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~
It ends with two slugs in your spine and a bat upside your head.
You stare at red on the black asphalt illuminated in the yellow of the streetlamps, fixed. And the city goes on around you as you fade, voices, and roadways, and the unforgiving reign of the night sky above.
You know of nothing else until you know hunger, all-consuming. Until your head is a cramped space of screaming and crying, an active warzone for control. Until it is quiet again and you are alone, and you are still ravenous. Empty, hollow in ways that nothing sates.
Penance for your greed. Greed you cannot shake, greed that transcends your last life and every other one you swallow, desperately trying to slake your hunger. It’s never enough.
It should be funny, you think, when you are one voice instead of thousands. It should be funny that this life echoes the last, a mad scramble for the top, for power, for more, for everything and anything. It should be easy, you think, when your head is clear enough to have simple thoughts like that. (You have a hard time still with I, I, me, mine.) It should be easy to conquer, to overthrow, to destroy. But it stays just out of your reach, no matter how hard you run after it, no matter how far you stretch to grab it. Like sand through your fingers, it slips away every time.
You are lonely beyond feeling, in ways you are incapable of articulating, in a weakness you cannot afford. You bury it like the bones you bury beneath the ever-shifting sands. But still, it all lies there, just beneath the surface. Even the ones you dare to tolerate do not shrink that void. They remain out of respect, out of some misconstrued loyalty, hitching their hopes to your own.
They remain even when the man who wears the sneering smile approaches you.
Immortality, he guarantees. Godhood, he promises. No more hunger, he vows. Power, he swears, from inside his palace that scrapes the black sky. Your own soft steps echo within its emptiness.
A chance for it all to belong to you, you hear.
Even if it means acting subservient to this man who continues to smile at the sight of all your lethally sharp teeth when you bare them.
A painless transformation, into a form like his, one that can wield a weapon deadly enough to cut down all that stand in your way. And you can recall, like a half-remembered dreams, weapons just like that, though you’re not sure why.
Anything, everything, the hole within you screams, a vortex, a void, consuming. We want all of it to be ours.
Shawlong volunteers to go first and they do not allow you to be present for it. They leave you to sit in the empty quietude of his grandiose palace whiter than bleached bones until you lose all sense of time. And when he returns, it is in the body of a man. Thin and tall, with only a little of his mask atop his head that obscures one of his eyes. He holds a sword in his right hand, curved and sheathed.
He is alive and otherwise unharmed, staring at you with unsettling, human eyes.
The man with the leering grin asks you for your name next, and it seems less a courtesy before a contract and more like the keeping of a ledger, of those who might not be strong enough.
“Grimmjow,” you tell him. No title, nothing fanciful. You know a threat when you see one and you are no fool. This is not a battle you could win, not as you are now. But with all his extravagant promises made true?
All you’d have to do is lie in wait and go for the throat.
~
The room erupts in stars. A dazzling, dizzying swirl of cosmos as Sosuke Aizen’s hand closes tightly around the Hogyoku, gripping it in a vise. The force of it stalls the next breath in his chest and an ear-splitting screech rips from the jaws of the Adjuchas beneath him, echoing through the empty, bleached halls of Las Noches.
The feeling of fire, livid hot, scorches up Grimmjow’s right paw and through his body, wiping the thoughts from his mind, taking away his control entirely. He is a body with something else in it. The sight of the two Shinigami blur into constellations, into stardust and nebulas and he can feel himself staring, unblinking at them, before all cognizance melts into spectation. There’s a brief flash of premonition, of the moon that hangs crooked in the black sky just outside, the salt sea of stars, of biting metal, of thousands of watchful eyes, of something golden.
Of something pure.
Sosuke Aizen and Gin Ichimaru watch, mystified, as cracks of turquoise break across the skin of his future aspect of Destruction, the same way lava splits the earth, gouges it with molten fire. The splintering lines glow as predator pupils’ contract, the blue cracking beyond its limbal ring, bleeding out, consuming, until they are pools of blue, reflecting the cosmos.
His wraithlike eyes watch, unblinking. Lines continue to crack across his skin, glowing a luminous blue. Cracking and breaking as the bones beneath them break and shift and grow and reform. Disjointed, breaking backwards before righting with a resounding crack as they grow.
The Hogyoku held tight in Aizen’s palm is as hot as a live coal.
Jaws that are still half the sharp fangs of an animal and half plated fur that is melting away to a skull of high zygomatics and blunted molars open with a sickening crack. “You’re going to lose.”
“Your ambition will turn to ash in your hands.” Grimmjow is drifting through a cloud of starlight, consciousness fading with every second. His own voice growing distant, reality melting away into dark matter.
He’s burning, every part of him is burning, burning up, burning away.
The lava-like cracks in his face are deepening into patches, reducing the hollow of his left cheek to ash, leaving behind only a savage, pulsing light. A hand of flesh and blood blackens at the fingers, charring away to blue light once more.
“His prodigal son will leave you down in the deep parts of the world, company only to the black.”
Each breath his body takes is an agony in his lungs. The light spilling out of him is pulsing along with his new heart. Faster, and ever louder, an expedient drumbeat to the grave.
“You think you know of what you speak,” Aizen says over the sound of vertebrae snapping into place. He is loath to admit that there's something almost unsettling about the gaze of unwavering blue that stares at him, unmoving even as the flesh and limbs around it twist and bend and break.
“Red like blood and black like shadow. Orange like fire and golden like the god you wish to usurp.”
Aizen’s face twists, eyes narrowing in suspicious realization. The ultimate goal of his plan is still known only to him. He’d yet to even share it with Kaname or Gin.
This is a side effect of the Hogyoku he had not anticipated. He knew it was meant to absorb the desires of the souls around it and manifest them into reality. But this premonition was not the desire he had in his heart, the one he’d planned for painstakingly for over a hundred years.
The body of his Destruction is that of a man, long legged and made of savage muscle. A soldier, built to carry out his commander’s will by the sword, his body as the shield. There is more blue than before, soft and long in a flop of hair as it hangs limp over a face still half-formed. Those eyes keep staring, pulsing, crackling reiatsu, nothing in one moment and would-be stifling to a lesser creature in the next.
The skin of his palm has blistered where it touches the Hogyoku.
Stars rain down around them like snow and Grimmjow sucks in another breath that burns in his chest like smoke. He speaks without memory, without understanding, without comprehension. It matters not to him, time does not matter, only the vision of golden victory. Hazy, unclear, but golden, nonetheless. Golden and pure and unfettered.
“I have tasted your defeat.”
Aizen moves blindly, tangling fingers in the blue hair at the base of the now human-looking neck, he pulls sharply, forces those void eyes to look up at him.
“I will make sure you lose,” he snarls to his creation, the burning of the Hogyoku in his palm somehow lesser than the burning in his own chest. “You are my Destruction, and I will have you destroy. Even if it ends with you destroying yourself.”
Fully formed teeth shut with an audible crack as the last hinge of the jaw snaps closed, pale flesh visible for only a moment as it weaves layer by layer over the bone before a secondary set of teeth form over it. The outline of an animal’s jaw, all jagged and fanged.
And the cosmos fades from the gaze of his Destruction slowly at first, then all at once as new eyes roll back into their new skull, and the body he holds aloft by its hair slumps into unconsciousness.
“What an interesting reaction,” Aizen covers smoothly, releasing his grip and letting all that newly naked flesh hit the stone floor. His palm burns but he dares not open his hand. “Bring in the next one.”
“Interestin’ indeed,” Gin sing-songs in his usual way as he makes for the door.
The body on the floor does not move again.
~
You remember chains, about fresh wrists and ankles made of bleeding flesh. You remember the sight of the sun through a tall window, harsh and blinding. You remember wishing for the cold touch of the moon.
You remember burning with hunger, and not much else.
“You will obey me, or I will have no use for you.”
“I do obey you,” you say with your unfamiliar mouth full of mostly blunted teeth. You have chewed chunks from your own cheeks, from your own tongue, just trying to test their edge. You are a canvas of your own blood in varying stages.
“I want to see it in your eyes.”
And it should feel like a death sentence, and it is, it is. In all the ways that don’t matter. Not even when they brand your back and hand you clothes, uniform, a soldier as all the rest.
He unbinds you on the day you don’t try to look him in the eyes.
You are still hungry somehow, though you’re not sure for what.
~
They tell you his name is Ichigo Kurosaki, and you’ve decided you’re going to swallow him whole.
There is something about the sight of red and black and blood, even through another’s eyes, that is simple to set your sights on.
You hate it because you’ve never had it before. Never had anyone look at you and think of you as an equal. You have always been something lesser, and in the case of a few friends, something just a bit greater, but still a steppingstone for them. A means by which they intended to elevate themselves.
And maybe that’s why it burns in your chest, brings up bile and bitterness and rage. Because you were supposed to be more, he said so. You were supposed to be powerful, immortal, a god.
And this human here with his crooked smile and biting laugh, this human who wears a mask just like your own when it benefits him most (this human who doesn’t know what it is to be broken down in body and soul and remade in someone else’s image just to be their tool), this human who treats you as equal, same, as worthy.
This human with eyes that remind you of the warmth of a sun you haven’t felt in years. Decades? What is the march of time anymore to you, but a drumbeat to a different grave?
He is not yours to take, if the arm and the branding and the dignity you have had to reclaim are anything to go by. But you will take him, nonetheless. You’ve been patient, you think. You have waited your turn, waited for the right moment, your master be damned. He’d tried to raise a sheep but nurtured a predator instead. Pulled too hard on your chains and cut too deep, believed you’d stop howling the more you bled.
But this human. Golden and raw and wide-open, impenetrably defenseless. It makes your mouth water, your blood sing, your claws ache. The hole where your soul should be feels like it’s yawning, wider, wider, wider, as if swallowing this stupid man will finally sate you.
He who spits blood as red as your own, with his sword that is no sharper than yours. He shouts, of friendship, of victory, of love, of triumph, until his voice grows hoarse, gravelly and rough, like sand in an open wound. And the sound of it gouges something open inside of you, deep enough to ache for the rest of your immortal existence.
Mine, mine, mine, you say as you carve him open, gash your own claim into his flesh (for you learned early on that there is an ownership in maiming.)
You do not want to think about what that means. What the scar that tracks a path down your body, left by those hands that grip their sword until their knuckles go white, means.
You already know.
Every swing of his sword, every edge of it that kisses your skin is the same claim, the same declaration.
And you’d let him win, you think around his blade that sits between your lungs. You want him to win, you think as he grasps your hand. You will make sure he wins, you think as he lays you to rest in the sand.
Yours, yours, yours, he answers, he echoes.