Warnings: Pre-Slash/Pre-Yaoi, future twincest, angst, dark themes, AU
Pairings: Hollow!Ichigo/Ichigo, Urahara/Ichigo
Chapter Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Owned by Kubo Tite, et al.
Summary: Ichigo, in order to save his brother's life, traps his brother's soul within his own.
A/N: Be forewarned—this is a peculiar child of a peculiar brain. Whether the reader may find anything worthy of approbation, the author cannot say—except that zie hopes the reader will show enough human respect and dignity to refrain from sacrificing zir upon the alter of the reader's indignation. Thank you most kindly for your time and for, if you may be so inclined, a memento of your visit in the form of a review. The author is, as always, the humble and pitiable servant of your entertainment.
:Burning in the House of Marble:
Prologue
Twist and turn it. Bind and burn it.
Fists clench. Knuckles blanch. "What did you say?"
A wire-taut tension groans, swells through the wood-paneled corridor until even the air seems to be on the precipice of screaming violence. Existence trembles, frays at the edges, and begins to fold inwards. The odor of burnt ozone permeates the space.
"What did you say?" Fingers slice forward, wrap around a pale throat, and squeeze gently. "Urahara-taichou."
Shards of lightning-flash rage with savage effulgence behind the screen of bottle-brown eyes. Something dark and monstrous moves with liquid grace beneath the caramel-cream of the young man's skin; it peers out of the shadows stretching across his saturnine features and waits with alien hunger.
"They are going to execute your brother."
Harsh press of fingers: five perfect sanguine smudges, five perfect lurid crescent moons. "You said—He's not a hollow anymore. It was supposed to—"
Thin lips trace a rueful grin. "Not a hollow, no, but something worse. He is a demon with Shinigami powers, Kurosaki-kun."
"Come ta see the creatures in the zoo, little brother?"
He cannot meet the molten glare, cannot face the mocking grin on colorless lips. Beneath his fingertips the pulse of another life still whispers. The pure, unadulterated rage and betrayal a roaring tempest in his brain; his hand about another's throat—so close to crushing it. This is not my hand. I would never… not to another human being…
But he would, he knows this, feels it deep in his gut—a cancerous knowledge.
"They're gonna kill me, ne?" Wild laughter. Black nails score uselessly across the white stone walls. "All yer hard work fer nothin'. All yer sacrifices—nothin'. Can't do anythin' right by yer own self. Stupid, pathetic, precious little brother."
Who are you trying to save, Kurosaki-kun? How can you save anyone when all you know is fear?
Fear of loss, of being alone, of being one half of a whole.
No, fuck that.
"I'm going to," he says on the knife's edge of a whisper, eyes open, matching glare for glare. "I will save you, so shut the hell up."
Cold smile, blue tongue scoring across colorless lips. White fingers dance around the gapping black hole in a sculpted chest. "We'll see."
A warm touch travels across his sweat-slick brow. The scent of sandalwood and cloves rises to his nostrils. "My, my, you really are something, Kurosaki-kun."
Another painful jerk, cold fingers digging into his lungs, white teeth tearing at his heart.
"Even I never suspected it could be used to do this."
Let me out. Let me out. Fuckin' stupid—
Vomit boils up the back of his throat, acrid and putrid. He chokes. Muscles clench violently. He heaves. Pungent black ichor dribbles from the corner of his mouth.
"Such a silly child."
He never realized that the living world would be so full of… people. Their noise, their stink, their refuse, their bird-fragile lives, all ceaselessly roiling together, spilling across the face of existence, staining everything. Horrible and immeasurably precious.
Cold fingers slide into his brain. Another pair of eyes take in the sights behind his own.
Weak. Cattle fer the slaughter.
"You didn't always think like that." No, once you gave your all to protect them.
How would ya know? Wicked giggle.
He adjusts his footing atop the chain link fence. A mother and daughter pass by below. The little girl gives him a wide-eyed stare. The woman doesn't see him at all. The wind shifts, carrying the scent of burning garbage from the incinerator up the street.
"You died for them." You left me alone for them.
His brother stretches beneath his skin. Mocking. Always mocking.
Tch. Ya really are ignorant.
The air here is different, heavier. It smells. Not even the worst areas of Rukongai have this particular permeating stench. Is this life?
There's no going back. One bridge burned to ash, another waiting to be discovered somewhere here in the human world.
What will you do now, Kurosaki-kun?
Live.
Prologue End
Chapter One
Let me steal this moment from you now.
He awakes to find his own hand slowly strangling him. A moment of disorientation, a burning breathlessness, and he wrests back full control of his body. His brother retreats with a feral laugh, sharp teeth catching in his heart.
Whenever you let your guard down, little brother.
A slate gray sky arches overhead, clouds pregnant with imminent rain. He stretches out his traitorous right hand, blunt fingers splayed wide, as if to grasp hold of that leaden firmament and tear it down. Then, as muscles tremble and throb with the strain, he allows it to fall limply to his side.
How many years—decades—has it been since he left the Gotei 13 and Soul Society altogether? The human world has changed all around him, always rushing fecklessly towards an unknown and uncertain future. So very different from Soul Society where resistance to change has almost become a religion in and of itself.
Or used to. Maybe it has changed.
He digs his fingers into the tarpaper roofing beneath his supine body. Grit gathers beneath his nails.
He wouldn't know either way; that part of his life has long since been relegated to the past.
Bottle-brown eyes slide closed as the first cold drop strikes his forehead. A deep rumble moves through the heavy air, reverberating in his lungs, and the heavens crack open. Inside his brother howls like an animal.
Whip of wind through orange hair. Brown leaves scatter.
"You." A reflexive clench of raw-knuckled hands. The sword at his back thrums with blood ecstasy. His brother grins cruelly behind his teeth.
"Maa, is that any way to greet an old friend?"
"Wouldn't say 'friend'." Would never be stupid enough to make that mistake.
The man inclines his head, gray eyes falling into the shadow of his green-white stripped hat. "Colleague, then."
Fuckin' sadist in a—
The chilling breeze carries that familiar scent of sandalwood and cloves to him, and he is hit with a pain like he has never known, a hunger that he has never realized lived inside him. Brass needle digging up beneath his ribs. I want to go back. I want to go home.
He turns away—away from that laconic half-smile and those shadowed gray eyes. The playground lies silent and empty in the gloaming, the last child having long since scurried home to dinner. A seesaw creaks sullenly as the autumn wind teases it.
"What do you want"—he cuts the dirty-blond a cold-heat glare—"Urahara-taichou?"
Quick, lilting chuckle, knife-sharp and silkily smooth. Winter eyes flash, catching fire in the fading light. White fan snaps open, closed, slitting the growing night.
His brother stretches clawed fingers into his kidneys. Cut 'im. An image follows: hot red smeared across his mouth; thick, wet meat pulping in his hands. Cut 'im!
"Just a humble shopkeeper now." Razorblade smirk. "There were some complications."
He sucks in a deep breath, filling his lungs until they ache with fullness, until nausea rises up the back of his throat in a bitter, acrid spurt. He clenches his fists into bone-blanch paleness.
"What do you want?"
"Ah, but isn't it more a matter of what you want, Kurosaki-kun?"
Snap, snap goes the fan.
"You cannot keep this up much longer. There is a finite amount of time two souls can share one existence."
The aromatic green tea burns across his tongue, down his throat. His stomach gives a slow roll in protest. He hasn't had anything but water for all the decades he's been in the living world: water from runoff, puddles, from fountains, the rain. He doesn't steal, doesn't take what isn't free for taking. He's got enough pride left—enough foolishness left—for that at least. No food, nothing that would allow his spiritual presence to stabilize.
Cold hands slide beneath his weathered cheeks. Ya don't need anyone else.
Just like living in the ghettoes of Soul Society again, except…
He takes another scalding sip, ignoring the words and scrutiny of his unwelcome host, ignoring the rage and frustration of his brother inside his soul. Sometimes, as each year rolls into dust, he wonders if it really is his brother and not just an acerbic, cruel presence he conjured up to fake his own sanity.
"I don't care."
Something alien and oh-so heavy pushes into his stomach. The wood-paneled walls of the shop—an incongruous throwback to an earlier time amongst monsters of cement and steel—groan and flex with the rising swell of power.
Brother or not brother. Curse or blessing or cancer.
"I don't fucking care."
The smell of burnt ozone rises, overpowering the musk of aged wood and old lacquer. He pins the man beneath his coldly furious gaze, beneath the weight of his fraying consciousness.
You did this to us, if there even is an us. You were supposed to—but that's impossible, isn't it? One doesn't become a Shinigami again after being a hollow, no matter what power you steal from God.
Cut 'im. Before he—!
The clear glaze of the tea cup begins to crack and flake, leaving behind the rough green-brown of naked pottery. His hand flexes about the warm vessel in remembrance of locking around a cream-pale throat a lifetime ago. Should have done it then. Squeeze. Ended this all.
"If I could give your brother back his existence"—quirk of a brow—"would you care then?"
Hot tea sloshes over his hand, pinking it. Shards of broken pottery pierce his palm and cut open the meat of his fingers. Around them the dark wood walls sigh with relief as the savage reiatsu folds in upon itself.
With brutal precision black fingernails slash across his lungs, stealing his breath as a cold mouth sucks upon his bird-wing beating heart. It's too late to be free, little brother.
A warm hand closes over his injured right one and pulls it across the top of the low circular table. Gently, gently the sharp fragments are worked free by dexterous fingers. Crimson droplets splatter the tabletop, but no pain visits him. Lately, it's been difficult to feel physical injuries.
"The degradation has already started." Cool gray eyes in shadow. Fool's mouth in a grave line.
Fools always carry switchblades up their sleeves.
"What do you get out of it?" What's the price this time, puppet master?
"Would you believe altruism? Remorse? No, no, of course not. So suspicious." Coquettish tilt of the head. Molasses slow half-smile. "Or, perhaps, I hate to leave an experiment unfinished? Especially one so… fascinating."
"You're not God."
"Of course not."
Chapter One End