There's a kid crying on the riverbank.
Down the road, Arago shoves his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels, considering. The sky is crystal clear blue above him, the waters of the river shining and clean. There are no other kids around, but no adults, either, and Arago rolls this knowledge around his mind like he would candy on his tongue. Something's off, even if he doesn't know what, but not so much in a supernatural way; just a very human way.
He hasn't been in Karakura long, merely a week at best, but just because Arago's looking for the supernatural doesn't make him blind to reality, either. The first day he arrived, walking down this path towards his hotel, there'd been police tape all around the bank of the river. Old police tape, mind, the yellow worn thin and plastic ripped from a few days exposed to the elements, and by the next day it'd been gone, the incident cleaned up and put behind them.
Officially, that is. The heavy-lidded eyes of the parents and the way they all seem to be steering their children away from the river says whatever happened, it's still fresh and ripe in their minds. Something tragic, more likely than not—this Arago knows not just from the grief in the stranger's eyes but also from the air itself. Death always leaves its mark. He's witnessed enough of it to know, by now, and there's something most definitely wrong with that river.
So the kid, crying near the edge, no guardian in sight? That sets off alarms.
Arago waits a bit longer, just in case a frantic parent comes barreling around the corner—he's had his fair share of weird encounters, and he doesn't want to be on the receiving end of another one. When no such adult authority appears, Arago sighs.
It's not like there's much debate about it, really. Arago's always had a soft spot for kids, and he's never been the type of person to walk by when anyone's crying, let alone a child. Besides—there's something just not right about that river. It's almost supernatural—not strong enough to catch his attention, but enough to make him wary. Leaving a kid alone on a riverbed that smells like death… No. Arago has never been that type of person, and he's not about to start now.
He steps hard on the concrete, making his footfalls heavier so the kid can at least have some warning that he's there. It's weird, and a bit uncomfortable—when Arago traveled the land of the Fair Folk, he'd had to watch his tongue and step lightly just to survive. Being able to act freely again is one of the main perks of being back here, but he still keeps his steps light out of habit.
He's not entirely sure if the kid's heard him until he stops nearby, figuring out what to say. The kid's shoulders go up by his ears, his back stiffening, his sobs starting to muffle. Okay, so, the kid heard him—and now, on the defensive. Kids are trusting little tykes, so this… Isn't exactly a welcoming sign.
The suspicious lack of adults seems much more ominous now. Arago thinks of Joe with a pang he just barely pushes past and crouches down on his knees so he won't loom over the kid.
"Hey," he says, making his voice softer than usual. "Hey, kid. You okay?"
A ragged breath and a stiff shrug is the kid's hesitant response. No words.
Arago waits. The kid doesn't say anything else.
"…You need any help?"
Another ragged breath—damn, the kid must have been stifling his sobs like crazy if his voice is this wrecked from the strain—and a small, hoarse voice finally answers. "No."
"Right," Arago says, and leans back, considering. "Look, uh… kid, you don't look so good right now. Is there— seriously, are you okay?"
Some secret tension seems to break, and suddenly the kid's on his feet, round face shiny with tears and eyes wide and furious. His hair sticks up on his head like a short orange pom-pom, and it'd be adorable if it wasn't so heartbreaking.
"I'm fine!" The kid shouts, like he's trying to convince not just Arago but also himself. "I'm fi-i-ine! Go away!"
Arago surveys him. It's a shot in the dark, but… The river. The quiet fear on all the adult's faces, the way they've been clutching their kids close. The police tape. And, most damning of all—the kid, here alone, no mother or father here to comfort him.
Arago knows the signs like the back of his hand. He lived them, after all… and while he was never much of a detective, he'd never been completely hopeless at it either.
"They were the best, weren't they?" he asks, gently. The kid's face falls into furious confusion. Arago looks away, thinking of Joe and Ewan and the parents he can barely remember. "The person you lost. They were the best."
The kid's face just— falls. Crumbles like wet tissue paper, eyes scrunching up and lips trembling before he remembers himself, teeth clamping hard on his lip, eyes blinking furiously past the tears.
"Sorry," Arago says. He feels a bit ill. "I— sorry. I didn't mean… it's just, I've also—" The words stick in his throat, and he nearly chokes on them. No, no. He can't. Even years later, those wounds are too raw to speak aloud.
He draws in a shaking breath and closes his eyes, trying to bring himself back under control. When he opens them again, he fixes his eyes on the boy, willing him to understand what Arago is saying.
"I know," Arago says finally, halting and painful, "how it looks to lose someone. That's all. I— I'm sorry."
The boy stares at him, chest heaving with the effort of choking back his sobs. His hand rises and swipes hard at his face once, then twice, as if to scrub the evidence of his weakness away, then falls limply to his side. His red-rimmed eyes, a dark hazel, are shrewd and suspicious. He licks his lips and looks away then back again, and doesn't even seem to notice when a few tears break free to roll down his ruddy cheeks.
"Who was it?" the boy asks in his soft, ruined voice. His words are pointed and blunt in a way only children can manage, unknowing of just how devastating that question can be. "Who'd you lose?"
Arago looks back to the river, fighting the instinctive impulse that had risen at those words, the painful memories lurking beneath the surface of his mind, just waiting to strike. He stares at the afternoon sun hanging low in the sky until the sheer brightness of it makes his eyes water from something other than old pain.
"Lots of people," he says finally. Knows, even as he says it, that it's not enough.
He doesn't really want to say it, doesn't want to bare their names in the air for the world to know. It's been years, and for all his hope of retrieving Ewan and Seth, there have been no signs. No answers.
He makes the mistake of looking back. The kid is small— shoulders hunched and expression worn in a way only grieving children can achieve, like something's gone and plucked his heart from his chest. Quiet and guilty and grieving. He looks— he looks like Ewan.
He looks like Arago did, all those years ago, the first time Ewan died.
"My brother," Arago says, almost without meaning. "And— my father." God, Joe. Sometimes Arago can hardly believe he'll never see the man again. Joe had always been— almost invincible in Arago's eyes. Accepting and unyielding. Every reminder of his death is like a knife to the heart.
He doesn't say Seth's name. He'll save Seth. He will. He hasn't given up hope just yet, and if he's lucky, maybe he can save Ewan too.
The two names Arago does give are enough to shake the kid. He's staring at Arago like he's just now noticed him—maybe he hadn't really believed Arago had meant what he'd said after all. Arago wonders what the kid saw on his face to convince him now.
The kid realizes he's staring almost at the same time Arago does, and looks away quickly, but some of the weird tension in his shoulders has eased away. "…Oh. Sorry."
Arago sighs and leans back. "Yeah. Me too."
The kid sniffs, hard. Arago does him a favor and doesn't look over. "I lost my mom," the kid reveals, in a small, shaking voice like he's sharing a shameful secret.
Arago's eyelids flutter closed, pained. This isn't the conversation he thought he'd be having today. "I'm sorry. I— I know— how hard that can be. "
The kid's breathing gets a bit heavier, more ragged. "There was the river," he says, near babbling, like with that one confession the words just won't stop. "And— I thought I saw a woman, I thought I saw her go into the river, and I went after, but it wasn't a woman it was this monst—thing, and, and, my mom—"
The kid breaks off. Arago sits up, heart pounding. Monster, the kid had almost said, and that makes some part of Arago perk up— but there's something else too, something far more important, so Arago takes that little tidbit and stores it away to explore for later.
"Hey," he says. "Hey, kid, it's okay. You don't—"
"My mum's dead," says the kid, and then he cuts himself off but Arago—Arago knows this, knows that thinking, knows that dull, lifeless look. He knows it because he saw it in the mirror countless times, after Ewan, after Patchman, after losing Joe.
"It's not your fault," Arago says, a bit helplessly, because he doesn't know the kid but he knows that much, at least. "It wasn't your fault, kid. Whatever happened, it wasn't your fault. It wasn't you."
The kid's head falls down to his chest. He nods.
Arago knows that the kid doesn't believe him. How could he? Arago is a stranger, a nameless voice of concern. This boy does not know him, and in truth, there is very little Arago can say that will have any effect.
And yet. For all that Arago is a stranger, the kid is still here, curled up on the riverbank, spilling his secrets into the open air. To a stranger, no less, and Arago—
When he lost his parents, when he lost Ewan— Arago had not been like that. He'd held his hurt close until Rio had come and ripped it out into the open, all the tears and messy emotions that'd been building up like a bomb in his chest. But even though Arago can remember that, can remember how jealously he had guarded his grief, he also remembers how difficult it was. How the tears and furious words and confession would build up behind his throat like water behind a dam, ready to overflow at the first sign of genuine concern, at the first offer of an open ear.
Arago had bitten back the words anyway. This kid hasn't.
There's hope in that. And Arago seizes it with all he has, because this kid—this kid's been cut on the edge of the world, but some part of him is still trusting. Still seeking the words he so desperately wants to hear, the words Arago himself was deaf to, so long ago.
Arago is not very good with words. But he knows grief—almost too well, perhaps—and so he will try.
"It's not," he says again, and when the kid doesn't look up says it a third time, for emphasis. "It's not. She— moms are like that. Parents are like that." The vague faces of his family before they'd been lost in the flames. Joe, wry smile on his face even as he faced death with open arms. "They— they do these things, and—and you and I, kid, we couldn't have stopped them. Because she loved you, kid, and this was her choice, and I promise you, she wouldn't have blamed you."
The kid's head snaps up, eyes burning. He opens his mouth, and Arago, Arago can't listen to this—can't stand this conversation, this kid who's pulling all of Arago's wounds out into the open—but the kid deserves to hear this, too, deserves to know.
No one should have to live with undeserved guilt.
"My dad—he, he never blamed me. He did it for me, but he did it—he did it for him, too, because if it had been me he wouldn't have been able to live with it. So—it was his choice. In the end. It wasn't my fault. And—and it's not yours either, kid, okay?"
Arago doesn't know if he even believes those words himself. It's a mantra he's heard so often, from Rio, from Coco, even from himself—that he knows it by heart. His mind accepts it. His heart, not so much.
"It's not your fault," Arago says, a bit helplessly, and the kid's face cracks open like dam breaking—face screwing up, eyes watering, lips trembling—and when the kid goes down on his knees, curled up and crying, Arago knows he's gotten through.
He doesn't hug the kid, because he doesn't know him, and physical affection is still a weird thing to Arago, for all that Rio claims he's basically touch-starved. Instead, he kneels by where the kid is curled up in a small ball of tears, and rubs his back—lightly, at first, in case he freaks the kid out, and then more firmly when the kid leans into it.
When the kid's tears finally stop, he looks washed out and weary, brown eyes red and puffy, still sniffling hard. He looks exhausted. Arago feels much the same. He hates picking at old wounds, but it's worth it, to see some of that horrible guilt leave the kid's eyes. The kid needed this. Desperately, desperately needed this.
It makes Arago wonder what would have happened to him, if Arago had not come here this day.
Regardless, what's done is done, and Arago sits back on his heels, looking up at the sky. It's late afternoon—almost dusk—so the kid will probably have to be ushered home soon, but Arago doesn't want to leave the kid alone just yet, not after a conversation like that. It feels too much like running away.
He sighs heavily and rocks up to his feet, stretching out his arms. The kid looks up at the movement, quick and startled. There's a weird look on his face.
Arago looks back at the sky, mentally counting the change in his pockets and his funds for the week. He can… probably squeak it. Maybe.
Rio will understand. Hell, she might even send him extra cash because of it. Weird thought, but totally a Rio thing to do.
"Hey, kid. Want some ice cream? It's on me."
The kid looks at him. He's doing something weird with his face—like, the weird look is gone, but what ever's replaced it is equally confusing. Arago is so bad at this.
"It'll make you feel better," Arago tries. "Like, certifiably, I have tried this. Or, um, if you like chocolate?" Wait. Waaaaaaait. "Or, no, wait. I'm— this is not a kidnapping scam. I— agh, you know what? Uh, maybe you should just head back. Yeah."
The weird look intensifies. The kid squints. Then his shoulders fall, and he doesn't smile, but there's a lack of tension on his face that suggests he's close to it. "I like ice cream," says the kid, and starts walking. Presumably to the ice cream place. With a stranger.
Arago gets a sneaking suspicion on those earlier weird looks. Not fear and wariness over a stranger like he thought then—disappoint that Arago might go? Relief at him choosing not to?
Did stranger danger not factor in at all? Even after Arago mentioned it? Like, sure, Arago would sooner stab himself with Brionac than hurt anyone, but the kid sure as hell doesn't know that. And he's not Arago, who has the power to fight should his trust be betrayed. He's just—a kid. A tiny, redhead slip of a thing who is, apparently, okay with a stranger buying him ice cream.
God, kids are weird.
Arago goes anyway. He does owe the kid an ice cream.
The kid gets vanilla ice cream, like a heathen. Arago gets chocolate, like a true believer, and even manages not to wince at the miniscule amount of money left in his wallet. Cheap hotel tonight. For sure.
"Is it any good?"
"Yes." The kid looks down, takes a bite—a bite!—out of the cone. It must be freezing, and the kid's face does this weird little twitch, but he doesn't say anything. Is he trying to act cool? Is he trying to impress Arago? The whole thing is surreal, and Arago kind of wants to laugh. He's exhausted though, so maybe that's just the hysteria talking. "It's good. Thank you, um… sir."
Now that the kid's not crying his eyes out and picking at old wounds, Arago can now fully appreciate how hilarious and also somewhat adorable this is. Kids. What the fuck. It's like being around Coco, only smaller, and with fewer sparkles.
"Arago," he returns, and licks his ice cream to show the kid, by way of example, how to properly eat his dessert. "My name's Arago."
"Arago," the kid repeats. He looks up, brown eyes bright in his face. His tears have dried, by now, his face returned to its normal pallor. You almost couldn't tell he'd been crying. Dangerous, that. "'M Ichigo."
Arago grins down at him, ruffles his hair on impulse. "Ichigo? Cool. Nice to properly meet you, kid."
A small smile flickers at the edge of the kid's mouth, crooked but pleased. "Nice to meet you."
Arago takes another lick of his ice cream and looks at the sky. The sun is starting to set. Whoever's taking care of the kid will probably be worried.
"Getting real late," Arago says. "You should probably get home, kid."
The kid's face falls, and Arago has a single second to think— Oh shit oh shit what if he doesn't have a home anymore— before the kid says, "Oh. You're leaving?"
This time, Arago's spirits fall for a different reason. "That's… Well…"
He wishes he could say otherwise—the kid's finally smiling, and it'd be a shame if it died so soon, because Arago has a sneaking suspicious that the kid hasn't smiled for a while now. But the truth is, Arago is leaving. He came to Karakura for a reason, and no matter how sympathetic he feels, it wasn't to cheer up a lonely kid. He came to find the supernatural, and so far there's been nothing concrete.
There's no reason to stay.
He's about to explain, in the simplest terms he can—when a flash of black catches the corner of his eyes.
Arago whips around. Nothing. But he trusts his eyes, and he knows— someone was there. He can feel it.
Years of walking the land of the Fair Folk has given Arago an awareness of the supernatural that's near unmatched. Only Rio can challenge him, and that's only when she dons the wolf pelt. Coco can track, and Oz is always on top of supernatural gossip… but in terms of pure, instinctual awareness? That's all Arago.
So he knows. He knows that someone was there, less because of sight and more because of Sight. He can practically taste the lingering power in the air, the weighty regard of a powerful being. His skin crawls, and Bionic seems to hum beneath his skin, liquid fire in his veins. It's the most positive magical reaction he's gotten in ages— since he emerged from the land of the Fair Folk, even, and that was years ago.
"…Arago?"
"Huh?" He starts, turning back to the kid. "Oh, it's nothing… I just thought…"
He sweeps the area one last time, but there's nothing out of place—the setting sun, the ice cream vendor behind him, the empty rooftops, the families scattered around the street, the black cat sauntering from the alley…
"It's nothing," Arago says, but his heart beats loud in his ears, and he knows, he knows it's not. Power has a distinctive taste, and after years of chasing down leads, Arago's gotten damn good at finding it.
Jackpot.
He feels breathless. This is—this is good. Hell, this is the best lead he's had since he began this quest. After a week of quiet, he'd thought Karakura was like every other place— another dud, the magic withered or long-since died. This one glimpse, faint though it was, has turned every plan on its head. Forget the faint taint of the river. Forget that weird glamour on the shop down the road. This is what Arago has been searching for. The power of eons. The power of the afterlife.
The power to awaken even the dead.
Just like, all his plans have changed. Arago grins down at the kid—Ichigo, right, he'll have to remember that— and ruffles his hair again. "Nah, kid," he says. "I'm not going anywhere."
Ichigo blinks, eyes narrowing with faint suspicion, as if he suspects Arago of humoring him. "You're not?"
"Just finding a hotel— you'll see me again, probably. Hopefully under better circumstances."
Ichigo's smile returns full-force. It's good. It's a good thing. The kid's face was made for smiling, and it's a damn shame the world's already tried to knock it off his face. "You're staying here?"
"In Karakura? Yeah, for a bit."
Ichigo's eyes glitter. "Awesome," says the kid, and Arago grins back, pathetically grateful for the chance to keep that smile going. If he'd made the kid cry after all that, it would've been a shitty ending to a shitty day. It's nice, to see things are looking up.
"…Seriously, though. You should get going, yeah? Bad idea for a kid your age to stay out at dark."
Ichigo rolls his eyes. "I know," he says, far too patiently to actually mean it. Arago gets the distinct sense he's being humored. It's a really weird feeling. "I'm always careful."
If the kid is anything like Arago was, that's a bold-face lie. "Sure."
That gets another grin out of the kid. Arago is on a roll. Maybe in a better life, he could have been a babysitter instead of a cop. What a weird thought.
The kid skips back a few steps, still hesitant, then looks up. "Thanks. For today. For what you said. It—" For a moment his young voice stutters, catching on the words. "It meant a lot."
Then, before Arago can recover from that gut-punch, the kid turns neatly on his heel and barrels down the street. Gone in a matter of minutes.
Arago watches until the kid disappears from view, presumably into his house. on
He's not in Karakura to help a kid deal with his grief, however responsible Arago feels. But… the flash of black cloth and power, there and gone again in mere moments. The legends of monsters and black butterflies, warriors appear and reappearing. The whispers in the magical community, of a door between life and death…
Arago only ever planned to be here a few days, but this sort of lead—it'll take time. If he's learned anything from being in the force, it's that. Which means, Arago's stay just got extended from a few days into a few weeks. Even months, depending on how elusive the magical community here is. He's in for the long haul.
Arago can help the kid out too, while he's out of it. He can do that. It's not too hard.
He blows out another breath— less annoyance, more hardening of resolve—and turns in the opposite direction, heading towards the hotels. His hand sneaks into his pocket, and he types the number without looking, his mind still on the kid, on the black cloth, of grief and loss and how to deal with it.
He's so unprepared for this. He never asked to take care of a kid. He doesn't know how . But he wants to. Just like how Joe helped him, years ago, now it's Arago's turn. Paying the kindness forward.
Three rings, and then a click. Just as usual.
"Arago, hey. You don't usually call this early."
"Yeah, sorry. It's evening over here. I forgot the time difference... Did I wake you?"
"No, no. I'm making breakfast now, actually. Coco got an early shift." A pause. "…You didn't use up all the money already, did you? Everything pan out okay?"
"Hey!" he returns. "Yeah, no, everything's cool. Weird day, but… Good. I'll be staying here for a bit, I think."
"You will? That's… You think—this is it? Wait—what do you mean by weird day! What's happened?"
Arago grins.
"Honestly, Rio," he says, leaning back his head to look at the darkening sky, "I don't even know where to start."
.
.
.
:: To Be Continued ::
A/N:This was a prompt from my good friend Yarra- who continues to wow me with kickass crossover ideas. There will be four parts to this story, in order to try and cover all of the original prompt. Stay tuned, and let me know what you thought!
