A/N: Hello! This is my first time writing fan fiction so I would just like to say thank you in advance to anyone who chooses to review this. The first four chapters were all written at the same time to get the story moving.

As I write this as of 2-20, if you're bothered by OCs like Alan, know that the emphasis on his interactions with Ichigo declines after 1-04 and is mostly to set the stage; he himself leaves the narrative at 1-10. I'll be trying to use them sparingly and to keep the focus on the cast we know. Rukia enters at 1-05, and 1-07 is probably the most representative early chapter of the tone of the rest of the work overall so far.

Bleachand all products thereof are copyright to Tite Kubo, et al. This was influenced by Stargate SG-1, The X-Files, Welcome to Night Vale, Men In Black, The Cabin in the Woods, and many other sources, but was not directly based upon any of them in terms of content.

"The situation on Gehenna doesn't look good."

"Nothing on Gehenna ever looks good."

"The Committee is refusing to consider additional funding to deal with it, with everything else that's going on."

"They should know by now this isn't something you can Charlie Wilson your way out of."

"Evidently you've convinced them you're fully capable of doing more with less."

"...I guess we'll just have to go headhunting."

"Do you have someone in mind?"

"...As a matter of fact, I do. Send Hayward to Yokota and tell him to go to Karakura. He'll know what to do."

Monday, February 10, 2003

A sudden proclamation of "Hello and welcome! Cheap! Fast! Safe! We'll do anything! That's Unagiya!" made Ichigo Kurosaki return to find himself slouched on a black imitation-leather couch, half-conscious from boredom. He'd had a long day at school and not a single job had come in during the hour he'd been at the shop. He pinched the bridge of his nose to try and focus as Ikumi Unagiya, his boss, prattled aggressively with whatever prospective customer was calling. He was irritated at the limbo he occupied: he neither cared what Ikumi was saying, nor could he remember what he had just been day-dreaming about.

The latter hit him first, not in its actual substance but in an allegory of losing it: a sudden, hellishly intense recollection of a senkaimon's shōji door closing off Rukia Kuchiki's face. He didn't notice his hands involuntarily clenching into fists.

It was the 434th day since he had seen Rukia. He didn't even deliberately keep track of the number, he just knew it. A month before that had seen the defeat of Aizen—he could track that exactly too but had stopped caring to afford it that level of precision. It didn't matter in comparison. He slowly relaxed his fingers after he realized his nails were threatening to penetrate the skin of his palms. His mind shifted to replaying her fading away for the last time, and that terrible look in her eyes. He didn't notice Ikumi putting down the phone and staring at him.

"Oi," she suddenly yelled, as if sensing something ailed him "Ichigo-chan, are you going to get any honmei-choco this Valentine's Day or are you stuck with giri-choco like usual?!"

"What the hell kind of question is that, as if it's any of your business!?" Ichigo yelled in response, suddenly shaken from his visions.

"I keep telling you to call me Ikumi-san and not 'you', Ichigo-chan, you idiot!" she huffed, before raising a finger in the air and issuing a matronly declaration "You won't get anything this year from anyone with that attitude."

"Like I want anything!" he hollered in exasperation.

Her eyes slid over to him and then a motherly smile broke out across her face "We both know you like chocolate," she said with a sweetness usually reserved for her son.

Ichigo was left with a twitching eyebrow at the act and nothing left to say, which was precisely what Ikumi had hoped for: it was in her estimation better that he be angry at the now than sad at the past, even if she didn't know what was always bothering her teenage employee. She would've kept up the assault, but the simple truth was she didn't actually know any of his classmates or much about his relations with them and had no good ammunition to use against him.

"So was that about a job or what?" he asked, trying to redirect the conversation.

"A customer wanted to schedule for her dog to be walked this weekend," replied Ikumi.

"Great," muttered Ichigo, slumping back into the couch. He was about to let himself get absorbed in his own thoughts again when he heard the door handle. They both looked up as the shop door opened and a figure stepped in from the sun's golden glare. Ichigo's gaze swept up the person. It was a man wearing mirror-finished black dress shoes, an uncannily black three-button business suit of an ultramodern cut, silver cufflinks, a white pocket square, white dress shirt, and black tie in a either a Pratt or Windsor knot. A pair of dark black shades sat upon the man's face, their lenses rectangular with the corners cut down at interesting angles. It was completely out of season given the average temperature outside all day had been around 10 degrees Celsius. Ichigo stopped for a moment, struck by this context and the sharp starkness of the man's ensemble, the effect and color palette almost reminding him of—no. He immediately put it out of his mind.

He was taller than Ichigo by half a head, maybe 186 to 188cm tall, and it was clear from how he filled out the getup that he was exceedingly fit. The way he carried himself conveyed an edgy awareness just beneath a sense of languid self-assuredness: a man who clearly could be extremely intimidating but felt absolutely no need for it at present. He didn't seem bothered by the weather in the slightest. He had a modest tan despite the winter, but any considered study of his face quickly revealed he was not Japanese.

He was possessed of a strong jaw, moderate chin, modest cheeks, thin lips, and moderately narrow nose. His hair was almost black, kept somewhere between a crew cut and a faux-hawk, and he had the barest shade of stubble. His age was difficult to estimate, but he seemed to be in his late-30s, though he could've easily been older as he seemed to take care of his appearance. Ichigo could only peg his ancestry as some kind of European and could likewise only guess at his eye-color, for he made no move to take off the shades, instead just flashing them a winsome smile of flawless white teeth. Ichigo had seen enough Hollywood movies to immediately conclude He looks like some kind of movie-star, only belatedly realizing his mouth was ajar.

"C—Can I help you?" Ikumi asked. The usual belligerence in her voice was totally absent. Ichigo turned his eyes to her, seeing a similar expression on her face as he felt on his. They were both thinking the same thing: Why would somebody like this be in Unagiya Shop?

The man replied in completely flawless Kantō dialect Japanese with a certain rich baritone: "Hello! This is the 'We'll do anything' Unagiya Shop, correct?" His general gaze surely took in Ikumi's shirt and he had to have passed the sign outside bearing the name. It must've been rhetorical, but perhaps that was the point, as both Ichigo and Ikumi were stunned into openly gaping. The man continued in spite of their appearances, "I've recently moved here to Karakura and would like to hire your services to conduct some outdoor maintenance of my new house."

Ikumi and Ichigo exchanged a look which allowed not one but a thousand questions to flow between them. "Ah, and you are…?" Ikumi offered.

"I can pay in advance," the man replied, as if he hadn't heard her question at all.

"Our rate is ¥800 an hour," Ikumi replied with a sudden lack of hesitation.

The man shrugged slightly, removed a wallet from his right-hand pants pocket, and pulled out a single crisp ¥2,000 note, walking up to her with it while putting the wallet back away. She snatched it away from him immediately. "Ichigo-chan, two-and-a-half hours, chop-chop!" she proclaimed.

Ichigo found himself just as stunned at her reversal in attitude and protested "You want me to go outside and do yard-work or something in this weather just like that?!" Ikumi just glared at him in response. After a few seconds of the withering look he sighed and slowly got up, grumbling below his breath, and put on the jacket he'd been sitting on, heading toward the door.

"I live within a short walking distance from here," the man in the suit offered with what felt like excess cheer, moving to follow him out the door.

"Yeah, yeah, let's go," Ichigo said, heading outside.

They had been walking along a series of streets and alleys toward where the man said he'd bought a house in silence for about five minutes. According to his directions it wasn't much farther. Ichigo finally decided to break the ice: "So…why did you move here?"

"I liked the location," the man said, as if that explained everything.

Ichigo couldn't shake the feeling that something was simply off about the guy. Everything about him was wrong somehow. It didn't fit. "Well…uh, what's your name?"

The man smirked, and in what sounded to Ichigo's ears like a generic American accent but retained the same baritone, said "Alan is fine for now."

Ichigo frowned and raised an eyebrow before venturing "Hello, Alan," in English.

"Not bad!" Alan replied, once more in Japanese.

The exchange left Ichigo feeling even more out of his depth and they continued on in silence for another minute. This whole episode had been surreal. Still, there was nothing for it. At last Ichigo half-turned to Alan and asked "So…what kind of 'outdoor maintenance' did you have in mind?"

The same smirk as before danced across Alan's lips more severely this time, revealing those unnaturally white teeth. Something about their gleam made the waning sunlight suddenly lose what little warmth it had, like a switch had been flipped. Alan abruptly stopped and turned toward Ichigo. "Didn't you ever think it was weird that it seemed like everybody in the Soul Society was Japanese? Odd hair and eye colors aside, did you ever meet anyone from anywhere else?" he asked casually.

Ichigo's blood instantly ran cold as he froze in place. "...W—What did you ju—"

Alan ignored him completely. "Didn't you ever think it was weird the afterlife for all of humanity would resemble feudal Japan? Do you really think Westerners, even dead ones, would tolerate that kind of system?"

The color seemed to drain from the world. Ichigo found his voice caught in his throat "—What—"

The man's smirk turned into a grin. "Didn't you ever think it was weird Zero Division wasn't tasked with eliminating Sōsuke Aizen? Yamamoto-sōtaichō is a militarily incompetent, senile, brutish war criminal, but is he really that stupid?"

"—Who—" Ichigo sputtered out. It seemed like the world was drawing in on just the two of them. He took a step back. He couldn't perceive reiatsu and hadn't been able to do so since he lost his powers, but he was reminded of nothing so much as the first several times he had met the taichō of Soul Society. Through body-language and force of personality alone he felt like this guy, Alan, was crushing him.

Alan's grin remained restrained but had hints of something maniacal and predatory, something oddly familiar. "Didn't you ever think it was weird everybody had to rely on a teenager to save the world? Say, for that matter, if Urahara-san knew what was up the whole time, why didn't he send the Visored with you on the first trip to Soul Society itself?"

Something within Ichigo's mind unlocked as if a key had just been turned. "—Who are you?!" he demanded, his voice ragged as he brought his fists up into a combative stance. His eyes had gone hard and there was a dangerous look in them. It's a nightmare, he found himself thinking. It's got to be another nightmare.

Alan let out a soft "Heh," and crossed his arms over his chest, winding his grin down to a smirk again, "I guess not. I bet you even thought her and all the rest really were actually professional soldiers..."

Ichigo's instincts howled a warning of danger, particular at the emphasis on the word "her." He let out a yell of "Who the hell are you?!" and rushed the man, suddenly intent on beating the answer out of him.

Alan blocked the first few punches with seeming boredom before grabbing one of Ichigo's wrists in a vice-like grip with blinding speed. Ichigo was stunned as he hadn't been able to track it. In the next instant it had been wrenched around his back and his own momentum was being used to shove him face first up against a wall on one side of the alleyway.

Ichigo struggled only to receive a warning pull on his arm, an implicit threat of dislocation or worse. That itself was one thing, but it was the voice that followed that made him stop. It was completely different from the voice Alan had used so far, as cold as a grave. "Ichigo Kurosaki,"Alan began, "blood type A, D.O.B. July 15, 1985, son of Masaki Kurosaki, and Isshin," there was the slightest of pauses, Ichigo himself not noticing it under the circumstances, "Kurosaki."

He continued: "You have two sisters, Karin and Yuzu. Your mother died on June 17, 1996. Your longest standing friend is Tatsuki Arisawa. Your favorite food is karashi mentaiko, you have a weakness for chocolate, your favorite actor is Al Pacino, your favorite musician is Mike Ness of Social Distortion, and you actually like reading William Shakespeare." He gave Ichigo's arm another warning pull that elicited a grunt from the teenager before releasing it, moving back to the center of the alley.

Ichigo whipped around to face the man, who was now holding his hands up in what would ordinarily be a conciliatory fashion with a what-can-you-do smile. From him it radiated subtle menace. Ichigo glowered, but two things kept him in check for the moment: first, the pain in his shoulder and cheek was real enough to confirm it wasn't a nightmare and any consequences would be real enough; second, the man had him at an extreme disadvantage both physically and contextually. They stared one another down for a small eternity before the young man spat "If you're not gonna tell me who you are, then tell me what you want."

Alan appeared to consider this theatrically for a moment before looking square at him, that smirk back on his face, and his odd wry tone back in force: "It really kills you to have to rely on everyone else again, doesn't it? Especially when there are so many more people you think you have to protect."

Ichigo felt his expression darken, but said nothing in response.

Alan pointed at him, finger wagging a bit as he spoke. "Your family, your friends…even all these strangers, you want to protect them all, don't you? You know what's lurking just beyond your vision and you can't do anything at all about it. You can feel it, can't you, your soul dying a little bit every single day?"

Ichigo felt whatever had prompted him to attack the man telling him to do it again and mentally clamped down on it.

"And the worst part is that they let it happen, isn't it? You put everything on the line for Soul Society, everything, and they repaid you like this. They thought you had earned living a normal life again and would want nothing more, and so they gave it to you. As if anything could ever be normal again. And yet you've been trying to convince yourself it was true to save your sanity, haven't you?"

Ichigo gritted his teeth and watched as the man reached up and slowly took off his shades, palming them. Alan's eyes were closed as if in thought and it was a moment before he opened them to look at Ichigo directly. They were a brilliant azure, and they regarded him with what looked like a mixture of pity, disgust, sympathy, camaraderie, and indifference. It was if the man could feel any one of the things in an instant, and so was feeling them all at the same time. Ichigo didn't know what to say.

"They're so bad at morale and psychology," Alan continued, in some nebulous mixture of sardonic irony and disdain. Something in his eyes flashed harder than diamonds and a frost fell over his tone, "But it wouldn't be the first time they misjudged. They let her grapple with the death of Kaien-fukutaichō for over 20 years even as everyone around her saw what it did to her."

Ichigo's eyes widened as he finally caught on to the man's insistence on referring to what was very obviously Rukia as just "her" when he had no issue revealing he knew everyone else's names. What was the purpose? Did he know her?

"Now you're really starting to wonder. I can see it on your face. Good," Alan said. "No, I don't know her at all. We've never met. So why, you ask? Two reasons, first…" the man trailed off and smiled at Ichigo with an unnerving knowingness, "it gets your attention. Second, I can't stand to see true loyalty returned with contempt and disregard in the name of tradition, custom, or honor. They owe her. They owe you. They owe a lot of people. Yet here you are, wallowing in self-pity, letting them believe they did right by you, by her, letting them go on with the charade. Do you think you're fooling anybody? Do you think everyone can't see what's happening to you? Do you really think your family and friends have bought it for even a single second?"

Ichigo felt that crushing sensation again as Alan's eyes went from a cold hardness to an incendiary glare. The man was smiling, and that edge of madness was back on his face. Ichigo realized then where he had seen it before: it reminded him of the seated officers of the 11th Division.

"You can't stop it, Ichigo, no matter how far you run, no matter how hard you hide, no matter how fervently you deny: you're not haunted by what you endured—you miss it," Alan said, his conviction absolute. He stared Ichigo down for what, from the teen's perspective, could've been the blink of an eye or a thousand years, until the teen noticed an odd glimmer in the man's eye. His voice suddenly had all the sincerity in the world in it: "Do you want to see her again?"

Ichigo felt his own eyes go wide before he managed to draw them back down to narrowed slits. The change in the older man's tone was striking, but it wasn't enough for him. He felt something like the fire he saw in Alan's eyes rise within him and asked "Who?"

"You know exactly who I mean, Ichigo," replied Alan, something that sounded like pity creeping into his tone.

"Say her name," Ichigo said. It wasn't a request.

Alan's smile seemed to increase. "Rukia Kuchiki is of all the people that exist in this world or any other the person you can least protect right now," Alan said, gaze unwavering and his voice a mixture of both blazing conviction and frigid fact, "So, one more time: do you want to see Rukia again?"

In that instant Ichigo knew that his questions, of which he had many, didn't matter. He didn't have to reflect on all the times like this he had endured before. He simply knew the answer. "Yes!" he snapped, without a moment's hesitation and a conviction to match the other man's.

Alan stared at Ichigo for some unknown time afterwards, complete silence between them. At last he put his sunglasses back on and reached inside his suit jacket. In a single smooth motion he withdrew and flicked something at Ichigo, who caught it easily. It was a business card. "Call me when you're free tomorrow," Alan said nonchalantly, as if nothing had just happened. He then began walking back down the alley from the way they had came.

Ichigo watched the man go and tracked him all the way until he turned out of sight before looking down at the business card. In the upper left corner was a logo of an angular winged star, and to its right it read:

US Air Force
353rd Special Operations Group
Lt. Col. Alan V. Hayward

An address at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa followed, along with a work and cell phone number. On the back was written a different number—a local one. The sun had completely gone down by the time Ichigo stopped just staring at it.

"Ah, Ichigo-chan, back already?" asked Ikumi, glancing up. He had returned at around the two-hour mark.

Ichigo didn't look at her, but instead went straight for the couch to grab his bag.

"Hey, so, what exactly did that guy need anyway?" she continued, narrowing her eyes.

"Rain gutters cleaned," Ichigo said without intonation, then: "I won't be here tomorrow, gotta study for a test." He was already maneuvering for the door.

"You better be back for the rest of the week!" she warned.

"Yeah, we'll see," he said, and walked out without another word. Ikumi stared at the door for some time in his absence. None of his clothes had been any dirtier despite the scuff on his cheek.

"Report," the voice on the other end said.

"He'll achieve initial operational capability in three days," Alan said. They spoke in English.

"You should be able to do it instantly." There was a note of irritation in the voice at the other end that wasn't lost on him.

"I don't take orders from you. I'm the one who built up his case file, and I was sent here with the understanding I would be doing it my way, I'm doing it my way, and in this case my way is going to take three days. He's not even of military age. He'll be ready soon enough, and if that isn't good enough for the Colonel or General they can send somebody else. Do I make myself perfectly clear?" Alan said coldly.

"Crystal," the voice replied, "I'll convey your time table to them." The call was ended from the other side. Alan flipped the cell phone closed and put it away before returning to considering a stack of restaurant and café brochures. It was proving hard to find a place in Karakura that served good coffee.

A/N: Just a few things for clarity's sake at the start:

I'm taking the Bleach Wikia timeline for granted because it seems relatively accurate.

I was unable to find an average minimum wage for 2003, but as of 2008 it was somewhat above ¥600 an hour. I figure Ikumi charges somewhat more to cover overhead.

I've opted to use Japanese terms for most concepts, organizations, and places in Japan, as well as honorifics, for flavor. Certain things that can be exactly translated will be, as might things that are unfamiliar to Bleach itself. In the last resort, I figure you can always use Google. Let me know if this is annoying.

In the narrative, names will be written in Western order, although should there ever be a case where Japanese names are given in full in dialogue, they'll be in the reverse order.

Alan Hayward isn't based on any one person in particular. He deliberately gives Japanese names in the wrong order; this is mentioned in the next chapter, but I figured I'd mention it here too. If he had theme music it would be "Made in Heaven" by Kota Hoshino.