There are several reasons I shan't continue with this one in particular (narrative reasons that you can probably see if you read it!) but I did say I would post it when I had written anything. Heads up, there's a little violence in this.
Three universes away from the long war, Kurosaki Ichigo is alone.
He's a god now, for all the good that does anyone. The god-king of empty hueco mundo, the last remaining world: immortal, eternal, and all alone.
The wind howls across the stark desert landscape.
(If a man howls along with the wind in the desert, and there's not a single soul to hear anything ever again, does it really make a sound? When there is nothing else, you might as well consider philosophy.)
Tonight he pauses, mid-step, on the side of a sand dune.
He feels something outside himself. It's... pulling at him.
That's novel enough on its own. All he has here is a well of power, achieved too late to save anyone who matters, the endless cold desert, and memories of the lost worlds.
It's all he's had for years now.
He turns towards the tugging, head down, eyes distant.
Something, he thinks, still needs him.
He clenches and unclenches his fists. The idea that there's still someone out there who needs him, who he hasn't totally failed yet — it itches at him like an incubus. It's heady, potent, seductive.
Kurosaki Ichigo whirls, kicking up sand in his haste to answer the call.
For the first time in decades, he tears open a garganta and it actually goes somewhere new.
The feeling pulls him on.
Thirty minutes (and also infinity) earlier —
Technically speaking, you can summon stuff from outside the three worlds. Nobody does it, because inviting a horror from outside of spacetime to please come in and make itself at home is considered... er, highly inadvisable. And also, Kisuke guesses — and this is really secondary at this point in his life, given the state of Soul Society — because it's technically punishable in seireitei by summary obliteration from the reincarnation cycle.
But mostly it's that inviting in an alien abomination never improves circumstances.
The current situation has deteriorated so badly that Kisuke is willing to trade his little life, such as it is, for outside assistance. All his reading (of the books that survived, anyway) suggests that not only will outsiders accept sacrifices, but they also understand the concept of a contract.
He's pretty sure — pretty sure — that the design he's writing on the floor of what was once the Central 46 deliberation hall is a coherent contract in this new syllabary. Pretty sure.
"You sure about this?" Shinji wonders, from his slouch against the far wall. He's standing on some of the rubble they pushed to its outer walls. His hands are in the pockets of his long black coat, but Sakanade is in easy reach.
"Yes," Kisuke lies with easy confidence. He glances over his shoulder. Shinji's just as scarred as he is now. He's more subdued after the loss of the rest of the Vizards. They've all had their losses. "How long do you think we have?"
He rolls his shoulders. Sighs. "...Minutes, still, at least. Aizen loves messing around with Ichigo."
And, neither of them says, but both of them know, Kurosaki Ichigo is the only one who can still stand up to him for more than a minute at a time. Currently, he's out there backed up by Ishida and Nelliel, but they truly are just backup, there to make barriers and cause a big distraction if Ichigo goes down.
This is not the team Kisuke would have put on barrier duty, once upon a time. Hachi, Tessai, young Orihime even...
But now it's an arrancar and a quincy fighting the shinigami war. And Ichigo. Always Ichigo.
Because... that's who's left.
"You've got no time at all if he figures out your shitty idea is a suicide technique," Shinji reminds him, clicking his tongue.
"It might not be a suicide technique," he says lightly. That thought makes his stomach turn, because either way he's giving himself up to whatever outsider can meet his terms. It's probably for the best if it just kills him.
"Uh-huh," says Shinji, like he's thinking exactly what Kisuke is thinking.
Kisuke goes back to his contract. He's pretty sure of it, but there's a lot of his own blood mixed in with the ink, and he's gotten lightheaded now. He compares it to his crumpled diagram carefully.
He's as sure as he can be that he's got it right. They are as ready as they will ever be to beg help off an alien deity.
"It looks right," he says finally.
Shinji straightens up. "Showtime?"
It's hard to read anything from his face, and it's not just the scars. They've all lost a hell of a lot, and Shinji's clearly braced for this one with the kind of grim skill that comes from practice: shut down, stone-faced, dead-eyed.
Kisuke has never been more grateful for how hard his remaining friends have become. Right now he thinks he could do anything, say anything, and it would break upon Shinji like a wave on a cliffside and fall away, leaving him untouched and indifferent.
This is it. Kisuke has risked his life plenty of times, but he's never just ...given it up before. This is the moment at which everything he is, has been, everything he has the potential to ever become, this is what it's worth: just one spell.
It comes down to his pale and trembling hands, smeared with ink and blood, pressed down to the design he's drawn on the floor.
He looks at Shinji and he meets his dark eyes and laughs. It sounds a bit like a broken hinge.
His reiatsu swells. He looks down and pretends he can't see Shinji close his eyes.
Then the design begins to glow, and he throws his call out into the great and terrible emptiness beyond the universe he knows, and then he can't see much of anything at all.
But he sure feels it when someone answers.
Ichigo blinks into being again in the middle of a fight. For a second he's confused, baffled — there has been nobody left to fight in his empty world for decades. Only him, and his hideously advanced regeneration, and the endless, screaming desert wind.
He's standing in a clear blue sky.
In that second of confusion, Aizen — Aizen? — stabs him, straight through the chest, and he can hear someone screaming his name.
It's the scream that gets him, if he's honest. The sword barely registers. But the voice... the voice is sharp and desperate and full of rage and horror and all that emotion is aimed directly at him, at Kurosaki Ichigo, long-abandoned little god. How long has it been, he thinks hazily, since he's heard his own name in someone else's voice? How long has it been since someone who valued him cried out for him?
It resurrects something in him. It's like his heart skips a beat, takes a moment to blink.
(Of course, Ichigo's heartbeat never actually skips. You can keep time by the steady thump of his immortal heart. His pulse is a metronome.)
He needs to do something about that voice. It's upset, so he's upset.
Triage. His brain arranges its priorities.
1. Aizen has stabbed him. He doesn't like this.
2. The voice is upset. This is upsetting him.
3. He doesn't know where he is, but it is not the desert. He likes this.
Ichigo wrenches the sword out of his chest in a spray of blood and pale, bubbling fluids. The wound bubbles white, hideously, and hisses into the cool reishi-rich air as it closes up.
Aizen's dark eyes go wide, but he hasn't got time to react. Ichigo keeps his grip on his blade, lunges forward, and cups the man's head in one hand. The skull disappears in the blast of a cero, and then Ichigo has the seconds he needs to obliterate the rest of him. That's the trick of it, you see: the regeneration offered by the hogyoku works only if there's something from which to regenerate — a charred bone, a lock of hair, a smear of blood.
In seconds all that's left is destruction.
That's point one taken care of.
Ichigo stops hovering in the sky, lands on a half-collapsed roof, and turns towards the echoes of the voice that screamed his name.
It's a tall, pale figure, dark haired and sharp eyed, and —
Ishida? he thinks. His brain stalls out.
"Kurosaki," he says, staring. "...He stabbed you."
Ichigo slides his hands over his own collarbone, his chest — the massive ragged slit in his shihakusho, wet with blood — and opens it, showing off the patched skin beneath. In a few hours, it won't even scar.
"Ishida," he repeats, unable to move past the fact of his being right — right there? Alive? Alive?
He stumbles closer to him, hand outstretched, and Ishida eyes him warily but he doesn't whip out his bow or run away, so Ichigo puts both hands right on his face, one each side of his jaw. He he presses his index fingers to the stems of his glasses feeling the cool metal and warm skin.
Ishida is warm. This is a human body, with a familiar human spirit inside it. They're both battered, but he knows them. He knows Ishida Uryu. He knows...
"Kurosaki," says Ishida, glowering out from between Ichigo's hands. His voice is a little slurred under Ichigo's compressing grip. "What the hell are you doing?"
Ichigo throws caution to the wind and hugs him, which goes about as well as can be expected: Ishida struggles, flopping like a fish on a line to show his displeasure, but he doesn't actually work very hard to dislodge Ichigo. He positively reeks of old sweat, acrid smoke, rust and the ugly meaty smell of healing injuries. Ichigo thinks he probably hasn't washed his hair in weeks.
He crams his face into his neck and breathes in like a crazy person. This is the best thing that's ever happened to him, maybe?
"Kuro — Ichigo! Unhand me!"
"Ishida," he gasps, clutching him. "Ishida, Ishida, Ishida." Like a chant. He might be rocking them a little.
This is when Ishida stops struggling. It's like something flicks on in his head, and the tension in his spine and shoulders changes its quality completely.
"Have you lost your mind?" he demands. He sounds like he's actually considering this possibility. His hands come up under Ichigo's arms, and very stiffly he attempts to hug back. "Kurosaki? Your reiatsu feels... different," Ishida mutters.
There's the world's most awkward squeeze, because apparently killing mass murdering wannabe-gods gets Ichigo enough credit with Ishida to rate physical affection — at least as long as he thinks he's on the edge of having some kind of psychiatric problem about it.
It feels so good. Ichigo might sob a little.
Ichigo makes a noise to show he's listening. He does not let go. He thinks about what he wants to say and settles on: "Yeah, yeah, I'm here. Where are we? What's going on?"
Ishida makes a much less positive noise in response to these questions.
Hoofbeats sound. That's... out of place.
"Ichigo!" cries a vaguely familiar voice, high and sweet and ringing like a struck bell. "We did it! Group hug!"
"What? No!" yowls Ishida, but of course it's way too late for that.
He can't dodge with Ichigo clinging to him like a limpet, and Ichigo doesn't even try, so Nelliel collides with them both. She is in her resurreccion form, a tall tangle of tumbling green hair and fur and hooves. She sends them both staggering with her mass. But her limbs are strong, and she pulls both of them into her instead of letting them fall.
Ichigo braces himself against Nel's side, shuddering. Ishida is pressed — smushed, really — against his front, and Nel is right there crowding her big warm-furred body into them.
"Stop it! Let — me — go!"
Ishida manages to shove Ichigo away, and then he uses an advanced movement technique to stage an immediate and unnecessarily dramatic tactical retreat.
"Eh? But you let him hug you!"
"He was acting weird!" Ishida accuses, pointing. "I thought he was going to cry!"
I am going to cry, Ichigo thinks. His eyes have been stinging since he first put his face in Ishida's gross sweaty neck. He blinks rapidly.
Nel, who allegedly lacks a heart but who has more emotional range in her right horn than Ishida does in his entire body, coos and encloses him in her arms, effortlessly pulling him off his feet. "You did it, Ichigo! Don't cry! We won!"
She spins around with him clutched to her, goat-antelope hooves clattering deftly over the rubble underfoot. "We won! We won!"
Yeah, he guesses they did, if she means he killed Aizen in the last five minutes.
But the thing is, for Ichigo... Aizen has been dead for thirty to forty years. Ichigo would know. He killed him.
Nel has been gone for even longer than that. In his memory, Aizen cut her hands off and gave her to one of the other espada to kill, to punish her disloyalty.
He was Ichigo's cousin. And Ichigo never knew it, not until Aizen had already collapsed Soul Society and destabilised the living world. Not until after he was dead.
(He'll never forget how Ryuken told him. He was wreathed in cigarette smoke and leaning against the wall of the hospital, dry-eyed, icy and vicious in his grief: Your mother, your sisters, and now my son... he was your maternal cousin, did you know? No. I see you did not. It seems you have a rare talent for getting your family killed, Kurosaki.)
Ichigo looks around. They're standing amid the high-reishi rubble of what looks very much like Soul Society. It's a damaged, blown up Soul Society, with its pale towers sagging and broken stone tumbling across the cracked ground, but it's unmistakably Soul Society.
And to add to this mystery, the tugging of something outside of himself is still ongoing, drawing him off to the north. Ichigo looks that way, brows furrowed. He feels almost compelled to get moving in that direction. There's something there that's his.
"They must be finished with their spell by now," Ishida says, adjusting his glasses, which were left askew during the hugs.
Ichigo doesn't want to let go of Nel — he still kind of wants to go and grab Ishida, actually — but he needs to start moving. There's something there. He has to.
As he looks over the broken cityscape, memories come to him like riverbed silt, disturbed, rising to the surface of murky water.
Hey, he thinks suddenly. What's Ichigo doing here?
He squeezes his eyes abruptly shut.
He's here because he was meant to distract Aizen while Kisuke cast some kind of mega-kido, some crazy high-risk summoning, drawn out in blood in the old assembly hall.
And he's just killed Aizen because... the spell worked. And he's here and not over there because this body is an Ichigo body.
Kisuke tried to something and trick it into doing what he wanted, and now he's got... Ichigo?
The memories integrate with a horrific lurch. It's been decades since he last vomited anything, but for a second he feels like he really might. (It's been nine months, here.) Ichigo no longer needs to eat because he's immortal. He's a lowercase-g god. He's alone in Hueco Mundo and if he could die he'd be dead by now. (Ichigo used to be hungry all the time, here, but now they always have enough supplies. They stockpiled for so many more people than they now have.)
He opens his eyes. Looks at Ishida.
"...Let's go see Kisuke," he says slowly. He starts walking. It satisfies the relentless pull towards that call, at least.
Ichigo is not sure what Shinji and Kisuke were trying to summon, or if he's the really answer they were expecting.
"Do you think we can have a victory party?" Nel asks, tapping her lip.
"With who?" Ishida wonders. "You and Grimmjow? I'd rather get stuck in Kurosaki's octopus arms again."
Nel shoots him a look. "Grimmjow does his part. ... Mostly. He'll be sorry to have missed this, I think."
Grimmjow, Ichigo knows, is recovering from getting run through, with his usual bad grace. Unlike Ichigo, he isn't an immortal with instant regeneration powers.
"Yuzu," Ichigo suggests, in a lightning strike of memory. He's seared by it: Yuzu, beautiful and haunted, alone in the living world with no father and no mother and no twin. Ichigo hasn't been able to see her in a while, because her safety consists in her anonymity, but he can see her now. He can see her today, probably — he can pass through a garganta to the living world and crash her afternoon lectures and smoosh his face into her hair and hug her until her ribs creak.
He has so much living family here — a sister and a cousin he hasn't got killed. It seems like a tremendous wealth of family associations, suddenly.
...They're not really his, exactly. They're... this other Ichigo's. He lost his — Aizen killed Yuzu, eventually.
I am me, dumbass, he thinks to himself, in a confusing series of echoes and ripples.
Well. Fine then. Maybe they are his. No take backs, Local Ichigo.
Yeah, he's... giving himself a headache.
He's still integrating, he guesses. But he remembers the important things. Karin is dead. A building got dropped right on her during a hollow attack in Karakura. Horrific, but fast. In his world it was Szayelaporro who took both of them, hell-bent on dissecting his perfect rare quincy specimens.
There's something viscerally satisfying about the way his sister's name makes Ishida brighten. "That would be better."
"Ah, Yuzu-chan," coos Nel. "Your sister, right? She seems sweet."
"Yeah. My sister." He has a sister.
They pick up the pace by mutual consent. There's an equal mix of sonido, shunpo and hirenkyaku between them, but despite the minor differences, they all do pretty much the same thing.
When they get to the assembly hall — a place that no doubt had a real name when Soul Society's government used to gather here, which Ichigo of course cannot remember for love or money — its missing wall is covered by a huge, glittering barrier.
Shinji looks up as they approach, squinting through the barrier. His eyes are hooded beneath his sharp fringe.
His face is not as Ichigo remembers it from decades ago (which is to say he, uh, has a face, and not just a grizzly red topography of valleys and bumps where it got cut off) but also exactly as he remembers it from this morning.
The headache isn't going away.
"You're back early," he draws. It's an understatement. It's strange that they're back at all, probably. Ichigo privately marvels at hearing Shinji's drawling cynical voice and distinctive Kansai dialect again. "What happened?"
"Aizen's dead!" Nel crows, leaping right up to the barrier. "Ichigo killed him. Obliterated his entire body."
She sounds like a proud big sister. Accordingly, she slings one arm around Ichigo's shoulders and draws him in to her side. She's taller than him in her resurreccion. It's easy to fit under her arm, and he really, really likes the solid weight of it over his shoulders.
... He really misses being touched. It's so easy to sink into Nel. Her weird furry goat-ribs rise and fall against his side.
"You were trying to summon something. You got me, I think," Ichigo elaborates, throwing her arm off.
Something unnamable passes behind Shinji's eyes. For a moment they change, distinctly hollow, and then he settles back on his hips, long limbs folded.
"Ichigo, huh?" he asks, voice low and hostile.
"Don't be like that. It's still Ichigo," Nelliel says cheerfully. She pushes him towards Shinji. Ichigo leans back against her just to avoid slamming into the barrier. "Just smell him. It's just... extra Ichigo!"
"Extra Ichigo?" Ishida repeats. "Is that a good thing...?"
"Hey," says Ichigo, mildly.
Shinji eyes her. He declines to 'smell him'. "I'll take your word on it," he decides, finally.
"I need to come in," Ichigo says. Whatever it is he's drawn to, it's in the room with Shinji. He has to get to it. The closer he gets the more he needs it.
Shinji does not look like he wants to relent, but his barrier cracks like glass and falls in a rain of glittering reishi shards anyway.
Ichigo springs forward and past him.
Then he lays eyes on Kisuke and it feels like the whole world takes a breath around him.
He's hunched over his rusty-smelling ink design on the floor, pale-faced and leaking reiatsu. He looks terrible, exhausted and trembling. Ichigo knows in an instant what the design means.
It's god-knowledge, buried in his hindbrain.
He's never thought of himself in these terms before, but it's all here in the ink and blood, laid out before him and sealed with a sacrifice.
Ichigo knows he is is only a little god. But he's one who answers prayers.
"Yo, geta-boshi," he says, and drifts inexorably forward to sit before him.
