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Ichigo opened his eyes to the wide black expanse of Hueco Mundo’s eternal night sky.
His head ached with a dull, persistent throbbing, like he’d been hit with a blunt object. He was outside, clearly, flat on his back in the sand somewhere. The sky glowed overhead like a television on standby, lending its impossible illumination to his surroundings. How had he ended up in the middle of nowhere?
Or—not the middle of nowhere. The middle of Las Noches’ broken citadel. He’d gone there to…to…
Grimmjow.
Two thoughts vied for his total attention the moment his clouded memory began to clear, bringing both context to his situation and a slow dawning horror. He immediately knew two things to be true.
The first was that he’d come to Las Noches as a favour to Yoruichi, who had been keeping her ear to the ground for any trouble headed Harribel’s way. She’d been called back to Soul Society on family business before she could deliver her most recent report, and being the weekend Ichigo had nothing pressing going on. A trip into the black was always great to break up the monotony of living world adulthood, and he liked seeing Nel and the others when he could. He’d dropped off the letter and had been heading back to the artificial kumon point when a blue-white flash had intercepted him.
Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez.
It had been a while since Ichigo felt the particular rush of frenzied adrenaline that came with the sight of, privately, his favourite arrancar opponent. But there he'd been, standing right in front of him with his hand already hovering over the hilt of his sword, his electric blue eyes almost black in the gloom. It didn’t take anything away from the picture he made: over six feet of lean arrancar muscle and bloodlust, his sharp-toothed jaw mask unable to obscure the delighted smile of an absolute maniac hell-bent on opening Ichigo up and sucking the marrow from his bones.
They’d fought, of course. They always fought. But that time had been different—they’d started in on each other within the hallowed confines of Las Noches, which weren’t stable enough for the kind of power they unleashed on each other.
The memory of an explosion beneath their feet was the last thing Ichigo could clearly remember. That, and the startled look on Grimmjow’s face as realisation dawned, inches from his own. A clawed hand had become a bracing one that reached for his arm, and then the world of darkness had bled into confusing white light and pain.
Overhead, the night sky gave no answers to his plight, but Ichigo understood one more thing in the fallout of their truncated battle very clearly.
Whatever that explosion had been, Ichigo couldn’t move his body anymore.
It wasn’t paralysis, or at least not the kind as he understood it from movies and tv. He could feel pain; his right thigh was brilliant with a roundhouse kick he’d received, and his left hip was bleeding sluggishly down his side into the sand. He could feel, but he couldn’t do more than blink and breathe. His head felt like the only mobile thing he had control over.
Beside him, somewhere beyond his narrow field of vision, someone inhaled sharply.
“Fuck.” Grimmjow sounded hoarse but lucid, and like a magnet Ichigo felt his head trying desperately to turn towards the sound of his voice. “Kurosaki?”
“Beside you,” Ichigo managed, forcing his head just enough that he could make out the white fabric of Grimmjow’s jacketed shoulder. From the angle, they weren’t side by side, instead almost facing in quarter opposite directions, like the hands of a clock at three and six. “Sorta. Can…can you move?”
Muffled sounds of strain and breathing from Grimmjow were all Ichigo could pick up for a moment. No sounds of limbs shifting over the sand, though. Whatever had happened, had happened to them both. There wasn’t a lot of comfort in that thought, but at least Grimmjow couldn’t try to sucker him with a few free strikes.
“I can’t move,” Grimmjow admitted finally, sounding almost plaintive in his confusion. “I think there was something in that gas.”
“What gas? It was an explosion.”
“Yeah, moron. A gas explosion. Think there was some old lab storage under us.”
Ichigo’s stomach dropped, but mostly he was confused at the concept of stockpiling paralysing gas. “I thought you guys liked fighting. What good is an opponent who can’t move?”
Out of his range of vision, Grimmjow huffed a breath that could have meant anything. “Not everyone fights fair like you do, Kurosaki.”
“Or you,” Ichigo pointed out. For a long time there was no reply, and it wasn’t clear if he’d pissed Grimmjow off or not.
For a long moment they lay there together in weird silence, sore and immobile from the neck down. What kind of sick bastard would make a gas like that? Except, of course he knew. People like Aizen, Kurotsuchi, even Urahara could probably find some use for something that kept people still but completely alert. A hopelessly charitable corner of his memory provided him with neurosurgery examples, but he knew better. Leaving pain receptors turned on was just barbaric. It was either for torture, interrogation, or examination.
“At least if we blew up the canister or whatever, nobody can ever use it again.” Ichigo said it to the sky, but he felt Grimmjow listening. “Hopefully it wears off soon. Everyone here thinks I went home already.”
“They’ll be here soon,” was all Grimmjow said in reply. “Hard to miss a bang that loud. If you haven’t noticed, it’s a quiet place here.”
“When you say ‘they’…”
“Hollows.”
Ichigo stopped thinking. “I don’t want to be eaten alive, Grimmjow.”
“No shit.”
His breathing was coming a little faster. “Can you not sound so defeatist about this? We have to do something. Maybe if we start with our fingers and toes, we could force it to wear off faster.”
Grimmjow snorted. “More likely the hollows will be the ones starting with our fingers and toes.”
“Grimmjow, for fuck’s sake, will you just wriggle?!”
Half-deaf with the internal exertion he was putting on himself, Ichigo stopped paying attention to whether Grimmjow was peacefully waiting to be digested by a mindless hollow or not. If he could get his movement back, it wouldn’t matter because he’d be able to pull them both to safety. Even just being able to get up on his knees might be enough. His sword was—somewhere—but it didn’t matter if he didn’t have working arms to swing it. Ichigo poured all his concentration into trying to move his digits even the tiniest fraction against the drug that had taken control of his body.
Sweat had broken out on Ichigo’s forehead around the same time that lumbering footsteps began to approach, heavy and far too big to be humanoid. He couldn’t move a damn inch, they were literally going to devour them both, he—
“Heeeeeyyyyy!” Ichigo yelled into the crisp desert air, hoping someone might hear him. Someone with a sword. Someone like Nel. “We’re out here! Help!”
“Sure, call more of them,” Grimmjow said dryly from off to his right. “Great idea, dipshit.”
“It’s more than you’re doing,” Ichigo said fiercely, pissed off and frightened. Every footstep he could hear was coming in his direction. Maybe five hollows, probably soon to be more. “What are we going to do? Spit at them?”
“Good a plan as any.”
By then, Ichigo could actually see them: as big as houses, wearing the vaguely animal-shaped white masks of basic hollows. Their skin was muted tones of various colours, looking bumpy and scaly, like crocodile leather. One made an excited, curious grunt that even through its two-layered vocal cords sounded too much like a person. Their speed picked up into a trot, heading straight for them.
Oh god, Ichigo thought. He wasn’t in his human body, he was a shinigami and he was about to die in the middle of Las Noches just because Yoruichi had a social life and Grimmjow couldn’t keep it in his fucking scabbard—
Ichigo gave it one last-ditch heave with his entire mind, trying to get his body to move. Nothing happened. The horde descended upon them, their slavering mouths wide open to feast.
Grimmjow roared.
Not the borderline safe snarling of their battles. Not even the sonic scream he’d let out the first time they’d fought at full power, years ago. This sounded like a beast of myth: a layered, throaty, vibrating roar that shook the air and sand around them like an apex predator declaring its territory. It was deafening, heart-stopping. And every single hollow heading in their direction heard it and screamed in an instant of chilling, instinctive fear.
The hollows turned tail and ran like the hounds of hell itself were snapping at their hind legs. In fact, every spiritual signature in the wide vicinity absolutely fled the area, growing further and further away like fireflies escaping the dawn. When nothing but silence and the sound of his own settling breathing were all he could hear, Ichigo let his head slump back against the cold sand.
“You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?”
Grimmjow’s laugh was more like a wheeze. “Did you really think those bottom feeders were going to take one step in our direction once they realised what I am?” He sounded slightly husky from his earlier outburst, his words burred slightly with exertion. “Idiot. They’re hardwired to instinct. Sure we’re laying here like a couple of free steaks, but you don’t try to eat a live grenade just because it’s not doing much.”
“You’re not a grenade,” Ichigo fumed. “You’re steaming dogshit for making me think I was about to die just now. I hope ants come out and crawl up your ass.”
“Uh huh. Pretty sure I just saved your life.”
“Piss off.”
Grimmjow just gave another rusty laugh and didn’t respond. He seemed pleased with himself, which just annoyed Ichigo even more. Rather than give him the satisfaction of making an even bigger deal about it, he went back to trying to get his limbs working again. At the very least he could monitor how fast or slow the chemical was wearing off. If it wore off.
“Oh, what’s this?” a high, strident female voice called across the sand sometime later. “Taking a little nap before you head home, shinigami? That’s bad company you’re keeping, though.”
Ichigo’s heart lifted. Harribel’s fraccion? One of them, at least. They were saved. They might be weird but bloodshed within Las Noches would break the tenuous treaty Harribel went so far to broker with Seireitei, and they were nothing if not relentlessly loyal to her.
Beside him, Grimmjow had gone completely silent, and if Ichigo’s instincts were right, there was a gathering air of tension surrounding him that prickled at his skin like static electricity. Then, he said two words.
“Loly Aivirrne.”
Who’s that, Ichigo wanted to say, but the tone of Grimmjow’s voice told him enough.
“Wow! Hahaha!” Loly almost skipped into view, hands braced on thin hips to stand between them both, swinging her delighted gaze from one to the other. “You two can’t move an inch, can you? That’ll teach you to play on a landmine, Grimmjow! Hahaha!”
“Have we met?” Ichigo asked, not liking the amount of enjoyment she was gleaning from their situation, but not so much he wasn’t curious where he knew her from. Maybe from when the quincies invaded. “Grimmjow said your name is Loly. Do you think you could—”
“Don’t talk to me, Kurosaki Ichigo,” Loly interrupted, waving his words off like so much smoke in the air. Her snapping eyes were locked to Grimmjow’s prone form with more than idle curiosity. “You’re off limits if I want to keep my skin. But nobody cares what happens to Grimmjow. Nobody at all!” Her laugh this time bordered on shrill madness, and if Ichigo wasn’t mistaken, a little reckless fear. “I owe you so much for that day! Nobody will blame me if I take an eye for an eye. Or you know, a leg for a leg.”
Heart thudding with a slow drumbeat of growing danger, Ichigo tried to turn all the way in her direction to see what was going on. She seemed young, relatively weak compared to Grimmjow, but there was something unstable about the way she looked at Grimmjow—about the opportunity presented to her. Was she going to actually do something to his leg?
Loly knelt down over Grimmjow’s thighs and planted her palms on either side of his chest. Ichigo couldn’t see his face, but he heard the words that came out of his mouth in a voice colder than anything Grimmjow had ever directed at him.
“Make it count, bitch. You know what happens next.”
Loly tossed her dark pigtails to one side with a wide smile, dipped her head and kissed Grimmjow with a messy, open mouth. Her free hand, not the one now holding Grimmjow’s face still, slowly drew a long dagger from a sheath on her thigh.
Ichigo was distantly aware of his breathing bordering on hyperventilation, of his every vein and artery pumping useless blood to all his limbs in a rush of pure adrenaline. She was forcing—Grimmjow was—
I have to protect—
I can’t—
I have to stop—
I can’t move.
Ichigo opened his mouth to scream, to shout, and with an enormous push of mental will, felt himself fall down a dark, yawning shaft lined with blue skies and sky-scraping towers pointing in the wrong direction.
I can move, a voice like dark shadow and glittering malice laughed softly in his ear. I can move long enough to burn the poison right out of you, Ichigo. The air’s good here tonight.
It had been years since Zangetsu sounded like that. Like danger and a promise. Ichigo knew he couldn’t assume control like he used to—they were long past that—but craning his neck Ichigo could see Loly forcing her mouth down onto Grimmjow’s not for enjoyment but for pure repulsive control, her dagger held aloft and ready to fall straight into his neck, or his chest, or—
Ichigo didn’t give his permission so much as he flung the arms of his will and all the authority they held straight around the dark presence of his soul, his other half that was more honest and vicious than he’d ever let himself become. The thunder that shook his heart in response felt truer than anything he’d ever experienced as Zangetsu’s influence flowed over the top of his own, not ripping the reins from his hands but threading his fingers through his own, breathing over his shoulder…laughing with opportunity to stalk Hueco Mundo’s darkness once more, even if only for a minute.
“Get off of him.” Ichigo’s whispered command rolled across the short distance of sand as he saw twin horns push from his brow out towards the scene unfolding, saw the crimson pinpoint of light gather between them, holding the devastation of a black hole within its concentrated nucleus. It only took the smallest tilt of his head to find his target.
“Cero.”
Loly’s scream was more like a squawk of surprise as the blast pierced her chest and kept going, throwing her so far into the darkness of Las Noches that Ichigo immediately lost sight of her for another shot. But he wasn’t—finished. It wasn’t enough. Thwarted rage swarmed under his skin, directionless and building on itself like a cyclone heightening its force with every circuit through his veins. The mask came down over his face like a spreading veil of absolution.
Rolling onto his side, movements jerky and limited, like a wooden-limbed puppet pulled up by an invisible hand, Ichigo pulled himself through the sand by his hands, dragging his body with him. His hands were bone white and black clawed. Long hair was falling through his horns and into his eyes. The night was pale grey and ivory lights to his supernatural vision.
I’m still me.
It didn’t feel like the truth.
Ichigo opened his mouth and shrieked his rage at the night in all directions, feeling all life foaming at the mouth in panic as they fled, feeling the land shudder and finally lay still beneath his will.
When his hand finally reached Grimmjow’s skin, when Ichigo was able to pull himself so far over that when he collapsed down his ear was touching a warm heartbeat, the crimson fog of his territorial anger beginning to recede just enough that he could form real thoughts again. But his body—it wasn’t anything close to his own and Ichigo didn’t want that to change just yet. Not until it was safe. They weren’t remotely safe.
“Kurosaki,” Grimmjow rasped. “Get off me, you fuck.” He turned his head and spat hard off into the sand. “The hell have you turned into this time?”
“She was kissing you,” was all Ichigo could think to say, staring across the mound of Grimmjow’s muscular chest up to the jut of his chin. “She was going to kill you. I had to.”
“That bitch is crazier than a shithouse rat,” Grimmjow said, seeming to agree. “Doesn’t explain why you’re on my chest right now, how you moved, or what the hell you’re doing in full mask and horns.”
“Protecting you.” Those words wanted to distort into something primal, something built into the core of his soul, but Ichigo held it back. He wasn’t going to go on a mindless rampage, but he was definitely lacking inhibition when it came to impulse control. “Zangetsu is giving me some additional strength through our bond to burn out the chemical, but it’s going to take time. Let me just—be here for a few minutes.”
“Protecting me,” Grimmjow repeated, running his tongue across his teeth. Without warning, he turned and spat again, and again. Ichigo couldn’t blame him. “Couldn’t get a decent go at her top lip or I’d have ripped it off her face.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” Ichigo replied, feeling the mask begin to crumble at the edges and blow away to dust. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Grimmjow muttered. “Pissed off. The second I can get up I’m going to hunt her down and finish the job. There’ll be no Inoue fucking Orihime to save her this time.”
The mention of Inoue was new, but Inoue healed everyone. “She said something about her leg.”
“I ripped it off a few years back. Owed your woman for restoring my arm. Found two of them tag-teaming her in her cell behind Ulquiorra’s back. They beat the absolute shit out of her—”
“Maybe stop telling that story,” Ichigo managed, feeling the red haze of bloodlust begin to cloud his vision again. His claws dug small holes in Grimmjow’s right pectoral, just above his nipple. It belatedly occurred to Ichigo that Loly had pulled open his jumpsuit almost all the way and felt something like madness start blaring in his ears, his eyes, his teeth and his claws. “Tell me…something else. Something boring.”
“Boring,” Grimmjow repeated to himself. At his sides, his hands were starting to twitch a little. “Guessing anything that’s a fight is going to get your blood up even further. All right.” There was a small silence, and Ichigo listened painfully hard to the breathing and heartbeat under his ear for long seconds. He was in control, he was, he just— “I got a birthday coming up in a few days.”
Ichigo blinked behind his mask. “You do? When?”
“Last day of the human month of July.” He said it with no inflection. “It’s not my thing, but Harribel thinks it’s important to start exploring the shit that makes us arrancar different and the same. Milestones of eternal life don’t really matter to me, but I guess I’ve almost died a few times too many now. Might as well enjoy Nelliel’s sour face when she has to dig up a gift for me.”
Ichigo shifted against Grimmjow’s chest, trying to get comfortable as more of the mask started to fall away from the cheek pressed to him. Birthdays. They were born two weeks apart—well, two weeks and like two hundred years, probably. “What kind of stuff do you like?”
“Nothing.” There was a slight pull against Ichigo’s scalp that said Grimmjow’s revived fingers had found the loose fall of his unnaturally long hair. “Useful stuff.”
“Like a comb?”
“I have a comb.”
“Maybe a better one.” The tug on his scalp became more like a yank. “Ow. My birthday was on the fifteenth.”
“No shit? What’d you get?”
“Nothing. Well, a couple of gift cards so I can buy things I like. And Yuzu baked a giant strawberry cake.”
“Heh. ‘Cause of your name. Isn’t yuzu some kind of lemon?”
Ichigo stared at the nipple so close to his claws and thought about scratching it off. “Yuzu is my sister’s name. I have twin younger sisters.”
“They strong like you are?”
Ichigo felt an entire chunk of the mask disintegrate with his smile. “Karin has potential, but Yuzu got almost nothing. Don’t come to the living world trying to fight them. You might just end up meeting my dad instead.”
“Dad.” There was an almost puzzled quality to the word. “Never figured you for someone with one of those. He where you get your powers from?”
“Mostly, but Aizen claims some of it too. Zangetsu is…was, formed from the merging of my soul with an artificial hollow-shinigami hybrid that he created. It bit my mother, who was a quincy, and—”
“Is your father strong,” Grimmjow said, sounding so pained it didn’t even seem like a question.
“Oh. Yeah, he’s strong. He flicked Aizen into a commercial building once using just his finger.”
Under his cheek, Grimmjow’s chest started vibrating and moving. It took Ichigo longer than he’d like to realise Grimmjow was trying to hold in a laugh. “I like your old man’s style. I see where you get it from.”
“Get what from?”
“Your fuckin’ audacity, Kurosaki. Laying on my chest like you’re about to nod off. Fuck you. You should be scared of me.” Turning his face down, he glowered at the sight Ichigo made there with eyes like dark blue chips of night for a few seconds, then fell back. “But damn if those yellow eyes of yours aren’t taking me right back to when the fake blue sky lit you up like a beacon. Kicked my ass that day. Then you saved it.”
“No fight talk,” Ichigo said weakly, even though he really wanted to hear more about his own heroics. “My eyes are yellow?”
“Black whites, yellow irises. Same as before. Mask’s a bit different this time, a thick black bar down your left eye from the hairline, and nothing else.”
Nobody had ever told Ichigo his eyes changed colour before. Actually, that probably explained Inoue’s face a few times when he’d looked at her back then. Had he resembled a monster? Her brother? Even Grimmjow hadn’t had black eyes. Probably too evolved by then.
“Are they ugly? My eyes.”
The silence between them was a little long, but Ichigo didn’t think it was down to Grimmjow wondering how to respond. Maybe he too, was just thinking about times past. Battles won and lost. Beatdowns that he’d never get to experience again.
“Nothin’ ugly about you.” The mild emphasis on you made Ichigo feel ridiculously warm and immediately embarrassed about that.
“Glad you think so.” The rest of the mask fell off like an enormous crust, slipping down the side of Grimmjow’s chest and dissolving to nothing before it hit the sand. “I think Zangetsu is nearly done. I feel a lot calmer now. Thanks, Grimmjow.”
“For what?”
“Keeping me sane.”
Grimmjow’s laugh was a single bark of incredulity. “Nobody ever accused me of that before.”
An entire hand lifted from his side and slipped into Ichigo’s hair, still extremely long judging by the swirling hanks of orange that pooled around them both. A pale hand, no longer sharp-clawed, stroked carefully around in Ichigo’s scalp like it was charting a map.
“Guess if you’re gonna use me as a mattress, I get my own back.”
“I don’t mind,” Ichigo replied, his eyes slipping closed. “You’re burning off the paralysis pretty fast, too.”
“Not the first time I’ve been dosed with poison.” A warm thumb pushed the swirling crown of his hair in the opposite direction, making Ichigo’s eyes roll back in his head. “But we said no fight stories.”
“For now.”
“For now.”
The lull between them was nice, for a while. Strange how easily they fell into physical touch and sharing tales, where even mundane things like a birthday might seem like an overshare between enemies. But they weren’t enemies, and never would be again. If there was one instinct Ichigo would follow down into the dark every time, it was someone trying to hurt Grimmjow when he wasn’t able to fight back. Hurt anyone, really, but Grimmjow deserved the chance every time to prove himself and win. Part of Ichigo would always be rooting for him, with his incongruously honourable nature and clean, efficient violence. Even when Ichigo had been a kid, he’d always liked fictional villains like that. Doing things their own way, by their own code. Having lines drawn in the sand.
If he had to don a mask now and then to make sure treachery didn’t steal that from him, so be it.
“Sometimes I think that if you’d been put in my situation, and me in yours, we would have turned out like each other.”
The lazy, drugging hand in Ichigo’s hair stilled for a moment. But just a moment, and then it resumed its idle trails once again.
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“You would’ve protected your friends. I got all mine killed.”
“I’m your friend.”
“We’ll never be friends.”
The statement wasn’t cruel, but it was final. Ichigo felt the cold crystallisation of the moment shatter the warmth of their closeness so quickly his head spun. In an instant his long hair dissolved and his horns faded, leaving him feeling…himself, alone, and entirely able to move again. The spell had broken, and its cradling protection stripped away felt a little like grief.
Ichigo pushed himself upright and turned away, clearing his throat and checking automatically for lingering injuries. None. Zangetsu did great work.
“Can you move yet?” Ichigo asked, not turning fully back to look at him. Crisp, not unfriendly. Concerned but not needy. It was nothing, really. Just circumstance and strange gas. He’d forgotten worse.
Behind him, under Ichigo’s miserable eye, Grimmjow sat up in a quiet rush, so easily it seemed like the gas had stopped affecting him a long time ago. He ran his hands through his hair, wiped his mouth and zipped his jumpsuit back into order. There was a banked disgust in his eyes as he looked down at his own body, his nostrils flaring like there was a sour note in the air.
“I’ll head to the kumon point,” Ichigo said unnecessarily as they both got to their feet, a little rocky but perfectly functional. “Do whatever you want, but don’t tell Harribel I got caught up with that Loly person. I don’t need her feeling like she owes me anything because of one arrancar girl.” Or you.
“Whatever.” Grimmjow seemed occupied with testing his limbs one by one. “Don’t come back in a hurry.”
“I—”
Grimmjow’s eyes flicked up, sharp and blue as ever, but Ichigo couldn’t have finished his sentence if he tried. There was a tightness to the estigma around his eyes, pulled in and nothing like the unrestrained arrancar Ichigo so often met with and fought. Everything was wrong, but Grimmjow was trying to act right. The intuition felt painful in its sudden weight.
But Ichigo couldn’t leave it there. Fuck if he wished he could. But that wasn’t him.
“Come back with me.”
Grimmjow’s eyes narrowed. “The living world?”
“My house,” Ichigo said, agreeing and disagreeing. “It’s warm and my family are there. You can have an hour long bath and wear my sweatpants and ask my dad about whatever you want. Or do none of that, but don’t stay here. We don’t have to be friends.”
“You know I hate pity.”
“It’s not pity.” The breath held in Ichigo’s lungs ached with its need to be words released.
“Then what?”
Spotting Zangetsu laying flat and innocent on the sand, Ichigo walked over and grabbed his sword. It took almost nothing to affix it to his back, magnetised by the sensation of spiritual energy finding its own.
“An early birthday present, I guess, if you want it. A taste of the mundane.”
Grimmjow’s chin tipped up in understanding, a clear and intelligent light shining in his eyes. That bastard, he always saw too much. “And a late birthday present for you, huh?”
Ichigo refused to reply. It was past time he didn’t have to try so hard. When was the last time someone came freely to him? Why did it have to be Grimmjow who would catch his attention so fully? Surely the universe owed him one by that point.
“It’s probably just pity, like you said.” Turning in a half-circle, finding his bearing, Ichigo started in the direction of what he figured was the kumon point before their unplanned battle. “Seeya.”
He could try again next time, Ichigo told himself, feeling tied up in frustrated knots he knew he couldn’t loosen until he was free and clear of Hueco Mundo and Grimmjow’s perceptive blue eyes. His scalp prickled with the remembered echo of absurdly gentle fingers pushing his hair the wrong way. And then, of Loly forcing herself down on Grimmjow, unable to move. Himself, unable to fight. Maybe normalcy, even as fierce and unsafe as it seemed, was more important.
Turning on his heel, walking backwards out of range, Ichigo cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “What kind of gift do you want, then?”
Grimmjow barely looked his way, giving a casual wave behind his own shoulder as he walked off.
“Just come back sometime.”
Ichigo’s heart jumped up into his throat and swelled there. “I—okay, when?”
“Whenever you’re missing me, dipshit. I don’t care when.”
But we’re not friends, Ichigo wanted to shout back, staring after him with confused frustration and too many arguments trapped behind his clenched teeth. Instead he stood there like a moron, fists bunched at his sides, wanting to argue right up until Grimmjow chanced a narrow blue-eyed look over his shoulder, estigma finally relaxed at last, a hint of a smile in the curve of his mouth. A real one.
We’re not friends, Ichigo thought, and something clicked deep like the inner workings of an old clock. We’ll never be friends. Grimmjow didn’t want—
“I’ll be back real soon then!” Ichigo called, face hot and invisible in the shadows. Grimmjow’s laugh was jackal-like and completely out of sight by then, and something about it made Ichigo feel better all over.
Sure, he couldn’t fight Grimmjow’s battles for him, couldn’t give him solace and comfort or any of the things regular people might want. But Grimmjow, the arrancar Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez was still really honest about one thing he did need, and Kurosaki Ichigo was nothing if not generous when it counted.
“Yeah, I’ll be seeing you.”