo wonders with a rush of cold dread in the pit of his stomach, have any natural resistance to the spiritual power of Quincies?
Congratulations. Grimmjow says in his mind. He's found a way to smirk down the bond. You've finally figured it out.
It's mainly a transfer of Spiritual Power, Urahara's voice reminds him.
We will kill each other. Grimmjow says, his voice like ground glass, We will kill each other, Kurosaki. We would've killed each other as a Hollow and a Soul Reaper, and we will kill each other as soulmates. The last word is spat out like it's burning Grimmjow's mouth.
Don't think anything's changed. It was always just a matter of who got there first.
And then he's gone, disappearing into the greyness of Ichigo's mind.
Ichigo breathes in deep, and then out, releasing all the tension he had accumulated in his muscles.
He knows what he's going to have to do.
Thank you, He says into the bond, not caring if Grimmjow hears it or not.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow wakes into a dream.
In his dream, Kurosaki stands in front of fire and plunges his hands into the heart of it. He pulls out his soul through the steam and smoke.
Two swords gleam in his hands. Both of them are Zangetsu, Kurosaki says.
Grimmjow wakes up.
You can do it now, Pantera tells him.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow enters Soul Society through a circular variant of a Descorrer, which opens into a huge underground laboratory.
A huge underground laboratory that is stock full of Soul Reapers. Grimmjow contains the itch of extraordinary murderous intent under his skin with sheer and admirable willpower.
None of them are worth his time or effort.
The Soul Reaper that's standing next to Grimmjow— he's Captain class, Grimmjow's constantly active hindbrain hisses— has long white hair like a waterfall down his back.
He is near about the mildest, and Grimmjow arrives at this word after a few seconds of deliberation, among all the other ones Grimmjow has seen so far. There's something about him that still puts Grimmjow on edge though, not the presence of violence, but the uncanny absence of it.
There's one little blond brat, her snaggletooth pinched over her lip, regarding him with her eyes narrowed in increasing suspicion.
She's about as tall as the blond Kurosaki, except Grimmjow doesn't think of that anymore.
He's back to where he belongs, the battlefield.
This brat has been looking him up and down for a good minute now. Grimmjow wishes dearly Urahara would hurry the fuck up with his preparations for opening the Sun Gate or whatever, this place is absolutely crawling with Soul Reapers and Soul Reaper Adjacents, and it's making him sick.
“You're that arrancar who got his ass handed to him by Shinji,” That brat says, hands crossed in front of her chest and mouth curled in a shit eating grin.
Grimmjow lets his mind take him back briefly to that day in Karakura— Kurosaki's face against the sun, his hair a halo of fire around his head— and remembers the lanky beanpole of a guy who interfered, between his and Kurosaki's fight.
Every crime in the world is on one side of the scale and this on the other, and Grimmjow has never had to spare a second thought as to which one outweighs the other. If this brat is an acquaintance of that man, who pulled out a hollow mask and fired a cero at him, lacklustre as it was when compared to Kurosaki's, then it explains why Grimmjow can taste this familiar hybrid reiatsu at the back of his palate.
“And you are the outcome of one of Aizen's experiments, I suppose?” Grimmjow says, and watches as her pupils explode into all-black. Ah. Hit the nerve right on the spot. “Am I right, half 'n half?”
The kid shoots like a bullet towards Grimmjow before her companions can stop her, her yell of incandescent rage drowning out the murmur that rises in the room around them, and Grimmjow likes her speed. He likes her anger. He doesn't like people who are all bark and no bite.
He laughs, short-lived but genuine, as he blocks her sword with his forearm, the impact of the blow is really commendable, and then twists his arm so the edge of her own sword is against her throat.
“Don't worry,” Grimmjow says as he lets go, “So am I.”
The kid glares at him for a while, and then jumps back to her place. “Crazy bastard.” She says, cracking her neck, but there's an odd understanding in her voice.
“Hiyori! Get the hell back in here!” Somebody yells, and then walks into his field of vision.
Grimmjow hears the catch in his own breath. This is that man. Who stepped between him and Kurosaki in Karakura.
He's about to pull his sword out when his vision begins to swim.
The bond is forced open between them with the sheer magnitude and intensity of Kurosaki's emotions, determination and desperation clashing inside his mind, the friction between them almost unbearable.
Kurosaki has seen something that has shaken him.
Speak of the devil, and an image materialises in the darkness behind Grimmjow's eyelids.
The Quincy boss is standing in front.
The floors are white and the pillars are white and the sky around is a blue bright enough to register on the cones as white. Soul King's Palace? Kurosaki's in the Soul King's Palace. Kurosaki is scared. Yhwach's eyes—
Grimmjow feels the bond roil with a wave of nausea, and it hits him at lightning speed. The impact sways him physically. Grimmjow can only hear a faraway ringing in his ears—
“The hell?” Half 'n half brat is looking at him, brows furrowed. “What happened to your fucking reiatsu?”
The cold greasy feeling running along the bottom of Kurosaki's mind— that's terror.
Anger never turns blind unless you're scared alongside, and this is exactly what is happening to Kurosaki at the moment.
Grimmjow spreads his feet a little further apart to steady his posture, and concentrates all of his focus into holding on to his end of the trembling bond between them. He doesn't really have anything to send to Kurosaki— like Kurosaki earths him when he's feeling like a live wire.
But that helps too. Kurosaki realises Grimmjow's presence and it takes an immediate effect on him. Even if Grimmjow's done nothing but just be there, Kurosaki grasps at it like he's drowning.
He can't see what Kurosaki's seeing anymore, so at least that's an improvement.
“You did a good job.” The white haired Captain standing beside him says, his face beaming with something that closely resembles pride. What the fuck, Grimmjow thinks to himself, very carefully so Kurosaki doesn't get to hear it. This guy barely even knows him.
“It is difficult at first, you know.” The man continues speaking, reaching inside the sleeve of his shihakushō with a hand, like he hasn't even noticed the look of pure shock on Grimmjow's face. “I had trouble adjusting to it for a long time, and we had years to adjust. You two, you and Ichigo-kun, you've barely had time.” He sighs, closing his eyes briefly.
“You have a—” Grimmjow can't help the exclamation. He's known it was rare, this entire deal of soulmates, and this is the first time he's meeting one of a pair. Outside of hearsay floating in the wind, outside of Szayel's laboratory, that is.
“It is difficult.” The man says, his voice a soft caress. “Suddenly baring the whole of your mind to someone else. And neither you nor Ichigo-kun seem like the kind of people to me who will go with a decision that has been made for you, even if it's been made by the universe itself, without a fight.”
Grimmjow feels his eyes widen, his reflexes acting faster than his comprehension. The Captain smiles at him, at however his face is looking like at the moment, but it's not an unkind smile.
“Fight it.” His vibrant green eyes sparkle, like he's telling Grimmjow a secret. “Fight it. Fight till you determine that it wasn't the universe who made that decision for you. It was you two, yourselves.”
“Captain Ukitake! Please get your spirit sphere!” A Shinigami woman in glasses says. “Jaegerjaquez-san, you too, if you would.”
Grimmjow clicks his tongue and shifts posture to move. After all this is over, he's going to kill Kurosaki twice over to make up for all of this. He has a lot to settle with Kurosaki.
The ground slips beneath his feet.
Kurosaki is paralysed with terrified confusion. An invisible force is gripping his wrist, and Grimmjow realises with a preternatural lurch of animal rage, that it is not Zangetsu that Kurosaki's holding in his hand.
In front of Kurosaki, a ball of resin is split into two. Along with the limbness abomination of a being inside, oval irises expressionless, dead—
“The Soul King,” Grimmjow manages to grasp out through the crushing trip of asphyxiating terror like a noose around Kurosaki's neck, a world away, “He's dead.”
The room explodes into silence.
“Everyone get back!” The Captain says, his voice even-keeled even through the palpable urgency, and then turns his level gaze on Grimmjow. “Thank you, Grimmjow.”
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Everything is falling apart. Ichigo can't bring himself to draw the next breath.
All quincies have his blood running in his veins.
My son, born in the darkness.
Is this what is meant for him? Always a part of someone's greater plan, always a means to an end, always a puppet in the grand cosmic scheme—
No, Grimmjow's voice inside his head pushes the thought back. Don't you dare pollute my mind with that shit.
Grimmjow is panting from exertion, adrenaline gushing in his veins as a compensatory response to the terror Ichigo felt in his own heart.
Ishida's gone over to the Quincies. In his heart, Ichigo cannot bring himself to believe it at all, but it was Ishida's arrow through Yoruichi's shoulder that caused the Soul King's severed body to collapse. It was Ishida's arrow that sent them all crashing down from the Soul King's palace, and if it wasn't for Inoue's shield, they'd have been obliterated from the fall itself, burnt to ashes from the friction of air in the journey downwards.
Ichigo can't tell if everything is happening very fast, or if time is stretched so slow that nothing is moving at all.
Inoue is healing Yoruichi's mangled arm. Chad is sitting like a statue carved in stone.
He has to move. He has to—
Everything begins shaking again.
The absorption of the Soul King is complete. It's over.
This is despair. This all-consuming blackness, clinging to the pores on his skin, seeping downwards, inwards, a toxin spreading through not only body but also his mind. How did Ichigo let himself forget?
A flurry of cackling black rushes downwards from the Spirit Palace to Soul Society below, even the rejects of the Soul King's reiatsu so potent with reishi that they turn the air around their path into a glowing canal of plasma condensate.
Incoming. Ichigo says, unable to recognise his own voice in his mind. Grimmjow—
Grimmjow is about to retort something in response, Ichigo can feel it on the tip of his tongue, sharp, seething, but then Grimmjow's knees buckle.
He drops down to the ground like his hamstrings have been sliced through and through, barely managing to brace the fall with his palms, and a world above, Ichigo shoots up to his feet.
Grimmjow! Ichigo doesn't care how frantic he sounds, how much of his heart swells up to his throat, choking his voice. Answer me, Grimmjow!
Grimmjow can't breathe. He can't breath and he's falling and it's not harmless, and Ichigo's voice isn't reaching him through the dense miasma of memories clouding his mind.
Ichigo closes his eyes, trying to focus on what Grimmjow is feeling, and in the darkness behind his eyelids, he's standing inside Las Noches. Ichigo recognises this room, the 'Conference Room', as Grimmjow had told him when they had gone to Hueco Mundo together while they were training. Before everything went wrong.
Grimmjow is trembling, Ichigo realises, not in fear, not in pain, but from apoplectic rage.
The brutal, crushing reiatsu bearing down on Grimmjow intensifies further.
Realisation shocks through Ichigo's conscious. Aizen.
The subsequent wash of reiatsu floods through Soul Society below, and when it clears, Ichigo can't sense even a trace of the black half-sentient infestation. Temporary relief makes Ichigo bold, and he lets himself think back to the time, not so long back, when Grimmjow's mere presence at the other end of the bond helped him stay on his feet when it mattered the most.
He thinks back to that one evening in the training bunker, Grimmjow's hand reaching out to him.
Maybe it really is that simple. Maybe it's not. Ichigo finds his end of the bond in his mind, and then holds it as fast as he can. He gathers every ounce of strength in his body, all the remaining faith, all the assurance and lets the bond soak everything, and then he yanks it as hard as he can for good measure.
Grimmjow yanks it back twice as hard. Don't get too cocky, bastard.
He's back on his feet.
Ichigo takes a deep breath. “Yoruichi-san, how do we get back up there?” He asks, and she grins back at him, a rare warmth lighting up her eyes.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
The Sun Gate opens into the Spirit Palace.
Or so Urahara said, but as far as the eyes can see, Grimmjow can only see the same bland white structures of white, the revolting hallmark of the Quincies' architecture. Distantly, Grimmjow wonders, what is with these monstrous power-freaks with an insatiable fetish to play God and their affinity for white?
The new jumpsuit's Urahara has designed for him is black.
Mini-Yoruichi makes a leap for his dearest older sister the moment he steps foot on the graveyard ground. Red Pineapple Head turns to Grimmjow, the absolute fucking gall, like he's meant to do something. Grimmjow stares right back.
“I figured you would want to along with him too,” Red Pineapple Head says, “Ichigo's with Yoruichi-s— Ahn! Rukia, what the hell?” The tiny black-haired Soul Reaper quickly withdraws her knife-sharp elbow from his waist and looks away into the distance.
Ah, Grimmjow knows this one. Perhaps she remembers the look on Grimmjow's face before he's about to put his hand through someone's midsection.
“Don't fuckin' think for a second that you can order me around.” Grimmjow says, hand ready on Pantera's hilt.
“There, there, there! Tha-aaat's it!” Grimmjow can only detect a swell of a pink, flowery kimono before the Soul Reaper— not only just a Captain this time, the Captain-Commander, Ringmaster of the Circus Supreme— steps in between them. It's like he moved in a quantum leap, vanishing from one co-ordinate and appearing at the other near simultaneously. “No fighting!”
He was the one who cradled the White-haired Captain's unconscious, hollowed out body to another, supposedly more secure place, with a gentleness incongruous to the burden of his Spiritual Pressure.
It had unsettled Grimmjow, for some unfathomable reason. It made the joints of his bone-cage want to shake loose with immoderate want.
Grimmjow clicks his tongue, and darts behind the young brat, who's nowhere to be seen by now.
Before he even sees Kurosaki, before he can even taste the ever familiar sun-warm reiatsu at the back of his palate, he can feel the tug at the very centre of his existence, the bond pulling him inexorably, inevitably towards Kurosaki.
He hasn't seen Kurosaki in so long. Not since he ran.
A sudden ache twists inside his gut, lancing through the bond, but Kurosaki's face doesn't contort with it.
Kurosaki looks better than Grimmjow remembers. There are two swords strapped to his back. It wasn't just a dream. His Spiritual Pressure is noticeably higher, but it isn't as blatantly oppressive as before, all of his handsome strength condensed instead into the margin of his body. Precise, calculated.
He's looking at Grimmjow like he's remembered how to breathe again, and all Grimmjow can think of is one rainy night in Karakura Town, when Kurosaki's father had told him about his mother, and one line had drifted down the bond and found its way inside Grimmjow's hollow chest.
Kurosaki is like the sun.
Before Kurosaki can say something stupid, and he's clearly opening his mouth to say 'I didn't think you would come', Grimmjow cuts in. Prophylaxis, he tells himself. Better than the cure.
Kurosaki is like the sun.
Don't get the wrong idea. Grimmjow says, I can't let Hueco Mundo get destroyed, is all. If Hueco Mundo is destroyed, where am I going to kill you?
Kurosaki smiles in reply, violently beautiful, like mercy, like salvation.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Fluid black rolls off Yhwach.
Distorted egg-yolk eyes crawl all over him, crowding near his head. The Spiritual Pressure radiating off him is so immense that it buzzes in Ichigo's ears.
A few more hits. A little more of it, he has to land exactly on that balance. Grimmjow cannot sustain much more of the Quincy reiatsu that's overflowing the bond.
By his side, Inoue looks worried. Her lip trembles, but her hands do not. Her shield does not waver.
The guy that Grimmjow's fighting has the ability to create immunity to Spirit Particles, as much as Ichigo has been able to decipher in between dodging blows from Yhwach. He has to be careful, too, the more hits he takes, the more he holds Grimmjow back.
Urahara is with Grimmjow. So is Yoruichi, and a little kid that Ichigo can assume is Yoruichi's younger sibling. None of them are doing good, but if there's one reason that Ichigo can keep his head all here, all in this one fight, it's because Grimmjow is there with them.
He'll win. Grimmjow will—
The tip of his sword turns white. It takes root in the metal, in its very soul, and flows upwards, pure and cleansing, defying gravity, defying logic.
Inoue nods in understanding. She wraps her shield around her and jumps back, perfectly timed, as the white finally reaches the hilt of Zangetsu's blade.
Reiryoku explodes.
The atmosphere triples in weight, and then there's a brilliant flash of light and smoke, neigh simultaneously with a tremendous, resounding boom. Such is the density, such is the pressure of his Spiritual Power that it diffuses the excess energy in superheated plumes of smoke.
Grind, Pantera! Grimmjow says, synchronised inside his mind, Spiritual Pressure exploding now that there's no element of Quincy flowing down the bond.
The smoke clears.
It's true. Ichigo is no longer a Quincy. He's no longer a Soul Reaper either. He has his Vasto Lorde horn jutting proudly out from one side of head, one of Zangetsu's blades is brilliant white and the other absolute black. He has his mother's blood flowing in his veins, and he has the Soul Reaper powers of his father. He has the Hollow powers of his own, as well as that of an Espada in Release.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
“You think this would affect me?” Grimmjow says, gritting his teeth against the seething pain. He can distantly feel cold sweat trickling down his forehead, over the hollow of his temple, down into his eyes. It burns, however much he tries to blink them away.
The Quincy bastard is bleeding out on the ground in front of him, his heart a wet, red smear on the ground.
He has set one hell of a trap, Grimmjow will give him that, but Grimmjow won't let him get away with the last word, not as long as he's alive, no.
“All of you Quincy fucks combined wouldn't be—” The air is too thin inside the Gift ball. His vision swims with the lack of it, and at the frayed edges of his peripherals, he senses Urahara collapse. “— wouldn't be more of a headache than he already is.”
Days flash by before his eyes.
This really must be it, he really is at the very edge of existence for his mind to conjure up these images, but fuck it, there's no time anymore. This is the only way he gets to see Kurosaki smile once more before he gasps his last poisoned breath inside this collapsing coffin.
Grimmjow had wanted to sever the bond. It was nothing but a shackle, nothing but a route directly to the heart of the fire. Trading uncharted waters every waking second, walking barefoot over unfamiliar terrain.
Kurosaki's armed with something that Grimmjow can't even see, much less defend himself against.
He was better before, he was better when he could feel only the few easiest ones— hunger and rage and pain, each one feeding into each other and forming a comprehensible loop.
“I've lived with the worst kind of poison! Inside me! I'm immune, goddamnit!”
He's laughing as the words tumble out of his mouth, a little slurred perhaps, but he can't really hold it against himself. There's no one here to hear him, no one that matters enough anyway.
So Grimmjow laughs, and he laughs, and he laughs till the hinges of his chest want to come loose with the devastating force of it.
This is it, the frenzied realisation, the confession.
Kurosaki is like the sun, the words still inside him, infected, festering, rotten.
Preserved.
Bankai. Kurosaki descends into balance. Tensa Zangetsu.
Pantera opens her eyes. Now. She roars.
The world shatters around Grimmjow and takes him with it. All of the plates covering his body burst open simultaneously in a flash of pure energy that he can feel on his tongue, the light from the explosion so bright, so dense that it nearly carries all of his weight. He's floating, cradled in the vibration of atoms, barely contained.
The inexplicable light turns into substance: longer, sharper talons emerging from the nascent blackness of his hands, his feet no longer weighed down by armor plates. Kurosaki's scar glows across his chest in an iridescent blue.
Get up. He says. Get up. Go after him.
Kurosaki listens with his breath held.
Kill him, before I find you. I will find you. If we die without showing each other these forms, we will never be able to forgive each other. I am incapable of it anyway, but what excuse will you have for yourself?
The bond is incandescent between them.
Everything in Grimmjow's three-meter radius gets vaporized, the shockwave travelling through the ground and the air at the same velocity. The laws of physics don't work here. This is a kingdom he's made for himself, where he's allowed to say the words out loud that he doesn't let himself hear.
He's allowed to want.
And no Gift Ball, no Bereich, no power in all three worlds would be able to surpass how much he wants Kurosaki.
“Segunda Etapa,” He tells the flabbergasted Quincy in front of him, and this fucker doesn't have much longer left anyway. Grimmjow hopes he's thanking his God for the small mercies. “Don't blame yourself. Not even Urahara knew about this.”
The Cero fires.
It doesn't destroy, it obliterates. Everything.
This is his kingdom.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Ichigo runs.
He doesn't have to apply conscious thought behind directions, because Grimmjow's reiatsu is a brilliant beacon burning in the horizon. His feet will take him there, because that is where his heart is, that's where his soul will lead him.
Something moves in the air. It's so swift that it only displaces a few atoms out of their slumber of constant movement. Ichigo blinks.
Grimmjow stands in front of him, devastating in the glory of his second release.
You, Ichigo whispers in amazement, You did it, Grimmjow.
Yes, I did. Grimmjow says, But the war isn't over Kurosaki. Not yet. Not until I kill you.
Grimmjow, please, Ichigo says, let's just—
No! Grimmjow snarls. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of it, do you hear me? I'm tired of not understanding what I feel! I don't like not knowing! I'm supposed to hate all these things, I'm supposed to hate it when you go around trusting me with your most vulnerable parts, but I don't, I feel all wrong! When you're sleeping on the verandah next to me, I don't feel like I want to kill you, don't you understand, Kurosaki? How dare you take away the one thing that was mine in this endless death?”
Ichigo stands. Speechless. Like an effigy of his own self.
This bond can't exist. Grimmjow's voice hardens. I can't cut the damn bond, but I can cut you open. I'll kill you and then I won't have to feel like this ever again.
You know, Ichigo says, and he feels so tired all of a sudden. It's all catching up to him finally. You've been saying this from the beginning. Why can't the bond exist, Grimmjow? What difference does it make if the bond exists or not? Even if the universe has decided this shit for us, that doesn't mean we should go along with it. That doesn't decide our fate.
Grimmjow stands in frozen silence, his face racked with desperate rage that has turned to physical pain.
Just because we are soulmates, doesn't mean I'll hold you down. Ichigo hears his voice say. It resonates inside him, amphoric. Doesn't mean I'll tie you to myself. Doesn't mean I'll ask you to love me.
The last of his words are reduced to nearly a whisper, but that is enough to detonate something inside Grimmjow.
Grimmjow moves, the reishi-dense air parting before the flawless aerodynamic shape of his body. A perfectly crafted weapon, Ichigo gets a second to marvel, before Grimmjow's unrestrained fist connects to his jaw and it sends him flying.
Ichigo doesn't resist.
The blow sends him over the circular edge of the Spirit Palace towns, and he falls. The wind sings in his ears, whistling around the fading tip of his horn. His merged form is leaving him, but at least his reiatsu is stable. Not Quincy, nor Soul Reaper, nor Hollow.
No matter what happens to him at the end of the fall, Grimmjow will be okay. Grimmjow will be safe.
He closes his eyes as his own skin envelopes him once again and braces for when he will enter the atmosphere of Soul Society.
“Don't you dare go down without a fight!” Grimmjow yells out loud, his voice breaking with condensed desperation. “Don't you dare, Kurosaki!”
Ichigo opens his eyes. Above him in the air, Grimmjow is an approaching meteor of blue-black, the air whipping through his long white hair. The tips are a darker blue than the one Ichigo knows. He looks beautiful.
The air burns his eyes. They begin to water.
Grimmjow catches him.
That doesn't stop their fall. They both crash through the invisible dome above Soul Society, and then they make contact with a canopy of foliage, tumbling and spiralling through the branches and the leaves.
They collide against the soft, green moss in a graceless tangle of limbs, Grimmjow below and Ichigo over him.
They've landed right at the very boundary of Soul Society, beyond Rukongai. In the dense jungle surrounding the periphery.
Grimmjow braced the fall with his own body but Ichigo can feel the burn against his own back.
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
Grimmjow flips them over before Kurosaki can breathe.
Why don't you understand? What part of this don't you understand? Grimmjow is saying, his chest heaving with every breath. Kurosaki is stunned into silence, amber eyes wide open. Grimmjow has never known what to do with so much light. “This Bond,” The word burns his tongue, “Can't exist because I'm a Hollow!”
Kurosaki stares up at him, not even trying to move. He doesn't even try to get the upper hand back. Kurosaki won't fight him anymore. So what? He asks, sounding as hollow as Grimmjow is inside, and he's done it, he's finally done it— he's carved the heart right out of Kurosaki.
He aches.
Because I don't have a soul, Kurosaki. I don't have a soul, I have millions. Don't you know? I killed and ate them all to get there. None of these are mine. None of this, He gestures between him and Kurosaki with an obsidian hand, is meant for me.
“That's bullshit.” Kurosaki says out loud. His eyes are burning again. He lifts a hand and touches Grimmjow's chest with the flat of his palm. There's no hesitation in his touch. “You have a soul right here. I can feel it. Right here. The bond may be a lie, but this is not. All those souls have become you.”
Kurosaki's touch soothes the cacophony of thousands, millions of fractured souls into gradual silence. There are no longer any howls of anguish writhing out of the cracks, the seams which aren't quite stitched right.
“Stop looking at me like that.” Grimmjow says, at a loss for words, wrenching Kurosaki's arm off his skin. Kurosaki doesn't resist. It falls on the grass, limp. “It makes me sick.”
“So like I said, even if we can't break this bond, I won't hold you back. You're free, you've always been.” Kurosaki says with a sad smile, wrong, wrong, wrong. “I love you. I don't want anything in return. I don't want anyone deciding anything for you.”
I love you, Kurosaki says.
Love you, I love you, Grimmjow, love you, I love you, the bond sings.
Before Grimmjow knows, he's throttling Kurosaki, the black pinpoints of his claws digging into Kurosaki's skin.
“You can't love me.” Grimmjow says, enunciating every word clearly.
This is what lights the fire in Kurosaki's dull eyes once again. “You can't tell me what to do. I'm telling you, I can keep it from coming through the bond. You won't have to feel my own feelings.”
If you could, you'd probably have been in love with me too, drifts down the bond, wistful.
“I can't love!” Grimmjow yells. Desperation and blind rage seethes inside his chest. It amplifies and reverberates inside his ribcage, because he's hollow inside, he's hollow. “Bond or no bond, I can't love! I have no heart, Kurosaki!”
The bond opens into a vortex between them and Grimmjow is sucked into it, helpless.
Mornings. Kurosaki's voice gets heavier with sleep and his hair leaves patterns on his cheeks because he sleeps on his side. Kurosaki was nine. Nine on the seventeenth of July. Karin calls out, “Ichi-nii! Grimmjow-san is here!” Afternoons. soft and unhurried, the smell of oranges. Kurosaki likes the caramel candies. Kurosaki is kind. To everything, everyone. Evening, the smell of popcorn wafting from the kitchen. Yuzu smiling. “Grimmjow-san, why don't you stay for dinner?” Kurosaki's body is a line of warmth beside him on the sofa. Kurosaki laughs.
Kurosaki's pulse takes root in his chest, like a prayer for which no words are needed.
Kurosaki.
Kurosaki is like the sun.
Grimmjow realises he's panting.
Below him, Kurosaki isn't breathing at all. He's seen everything, heard everything.
He's holding his breaths and he's trembling, and he's looking at Grimmjow like he's discovered something wondrous. He looks scared, almost. His face is softened with incredulity.
Everything inside him is filled with a tremulous disbelief. He's thinking desperately, Are you going to leave again?
Grimmjow grips Kurosaki's forearms. There's no force in his grasp.
“What is happening to me,” He says, his voice cracking in the middle and he feels Kurosaki's heart squeeze behind their breastbone. What is happening to me, Kurosaki?
——-∘◦✧◦∘-——
For minutes, years, seconds, two and a half heartbeats, nothing happens.
“Grimmjow,” Ichigo says, slow and amazed. This unfathomable tremendousness of Grimmjow's emotions is all for him, and him alone.
The bond opens up between them.
The sky splits and there's so much light, light streaming everywhere, enough light to obliterate even the darkness behind their closed eyes, the darkness inside their throats, hidden in the folds of their guts.
It washes through them.
He's nearly giddy with the feeling, with the madness of blue that's in Grimmjow's eyes. His long white hair shimmers into nothingness, pale skin replacing the jet-black of his limbs.
His crown of light dissolves into the teal of his estigma, into the ivory-white of the mask over his cheek. His mussed hair falls all over his face.
Ichigo reaches up with a trembling hand and tucks one stray lock behind his ear.
Grimmjow is shaking. Ichigo can see that even if the edges of his vision are blurred with moisture.
“Same thing that's happened to me.” He says, something bubbling inside his ribcage, like warm laughter, like unshed tears, like brilliant joy.
He sounds breathless with it, and he can't look away from Grimmjow— Grimmjow, who's finally reaching for the bond with a vicious desperation that if he looks away for a single second, it might slip from his hands.
He reaches for the bond as well, with everything he has in him.
I've been in love with you, Grimmjow, Ichigo says, momentarily swaying with the starburst of sensations behind his eyes as the word love reverberates in the bond. It rises inside his body, fills his heart and spills out, like a young river that has just learned of its own strength.
“This. . .?” Grimmjow asks, the steel of his voice shaken with disbelief. “If this is what it means— then I've—”
I never knew, The bond carries, How was I supposed to?
“We'll learn.” Ichigo says. “We have all the time in the world to learn.” This must be what delirium feels like. “Looks like we didn't need the bond for this to happen after all.”
Grimmjow shudders, his eyes shut tight, lashes fluttering with the force of his clenched jaws. Fight it, a memory of a voice rings through the bond, Fight it. It wasn't the universe who made that decision for you. It was you two, yourselves.
Ichigo heaves a breath in, shaking and wet.
There is light everywhere, haloed behind the chaos of Grimmjow's hair, streaming from their mouths, bright over the crest of Grimmjow's mask.
Why did you feel like that? Grimmjow asks, That funny feeling you got when I said I'm your soulmate? I know bitterness. That's all I've known. How could you want this? I don't know this, I was never supposed to know about this.
Ichigo laughs. He's aware of the light swimming at the edges of his vision, one drop of tear rolling down the farthest side of his cheek. Did you ever know how much you hurt when you used to taunt me with that? Grimmjow inhales a harsh gulp of air.
I don't care if the concept of a Soulbond is sacred or not. Ichigo says. “You are. To me.”
He cranes his neck up. The look in Grimmjow's eyes isn't that of an apex predator zoning in on its prey. These are the eyes of a man stumbling towards the light at the end of a dark tunnel.
Ichigo touches his lips to the corner of Grimmjow's mouth, whisper-soft.
The bond bursts into golden light.
Grimmjow makes a broken sound, his fingers clutching at Ichigo's torn shihakushō, curling into the short hair at his nape, everywhere his hands can reach, and then he kisses back.
Grimmjow kisses like he's planning a siege, all of his focus honed to a knife-sharp edge. Thorough and meticulous. Not one movement without purpose, not a single breath wasted.
Grimmjow kisses like he's drowning, and Ichigo can feel him reaching for the bond between them and Ichigo can feel it open up wide between them— and there's so much light, light streaming down their faces, light pooling at the join of their mouths, light, liquid golden, light sparking out from everywhere they're touching, they're glowing, the bond shining with light, light, light, light entering their bones to stay.
It's like standing in a field of sunshine. There's nothing but desire in the bond. Wonder. Joy. Longing, so dazzlingly bright that it hurts to look at it but it hurts more to look away.
Time slips. Ichigo doesn't know how long they kiss.
When they part, Grimmjow's skin feels like his own.
I was scared. Grimmjow grits out, his fingers cradling Ichigo's face. I was scared I was gonna have to live without this when the bond was finally gone. And I couldn't, the words choke in his throat but Grimmjow carries on, fierce determination writ clear in the firm set of his jaw, “couldn't live without you.”
Warmth blooms inside the bond, throbbing with a tender ache. A beat.
A pulse, inside the hollow that loss has cleaved out from Grimmjow's flesh.
I love you, Ichigo says, I love, I love, I love you. He says it over and over again.
The writhing hunger inside the bond is a distant memory. A faded scar on skin. Healed. Loved.
Grimmjow drops his weight on Ichigo and Ichigo catches him, face buried in the crook of his neck and hands curled across the wide stretch of his back.
Grimmjow feels exhausted. Comprehending happiness tires him out faster than a war ever could. The war is over now. Ichigo runs his fingers through Grimmjow's hair. They're going to be okay. They're going to be happy.
They can stay like this for a while now. Tangled in each other, at the edge of civilization. The light, filtered through the leaves, is green.
Through the exhaustion in his body and mind, the bond shines with light. Love. Perfect and pure and theirs.
You too, Grimmjow says, Love you too, Kurosaki.
Ichigo lets his burning eyes close.
They're going to wake up to a new future.
Together.