As Above, So Below 🗡️

by sayhitoforever

Summary:

It's been four months since Ichigo was brought back to life with necromancy and the effects have started to take their toll. He may not be cursed anymore, but something else has started to haunt him.

Plagued by waking nightmares, Ichigo is losing track of time, and there's nothing he nor the Ghost King of Hueco Mundo can do.

{SEQUEL TO EVEN IN DEATH}

Notes:

Surprise! Thought you’d seen the last of this AU, huh? 👻🗡️

Many thanks to Chu, Eva, and my Halloween wife, Murder, for encouraging every menty b I had while working on this.

This is a SEQUEL! If you haven't read the first installment, you may find yourself a bit lost. No worries! You can read the initial installment of this series, Even in Death, here!

Happy Halloween! 🎃

Chapter 1

                               

 

---

 

It always comes in flashes.

A flurry of images so fast, too fast to remember or catch most nights, of cold sand and crushing darkness. Accompanied by the skittering sensation of frigid fingers down his spine, locked up at every joint like a proper night terror, Ichigo is a prisoner in his own skin to the shadow that has been creeping steadily through the open door he had no way of closing in his own mind.

Sometimes, he sees a city. Tall and glass, towering and magnificent, looking so much like Seattle, yet utterly destroyed. Buildings sheared in half, a broken road he sprints down, running, always running, but to what or from what, he never knows. Sometimes, water floods the streets like Genesis, sweeps him up, pulls him under, drowns him with a vigor. Sometimes, the city is already half-flooded, and he’s wading up to his chest in still waters. Sometimes, it’s just him and the broken reflection in a ruined window.

Always, there’s a face bleached of all color, eyes he can never see, blurry as if the lens of his own dreams is unfocused. Hands, white as bone, rotting away to shadow as they reach for him. An unhinged grin bearing blunted teeth in a black mouth. And dark water, viscous and thick, that pours from it in a steady stream, a flood, an active, gasping drowning.

Ichigo always wakes to the sound of something laughing, a chilling peel of it ringing in his ears like the backfire of a spell he had no business casting.

It’s wickedly early when he jolts upright in bed that morning, nothing but his unsteady, panicked breaths filling the room for a few moments. He shucks the bed sheets off fast, kicks them down off his legs in a tantrum, hating the sensation of being held down. Weak sunlight peeks through the heavy curtains behind his bed, and Ichigo sits there in the cold morning air, hand pressed to his pounding chest, and tries to breathe.

Beyond the closed bedroom door, the apartment is perfectly silent. He’s alone. Which, considering the hour as he squints at his bedside clock, makes sense. Grimmjow has been going around when Ichigo has to finally sleep or risk passing out in public and smacking his teeth out of his head to follow up on their leads. Leads as to who Ichigo’s family is on his mother’s side. How many of them there were, where they lived, if they even knew that Masaki Kurosaki had a son, much less two other kids, and a husband. If they even knew that she’s dead. Killed.

Not that they’d been having much, or any, luck since they’d started. But Grimmjow could keep the hours that Ichigo couldn’t, didn’t really tire out, and didn’t have other obligations like living family or training to pull him away.

Ichigo’s starting to think there are more perks to being dead and a ghost than being a living human being with needs like sustenance and bathroom breaks.

It had taken some getting used to, having undead royalty as a sort-of roommate. Ichigo isn’t sure why he never expected Grimmjow to hang around. Maybe because he’s an asshole and had been since the moment his mother’s rug had birthed him into the World of the Living against Ichigo’s better intentions. Maybe because he’s the universe’s worst roommate, because that’s essentially what he’d become: Ichigo’s unwelcome and somewhat permanent house guest. He didn’t sleep, he left less than a bowlful of cereal in the box whenever he felt the need to remind Ichigo he could eat if he wanted to, and he frequently walked through walls with no respect for what or who was on the other side.

But despite his general assholery, Grimmjow is surprisingly easy to have around, gives Ichigo a bit of the chaos he’s used to back home. He’s mouthy and foul, but he never backs down, even when Ichigo’s own temper flares in reply. Knowledgeable and old, he’s a font of information, of resources, and he seems all too willing most days to just tell Ichigo anything he wants to know.

About the world, about magic, about Hueco Mundo, about death. They’re comfortable enough orbiting around each other now that he even drops an anecdote or personal fact every so often. Just a tiny, keyhole glimpse into someone who’d been around for over fourteen centuries, and Ichigo secretly hoards them like a dragon.

The raucous spring showers of New England are blasting against the window in Ichigo’s kitchen as he moves about making himself tea and some toast at a snail’s pace. The sound of the downpour gently dulls the continuous static in his head to something almost livable.

It must say something about them, that Ichigo doesn’t so much as flinch anymore when he’s alone and setting his mug on the island counter one second, and the next his apartment is filled with the smell of wet and a very soaked Ghost King, boots hitting the hardwood floor with a sodden squeak.

“It’s pissing sideways out there,” he complains, and it’s clear the trench coat he’d glamored onto himself has not helped at all. His wet hair is plastered to his pale face, almost blending right in, as his luminous blue eyes swinging up to take in Ichigo standing in the kitchen.

It definitely says something about them, probably something borderline domestic, that Ichigo doesn’t even have to open his mouth when Grimmjow phases in and out of visibility, most of the rainwater that had been soaking him splashing to the floor with a wet slap. And he’s gone and returned again with a towel in a matter of seconds, wiping up his mess by dragging it across the floor with his booted foot. He keeps talking the whole time, as if phasing from one place to another doesn’t cut his voice off like a radio abruptly changing stations.

He’s talking, and Ichigo knows he is because he can see his mouth moving, but he’s not hearing a word. The sound of rain may have dulled the volume of that static-like TV snow in his head, but it’s dialed it into something almost audible. A whisper of something, a voice—

“—and that’s how I convinced Howard Carter and his team that the tomb was cursed. Amazing what aerosolized hemlock can do.”

“Yeah, amazing,” Ichigo echoes back, eyes unfocused on the gnarled bark of the tree just outside his window. Today’s different for some reason; even with the rain, he can barely hear his own voice over the static. It’s louder somehow, louder than it’s ever been.

“You’re not listening to me at all.”

“I’m listening,” he insists, finally blinking some moisture back into his dry eyes and looking across the island counter.

Grimmjow’s sitting on a barstool on the other side with his palm cradling his chin, an unimpressed frown pulling all his sharp features down into his usual scowl. His pale hair hangs long and damp in his face, down in his eyes that watch Ichigo as they always do, with the kind of special attention that a predator watches its prey. The silver about his ears and his eyebrow glints in the poor morning light from the window.

“I just told you I came up with the curse of King Tut, you’re not fucking listening.” He pauses, head still tipped into his palm, eyes narrowing infinitesimally as he appraises Ichigo’s dark circles and the white-knuckle grip on his mug. “It’s still happening, isn’t it?”

There’s no use lying about it, Grimmjow could see through him like he was the one capable of being intangible. “Yeah, it’s louder today.”

“It’s not… effecting you, is it?”

Ichigo shakes his head. It isn’t, at least not in ways he’s able to detect. Though he’s sleepless and haunted by night terrors, with the shittiest tinnitus even Isane can’t seem to cure, his waking hours are largely unaffected by anything other than fatigue. His magic is unchanged, undiminished in its strength, and nothing out of the ordinary has happened with any of his spells or his training. It was just… eating away at his mind.

“I don’t think so,” he says, and yet Grimmjow’s eyes narrow even further, as if the answer is unsatisfactory. Ichigo is accustomed to his particular brand of scrutiny now, but Grimmjow’s eyes are searching and so blue. Blue as the pyreflame that pulsed like a heartbeat through the skies of—

That’s what it was. He thinks he’s dreaming of… the other side, of Hueco Mundo. Of the sand and the sky and the energy he could feel there, the spirits. The one face though— he’s not sure why he keeps seeing it. Unohana isn’t sure either, though she’d expressed concern in her gentle way. She’d taught him safe-sleep exercise, breathing patterns for bed, long forgotten herbs he could stuff in his pillowcase to ward off certain types of spirits that might be attracted to a soul that reeked of fresh necromancy.

Unohana had even hired him part-time, though he spent most of it in a chair reading her books. The little old ladies who frequented her shop thought he was adorable, and Ichigo wasn’t above flashing a cheesy grin to make their day. She paid him far more than he was worth, or for the kind of work she had him doing, which was next to nothing, but she wouldn’t hear otherwise. He’s sure being under her watchful eye was really what she wanted. Between her and Grimmjow, he was covered at almost all times.

Still, Ichigo dreams of that blackened mouth. Still, Grimmjow watches him like he’s getting paid not to blink.

The kettle screams, and Ichigo turns away, a wave of his hand killing the gas flame of the stove.

With his back to him, Ichigo can better ignore Grimmjow’s prying gaze. “Anything today?” He sinks his sachet with his spoon and glances over his shoulder briefly.

“You know anybody named… Haschwalth?” Grimmjow asks, tongue curling around the sounds of the consonants. Ichigo doesn’t miss the fact that the Ghost King has penned the name onto the meat of his left palm, as though he was afraid to forget it.

“Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Then I haven’t got shit.”

With a heavy sigh, Ichigo sets his mug on the counter and knuckles his eyes for a moment. Seared to the backs of his eyelids is a set of white teeth in a grinning, black mouth, moving to form words, and Ichigo opens his eyes again so fast he sees stars. Grimmjow is still watching him, unblinking and honed in. Like he’s waiting to find something that proves Ichigo is lying about his wellbeing.

It’s not that he didn’t trust Grimmjow. If anything, the Ghost King had proved to be of utmost trust since Ichigo had accidentally conjured him. He could leave at any time since fulfilling their contract, tell Ichigo to get fucked and disappear back to wherever or whatever he’d been doing before all this. Half of him woke every day and expected to never see Grimmjow again.

Still, he stayed, and what’s more, he was doing his best to be helpful too. Ichigo couldn’t make sense of it, and he knew better than to ask, figuring all he’d get in reply is some snark and a middle finger. A good mystery after all. Only, Ichigo didn’t much mind solving this one, because solving it might mean it went away. And to say Ichigo had grown accustomed to sharing the same space with Grimmjow, even if it meant regular grocery trips and next to no privacy, would be an understatement. Ichigo… kinda liked him.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you asked your old man if he knows anything else?”

Ichigo grimaces; he’d already demanded answers from his dad months ago, before he’d let Grimmjow and the demoness storekeeper electrocute him directly into the afterlife. He hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with his promised explanation, even after all this time. All to avoid fessing up to what had happened.

He’d gone home for Christmas at the very least, laden with gifts for his sisters and even a few good ones for his dad, but hadn’t stayed long. Pots he’d had Nanao charm to clean instantly with just a rinse of water for Yuzu. An old school iPod with limitless battery and space that Shuhei had done something truly cursed to that he wouldn’t say for Karin.

It was just… the prospect of tearing open the scar they all shared just to tell them that he was alright, that their mother hadn’t died for nothing. It was the prospect of having to tell them that whomever had cursed her, cursed him, might still be out in the world somewhere.

“I just—”

“Still a no then, got it,” Grimmjow mutters, as if there was going to be an easy way to tell Ichigo’s father what had happened, both to him and to Masaki.

He takes a tester sip of his tea, and Grimmjow’s intense gaze tracks it from his lips to his neck, where his throat moves as he swallows, an unnerving habit of his that Ichigo has noticed since they’d all but started living together.

Could it really be considered ‘living’ together if only one of them still had a pulse?

“Today’s the day, right?” Grimmjow asks instead as he drives a hand through his damp hair, pushing it off his forehead. Tufts of it flop forward again anyway, almost silver-blond in the light.

“If I pass, then yeah, today’s the day.”

Nearly two months ago, Shuhei had offered to proctor Ichigo’s test to rank up to the title of Master Enchanter. For weeks, they’d been meeting down in Nanao’s flawlessly warded basement so Shuhei could continue training Ichigo on his offensive magic in a space crafted to support and contain them. He’s pretty decent now, decent enough that Shuhei said he was ready for the final test. Considering how proficient he was in all other categories, he said he’d grant the title if Ichigo could best him in a duel. Tonight would be the first time he could try and pass, and he’d barely slept.

“Am I still barred from the Scooby Gang headquarters?”

Ichigo rolls his eyes. “Yes, you pyromaniac. Nanao is still upset that you burned half her garden.”

“I said it was an accident,” Grimmjow seethes, equal parts not over it. “There were mosquitos trying to eat me.”

“It took her three days to put out those pyreflames,” Ichigo counters in defense of his friend. Three whole days, and it was the first time he’d ever seen Nanao even remotely flustered. “And you don’t even have blood.”

“So, I still can’t come then?”

It had been easier than he’d anticipated, introducing the undead King and subsequent spirit that had not only ‘helped’ Ichigo answer the most haunting question of his life, but brought him back from the dead to his friends. They’d taken it about as well as he’d hoped in that nothing devolved into a brawl and Grimmjow didn’t feel the overt need to flex on them by bursting into flame. Although Ichigo’s very lengthy, near-begging conversation with him prior to that meeting may have been the only thing that prevented it.

Grimmjow had been folded into the riffraff in much the same way Ichigo had, quickly and all at once. Leave it to strays to recognize one of their own. Though he hadn’t physically been home to see his sisters or his dad in a few months, using video chats to hold them over for the time being, this rabble of weirdos had taken Ichigo right in and filled him with a sense of belonging that Seattle had never given him. All it had taken were a few mages, a demoness, and a Ghost King.

“No, I expect a feast fit for a Master when I come home later.” Ichigo cracks a smile, and Grimmjow’s scoff and blatant middle finger push the sinister laughter to the back of his mind for a comfortable moment.

 

~

 

If he’d had any lingering doubt that Kurosaki’s old man had been hiding any secret magic from his eldest son and two daughters, it’s instantly dispelled for Grimmjow watching him start a tiny grease fire in his own kitchen one night, trying to help prepare dinner. There’d been a lot of squawking and flailing and it had ultimately been the daughter with the dark hair, the one whose perma-scowl reminded Grimmjow of his own stupid mage back in Salem, who’d had the wherewithal to drown it in baking soda. Take-out had arrived a prompt half-hour later. All viewed from a corner of their home where he held himself wholly intangible to their Sightless eyes.

Grimmjow had to be sure that there wasn’t unaccounted for magic in the remaining members of the Kurosaki household, for his own sanity and afterlife. But that confirmation did nothing to solve their mystery or put him at ease.

The amount of raw magic in Ichigo does not make sense if he had inherited it from only one parent. Grimmjow has never seen anything like it before, in all his years. It’s so potent, nearly palpable, sometimes when he’s practicing. It’s almost a fucking relief that Grimmjow is banned from that four-eyed woman’s dingy basement because the concentration of Kurosaki’s magic down there some nights is so strong, smothering, it triggers a gnawing deep inside him he hasn’t felt for hundreds of years…

As for answering the question of who would curse Kurosaki’s mother, and him by extension, Grimmjow kept coming up continually and irritatingly emptyhanded. No contact with grandparents, no names for him to chase, just a bunch of ironically dead ends. Grimmjow’s own curiosity had really shot him in the face this time around, but he’s too proud to give up yet.

And he knows Kurosaki doesn’t go home enough, for his own taste and his family’s. Knows he’s been avoiding the situation of having to answer the equally fucky questions he’d asked his father not four months ago. Even though his old man could know more than he’d divulged. And Grimmjow had become weirdly… inclined to checking on them himself, if only to observe, not that he’d ever tell Kurosaki that he did. Weak-hearted human would probably thank him for ‘taking care’ of them.

A complicated little bastard, right from the start.

One that’s been trying to hide his growing fatigue from Grimmjow and failing poorly. If he thought Grimmjow wasn’t paying attention to those dark circles and the way he dragged himself about most mornings, he’s mistaken. Grimmjow pays acute attention to it, the bloodshot whites, to the way he spaces out so bad he has to be physically interrupted sometimes. He’s quick to shrug it all off, but Grimmjow has been watching as it becomes steadily worse as the weeks go by, with nothing he nor any of Kurosaki’s little mage friends, or the shitty demoness, could do.

He’s strong, stronger than Grimmjow continually gives him credit for. Even now, he’s a bright spot of warmth in the farthest corner of Grimmjow’s soul, a little, golden spark. But something had been plaguing Kurosaki even worse as of late, something he didn’t want to talk about no matter how Grimmjow pressed him.

From the window of their cozy home, no one in the Kurosaki house tonight seems to feel it at all when, three thousand miles away, for the briefest of moments, the bright flicker of their brother and son’s spirit sputters out.

 

~

 

“Again,” Shuhei demands, voice cutting through the ringing in Ichigo’s ears. Down on all fours, forehead to the ground, he pants heavily against the hardwood floor of Nanao’s basement. It is, expectedly, immaculate in its cleanliness and he’s ruining it.

He’s bleeding freely from a gash just above his left eye, trickling down and blurring his vision a bit. He’s lost all concept of time, has no idea how long they’ve been down here now. It takes more energy than he wants just to lift his head to watch Shuhei net his hands together, crossing one staggered finger over the other into a complicated knot that he inverts with a twist of his wrists.

Self-preservation prickles at the nape of Ichigo’s neck like sweat and he manages to get his knees under him far enough to dodge the lethal edge of a red scythe that scores a deep groove into the floorboards he’d just been kissing. Distantly, he can hear Nanao make a frustrated sound at another bit of damage done to her house. Ichigo pushes himself to his feet, head pounding from the knock it’s already taken and spinning with the blood it’s lost.

“You know if you want to be ranked, I’m gonna need to see a bit more than some basement parkour.” As if he hasn’t been doing his fucking best to bifurcate Ichigo from head to dick.

The red scythe gleams sharp and terrible in Shuhei’s loose grip, its illusory chains jangling softly at his side. It’s the only warning Ichigo gets.

He manages to spell a bracing shield across his forearms, thick, crisscrossing bands that stop the scythe’s damage but not its force. It drives him back into the far wall with a crack that he’s unsure is the brick giving way or his spine snapping. It’s definitely the back of his goddamn skull because pain bursts bright like a firework across the backs of his eyes. He ignores the slow trickle of something warm down his neck to lean fully against the wall, as steady as a drunk toddler, sight a wobbling haze of blood and fresh pain.

Inside himself, something laughs low and slow.

His vision of Nanao’s basement, scored by Shuhei’s scythe and probably marred in Ichigo’s own blood, tunnels away to black like old-timey movie credits closing in. He hears himself exhale audibly, like the volume in his head is dialed up to a thousand in full surround-sound stereo. The sound of one of his friends calling his name is drowned out in a distorted, gurgling cackle.

The world around him flickers by in clipped blinks, like the snapping shutter of a camera.

And then it’s Ichigo’s left hand out in front of him, the movement divorced from his own self-control. He crooks each of his fingers at the first knuckle, and breathes in shakily, the sound so loud inside his head. The air feels like it singes his throat, like bellows for whatever is growing in his chest. He moves them, fingers bending in awful, disjointed pops at the second knuckles, like broken spider legs. In his facedown palm, something grows warm, grows hot until it burns. A pulling sensation, down his arm, like it has tapped into the desperation raging in his ribs. He doesn’t know— there’s no incantation, no words that spring to mind, or to his lips. It just comes out of him.

Fire, black like pitch, pouring from his bent fingers like liquid. It hits the floor in a spray like a crashing wave, scattering across the basement with the speed of a wildfire.

Shuhei’s quick-clasped hands— one atop the other, turning the bottom one away from himself to press them together, rotating until they’re backwards like a false prayer as he splays his fingers in the kind of shield Ichigo has only ever read about— are all that protects him.

For a moment, the room is a void. Bereft of color, of sound, of warmth.

Ichigo staggers back, what he’d thought was just the spell spreading really a burst of pinpricks in his vision. Vertigo hits him like a sucker punch, and the whispering tucked in the back of his brain rises to a roar, to screaming so loud it drowns out Shuhei’s shouting. To the laugh that rings in his head like the tolling of a haunted bell, wicked and terrible. 

The last thing he sees as he slides bonelessly down the wall is Nanao and Isane working in tandem, a pair in total synchronicity. Fingers that twist artfully over an open palm, churning a mist, heavy and white. A jerk of their wrists and it blankets the room in a burst to snuff out every flicker of black flame.

Ichigo’s entire world inverts, swallows itself whole in a wash of frigid water. He goes under in a glittering haze of vicious laughter. It bears down on him from every conceivable angle like unforgiving porcelain.

And he’s right there again, in the tub, held under, fighting water as every molecule he’s made of screams an electric symphony, a crescendo of drowning agony. He thrashes, kicks out uselessly against unbudging walls, tries to pull himself to the surface and can’t.

And he’s right there again, in the tub, as white hands grip the edge of it, one finger curling over at a time. Black claws, long and jagged, tip-tap against the porcelain, eerie and echoing, before they begin to slide down into the tub. Reaching, grasping, choking, one gets ahold of the hair atop Ichigo’s head, and pulls, holds him painfully under the water to the bottom. The other finds his jaw, grips it like a vise, pries his mouth open and forces him to try and breathe in the water that drowns him.

He screws his eyes shut as he jerks his head vainly, tries to free himself, tries to surface, breathe, he can’t breathe— One sharp finger hooks into the corner of his mouth, holds it open wide and he jolts, eyes shooting open to the sight of golden ones directly overhead. Gold set in black and a darkened mouth of white teeth that grow in number as they grin, something dark like ichor dripping down a sharp chin permeating the water, blackening it. Ichigo tries to draw a breath, to scream, to something, claws cutting into his cheeks, body writhing as that awful face looms closer.

It takes only a second, the hand in his hair letting go to grip his throat, water tinged black as the face above him turns to smoke. In a choking, panicked gasp, he swallows it all.

Ichigo comes to under watchful eyes of familiar blue, haloed by Nanao’s ceiling painted and charmed to mirror the stars shifting across the hemisphere of the night sky. A swirl of brilliant fire flickers at the edges of his vision, surrounding him like a veil.

Even without the conjuring, without the manacles of hammered metal that signified his binding servitude to Ichigo, the pyreflame that Grimmjow could channel at will had never burned him.

It should, especially now. There’s nothing to protect him, no contract, no shield he wears. The flames are nothing more than a cold caress, as familiar as the icy hand that holds the back of his busted head. The same ones that had cradled his heart.

“You fuckers really went all out, didn’t— he’s bleeding!” Grimmjow’s voice grates past the fading ring in Ichigo’s ears, a relief and a surprise all at once.

For a split second, he assumes Grimmjow will accidentally drop his head back to the floor in a tantrum and he’ll bleed even more. But the cradle of his skull remains firmly cupped in the cold palm of the Ghost King. A trickle of gentle warmth sluices through the chill of Grimmjow’s pyreflame, slips between his equally cold fingers to prod at the edges of the gash in Ichigo’s head. He’s been busted open and patched up enough times down here in the last few weeks to recognize Isane’s healing magic. She was far more adept and finessed than Ichigo could ever hope to be.

“Grimmjow?” Ichigo rasps as he’s eased up into a sitting position. His head is throbbing as if someone has taken a jackhammer to every suture of bone. “What’re you doing here? What happened?”

“He just showed up,” Nanao supplies from somewhere nearby, sounding a bit more miffed than usual. “And you passed out after that last spell you used.”

“Literally, just appeared,” Isane mutters even as her spell continues to pull the parted edges of Ichigo’s scalp back together. They’re all somewhere on his periphery, like fixed points on the outskirts of a carousel.

He jams the heels of his palms into his eyes and rubs them. Only a wash of color from the pressure blooms against his eyelids. His ears are no longer ringing, and when he pulls his hands away and blinks blearily into the sparsely lit basement, he no longer has pinpricks in his vision either. He looks from one concerned set of eyes to another, catching Isane’s last as she seems to scan over Shuhei to check for injuries. He’s sat on the floor beside Ichigo, just an arm’s reach away. He looks entirely unharmed, albeit maybe a little shellshocked.

“That was something else,” Shuhei mutters, shaking his head at Ichigo, half-impressed and still catching his breath. He holds his forearm up so that Ichigo can see that even with the nigh unbreakable shield he’d summoned, the hair on his arms has been singed away. His skin is unharmed, but he looks like he’s been shaved in preparation for another tattoo. “Was that some kind of ancestral spell? Family hand-down?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Ichigo croaks, feeling about as wrung out as he did after being brought back to life.

“Between the two of you I just can’t catch a break,” Nanao huffs and Ichigo finally takes the moment to look around at her once pristine basement.

It looks like the aftermath of a housefire. Scorched and terrible, the previously cream-colored and wainscoted walls are charred to an ugly black nearly up to the ceiling. Her hardwood floors aren’t in any better condition either, scorched and eaten down to the foundation in places. Between the devastation of the room and the hair all but singed from Shuhei’s arms, Ichigo almost wants to throw up. And the stench of sulfur permeating the room definitely doesn’t help that feeling one bit. The only thing that stops him is Isane’s gentle magic easing the vertigo and the nausea bit by bit.

That had come out of him, that black fire. It had done all of this. And Ichigo had had no control.

“Nanao… I am so sorry, I—” She throws a palm up at him as she approaches, effectively shutting him down, flipping her dark fringe out of her face.

“It’s fine, it gives me an appropriate excuse to finally redecorate and try out some new wards.”

Grimmjow has yet to blink. He’s staring at Ichigo with that same, singular intensity dialed up to a thousand. It’s only now that he notices the pyreflame hasn’t just spread from his hands, because his crown of black bone is on full display, flame licking at every groove and point of it. There’s an unsettling amount of concern pulling his pale brows together into a deep frown.

“How does that feel?” Isane asks, smoothing a hand down the back of his hand as if to feel it out physically too.

Ichigo hasn’t felt this good since before the tub. His ears aren’t ringing, as he moves his legs, stretches them a bit, he notices that the heaviness in his limbs has subsided as well. Maybe he’d had Isane targeting the wrong spots all this time and the rest of what he’d been trying to have her heal had been psychosomatic.

“I feel… great, actually. Thanks, Isane.” He flexes his fingers and inspects the palm of his left hand. Same as it ever was, no evidence that strange, black fire had come out of it at all. He pats his face down, and she’s even tended to the gash above his left eye, not even a whisper of scarring.

“Well, I think that everyone but Grimmjow here would agree that was you besting me handedly in a duel so… Ichigo Kurosaki,” Shuhei says from the floor scored deep with their magic and decorated with Ichigo’s blood, mouth quirking with a small smile. “Henceforth, you have earned the rank of Master Enchanter.”

Despite the sheer amount of chaos that has unfolded, all the questions that are brewing within him now, Ichigo beams at them. Though it had taken him just a bit longer than he’d anticipated, he’d done it. Master Enchanter. His mother would be so proud.

“Let’s hold off on celebrating until I don’t feel like liquid shit though, alright?” Shuhei jokes, and Ichigo winces a bit internally.

What the fuck had that been? It was… so dark, so strong, so completely out of his control. He could of— he could have hurt his friends. He’s lucky he didn’t. He’s lucky that they were all adept mages on their own that they could not only protect themselves but stop… whatever it was he’d unleashed.

It’s Grimmjow who rises lithely, crown dissolving and pyreflame snuffing out as he stands, offering Ichigo a hand up. They grasp each other’s arms as Grimmjow hauls him to his feet, grip nearly crushing as if he’s expecting Ichigo to not keep his legs under him. But the dizziness is gone, the vertigo with it, and whatever spell Nanao had been muttering to the walls has scrubbed the air of the foul stench of sulfur.

Isane has pivoted to help Shuhei, hands all aglow in soft green sweeping down the length of both his arms to check for damage. When she seems to find nothing of concern, Ichigo offers him the same and helps pull him to his feet. He grins, wide and friendly even for him, and claps Ichigo on the shoulder.

“Congrats, man. You worked hard and it’s gonna take me like six whole months to grow the peach fuzz back.”

“Thank you for proctoring me. I’m sorry—”

It’s Shuhei’s turn to put a hand up to him. “Save your sorry and teach me that spell someday instead.”

As if Ichigo didn’t already hope that nothing of the sort ever came out of him again. “You bet.”

Nanao is quick to shoo them back upstairs, bearing the donning of their jackets and shoes with a saint’s patience. She ushers them all out into the humid night, the evidence of recent rainfall showing puddled between the cobbled brick that runs from her front stoop to the street’s sidewalk. Isane remains behind, likely to make sure Nanao is equally alright and Ichigo’s chest aches for the destruction he’s accidentally wrought. Shuhei bids his final farewell as he latches the gate at the end of the walkway, giving Ichigo another cajoling pat and strolls off to head home, no limp in his step, nothing.

He nearly forgets Grimmjow is even there, he’s been so silent since Ichigo had come to, and that can’t bode well. He forgets until Shuhei disappears around the next corner, and a hand gathers Ichigo up by the scruff of his coat collar without a single word of warning, yanks him flush to his solid side putting off more chill than the wet sidewalk, and warps him.

Being warped by a ghost is an infinitely different sensation than portaling. Or, dissipating, as Grimmjow insists it’s really called. At least with the latter, being mage-casted and safe, it felt like floating belly up in a swimming pool, suspended, just for a moment before your feet touch solid ground again. Ichigo is fairly certain, even without doing research because he almost doubts there is any, that being dissipated by a ghost is probably doing horrible things to his internal organs.

It feels like getting looped onto a taffy puller and stretched, even though he’s the most unstretchable, organic material on this plane of existence. Landing in his dimly lit living room jars every joint he’s made of and triggers the beginnings of a migraine throbbing behind his left eye. And to think Ichigo had been perfectly prepared to be reasonable about Grimmjow’s unnecessary drop-in until he feels what’s left of his dinner threatening to come back up.

“You wanna tell me what the fuck that was?” Grimmjow sheds his glamored jacket in a burst of blue sparks.

It’s funny, always has been and probably always will be, just how inhuman he looks against the backdrop of Ichigo’s very human apartment. Silvery blond, eyes as blue as the flame he wielded, in a grey long-sleeve, dark jeans, and boots, his head looks like it’s been superimposed on top of his body. And he looks pissed under all the out of place concern.

Ichigo puts his hands on his knees and all but doubles over, trying to compress his insides from trying to become his outsides. “I hate when you do that.”

“You gonna tell me what the fuck is going on for once?” Grimmjow demands again and Ichigo looks up at him slowly, frustration curbing the fresh nausea.

“You wanna tell me why you showed up there?”

Ichigo doesn’t expect Grimmjow to back down almost instantly. Blue gaze darting away, skipping over the couch, the table, the rug, avoiding him. He swallows down the remainder of his nausea and gives Grimmjow an expectant look. It takes Grimmjow just a few heartbeats short of Ichigo’s patience expiring before he answers. He still won’t look at him, drives a hand through the hair that’s as damp and unsytled as it had been earlier that morning.

“I don’t know if it’s some kind of… rollover from me pulling you out of Hueco Mundo, or if it’s some lingering soul-bind shit, but—” Grimmjow’s shoulders rise in an almost-shrug, the perma-scowl that usually scrunches his whole face managing to crease the lineless skin between his brows. Unwrinkled and young, which meant he’d either died that way or was powerful enough to shift his own form. All these months, Ichigo had been too reluctant to ask which it was. “I can sense you.”

Ichigo stops wondering immediately, just stares. “Sense me?” He’s lucky, that whatever Isane had done while he’d been laying on the floor and eased all the ringing in his ears, all his vertigo. He thinks, unexpected dissipation considering, that he’d probably be hurling on the floor now otherwise.

“Yeah, I don’t know if it’s your magic I can feel, or something else, but I can feel you. All the time.” Grimmjow doesn’t make it sound like a good thing. He makes it sound painful, like it’s an agony to have to feel this way. His brows are furrowed so hard now, Ichigo’s inclined to believe he might actually be hurting. “And for a minute there, I couldn’t. You were just gone. It was like you’d…”

“Died?” Ichigo finishes for him, voice sounding small even to his ears.

Grimmjow says nothing, his gaze of glacier blue sliding back to meet Ichigo’s, and his silence is deafening.

Whatever had come over Ichigo, whatever he’d done, whatever that spell was that he’d cast, that magic, it hadn’t been him. “That can’t be normal. Right?”

Grimmjow huffs out a noise that could almost be a laugh. “Fuck if I know. You’re the only thing that’s ever conjured me, much less bound me with that shitty rug. None of this has been normal.”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

He has to remind himself nearly every day that the person, the spirit, that he had conversations with, that he ate breakfast with, that he was trying to solve a sixteen-year-old murder with, should be impossible. One thousand four hundred and seven years old, he’d existed before penicillin, before the steam engine, before Greek fire. A King, in the closest thing Ichigo understood to be the afterlife. Sixteen years in comparison probably felt like a sneeze to Grimmjow. Ichigo’s own piddly twenty-five probably felt like a terrible joke with an even worse punchline. The prospect that Ichigo dying would cause him any whisper of pain is unfathomable to him.

“How long have you been able to sense me?”

“I didn’t really notice that I could, at first. But it’s been months, I think. Right here,” Grimmjow whispers, and he raps his knuckles against his chest, and Ichigo doesn’t know what to make of that. They’re standing so close that he can feel the chill that radiates from him. Death’s chill. “What the fuck kind of spell did you use? That room was black…”

“Yeah, all that charring,” Ichigo recalls, horrified again at the damage he’d caused to Nanao’s home. It was bad enough that Grimmjow had turned her garden into a vegetable roast, but now Ichigo had all but attempted to burn her house down.

“No, the fire was—” Grimmjow cuts himself off with a click of his tongue and a sigh, eyes darting as if he’s searching Ichigo’s apartment for the word. He utters one in that language Ichigo doesn’t understand, the one that sounds like crackling fire with all its consonants, in the First Language. He’d been trying to teach Ichigo, insisting he was dead enough to learn, but Ichigo’s mouth couldn’t make the sounds. “Black. Like, the emptiness of space. Void.”

“You saw it?” Ichigo can barely remember it, just the beginning, of the flames dripping from his fingers. The feeling of it burning in his chest, as though it was fully tapped into his magic, like it was draining him.

“What was left of it.”

Then it had happened sometime between Ichigo casting said spell and Isane and Nanao snuffing it out; the sense that he had died. “I don’t know what it was,” he admits.

Grimmjow’s eyes narrow a fraction in befuddlement, and he shifts his stance, leaning a little closer as he crosses his arms over his chest. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know. It just… came out of me. I—” Ichigo stops, tries to backtrack through it mentally, but once the pain had set in, it had been so hard to focus. The pain. “I hit my head and then… I think I blacked out? I remember raising my hand, but I didn’t recite anything.”

“That’s not fucking normal. Right?” Grimmjow echoes and Ichigo only has enough left in him to shrug.

“This is my first time dying, so I couldn’t tell you.” None of it has been even remotely normal, not since Ichigo had butchered some Swedish ottoman instructions four months ago.

“Yeah, yeah, alright, you cheeky meatsack.” Grimmjow rolls his eyes, letting out a long-suffering sigh as if Ichigo is some terrible responsibility he’s bearing alone. But he uncrosses his arms, and his eyes are wandering again, down the slope of Ichigo’s nose, across the line of his jaw, the sweep of his cheekbones. “I’m gonna— can I try something?”

He sounds so uncertain, quiet even, for someone who’s always so assured, so bold. Ichigo frowns, but it doesn’t even cross his mind to tell Grimmjow off. “Sure.”

Grimmjow rubs his thumbs against the tips of his fingers, as if to warm them up. The faintest glimmer of pyreflame shines in his palms and he continues to stoke it in gentle circles until it glows like a soft nightlight in Ichigo’s dim living room. He hesitates as he takes a step forward, lifting his hands up. Feverishly bright eyes flit across Ichigo’s face, as if making a catalog of details, searching every feature. They stray to Ichigo’s lips, to the bottom one he’s chewing on nervously and it sends a freefall swoop of something strange from Ichigo’s chest down into his guts.

This close, even with the slight glow his hands cast, Ichigo can see every shaded fleck of blue and even the smaller, deeper spots of almost-green in Grimmjow’s captivating eyes. The silver of the metal punched through his right eyebrow catches the light from his palms and glints back at Ichigo.

They stand there, close enough to embrace, as Grimmjow reaches up and cups Ichigo’s face. Cold index fingers press to his temples, thumbs settle beneath his eyes, and palms hold his cheeks gently. Pyreflame pressed right to his face and it’s as soothing as walking into an air-conditioned building on a hot summer day.

“Tell me if this hurts.”

“It won’t,” Ichigo reassures him immediately. It never had. At this point, he doubted it ever would, that it ever could.

Grimmjow’s eyes glimmer as he closes them to concentrate, and Ichigo is left to study the delicate veins of his eyelids from all of a few inches away. His stupid, pinchy eyebrows are, for once, smoothed out, relaxed, as if he’s meditating. Ichigo can feel every exhale like a burst of cool air between them.

It’s too close, too intimate to keep his eyes open for too long. So, they stand there together, Grimmjow’s cold hands holding his face doing… something. He feels nothing, the pyreflame doesn’t hurt and nor does anything else.

They’d been through so much, him and Grimmjow. For two people so diametrically opposed in all the ways that were supposed to matter, they got along like a house on fire. Ichigo is… grateful, he thinks, lucky too, maybe, that he didn’t have to be alone after moving away from his family. It’s not what he’d expected, or bargained for, but every day Grimmjow proved wrong every shitty thing Ichigo had ever been taught: that ghosts were cruel, dangerous, no good.

Or maybe they really are, and he’d just lucked out with the right one.

And he would have startled if they hadn’t already been nearly pressed against one another. Still, a shiver rakes down his spine as Grimmjow leans in to press his cold forehead to Ichigo’s feverish one, their noses touching. Trapped at the crossroads of two warring emotions, Ichigo is torn between shying away from the intimacy of the moment and collapsing into it. The hands that hold his head, cold thumbs stroking along his cheekbones so gently, are the only hands that have ever known his heart, living or dead.

“Anything?” he whispers, opening his eyes just to peek that this was really happening. He gets all of five seconds to marvel at the sweep of Grimmjow’s pale lashes before his eyes flutter open.

Blue enough to drown in, for a moment it’s like being held in suspension. Endlessly blue, unfettered, unguarded. It is so much the same look from the tub, staring up at him before he held Ichigo under, open, vulnerable. In all the things they’d grown comfortable talking about, they’d never once spoken about Grimmjow’s admission of being executed.

The moment pops like a bubble and Grimmjow steps away, hands falling away from Ichigo’s face. “Whatever it is… it’s beyond my ability to sense. At least without hurting you.” The distressed crease between his brows is back again. Ichigo grapples for the right thing to say but comes up empty. “I think it’s about time you go talk to your old man.”

He jams the heels of his palms into his eyes and rubs a little furiously. Not this again. He didn’t— there’s no reason to involve his family in this. They didn’t need to know all the details, it was bound to just cause undue stress, and it isn’t like they had any arcane knowledge to assist him with… whatever has been going on.

“He’s not a mage, he can’t— there’s nothing he can do to help this.” Ichigo waves a hand at his general person. Why Grimmjow couldn’t get this through his thick, undead skull is beyond him. Moment completely gone, he backs away to sink into the couch. The ringing in his ears might have been healed, but the exhaustion hadn’t been. Between the drain on his magic from the duel and whatever the hell that spell was, Ichigo’s in no mood to have a full-blown argument.

“You’re a son, you moron,” Grimmjow snaps, sounding exasperated with him. Ichigo sits back a bit on the couch, surprised, hands falling to his lap. “A son and a brother, with a family you’ve been avoiding. If it’s not getting better, then it’s getting worse. They deserve to know.”

“I don’t know how to tell them,” he admits with a forced smile, the biggest reason of many, and he looks over at the rug that lies in front of his big bookshelf. He doesn’t want to look at Grimmjow anymore, at all his distracting blondness and ethereality.

“Just— start at the beginning,” Grimmjow says, horrible and gentle, and Ichigo wants to punch him in the face almost as bad as he kind of wants to hug him right now. He studies the shelf full of tomes that Unohana has gifted him instead. They’re currently arranged by color, which means Grimmjow has put his grubby, aesthetically-driven hands on them because Ichigo would never put them in anything but alphabetical order. “You can leave me out though, might make a better story.”

Ichigo scoffs. “I can’t leave you out of it, you’re the only reason I’m still here.”

Grimmjow is still just standing there, aimlessly, looking like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and Ichigo finally works up the nerve to look at him again. They’d gone from choking each other out, to tentative teamwork, to saving each other, to maybe friends. Grimmjow practically is the main character of that story. Ichigo may as well be along for the ride, a cameo at best.

But he’s just as bad with emotions and words as Ichigo is. So, he doesn’t take it personally when Grimmjow flicks a spray of blue sparks in his direction. “Don’t go all sappy on me, meatsack. Save that for your family when you go there. Tomorrow.”

It was irritating when Grimmjow was right, which was nearly ninety-nine percent of the time. Being as old as the invention of the fucking fork really did make you wise, apparently. For a guy with an eyebrow piercing and a fashion sense straight out of 2007, it’s hard consolidating the two most days into someone who should be taken seriously.

And Ichigo does miss his family, like a phantom limb. He misses Yuzu’s cooking, nothing he makes, even with her recipes, is ever remotely the same. He misses pick-up soccer games with Karin, just him and her on the field at the nearby park after sunset, streetlights and golden hour the only light as they run each other ragged. He even misses his dad, misses having to hear about unfortunate and gross information about patients, misses his melodrama. Even misses the faint stink of cigar smoke on him after he’s had a good day. Shit, he doesn’t even think he’d mind sleeping in his tiny old twin bed either, with the window cracked open to let the spring air in.

One corner of Grimmjow’s mouth is already halfway up in that insufferable smirk, the one that usually dimples his cheek when it grows wide enough. And Ichigo’s supply of decorative throw pillows is already too low to chuck another one at him.

“Fine,” Ichigo concedes, the idea of telling Yuzu he’ll be home for dinner and knowing she’d go to the store immediately for roe convincing him. “I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll use Unohana’s portal and go spend a day or two there.”

“Good.”

“But only for a day or two. Don’t need you to miss me too much,” he says with a rueful smile, and hides his face in his arm folded atop the armrest.

“Have your old man take a look at you too.”

“Are you mother-henning me?” Ichigo laughs into the crook of his elbow, but it’s cut short by a cold hand gathering up a fistful of his hair and picking his head up. Gently, pulling it back until his neck is craned to stare up at Grimmjow. Favoring shirts with deep collars, today is no exception in the grey thermal with far too large a wedge of skin showing at his throat and the sleeves shoved up to his elbows. He’s looking down his nose at Ichigo, pupils swollen, fair hair disheveled, one corner of his mouth is still curled up.

It’s a good fucking look on him.

“No, I’m dead-ghost Kinging you.”

Ichigo’s scalp is tingling where his hair is being pulled, but he feels compelled to raise both eyebrows. “I’m a Master now, I don’t take orders from you.”

Utterly undeterred, Grimmjow’s cheek finally dimples under the force of his smile, and he gives Ichigo’s head a little shake by his hair. “You could be King of the Living World and I still wouldn’t give a shit. Long as you’re breathing, I’ll be haunting your stupid ass.”

“I didn’t know you were a romantic.” At this point, Ichigo thinks as he fights the rise of heat in his cheeks, they probably deserve each other. “Where’s my Master, date night dinner feast then?”

Grimmjow scoffs and lets go of Ichigo’s hair. He moves to step over him and collapses on the other side of the couch, toeing his boots off and kicking them under the coffee table. Predictably, he has no socks on because he’s a heathen. With a luxurious stretch, he swings his long legs up onto the couch and nearly sticks his scarred feet right in Ichigo’s face.

“Get out of my bed and go take a shower, Kurosaki, you smell like a crematorium.”

Ichigo narrowly misses getting toed in the cheek, dodging as he moves to stand up. “Didn’t you have a Hashbrown-someone to follow up on?”

“Nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow. It’s waited sixteen years already.” Grimmjow mashes his head down onto a couch pillow and stretches out fully, legs too long for Ichigo’s couch so he rests them comfortably elevated on the arm Ichigo had just had his face in. Disgusting. Grimmjow opens one luminously blue eye to stare. “Gotta make sure you don’t burn your own building down in your sleep.”

So, the night had gone to utter shit, per usual, but Ichigo is in no mood to break the bedtime routine he’s carefully cultivated, even if his ears aren’t ringing any longer. He sets his own shoes at the door and hangs his coat finally and busies himself making some tea. Grimmjow’s unrelenting stare is easy enough to ignore without his mouth running, and it’s even easier to fall into the nighttime motions. Easy to fall into his own wandering thoughts.

He’d been reading every tome of every subject Unohana had been willing to let him borrow, could that spell have been in one of them? He just— he can’t remember reading about any spell that produced black fire. Clearly, it had offensive purposes, but Ichigo had a mind for spellwork, particularly ones that required longer incantations. He’s sure a spell as strong as that one would have required one. And if it didn’t come from Unohana’s archaic collection, where the hell had he even learned it?

His entire train of thought gets interrupted as he blows a bit of dust off the top of the tin of tea he hasn’t touched in a while and promptly sneezes.

“You know when you sneeze, your skin glows a bit, super fuckin’ weird,” Grimmjow says from the other side of the room, where his arms are comfortably folded behind his head. He’s been watching Ichigo the entire time.

He looks up from the tin and blinks at him, taking a moment, before frowning. “I was electrocuted to death, remember? You were there.”

“Do you think you’d hiccup lightning? Because, I gotta be honest, I’m kinda curious now.”

With a roll of his eyes, Ichigo pours his boiling water into his mug and drops his infuser in. “I’m going to bed; you can guard the door since you’re so set on it.”

“Woof.”

 

~

 

Grimmjow doesn’t sleep at all that night. He doesn’t sleep but every few nights as it is, his spirit needing no more than that. And even though the exhaustion pulls on him, he ignores it to instead do exactly what Kurosaki had joked he’d do: he guards the door.

To be fucking fair to himself, he guards the door most nights. Though it’s a bit of overkill to have something like him sitting in a tiny, stone house babysitting a human. He can’t say he minds most nights here anyway; time is funny for him like that on the best days.

But tonight is not the relaxing, mindless sprawl on the couch that he’d let Kurosaki leave him in. Instead, he waits until Kurosaki finally settles into a deep sleep before he enters the bedroom noiselessly. Even breaths fill the room, along with the soft patter of rain just outside, and Grimmjow moves around the end of the bed to the side that Kurosaki has passed out on.

He’s got one arm angled awkwardly under his pillow, the other curled to his chest, and his face is relaxed in sleep, eyelids fluttering in dream. Even in the dark, with nothing more than the lurid green glow of his clock, Grimmjow can see him. Kurosaki is one pulsing outline of gold beneath the covers, brilliant and so warm, and Grimmjow is drawn in. He’s reaching out before he can even track the motion, a cold, dead thing seeking heat, and his claws are out, dark hand a glaring anomaly against the gold of Kurosaki’s spirit. His blackened fingers and the blue sparking around the tips of each one.

Grimmjow snatches his hand back like he’s been caught stealing, shaking it viciously to rid the unwanted flames trying to ignite.

Inside, something in him yawns wide, cavernous and familiar. He reels back on soundless feet, gets to the wall that separates the room from its ensuite bathroom and slides down it to the floor. Kurosaki slumbers on, none the wiser to his presence.

Hunger.

Grimmjow hasn’t been hungry for almost eight hundred years. So, why, why now? All of a sudden?

Every day it’s more questions without answers. Every waking second since that forsaken rug had spit him into Kurosaki’s living room, everything had been ridiculous and complicated. It had been the simple matter of not dying himself, of not letting some doomed human’s curse claim him too, and now it’s about making sure that doomed human doesn’t die. A full fucking circle. Only Kurosaki has gone above and beyond making that harder than it needs to be.

There’s no one else to witness Grimmjow swallow down that gnawing sensation, repressing the shudder that tickles down his spine as he does so. There’s not a soul there to watch him turn over onto his knees and shuffle on them across the room, towards Kurosaki who hasn’t so much as snuffled in his sleep. A tuft of orange hair hangs over his closed eyes, the rest of it smushed out around his pillow like a halo of fire.

Stupid, trusting human. Exhausting himself and his own magic and sleeping soundly under the same roof with something like Grimmjow. Grimmjow who could end his already pitiable short life if he so much as thought about it too hard. Grimmjow who still cannot resist the opportunity to search Kurosaki’s spirit again, both a fool and a masochist for even forcing himself to be in the same room anymore.

He reaches out slowly, for the hand Kurosaki has folded to his own chest, and curls a few fingers into his mostly open palm. The skin beneath him jumps just a bit at his cold touch, and Kurosaki’s eyelids flutter a little harder for half a second, but he doesn’t wake. So, Grimmjow breathes deep, past the unwanted hunger, breathes himself to a forced calm, a balance. He closes his eyes and he concentrates, on the thrum of Kurosaki’s spirit, the tangled thread of it all knotted up and wound around his own, and follows it.

And as he breathes, he pushes gentle pyreflame against Kurosaki’s warm skin, directly into the cradle of their entwined hands.

There.

Beneath all the gold, far beneath it, buried in like a tick latched to a feast: a flicker of black. It’s so impossibly small Grimmjow nearly misses it entirely. It’s done well to make itself so small in the sea of Kurosaki’s luminescence, and Grimmjow hasn’t the faintest fucking idea what it could be. He doesn’t want to end up hurting Kurosaki just to sate his own curiosity either, but one, controlled prod should be okay. He’s asleep, he doesn’t have the same defenses up in wakefulness, and his magic is still replenishing.

So, Grimmjow prods at it, barely. Pushes what amounts to a single flicker, one, whole ember of pyreflame beneath Kurosaki’s pulsing spirit to feel out this abnormality.

It lashes out like a biblical Mark of Cain, sending a screeching shriek through the contact, and a tendril of it whips around his finger. Grimmjow rips his hand away, fast enough to send him onto his ass, but still too slow. His index finger smokes black, black like that void fire, and he has to watch in horrified silence as his skin chars all the way down to his last knuckle. Eats away at it so fucking fast it takes him half a second to ignite his own hand to combat it.

With it comes the faint stench of sulfur, of rot, and Kurosaki picks that moment to groan low in his sleep, nose scrunching as he shifts in bed and Grimmjow has fucking dissipated into the living room before he can even process another thought.

Feel it, he can’t feel it. He clenches his free hand around his wrist tight enough to break the bone. With a hushed snarl, Grimmjow lets his entire arm ignite in pyreflame, illuminates the whole dark living room in garish blue. The sensation is gone, even as he crooks the finger slightly. And it burns. Not like true flame, but like… poison, something unnatural. It’s easy enough to put out, overpowering it as he has, but the damage is already done.

What’s left is hardly a finger anymore, just the grizzled remnants of one.

And if Grimmjow spends the rest of the night with his back pressed up against the closed bedroom door, facing into the dark living room, cradling his gnarled finger in his other hand, there’s no one else there to see that either.

It’s the closest thing to an existential spiral he’s gone through since the Divine Comedy came out and he had to wonder if, and therefore how, a useless fucking human had managed to get an account of Hell. Just running through his mental catalogue of every creature, living or dead or something in between, that he knew existed. If he knew any tiny, black specks that could roast a finger off of something like him, and coming up utterly empty. This was the second fucking time he'd lost this same finger too, all thanks to the stupid meatsack asleep on the otherside of the wall.

Kurosaki doesn’t stir at all until his normal alarm goes off in the wee hours of the morning, when sunlight is barely peeking in through the little window in his kitchen. Grimmjow is quick to dissipate from the door back to the couch, sprawling out in faux relaxation, carefully tucking his still aching hand behind his head.

He listens and he waits as Kurosaki moves through his normal morning routine. The rattle of the old pipes as he turns the shower on, the rustle of drawers, and the hiss of the gas-flame stove as Kurosaki starts his kettle for his tea with a spell from the other room.

Within twenty minutes, there’s a half full duffel bag sitting beside the front door and the smell of black tea permeates the apartment.

“Morning,” Kurosaki mumbles, giving a stretch of his arms over his head, the hem of his sweater riding up to expose tanned skin untouched by winter’s chill. He squints a bit at Grimmjow on the couch. “Did you go after Hashbrown anyway? You don’t look like you got any rest.”

Attentive bastard. What, did he look like he got attacked last night? Some dark circles? It’s an easy enough cover-up to roll with: Kurosaki did not need to know what had happened. Yet. The thought of making up some other shitty story and seeing if the mage could heal him again, just as he’d done before, as he shouldn’t have been able to do even then, had crossed his mind and he’d stamped it out.

“Tried for a bit, but I wanted to make sure you didn’t try to weasel your way out of leaving today.”

Kurosaki huffs and Grimmjow watches the way he moves through the kitchen, mug and tea and kettle and spoon. He doesn’t drag himself the way he has for weeks now, there’s no exhausted hunch to his shoulders, no shuffle of his feet. He’s nothing more than a cozy sweater, jeans, and some damp orange hair. And a solid flare of gold, as usual. Warm and familiar and looking like he got a good night’s rest for the first time in months. And one of those things is mighty fucking suspicious.

“I’m starting to think you’re trying to get rid of me,” he gripes as he twirls his finger clockwise and sets his spoon spinning in his mug.  

“Ya caught me,” Grimmjow grounds out, sitting up slowly, sure to keep his hand tucked behind the back couch cushions. “I just wanna sleep in the bed for once.”

“You just have to ask,” Kurosaki says with a quiet smirk that makes Grimmjow sit up just a little straighter. He doesn’t say a single thing more to clarify that, just sips his tea and scrolls his phone, leaving Grimmjow to sit there feeling duped and oddly warm.

The morning outside is cool but dry, the rain having trickled off some time in the early morning while Grimmjow was too busy trying not to devolve into homicidal mania. Kurosaki is content to chatter idly about his sisters for the short walk to the portal, not knowing that Grimmjow had been there just yesterday to check on them.

He’s careful to keep both his hands tucked in his pockets, nonetheless.

The demoness’ shop is warm and quiet, full of her collection of stupid human furniture and her deceptively unassuming presence. Her hair is pleated all the same, lustrous black and hanging over her shoulder as she looks up from an open notebook beside her register.

“Ichigo, good morning,” she greets, smile making the corners of her dark eyes crinkle. They flick for half a second to Grimmjow who refuses to so much as blink in her presence, and back to Kurosaki. “I wasn’t expecting you today.”

Kurosaki, bleeding hearted fucker, just grins wide and easy at his sometimes-boss, as if she isn’t twice Grimmjow’s age and fourteen other different types of fucked up. “I’ve decided to go visit my family, wanted to use your portal, if that’s alright.”

Unohana sets her pen down, a proper fucking inkwell pen of all the frivolous things, and rounds the register. She’s in knitted layers of nonsense and boots that look like they were made before the first damn Ice Age. “Of course, you know you have free use of it. I’m glad to hear you’re going to visit; you haven’t been in some time.”

Grimmjow is prepared when Kurosaki glances over his shoulder and gives the mage his smuggest, I-told-you-so look.

“How long will you be visiting?” she asks as she walks them through the winding hoarder’s path of her stupid store, to the backrooms. The locked one with her collection of books and her portal, and the other with the tub. It’s hard not to stare at the doorknob, the same oil-rubbed bronze as the one she’s currently sticking a key into, but the pull of it is different. The memory there feels heavy, tangible, like a lingering presence none of them could outrun.

“I’m just staying the night. I should be back sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy your trip, short though it may be.” She pushes the door open gently and steps aside to let Ichigo in. She doesn’t move as Grimmjow follows just a step behind, her looming bookcase full of dusty tomes, some probably bound in human flesh as was the old ways, comes into view, the gilded portal mirror beside it. “Are you going with him, Grimmjow?”

He fucking hates the way she says his name, properly, rolling the consonants of it the way they were meant to be rolled, spoken from a mouth that knew many languages. He much preferred the way Kurosaki said it, with the blunted vowels of an untrained tongue. He kept that to himself though, knew that mage would just chalk it up to his prejudice for the demoness.

“No,” Grimmjow replies, short and sweet. He didn’t need to explain himself to her.

She nods all the same, giving Ichigo her usual practiced smile and excusing herself from the hallway to leave the two of them alone. Kurosaki’s broad shoulders clad in a dark peacoat are reflected on the undisturbed surface of mirror. It’s an old thing, taller than the both of them and nearly as wide, its frame is all tarnished gold, rubbed to a shine in the places it was touched most. Grimmjow tries not to catch his own reflection.

“You should come with me,” Kurosaki says, quiet and open-ended as he lifts the strap of his duffel over his head to settle it across his opposite shoulder. His brown eyes are plain, no malice, no hidden motives. There never is with him. For all his downplaying of situations to mollify his friends and his family, Kurosaki never seems to pull that shit with Grimmjow.

“Not this time. Maybe next trip,” he offers, but the idea of being introduced to Kurosaki’s family feels so… human. It feels like all the things he’s never been allowed to have, has never had. The sheer concept feels entirely outside the realm of reality. “Gotta keep on Hashbrown, you know.”

“Right, good luck,” Kurosaki says with a wry smile as he turns to place a palm flat to the mirrored glass. It ripples under his touch, giving way to an iridescent, rainbow-like shimmer that doesn’t quite reflect anymore. He gives a last look over his shoulder at Grimmjow, a warm smile curling the corner of his mouth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Kurosaki steps through the shimmering surface and is swallowed up in an instant, the gold of his spirit going from a roaring inferno filling every edge of Grimmjow’s senses to just a flicker in the back of his soul again. He waits until the surface of the portal smooths out and solidifies, turning away before he can see his own face reflected back.

“Thank you,” Unohana murmurs as soon as he steps back into the hallway. Grimmjow’s lip curls at her platitudes. “I’ve been trying to convince him for weeks to visit his family.”

“Guess you didn’t try guilt tripping him then.” He turns on his heel and exits the space that’s far too tiny to be stuck in any longer with gutter scum.

She’s just behind him, hand lingering on the handle of the door she’s just closed long enough that Grimmjow knows she’s sealing it.

“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit. You’re rather important to Ichigo. He values your advice highly. If you assisted at all in convincing him, my gratitude stands.”

Grimmjow understands why Kurosaki likes her, why the whole gaggle of misfits likes her. It’s a naïve sentiment that he too was guilty of when he was just as young. She’s friendly, she always seems to know the right thing to say, even at the worst of times, and she went out of her way in nearly every instance to be helpful. It’s a good ruse, though Kurosaki was almost belligerently persistent that it wasn’t a ruse. She and Grimmjow were both old though, he could wait her out to find out all the same.

“You know I don’t like you,” Grimmjow says plainly, and wars with his own face to get it to un-asshole into something vaguely conversational.  

Unohana merely blinks at him, blasé as all fuck. “Yes, you do frequently choose to make your sentiments on this subject known.”

“But—” he hesitates, gives himself a spare three seconds to decide if he’s really going to commit to this or not before he opens his mouth again. “We have Kurosaki, in common, I mean. We both want what’s best for him.”

She cocks her head in that inane way he hates, and she looks him over, grey eyes cold and calculating, searching. What she’s looking for, he’d rather not know. “You are correct. I am rather fond of Ichigo, as it seems you are too.”

Grimmjow pulls his right hand out of his pocket and holds it up so she can see his charred index finger clearly. At least, what remains of the char that Grimmjow’s own flame hasn’t already healed, albeit slowly. It’s managed to heal to his first knuckle, nearly to his fingernail now. The tip of it is still crispy and useless.

“What do you make of this?”

Unohana doesn’t breathe, she never has, so long as Grimmjow has had the misfortune of knowing her. How she’s fooled anyone this long that she’s even remotely human is a fucking joke. Somehow, the lack of inhale as she leans in, eyes going wide in a mix of curiosity and surprise is more unsettling than it should be.

“I checked him over, with his permission,” he’s sure to emphasize before she can get hissy. “Found the tiniest fucking thing that lashed out the second I touched it. Managed to do this.”

“I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this before,” she whispers, and Grimmjow surely does not like that one fucking bit. Because he’d already had his little breakdown through the morning until Kurosaki woke. “Does it hurt?”

“Stings a bit, I guess. I’m regaining feeling as it heals. Just taking forever.”

They stand nearly head-to-head, and Grimmjow stares. She stares right back, unblinking gaze of grey like a heavy fog at the mouth of a rocky shore. She’s old, Grimmjow knows this. He just has no way of quantifying it, other than by a few of the books she keeps in her backroom. Old tomes, some that are the only copy of their kind in existence, the type that only someone who knew of them when they were written would know existed at all.

“Something has managed to find that open door anyway,” she murmurs as she stares at his ruined finger, brow crumpling. The door, the weak link, in Kurosaki’s soul that the two of them had opened when they’d brought him back with necromancy in the room no more than ten fucking feet away.

Grimmjow swallows a little thickly, put off by all the plain emotion on her face, a sight that mirrors the tightness in his own chest. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Has it hurt him?”

“Not that I can sense. It was… so fucking small, I almost missed it. Small enough that his own ridiculous magic should burn it up.”

“And yet, it hasn’t.” She’s quick to follow down the same rabbit hole that Grimmjow had tripped into; the mere fact that Kurosaki’s stronger-than-average magic hadn’t utterly ripped this tiny thing to shreds and should have already. “It must be something quite formidable,” she muses as he crooks his finger a little, to at least demonstrate that he can move it still. “To have done that kind of damage to you.”

“Anything come to mind?”

She taps at her chin thoughtfully, gaze wandering out of focus from his destroyed finger for a moment. “Not at present. But I can look into it, if you like.” Grey eyes wander back, and one corner of her thin mouth pulls up. “For Ichigo, of course. He would be rather upset to know you’ve been hurt.”

Clever demoness, trying to angle around his direct dislike of her. But two old as dirt memories had to be better than just his alone. If she could find anything, it would be to help Ichigo, to purge whatever thing had wriggled its way in, not Grimmjow. And that’s an easy deal to take.

“For Ichigo,” he agrees, and flashes a canine at her.

Unohana holds up a finger suddenly before she turns away from him, walking in measured steps back to the door she had just closed and reopening it. She wanders out but a few moments later with something fragile cradled in her hands.

“I am giving this to you then. So, that it can be in Ichigo’s home should he, or you, ever need it.”

It’s a dinky little thing, a white, rounded sort of pillar no taller than a half a foot and made of frosted glass. It looks like nothing more than a decorative trinket but it’s ripping hot to the touch when she places it in Grimmjow’s hands.

“Smash it, and it will summon me instantly.”

Grimmjow’s eyebrows go up. She must really trust Kurosaki, to have already prepared such a thing, with the full intention of just gifting it to him. The power to summon a demon, to summon her.

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate it,” is all he can say, because he sure as fuck doesn’t. He could handle any sort of bullshit Kurosaki tried to pull, but the meatsack would probably be grateful that the demoness cared so much.

“With all hope, it will collect dust,” she says with a tired, rueful smile, and it’s the first thing she’s ever said that Grimmjow couldn’t agree more with.

 

~

 

Yuzu cries when she opens the front door and sees it’s him standing there, overnight duffel in hand. Cries and then launches herself at him with the speed of a ballistic missile, knocking the breath out of his lungs as she drives her head straight into his diaphragm. Ichigo all but has to carry her inside, doing some waddling sort of three-legged walk to get her in the door. Karin is the dark blur that barrels into him next, leaping from the second to last stair directly into him. He pretends not to hear the sniffle she buries into his jacket. He still gets slugged in the shoulder anyway.

It’s easy, and it makes him feel all the shittier that he hadn’t come sooner. His bedroom is untouched when he enters it to dump his duffel in there. The sheets are clean and there isn’t a speck of dust on any surface, evidence that Yuzu came in every week as she always did and kept it up all the same, even if he didn’t live there anymore.

They eat, they pretend to watch a movie and talk over almost of all it. They stay up until Isshin reminds them it’s a school night and that neither of them can call out sick because he’s a terrible liar whose convinced their school’s secretary can tell.

Ichigo waits until they’re in bed to shower, yanking on the t-shirt and old gym shorts he’d packed before wandering back downstairs to tell his dad goodnight too. He finds him on the back porch, sitting at a bistro table that hadn’t been there four months ago, the makings of gardening boxes strewn across it that say Yuzu may have picked up a new hobby. Smoke curls from a lit cigarette that he lifts to take a deep drag of.

“Thought you quit years ago,” Ichigo says without preamble, and Isshin glances over his shoulder before shrugging a little.

“It takes me six months to get through a whole pack as it is.”

Ichigo pulls out the chair opposite his dad and sinks down into it. It’s chilly without his jacket, the night air damp and the sound of crickets is soft, lulling. They sit like that, in comfortable silence for a little while, until Isshin’s cigarette is half-smoked and Ichigo decides he needs to say something now or he’ll never work up the nerve to say it again.

“I think… I found out what happened to mom,” Ichigo says quietly, and winces as Isshin’s hand stops halfway to his face, smoke curling from the end of his cigarette. “And you deserve to know, if you want to know.”

“I don’t,” Isshin replies after a long while, bearded face unreadable. He hasn’t so much as looked in Ichigo’s direction yet, and Ichigo’s heart feels like it’s trying to stage a break out. “But it hardly seems fair to let my son be the only bearer of that knowledge.” He takes a deep breath, braces himself it looks like, and Ichigo feels like such a shitbag. He hates knowing this, hates having learned about it all even, if it meant that he might have been killed off by his own ignorance. “Is this what all those questions a few months ago were about?”

“More or less,” Ichigo concedes with a shrug. One thing at a time; his dad definitely didn’t need to know about the tub, or him accidentally conjuring Grimmjow. Stupid asshole, being right once again that it was better if he didn’t come with. “I’d found some information that didn’t add up, I guess. Had questions.”

“Some answers you found then, huh. Well,” Isshin heaves another deep sigh and turns to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray somewhere between all the half-assembled wood. “Am I gonna need another cigarette for this?” he asks, even as he reaches for the pack and the lighter anyway.

“She was cursed,” Ichigo finally blurts out once he’s got his next cigarette lit. “Someone in her family cursed the firstborns of her bloodline.”

Isshin’s eyes swing wide to Ichigo fast, warm and familiar and afraid, and Ichigo realizes he’s given away way more than he meant to. “I’m okay! It’s broken, the curse. I don’t really understand the how, but I know she broke it.”

“Of course, she did,” Isshin murmurs, shoulders deflating almost instantly, and Ichigo’s chest aches fresh at the nostalgic, lovesick smile that pulls at his father’s face.

“I’m just… trying to figure out the who.”

“You’d asked about your grandparents.” Isshin nods slowly in remembrance, and the cigarette he’d lit but had yet to take a drag of is still burning between his steady fingers. “She was arranged to marry someone else; I think I told you that over the phone when you’d called.”

“Yeah, you said she was part of a really old bloodline too. Was she like, mage royalty?” Grimmjow had called it blood royalty once, something Ichigo had forgotten until just now.

Isshin laughs at that, a startled sound that eases the tension just a bit, especially as he finally lifts that cigarette to his lips. “What, like the ring of Prince Ichigo?”

“No, you dick!” Ichigo flusters. Not that being a Prince would help him much anyway: literally everyone in casual conversation would think it was a joke, even girls wouldn’t fall for that, and Grimmjow would take every opportunity to pull rank on him just because.

“Mages don’t have royalty as far as she told me, but old bloodlines are an entire history. Centuries and generations worth of magic and power.” Isshin takes another drag and stares determinedly out at the neat row of hedges that line the small backyard. “Those old families wanted to keep it concentrated, pure. Cousins marrying cousins and all sorts of nasty business.”

“Are there a lot of old bloodlines?”

His dad just shrugs. “I don’t know, to be honest. Masaki never enjoyed talking about her family, and I never pushed it.”

Ichigo had figured his dad wouldn’t really know much; he’d said as much over the phone that night. But this is… even less than Ichigo had hoped for. “What about the guy she was arranged to marry? Whose family did he belong to?”

Again, all Isshin gives is another shrug. “His name was Ryuken, and that’s all she ever told me.”

A name. God, he couldn’t wait to tell Grimmjow. Maybe the guy was still alive, maybe they could find him. Maybe he’d be willing to answer some of Ichigo’s questions. Maybe he’d known Masaki when she was young. Unless… he was the one that had cursed his mother and, in turn, Ichigo. Grimmjow had also assumed that Masaki’s family had cursed her for abandoning them and her birthright when she’d married Isshin, but a jilted husband-to-be? That added up the more Ichigo calculated it.

It’s hard to prevent the lapse of silence as Ichigo’s brain churns over the possibilities, leaving his dad to ruminate on all his own. A sharp frown pulls at his grizzled face, dragging the corners of his mouth down almost comically.

“Cursed, huh?” Isshin murmurs, and breaks Ichigo’s spiral, brings him back to the father and the husband that he’s just informed he lost the love of his life to some magic bullshit he hadn’t even known about. “And she knew?”

“Yeah,” Ichigo whispers, and he rubs at his bare arms, at the goosebumps that rise with night’s chill, squeezes a bit, around the bones where that very same curse is carved, “she knew.”

“She never said anything.”

“Dad…” Ichigo sucks in a deep breath, tries to find the words to say this without sounding like some sort of magic, exclusionist asshole. “What could she have said? That wouldn’t have made you worry. I don’t think she didn’t tell you because she didn’t trust you. I think she thought she had it under control, and she did. Whatever she did— she saved me.”

Isshin looks over at Ichigo, really looks at him, and Ichigo looks right back. At the gray that’s started at his dad’s temples, the flecks of it running through his beard. He looks at the deepening of the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, at his laugh lines. It’s strange, Ichigo thinks, to see the evidence that his father is getting older, as he’s supposed to, just as Ichigo is. He spent so much of his time around someone who was eternally young, that the prospect of natural human life had all but slipped his mind.

“Thank you for telling me, Ichigo. I’m sorry you had to bear that alone.”

“I had the easy job,” Ichigo tries to joke, but it feels hollow. “I don’t know how to tell the twins. I don’t… I don’t think I will. Unless you want to.”

“Not yet. Maybe when they’re older,” Isshin says, and Ichigo can’t help but roll his eyes. The twins were already sixteen, but in his dad’s mind, they would be his baby girls forever. “You know, Masaki used to tell me she liked it when I smoked. Told me I looked sexy and dangerous.”

Ichigo wrinkles his nose at that information, his curry bubbling in protest down in the depths of his stomach for a second. “Ugh, Dad, please, I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing that.”

“Someday, my son, the gross habits of the person you love most might become your favorite too.”

The fact that Ichigo’s mind takes a screeching, hard left to the image of Grimmjow sitting on his couch, cereal bowl in hand, psychopathically bare feet kicked up on Ichigo’s coffee table while he watched the local crash report for morning commuters and made running commentary, makes him want to turn to dust. What the fuck.

“If it ever happens, I’ll let you know so you can have an I-told-you-so moment.”

“Thanks for coming to see the girls, Ichigo, they really missed you.” Isshin stubs out his last cigarette and stretches his legs out in front of him, knees popping as he does so. “Get some good sleep, your dark circles are loud enough to wake the dead.”

Oh, he had no fucking idea.

But Ichigo feels… lighter. He hadn’t realized just how heavy holding the truth about his mom’s passing had been until he’d put it down. He’s sorry it’s a conversation they had to have at all, but he’s grateful his dad is the kind of guy to shoulder something like that even if it isn’t his to bear. Not that Ichigo wants to give him any credit out loud, he’d never live it down, but his own protective streak seems like something he inherited.

His room is the perfect temperature with the window cracked as he crawls into bed, sheets crisp and smelling of fresh detergent. He snuggles down under the blankets and mashes his pillow into the right shape and breathes deep the familiar smells and the quiet of the night. He listens to the squeak of the downstairs bathroom door as his dad goes to shower and closes his eyes to the comfort that in the room just down the hall, his sisters slept soundly.

The sleep he settles into on the other hand is far from restful though. It’s dark, heavy, suffocating. He can almost feel his own body where it lies in his small, childhood bed, limbs weighed down with sleep, anchored to the mattress.

When it finally settles out, he’s back in that half-destroyed city and it’s fully submerged now, entirely underwater. Somehow, he still walks, doesn’t float, doesn’t swim, just treads the wrecked roads, up and down between the buildings.

He’s always alone here, in this dream, never sees another person, no matter how carefully he searches. So, when a voice calls to him, muted and distant, he breaks into a dead sprint after it.

“Ichigo.”

It’s so quiet that Ichigo’s convinced he’s imagined it until it calls to him again. His name, just his name, and panic seeps into him, pumps his heart in double time as he tears through the alleyways blindly, waiting to be called to again to get a sense of direction.

“Where are you?” he yells, and the unforgiving glass and steel of the broken city throws his own voice back at him and he has to wait for the echoes to abate before he can hear the voice again.

Further into the city he follows it, lungs aching, calves sore, to a skyscraper that scratches at the submerged sky, the back half of it sheared off.

Ichigo pushes at the unshattered glass of the revolving door of the building, into an empty lobby with polished floors and a cavernous ceiling and goes deeper. Through a door in the back, down a winding hallway, stopping and listening at all the doors along the way, and following deeper into the building. He stops in his tracks, lost beyond all belief, when he pushes a door open to a room that is utterly void of light. He waits, there have been other rooms where the lights clicked on only after he’s stepped fully into them, but the light never comes.

The edge of the door he’d been holding open slips from his fingers and slams shut behind him with an echoing bang.

 

~

 

Grimmjow’s late and he knows it, having been delayed floating around a Russian gulag looking for a prisoner who should have known Hashbrown, but in actuality was extremely dead and therefore utterly unhelpful. And he must have been a right motherfucker too, because when Grimmjow dissipates to Hueco Mundo, to the desolate stretch of barren white sands where fresh souls often wandered as they tried to regain their sense of self, the dude is nowhere to be found.

And Grimmjow’s list of known souls who’d been utterly obliterated is nice and short, so it’s safe to assume which realm this guy’s rotten spirit has been dumped in.

But it’s already evening in Salem when Grimmjow hops realms, and he knows Kurosaki said he’d be returning in the afternoon. Grimmjow had only stopped by the apartment after leaving the demoness’ shop to deposit his unwanted gifts. He’d stuck the stupid glass object on Kurosaki’s enormous bookshelf, high enough up that it couldn’t be simply bumped and sent to the floor and promptly left. Now, his own fucking due diligence in following Hashbrown down to the last hidey-hole is getting in the way of him getting home.

He stops abruptly, just steps beyond the grimy walls of somewhere that smells vaguely like Lower London, and nearly has his second existential crisis in less than forty-eight hours.

He’d just thought of Kurosaki’s dinky apartment, with his weirdly alphabetized books, his frankly out of control tea collection, all his stupid little throw pillows, his bed and the rattling pipes, that one owl that hooted at the most bastard of hours, and that fucking conjuration rug, as home.

Grimmjow had never really had a home before; mercenaries got what they were given as far as a bed, which he was lucky if it was any level of padding in the dirt, luckier even if there was a roof over his head. The palaces of bleached bones in Hueco Mundo that he’d laid claim to hardly counted either, they held nothing and no one of value. Just echoingly empty spaces and wandering, too-curious spirits he could vaporize by raising a finger.

When Grimmjow returns to Kurosaki’s apartment, it’s dark, empty, and quiet. Not even the quartz lamp on the corner table that Grimmjow could have sworn the mage spelled to react to his presence somehow comes on. The sigils that line the inside of the front door, the ones carved specifically to allow Grimmjow entrance through the wards, glow diffusely until dimming out entirely, leaving him to the black.

“Kurosaki?”

Between the emptiness and the late hour, Grimmjow can riddle it out for himself that Kurosaki hasn’t come back. And while he was a general dick about a lot of things, he was pretty punctual. Grimmjow even checks his bedroom to make sure he hasn’t just missed the duffel sitting on the floor.

The gold is still there, the presence of Kurosaki’s spirit that he’s been able to sense since he held him under the water and helped kill him, remains. Just as distant and small as it had been since he’d stepped through the portal for Seattle.

He waits all fucking night, rotating from the barstool with Kurosaki’s journal of notes that only he mostly wrote in (Grimmjow pens the information for the dead gulag dude in there anyway) to the couch, to the floor, and back to the couch. He’s tempted to actually tempt fate by face planting directly into Kurosaki’s bed, knows that’s likely when the door would come swinging open, but doesn’t.

Grimmjow knows too that he could just… sneak a peek at the family household in Seattle, to see if Kurosaki is still there, if maybe he’d decided to stay another night anyway. But he also knows that if Kurosaki so much as caught sight of him, he’d never hear the fucking end of it. No, no, Kurosaki is an adult, an adult on vacation at his family home, a place he was fully entitled to be without Grimmjow’s hovering supervision.

At least, that’s what he reminds himself again and again, even as he rearranges the entire bookshelf in a different array of colors and sizes. But he hasn’t rested in days and passes out on the couch shortly after, sleeping until long after the sun has come up.

If he stops into the coffee shop where two of the other meatsacks work that next morning, Kurosaki doesn’t have to know. Not even if the one with glasses whose yard he’d barbequed on accident looks at him as he walks through the front door, little bell tinkling overhead, as if he’s the corpse of her deceased lover come back to haunt her ass.

He even glamors a normal coat onto himself, the kind that makes it look like the cold temperature of the morning has any effect on him. He even waits until they’ve dealt with their line of customers, like a respectably passing human himself, before approaching them. They eye him, and the empty space around him where a Kurosaki should very much be, apprehensively.

“Either of you seen Kurosaki this morning?”

“No,” glasses says a little stiffly as she stuffs a couple of bills into the register and shuts it. “Aren’t you two joined at the hip anyway?”

“We’ve been tragically severed,” Grimmjow snarks at her, lip curling. Clearly, she still thought he’d roasted all her stupid herbs on purpose, the way she’s looking at him. “He hasn’t been in?”

“Not since the other day,” she replies, and knuckles her glasses further up her nose. “Is he feeling better since his duel?”

“I don’t know. I talked him into visiting his family and he was supposed to come back yesterday and didn’t.”

In Grimmjow’s defense, he isn’t really sure just how much Kurosaki has told them all about what had happened. They obviously know how Grimmjow came to be in Kurosaki’s life, he knows Kurosaki insisted to the lot of them that Grimmjow had saved him. He doesn’t know if they’ve been told exactly what Grimmjow saved Kurosaki from, or all the general and supernatural threats to his wellbeing said saving incurred. He’s pretty fucking certain none of them know about the necromancy.

“Aren’t you overreacting just a teeny bit?” the healer asks as she steams milk for a customer’s order. “Ichi hasn’t been home in like, what? Almost four months? And he’s been talking about Yuzu’s cooking every single day of those four months. He probably just stayed another night.”

“He has been looking too skinny,” Nanao remarks as she rips a fresh label from the little printer and tapes it flawlessly on a clean bottle that she sets aside.

“Way skinny.” Isane hums an agreeable noise, and lifts her pale brows at Grimmjow, as if that answered all his questions. “Did you text him?”

Grimmjow wrinkles his nose at the two of them, at the whole exchange. “I’m dead, do I look like I carry a phone?” The head of the lady at the closest table to them jerks up at that, and she gives Grimmjow a confused and startled look. These fucking humans, they were all the same, out to give him a complex for being unalive.

“You could just stop by the house. I’m sure he’s told you where it is,” Nanao points out as she settles a funnel into the mouth of the bottle she’s just labeled. She hefts a jug from the floor onto the counter and rips the seal and the cap off it. Carefully, she begins to pour the amber-colored contents into the empty container.

“That would make him look like a weird, stalkery boyfriend, Nan.”

“Kurosaki is not my boyfriend,” Grimmjow grates out, and it’s a miracle it comes out in a human language at all considering the rush of affronted anger that floods through him. “I’m a fourteen-hundred-year-old King of the dead, we don’t have boyfriends. You two are fucking useless.”

The two of them open their mouths simultaneously, as if to debunk that fact, but Grimmjow has already turned on his heel and stalked out the very way he’d come in. Boyfriend, those stupid bitches, he seethes as he throws the door open with more force than strictly necessary. Nothing shatters though so he doesn’t stop. He almost thinks about stopping by the goth’s house, if only to cover his bases, but he’s so fucking irritated now, he doesn’t even think to dissipate, just stomps his way back to the apartment.

He should have fucking left when their contract was fulfilled, he thinks vehemently, then there would be no stupid fucking friends making stupid fucking comments. He could have gone right back to having nothing to give a shit about and being bored enough to pluck his own eyes out. Now he’s got smarmy little meatsacks making cheeky comments like they’re all friends.

Grimmjow eats what’s left of Kurosaki’s precious cereal when he gets back out of pure fucking spite, relishing every second it turns to nothing before it even hits his stomach. It wears off pretty fast though, and he kicks the empty box off the coffee table and onto the floor and sits pissed off and vaguely concerned on the couch.

He has not a shred of proof that the tiny, black speck that had charred his now-healed finger has anything remotely to do with the fact that Kurosaki is late, but it nags at him all the same.

 

~

 

Dark, moonless midnight dark. And cold, like he’s slipped through the ice into the freezing waters below. He can feel the waves as they wash over him, soporific and lulling. Floating, he thinks he’s floating, suspended in utter darkness. Nothing hurts, nothing… he can’t feel anything but the cold, he simply is for a moment, just existing.

Until something pulls at his foot and his eyes shoot open to the nothingness. Unattached to reality and utterly blind, panic creeps into him at that touch as it more than brushes at his pant leg. A tendril of something, a rope, a vine, he has no way of knowing, twists about his ankle and snakes upward.  

Ichigo opens his mouth to shout, to say anything, and not a single sound comes out. Something pulls again at his other ankle, twisting and winding, and he tries again to yell, to scream, until he’s blinded. Lightning strikes the frigid water, illuminating a swath of endless, empty, churning darkness around him, and Ichigo waits for the familiar, jarring shock of electrocution that never comes. But in the trailing afterlight of the bolt, he can see himself, see his legs. He can see the void-black shadows wrapping about his calves, like hands reaching as they coil and constrict.

Like a hydra, more hands manifest from the two that twine his lower legs, at least a dozen creep up his thighs and around his waist. Full, undiluted panic strikes through him like lightning of its own as the light begins to fade. The shadows creep further, about his chest, grabbing at his hands and his arms. He’s all but mummified in the darkness, bound and voiceless, it seems folly to even struggle as everything winds tighter the harder he fights.

He all but gives up until noise finally ripples across the depths, a voice, Grimmjow’s voice, calling his name. Muffled, quiet, but unmistakable.

Ichigo thrashes and the shadows choke him, curl around his throat, round and round his head, his nose, his mouth, and smother him in the freezing dark.

 

~

 

And that nagging grows like a cancer when Kurosaki doesn’t come home that day either. Not in the afternoon, not in the evening, and the few walls of the apartment are starting to make Grimmjow a little fucking stir crazy. Kurosaki remains a little glimmer of gold, distant but still bright, drawn thin with the physical distance between them. And no one else, not any of the meatsacks, think this is strange behavior for someone who’s as much of a homebody as Kurosaki is.

So, he goes out again to distract himself. Tracks down dead gulag dude’s actual corpse to make sure he’s properly dead, and tries to account for anyone else in that small circle of horseshit that might know anything about Kurosaki’s mother. But all of it is a dead end, every last breadcrumb, every last third cousin twice removed from some random asshole.

He’s standing in a cemetery in Edessa on the third day since Kurosaki has been gone, too close to ‘home’, over yet another grave of someone whose name he’d come across. Grimmjow isn’t really one for coincidences either, knows better than to believe that things could be simple happenstance. So many of the people he’s tried to track down are dead, and the ones he did manage to talk to knew absolutely nothing. He’d lost count of how many leads hadn’t panned out in the slightest.

The whole endeavor of trying to find out who had cursed Masaki Kurosaki, and in turn her own son, is starting to feel like a joke with a punchline that isn’t going to be worth hearing. None of the information they’d scrounged up had amounted to anything either. It was why he’d pushed for Kurosaki to talk to his old man, to find out if there’s anything he might know. It all felt like her Seattle police file: cause of death, unknown.

Even here in a cemetery that covers sprawling green hills, dotted with headstones of all ages, there’s nothing but old bones and no answers. A corpse is no good to him. He gnashes his teeth as he stands there, turns to spit on the age-old grave, and begins the trek back the direction he’d come from.

Grimmjow has few rules of honor he stuck to and attempting to be as human as possible in all the places the dead claimed in the World of the Living is one. Graves of the single or mass variety, morgues, sacred lands, killing fields, you never know what’s lingering about, and he had no need for attention.

He gets halfway back to the rusted gates at the entrance, passing tourists and old folk alike, all who stare at his pale hair and paler skin, at his eyes, when he feels it.

Violent, it strikes him in two parts. The first, like an arrow to the chest, the sensation of the razor sharp edge of the arrowhead shredding flesh and muscle and sinew as it buries itself deep. He halts at the feeling, swaying on his feet as his vision of the green graveyard cartwheels around him. With a shaking hand, he grabs at his shirt, at his heart, staggers at the vicious burst of pain. The second, like someone wrenching that arrow straight out, leaving behind a gaping maw of ruined emptiness.

Grimmjow feels the exact fucking second that the flare of Kurosaki’s soul sputters out again and does not reignite.