A/N: As the summary suggests, this story isn't quite ironed out, yet, and since I only have about three pages written so far, the chapters will be rather short for now. That said, I just wanted to get some of this out, to hopefully get some feedback to fuel the further development of the story. The rating will change, though.
"Ichigo, come over here a moment," Keigo hollered, and said teenager's head snapped in that direction at the cue, showing other students that he was far from as unapproachable as he had first seemed, Orihime looked on with a small smile tugging at the corner of her lips. The fact that he had gone from flinching at his friends' touch to this carefree demeanour so quickly made her heart soar, and hope for it to stay that way, so they all may live their lives in happiness and peace from now on. It was the least they deserved, she thought, after all they'd been through, and all they'd done for the world.
Ichigo's state of mind could, in many ways, be seen as a pointer to understanding how the world was faring, at least where total world wide disasters were concerned. In his calm, carefree demeanour, it was clear to see that at least so far as he was concerned, the world was perfectly safe, and the same went for his closest friends and family. The soul reapers were all back in Soul Society, and he didn't get to see them much, but that was okay; it just meant that they were back to their own brand of normality, and busy doing their regular work again, which in most of their cases, since they were all fairly high ranking officers, meant that they had very little business in the world of the living. Even when there was a momentary spike on the monitors detailing Karakura that suggested a powerfull or even highly evolved hollow, there was no one dispatched to take care of it, on the grounds that the residents should be easily able to dispose of it on their own, regardless of rank or power. When the signal all but disappeared nearly immediately after having been picked up, that was the general assumption made by most shinigami, even Kurotsuchi's diligent researchers.
Happily aware that no one would suspect him of being anything more than a low level hollow at most, with his newly aquired and carefully practiced skills so well honed, Grimmjow Jaegerjaques sauntered away from the closing garganta at a more leisurely pace than most that knew him would have thought him capable of, especially when he was, in all relevant capacities, running away. From what wasn't immediately apparent, but it was enough that he quietly sonidoed away from the town that he had involuntarily appeared near the fringes of the moment he noticed it, still suspended in air as though there existed an invisible glass roof on the world. Once he made it far enough out in the wilderness that he was confident no shinigami would come sauntering past, he found a dry spot that looked comfortable and promptly dropped himself on it, immediately aiming to erase his presence from the air, and blocked all other thoughts from his mind. If he was going to do this, he needed to be able to hide, as much as the idea went against his very nature. And he needed all the practice he could get. Fast.
