It was - so cold. Not a natural kind of cold either, not the kind that you can dispel with a little fire and hot water. This was a chill of the soul and it was digging ever deeper. Shivering did not help, but his body was working on instinct now. He was curled up painfully tight in the middle of the room, as far from the slightly opaque, reiatsu-leeching walls as possible. He was wearing a light hospital gown, but he did not feel the cold temperature of the floor on his bare skin as much as the relentless sucking away of even his most private stores of strength. To sleep was death - to stay awake a torture. To think that shinigami had called themselves righteous! He had no strength to laugh, only in the most bitter and dark part of his mind, the only part of it still working.
They would leave him here to die.
He was going to pass out soon, he knew, and then he would sleep as the spirit energy in his very cells would be drawn out of him. And then he would die and one of those so-called scientists with their white jackets and mutilated faces would come in here to make the final check. And then they would take his body to a freezer and put it away until that bastard of a shinigami vice-captain Mayuri so chose to dissect him and figure out how he worked. If only he knew how to dissolve his body into nothing once he died, so that creature would never touch it.
Where was his pride now?! He would do anything, to be spared this horror.
Even as his eyes flickered closed and open again with the strength of only his will behind them he saw the movement, the posture, and the blurred image of something familiar. His fuzzy brain couldn't make any more of it as his body prepared to shut down for the last time.
His eyes closed for the final time. The last Quincy. He thought of his father, who had driven him so far and so long, and cursed him.
As his body passed into stillness, there was a long moment before the door was flung open and the natural spirit energy that was held in everything flooded into the vacuum.
The last Quincy awoke with an electric-current shock as a terrifyingly familiar reiatsu washed into his starving body. His fingers were clinging to shinigami black before he could stop them, his body pressing wantonly towards this immense flame. His breathing couldn't keep up and his vision was still dazed, but he knew who this was beyond any mistake.
"Kurosaki," he gasped, tears hovering in his eyes for the humiliation and the relief. He had died and now he was alive. He would not relish the explanation that both would face, but for now his heart was beating too fast, his panic still too high to think that rationally. He was being spoken to, but he could not understand the words. He was stood up on weak feet with his arm wrapped over a taller shoulder and he stumbled his way out of his prison before the full force of his captivity and subsequent revival hit his body and he passed out.
Two days later he woke up again to a bright sunny morning. He was lying on a low bed with carefully folded sheets covering his body and the window at the foot of the bed wide open. A smell and reiatsu that he had been living with for four years now pervaded everything.
Kurosaki Isshin was a shinigami. It was nothing that he hadn't known immediately upon meeting him, but they had never spoken of it. Just like they didn't speak of how he was a Quincy, though he knew that the big bumbling fool knew it.
Of course, just as he thought that, the idiot came into the room as if he could read minds. Grinning and with that explosive reiatsu filling the room, he made his way over to the sickbed after pushing the door shut behind him.
"Ishida Ryuuken. What a surprise to see you here, eh?"
And the sparkle of humor in his eyes only masked the anger and promise of vengeance on his behalf that was sunk below it, so he relaxed against his pillow and slowly tested each limb.
"An unpleasant surprise, I hope," he said dryly, survey done. Dragging himself up into a sitting position was more a management of dulled limbs than any kind of pain. A mild ache covered everything, but it could be ignored.
"Of course!" Isshin replied earnestly, sitting down on a stool and leaning forward. "If I'm overwhelming you just say so."
"No," he replied hastily, feeling Isshin's reiatsu withdraw, and his hand leapt out on instinct to grasp his wrist. Angry with himself for letting how much he needed it show, he scowled even as Isshin's smile softened. "If you're too tired to keep it up you should just say so," he retorted sullenly even as he berated himself for falling into this old series of arguments.
It was as he turned his head sharply away from Kurosaki's uncomfortably kind expression he caught his reflection in a glass pitcher and stopped. And looked back. And squinted. For the first time since this ordeal had happened, he screamed.
"WHAT HAPPENED TO MY HAIR?!"
There was no doubt about it. It was white as snow, unnaturally white. All the emotions he had been suppressing since the incident as he tried to simply survive came welling up over this tiny, insignificant thing. All his struggle for strength was gone as he shuddered hopelessly with Isshin's arms there, around him. Even as he felt embarrassed beyond comprehension for his weakness he couldn't help but experience over and over again the sucking black hole of spirit pressure and the feeling of his entire reiatsu being drawn out of him slowly and painfully. All this over the color of his hair.
The pulse of Isshin's indefatigable reiatsu was comforting, though, and slowly he regained control of his emotions. He felt better, though he wouldn't admit it, for his explosion.
"Isshin," he whispered, finally, once he was sure he had regained control of his voice. "Tell me you didn't know anything about this happening."
He response was reassuringly quick: "Of course not! The moment I heard your name here I found out what was going on. I know the captain of that division and he will have a lot to pay for once I find him."
He didn't have to look up to see the look that accompanied that tone - he had seen it conquer many hollows and just as many exams. They had been roommates for two years and then flat-mates for two more, unquestioning of each other's nightly habits and perhaps growing closer than was healthy for people of their clans, but branching out was what university was for. And then this had happened and they were forced to face the topics that they had been dodging for so long. And Kurosaki Isshin had unquestionably saved his life. There would be no repaying that debt.
They sat in silence, unwilling to move, as the sun moved higher in the sky and the smell of summer in Sereitei floated in. There would be a reckoning, but nothing could be worse than what he had already gone through. He was, after all, the last Quincy.