Have three (and a half?) ideas/sketches for the very beginning of the Two Idiots and a Temporal Incident Bleach AU. I made Ichigo a girl in this post because I have a deep-seated desire for more female Bleach characters that a) aren't constantly being rescued and b) aren't hyper-sexualized.
Two months after she killed Aizen, Ichigo came to the abrupt realization that she was ready to murder again.
“Grimmjow,” she said, “if you don’t eat that somewhere else, I am going to kill you.”
Grimm lifted his head to look up at her. The rotted arm hanging from his mouth twitched as he ground down, evidently severing some sort of muscle between his teeth. This was unfortunately the last straw for the limb’s integrity; a large chunk of slimy skin sloughed off, landing on the bare dirt with a horrifically wet plop.
Ichigo told herself she was not going to vomit.
The back of her throat tightened and her mouth filled with saliva.
She was not going to vomit.
Grimm locked eyes with her. Reached out a clawed hand to pick up the goopy chunk. Brought it towards his lips.
Ichigo contorted herself, leaning out over the side of the boulder she was sitting on, and heaved. Breakfast came up — a protein bar — and so did lunch — another protein bar.
Over the sound of her own gags, she heard him say, “And you think I’m disgusting?”
She gagged one last time, gave herself a second to be sure it really was the last time, and then reached out blindly for her sword hilt. Her fingers scrabbled over cold stone and found Zangetsu’s pommel, and then she was leaping down from the rock, fueled by the blood-thirst of someone a little too far past done with another person’s shit.
Grimm laughed as she crashed down on him, his breath powerful enough that she smelled the sound as equally as she heard it — but he had dropped the arm, and now she got to try and beat his face in, so it was a victory even if it was a Pyrrhic one.
Pantera caught Zangetsu’s edge (a brief connection, a split second of perfect understanding: grief pushed down and buried deep; a growing restlessness, born from the pointless question of now what; desperation to pretend the world remained as it was, before the war, before it was all broken, before they two were the last-) and Grimm shoved upward. Ichigo moved with the force of the block, springing backward and landing in a crouch. He grinned at her, more of a baring-of-teeth than a smile, and lunged forward.
And off they went, the two of them, playing pretend in a forest that was shrinking every day, the unraveling of reality itself closing in.
The sky was a perpetual, vibrant blue.
Ichigo hadn’t stopped to ponder the color of the End of Everything before, well, everything ended. But she thinks if she had, she would have expected it to be black.
Black, like nothing. Black, the color of absence.
But it turns out that the threshold of the apocalypse — where spacetime was being ripped apart, atoms and quarks torn open and destroyed — glowed.
Hat-and-Clogs had explained it before Aizen had killed him. In a twist of cosmic irony, blue was the color of sunny days and also nuclear fission. And so above them burned a spherical shell of brilliant blue, eating its way closer through the fabric of reality.
And beyond the shell, past the threshold? No color at all there, not even black, just a complete nothing.
There was a pun there, about moths and Aizen’s monstrous transformation and the destruction of fabric and possibly an emperor left wearing no clothes. If Renji had been there, he would have made it. Ichigo wasn’t drunk enough to do it for him.
Spirits, she missed him. She missed them all, with their stupid jokes and annoying —
“Can you shut up?” Grimm said. “I would, actually, like to fall asleep sometime this year.”
Ichigo stopped staring at the sky to roll over onto her side, squinting through decaying grass to peer at him. “I haven’t said anything?”
“But you were thinking. I know because I could hear you straining.”
Ichigo considered that, and then rolled over twice more, until she was close enough to Grimm to kick him.
Parallel to her in the grass, he tensed, bracing for a strike.
The joke was on him, though, that wasn’t her move. She let out a horrid, caterwauling wail, doing her best approximation of a drunkard trying to perform an aria. In her opinion, she managed the imitation quite well; the sound was positively, excruciatingly awful.
Grimm launched himself across the remaining ground between them, landing on top of her and desperately trying to muffle the noise leaving her mouth. “Shut up, shut up, shut up - ”
She laid off screeching in favor of employing a technique all siblings learn early in life: licking the hand trying to silence you.
Grimm recoiled, skittering away and frantically wiping his hand on the ground. “I hate you!” he cried.
Ichigo cackled, and he turned his head to stare at her, shoulders hunched and eyes wide, posture all offended-cat. But there was something else in his eyes, too — something a little self-satisfied, maybe.
She huffed. “Go to sleep, moron,” she said, and closed her eyes.
They stood over Aizen’s corpse. Just the sight of it was enough to make Ichigo’s hands shake with a mixture of fear and anger.
They had avoided this place by unspoken agreement, before now. Had wandered through what little forest remained, staying as far away from here as they could without getting too close to the boundary.
After all, why return? All it was was a reminder of how they had failed. How they hadn’t defeated him. Hadn’t killed him until he had already won in every way that mattered.
So, naturally, their return was prompted by nothing less than what Ichigo suspected was the stupidest plan to ever be created, synthesized from pure frustration, a deep lack of comprehension of kido theory, and the complete assurance that whatever they did, they couldn’t make things worse.
“The bastard didn’t even have the decency to rot,” Grimm said.
It was true. Aizen’s body lay there, perfectly preserved by the hogyoku, as the universe decayed around him instead.
“Looking at it makes me want to kill him again, you know?” Grimm added, kicking the side of the corpse. It was not a gentle kick. Something audibly crunched under his toe. “I feel like once just wasn’t enough.”
Ichigo breathed out. Breathed in. “Well,” she said, and her voice was as still and steady as Hat-and-Clogs could teach her, “if this works, we’ll get a second chance. Better make it satisfying, though, because I sure as hell don’t want to do this a third time.”
Grimm’s fangs glinted blue in the light of The End. “Oh, I have no doubt I will enjoy the opportunity immensely.”
He crouched down and put one hand over the spot Aizen’s heart should have been. “You sure you’re up for this?” he asked. “Your gargantas have always been shit, you know, and your kido is worse.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said. “Just do it already.”
And so Grimm unsheathed his claws and plunged his hand into Aizen’s chest. With a series of crunching snaps, a wet sucking sound, and a tide of the stench of iron, he ripped the hogyoku out of Aizen’s chest.
He cradled the tiny ball of divinity between both palms. Ichigo’s hands wrapped tightly around his. The two of them dripped gore and power from their fingers.
Focusing together, with neither array nor incantation, they imagined a clock, spinning backwards, and wished.
The hogyoku glowed, awakening from its sleep.
Blue light turned blinding white.
And everything came undone.
In a shocking turn of fate, the two’s methodology was successful.
But there was one factor — one small but vital factor — that they both forgot.
The type of time travel they embarked on required so much energy because, at its heart, it required undoing. In order to write a different book on pages that have already been printed, the pages must first be erased.
Under normal circumstances, the energy required to do this to a whole universe would be so immense as to be prohibitive.
With a hogyoku, doing so became possible, but very, very difficult.
Doing so with a hogyoku, with the entirety of the universe already undone, save for few cubic miles?
Well. The energy for that, dear reader, is peanuts.
And so the two time travelers, who had poured all the energy they could into the hogyoku in the desperate hope of landing far enough back to make a difference, found themselves flung back not two months, not two years, not even two decades, but about two centuries.
… There was, perhaps, a reason, that when everyone was still alive, those two were never put in charge of strategy.
discoholicmusic
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
janainaart
