I found this buried in the depths of my hard drive, about a paragraph off being completed, completely forgotten about. So I dragged it up and kicked my arse into gear, to get in finished for OlineK, whose patience has been fabulous.
Requested by OlineK, with the prompt 'engagement'.
Waiting
We owe this to ourselves,
We just can't let this go
Anberlin
The darkness poured over him like liquid as he retreated into the depths of his cave, jaw hanging loose in exhaustion but eyes bright with resolve and with a half-escaped madness. There was blood on his face but it wasn't his, there was a tiredness in his bones but he had no way to make it go away. He flicked a tongue over his teeth and wondered, not for the first time, if today would be the day.
It had to be, he thought.
There was sand, closely packed underneath him as he fell to the floor, a voice inside his head whispering words of encouragement so quietly that he was no longer sure if he could hear it, or it he was just imagining it.
Sometimes, he didn't know which option sounded better to him.
He could barely remember the days that passed, as if he went through them in fast motion, but the past seemed bitterly clear to him as he lay on the cave floor, tired beyond reason and wishing that he didn't have to move.
His breathing levelled as he rested, and after a few minutes, he dragged himself back to his feet, and though his body screamed in protest, he ignored it.
Now was not the time for failure.
It had been two months, twenty eight days and sixteen hours.
He wasn't counting intentionally, he thought, it was just that when there was nothing else to do, the seconds ticked by like insects stepping over the surface of your eyes, and you found yourself following their progress to stop yourself reaching another level of insanity, to stop your mind from wandering to a place that no person should ever reach.
He had come close to it several times in the last few months, but the thought of one individual pulled him back time after time. The thought of one goal, one aim, one thing that he had never finished, one battle left without conclusion, kept him going, each day, dragging himself out of the cave. At first the battles raged like thunder around the sky, but for months now all there had been was silence.
The silence, he thought, was less of a blessing than a curse. It made him focus more on himself, it made him listen to the voices screaming in his head.
The insects ticked seconds by in his head as he leant against the cave wall, waiting for the dizziness to recede. When it did, he began the same process he had tried every day since he had came to this cave.
It had been two months, twenty eight days, and sixteen hours.
He focused his efforts on his internal core, as he had tried to do so many times before, and he pushed everything that he had into himself. Every other time had been a failure, leaving him writhing on agony on the floor, but this time could not be a failure. This time, he had to succeed, because he didn't have long left. The date of his engagement was drawing close, and he was running out of time.
The heat filled himself, and he felt his jaw creak in his skull as it pulled back. The bones in his body began to reshape themselves, tearing muscle and flesh that began to re-knit itself almost as soon as it had ripped apart, and he pushed harder. He had reached this point so many times before, but had never managed to get passed it.
A scream ripped itself out of a mouth full of changing teeth, sounding feline and wrong in the dark, and as the scream echoed around his head as if it were a madrigal sung by a thousand voices he felt the switch trip, the line being crossed, felt the knowledge rush to him that this time, this time, he had done it.
He fell to the floor neither man nor beast, and the blackness took him.
It had been two months, thirty days, and three hours.
He woke, and stretched in a body that felt entirely new to him and yet in some way familiar. He flexed fingers instead of claws and opened his eyes into the darkness, warm with the heat of change and slumber. Pulling himself to his feet- two, not four- his head knocked against the low ceiling, which had not bothered him before.
Laughter rumbled through his chest.
He had finally managed it, managed to evolve back into what he once was. He felt the mask on his cheek and heard the voice that had been in his head so much more clearly now, as if before it had been muffled with layers of fabric. Pantera purred to herself in contentment as she settled back in the mind of a creature fit to have her.
The mask, he thought, was too large, and he snapped it off so that only the jawbone was left, as it once had been.
Muscles tensed across his body as he flexed his power out around himself in the monochrome silence. After all this time, he was back, and only just in time.
He reached out, and sliced his way between the fabric of the worlds.
It had been two months, thirty days, and three hours.
Ichigo Kurosaki lay on his bed, fully dressed, and stared out at the dark night. Streetlights and the far off blur of the city at night meant that few stars were visible, but the moon was nearly full and glowed with bloated glory down on the quiet streets. The restlessness inside himself was growing stronger with each passing day, an itch for something more that he could not reach. Life had reverted to normal since Aizen had been defeated, his communication with the Soul Society minimal, and boredom had crept like a unwanted guest into his life, lodging itself and refusing to move.
He turned his head to look at the calendar on his wall.
The day was circled in red ink, without annotation or explanation. The engagement had been set, appointment made, and the hours were ticking by.
But he had to come.
He had said to Ichigo, as blood ran from the corners of his mouth, that he would come back.
"When?"
He had looked away, pain etched across his face as if he were made of marble.
"Soon."
"When?"
The warmth that always seemed to surround him was fading; Ichigo could feel muscle under his fingertips tightening and loosening, waiting for the change that would soon take him.
"By your New Year. Now, go."
He had gone. He didn't even know if he had survived.
It had been two months, thirty days, and three hours, and Ichigo had woken every day hoping that today would be the day, that he would find out, that there would be a quiet rap on his window and a breath of spiritual pressure across his skin.
The loneliness of the world stretched around him.
The house was empty, and eager fireworks lit the night sky on occasion like blossoming flowers, shortly seen and then gone. He touched his fingertips to the glass of his window and felt the chill of outside through it, and glanced once more at the clock. The New Year was only hours away now, the next year drawing around the old, ready to enfold itself entirely around the present.
The ticking hand of the clock seemed to match his heartbeat as he stared out of the window at the quiet street below. The shadows pulled themselves around the normal, everyday sights so that even the shadows of the streetlights seemed ominous. There was a flicker of movement in the darkness, and Ichigo watched a cat dash across the pool of light from the streetlight.
The minutes ticked by as he stared at the shadows, hoping for movement, but the stillness remained, and almost in protest to it he found himself throwing open the windows, leaning his head and shoulders out recklessly, as if he meant to jump, or scream at the night sky.
All he did was draw in deep breaths of the air, the chill sharp against his lungs but revitalising, knocking the tiredness in him down.
He felt, for a moment, as if he were displaced from his own body, but the feeling passed, and he sunk back down on to the bed, shutting the window behind him, feeling if not better, then at least no worse either.
There was a movement in the corner of his room.
"Kurosaki."
He stared, but for some reason that he had no words to explain, he had no fear or even surprise, as if he had expected such a sudden entrance. Instead, the warmth of relief washed over him, and his fingers tightened into fists at his side.
"I didn't think you'd come."
Grimmjow stared flatly back, face expressionless.
"You asked."
"I didn't know if you were dead or not."
Ichigo watched with fascination as Grimmjow rolled his eyes, irritation flowing across his face with the fluidity of water, the emotion gone almost as soon as it had appeared. His eyes were still cool, but he took a step closer, hand hovering over the hilt of Pantera as he did so.
"But you still expected me."
Ichigo nodded, slowly.
"I didn't hope you were dead, y'know."
Since that was quite clearly the case, Grimmjow did not bother to respond, just pinned Ichigo with a stare that would have had lesser men crawling. Ichigo met the stare levelly, trying to keep the riot of emotions off his face, something that he had never excelled at. From outside the window came the dulled noise of explosions as fireworks lit the sky. One close by threw momentary green light across his room, illuminating the Arrancar in front of him with an eerie glow. Grimmjow seemed startled by the sudden light, glancing up at the window and then back to Ichigo's face, and he took another step closer.
Slowly, Ichigo got to his feet, and reached out.
When his fingertips touched Grimmjow's chest one of them exhaled, but Ichigo couldn't tell who it was. His skin was almost unbearably warm, as if heated from inside by some inhuman energy. He shifted slightly, and his fingers skimmed the dark edges of his hollow hole.
"I thought you'd be here sooner."
Grimmjow shrugged, a long roll of his shoulders that made the muscles under his skin flex, and remained silent.
As Ichigo's fingers dragged across his chest, Grimmjow's eyes slid shut, and he inhaled. Ichigo thought that he could smell the dryness of sand coming off his skin, dry sand and dead worlds. The air around them seemed to reflect it back at him, the feeling of desolation and loneliness, as if for just a moment there were no one else left in the world, just the two of them in a planet emptied of civilisation by disaster, only the warmth of their bodies left in the desolate cold of a barren world.
The muffled sound of a firework broke the silence and the spell, and Ichigo swallowed involuntarily.
His hand fell to his side, and the world righted itself again.
They stared at each other for the longest of moments, until someone moved in the dark and their bodies found each other, their mouths crashing with teeth and tongue and heat, just as they had the last time they stood near each other. There was no blood on their skin, no fallen towers and comrades, no desperation but for the pull in their own bodies, and it felt no different. Ichigo felt hands slip under his clothing and dug his own nails into Grimmjow's back, the warmth of his body blending into Grimmjow's.
The pull deep in his chest grew stronger the longer they touched, but the pain of it moulded itself into pleasure as the clothes of different races were left behind on the floor in a flurry of movement. Muscles tensed and contracted, breath left lungs with increasing speed as they moved together in a way that they never had before, but felt as if they had.
It had been two months and thirty one days, and the fireworks were still flashing in the sky.
In the darkness of a silent room, two bodies lay together, illuminated only by the occasional phosphorescent glow.