Author's Note : Awesome. Yet another goddamn new fic. I figure no one has actually done this scenario yet so here I am killing every inch of your brain cell. Stay alive and feedback would be greatly appreciated. Story is entirely in Ichigo's POV unless stated otherwise, and ha ha, this is a fic done to showcase my outrageous adoration for IchiUlq/UlqIchi, so you kinda know where this is headed for...characters may be slightly OOC. I'll tone it down. Hehe.
Disclaimer : Characters and settings belong to Kubo Tite the Great. I'll take the scraps.
Chapter One
You know the drill.
Fifteen going on sixteen, hardly one third through high school and barely a foot into my angsty adolescent years I've already seen more spirits than required of your average unlucky person skulking around in graveyards, been in contact with them until it becomes mandatory; heck most of my friends are deceased to begin with, no matter the numerous problems one may raise about my personality because that in itself is a valid point to end all arguments.
I don't mean to frequent their world, but it's just so that each time everything seems at peace with itself, a friend has to go missing or kidnapped or taken away by force. The friend simply will disappear from sight. Bewildering eh? I've always deemed my friends as Very Important Persons, but the fact that they are consistently snatched away in the middle of the night clearly highlights that point. Then off I go again with my humongous zanpakutou, without the slightest ray of logic that I may end up dying for real and leave my mortal body rotting alongside a mentally challenged modified soul whose idea of fun is to grapple with breasts and burst into tears.
The thought of it sends frightful shudders down my spine. I don't ever wish to return to my human body and have an unknown teenage girl point at her tummy and scream at me,
"Take responsibility for this!"
That would be crazier than the situation I'm blessed with now.
Granted my little known popularity with kids, them young kids whose milk teeth have yet to fully drop, I've never expected to be followed by them. Having them around is alright – I'm rather fond of them, but having them bumble about after every single jerk of the limbs is quite unbelievable. I don't mean it in a good way, mind you! They're worse than the most possessive of stalkers, more compulsive in their unreasoned behavior than hardcore gamblers, more tiresome than old people who are hard on hearing, and scarier than Tousen's hefty ton of paperwork for a speech on peace that – thankfully – never came through.
Kids get a little better after sometime, and when I was getting accustomed to the presence of crybaby Nel, she wandered off into the deserts of Hueco Mundo with her fellow minions. At least she's in good company; she truly deserves it.
Then I thought I'd be free of extremely young beings for a moment.
I was right; Ulquiorra Schiffer came along.
And gave me the bloody fight of my life when he wasn't busy taunting Inoue or me for the stark majority with some spectacular vocabulary. We wound up upstaging each other by advancing our respective battling forms, and things got incomprehensibly out of hand that I was completely knocked out. In an all out to-the-death duel too. Inoue and Ishida later briefed me on what really happened while I was busy lurking in the realms of tragic unconsciousness: my inner Hollow wasn't too pleased with my handling of matters and wrestled the steering wheel away from my control, then being the immoral sonofabitch he affirmatively is, he/I slashed Ulquiorra but never once fatally injuring him, and finally when the Cuatro Espada was busy charging his Lance of Mass Destruction was the exact moment Hollow Me landed an earth-shattering hit on his head. He didn't die of course; he recovered wonderfully but Inoue claimed he was woozy then, and in his wooziness he chopped away one of my inner Hollow's horns, and after the longest while nothing happened.
Then I woke up to see Inoue sobbing her heart out and Ishida looking concerned, before shifting his attention onto something beside me.
It was one whole piece of something.
Touch wood I didn't feel quite right about that. There was a mass of black cloth, though in one whole piece but tattered and shredded beyond belief, his broken lance, some bone fragments, and then nothing was left save for...
...one whole, small piece under all that post-battle debris.
It began to shake and teeter and made gurgling noises. It made Ishida curious. It made Inoue curious too. Of all people I was most curious. So I took action because the other two made for some outstandingly excellent stone figurines, and grabbed the torn black cloth, then tore it away from the moving lump.
The lump squeaked.
I blinked. Ishida's glasses glinted. Inoue gulped. I blinked again.
The revealed lump blinked back. Somehow I had the foggiest idea as to what it, no, who it really was. Then so commenced the checklist of distinguishable physical attributes.
Shaggy black hair – check. Green eyes – check. Small downturned mouth – check. Fine teal lines running down the cheeks – check. Shockingly pale even for one who's already dead for starters – check. Unflinching stare – check. I held up his chubby hand and inspected his fingers. Black nails – check. Ludicrously small in physique – uncheck. Practically naked – uncheck. The numeral tattoo on his chest - uncheck. Uncheck uncheck uncheck. What the hell was going on? Did the Espada, like Nel, revert to...?
"What?" I shouted at the tiny piece, simply for the sake of being surprised and unleashing the unwarranted surprise at the one who was the surprise.
"Oh my god...!" exclaimed Inoue. Yes, she covered her agape mouth with both hands in true damsel fashion.
"He needs new clothes," said You-Know-Who, rendering me amazed with his offbeat passion.
"It's...!" Inoue reacted sensibly.
"He went back in time," said You-Know-Who, again. "He's a..."
"A baby!" Inoue was near hysterics. She's a stellar example why I never can understand women, or even attempt to understand. Minutes or hours ago she was weeping her brains away and now she's over the moon. All because of a tiny piece who nearly ripped her heart out.
"Not really a baby, Inoue-san," Ishida pushed up his glasses. "He's a small child. From the looks of it I'd postulate his age to be around four."
"He's still a baby!" Inoue couldn't had been anymore deluded. "Let's bri-"
"Okay, child or not. We're done, let's get back to the rest," I said quickly. "Come on Inoue, we're bringing you bac-"
"No!" Inoue cried. "No! Look at him, he's about to cry!"
I stared hard at the tiny piece that was Ulquiorra Schiffer. I swore the greater my focus on his face the faster his green eyes grew. Not that his weren't big originally, but now that he had downsized to a child's build, his face naturally shrank, making his green orbs even larger, to the point where they almost swallowed his head and a pair of luminescent jade glow continued to stare back at you with equal fervor.
"We can't bring him back with us," I dissuaded her. "He's an Arrancar for chrissake!"
"But Kurosaki-kun, he's about to cry, and if we don't br-"
"He abducted you."
"He's so vulnerable, and is about to cry, and if we-"
"He held you captive."
"He's so small!"
"I agree with Inoue-san."
"Shut up, Ishida."
"I agree with Inoue-san."
"Yes I heard you the first time, bloody Quincy."
"I didn't say that, brainless substitute Shinigami!"
"Inoue can't possibly refer to herself as the third person, much less use it to agree with herself."
"So who said that?"
"Who?"
"It's me," a soft cherubic voice floated in. "I agree with Inoue-san."
"You?!" I shouted again.
The tiny piece named Ulquiorra merely stared back. It was nice to know he didn't bawl his lungs out.
"Don't shout at him, Kurosaki-kun," Inoue looked offended. "No matter what we're going to take him away! Unlike Neliel-san he has nobody to take care of him! And he doesn't even look like a Hollow now. He just looks like a regular small child. No one will know!"
"B-"
And then I was terribly outwitted by two humans and out-stared by an Arrancar.
Hence begins the second harassment by a kid who should have known better, and perhaps I could have been more pleasant about this should he opt to follow Inoue or Ishida or the both of them for an ideal option but no, and as said previously, I have this unspeakable charisma about me that just speaks volumes to kids (especially Arrancars), reaches out to them with the promise of extreme joy and candies, and have them irresistibly attracted to my every breath.
So he follows us about silently – me specifically, and sometimes I end up crashing into him. Do bear in mind I'm speaking as we make our way over to Soul Society.
That means something, right? Right, it means we've only just begun.