AN:/ Took an old idea and re-wrote it. Trying to do larger updates with more editing, so not going to get burned out by the schedule I had before.
Still writing for KHR and DA but I was really hating what I was writing before, so I don't know when the next update will be. Looking for betas.
The ghost shows up after his mother dies. At first, Ichigo thinks she is his mother, paled by death and angry about it, standing at the corner of the road and staring off into the distance. He stumbles to a stop and stares at her, heart in his throat.
But at a second glance it becomes obvious that the woman isn't his mother, looks almost nothing like her in fact, and he turns away in renewed grief. He can't even look at ghost right now, sees in their face the girl by the river, and the guilt and loathing chokes him.
So he runs away, back to his house and to his grieving father, who keeps pushing him more and more. Back to his small sisters, so tiny and new to the world.
He doesn't see the ghost following his retreat with sunken eyes.
The second time Ichigo sees the ghost, things have changed. He's made a vow, is determined to never be so weak or stupid again, to always know the difference between spirit and human.
He has sisters to protect, and a father who seems to be collapsing in on himself slowly.
So when he sees her, sitting silently on the stone fence running along his route to school, he doesn't turn away. There's a moment when, turning around the corner and seeing her there, he wishes his father could still walk him to school. But his sisters are more important, and he's no longer a little child who needs his hand held.
Instead, he walks by the woman with barely a glance. She looks the same as she did those weeks ago, pale and tired and angry looking. There's dried blood on her hands and a chain that pools out from her chest, but she looks alive in a way that only those newly dead do.
He has the urge to stop and ask her is she's ok, if she's seen another orange haired dead woman. To tell her that he killed his mother and he's looking for her.
He says nothing.
Tatsuki finds him after he starts skipping. He's been searching for the girl by the river, although he doesn't really know what would happen if he did find her.
"She's gone." Tatsuki says, standing behind him on the riverbank.
He doesn't answer.
"Unless…what they say about you is true." She continues, hesitantly. He turns and squints at her.
"What things?" He asks.
She sits down next to him and knocks her shoulders into his.
"That you see ghosts." She says finally, after a pause. He frowns and turns back to looking out at the river.
People have been talking about that ever since they noticed that he talks things that aren't there. He hunches in a little further into himself.
"…No." He says finally. It's almost true. In this case, he really isn't seeing ghosts. Even if he wishes he could.
Tatsuki nods. Then she punches his shoulder and hugs him, the sort of hug that starts off as a throw and ends with both of them clutching at the fabric of their shirts and sniffling.
"You're stupid. Skipping school, not showing up to karate. How are you ever going to get good enough to beat me being a sad lump by the river?" She says, rubbing damp eyes on his shirt.
He stifles his own cries into her neck.
"I'll be better." He says.
It's a promise.
School is hard. He's staying late at the dojo learning karate, learning how to be better, and he has to do his homework now late at night and alone. He's determined though, doesn't want to ask his father, who seems to go into hysterics now at every extreme.
He needs to be good. Needs to live up to his name and be a protector. That means making sure there's nothing his family has to worry about, including his own education.
One day, his sisters are going to be old enough go to middle school. He needs to be prepared to help them, since his father never seems to be.
So school's hard, but he succeeds. Rises up the class ranks by pure determination. It helps that for the most part it only takes one or two tries for him to understand something.
There's some jealousy from some of his classmates to deal with too. There have been comments before about his hair, about his weirdness, but now there are taunts about him supposedly cheating.
Tatsuki helps, but he can't let her fight all his battles. He thinks she understands.
He's been doing better at the dojo, but a few times now he's had to go home with bloody lips and torn homework.
His father starts surprising him with whacks over the head, calling it his fist of love. Sometimes Ichigo can see it coming and evades, but mostly all he ends up with is another bruise.
So the third time he sees the ghost, they both have blood on them and tired, angry looks. He's on his way back from the dojo, having convinced both his father and sensei that he can do the walk himself, when he stops and sees her.
He's honestly going to walk on by. He still hates ghosts, ignores them when he can and runs when he can't, but somehow, seeing his own emotions on her face has him stopping.
She's standing by the park, leaning against the swing set even though he knows she would just go through if she were actually putting any weight into it. Her arms are crossed but it doesn't do anything to hide the chain hanging from her chest.
He frowns at it, momentarily confused. He's seen the chains before, doesn't really understand them but knows that they come in different lengths, but this is the first time he's seen one so long. Most times they fade off after a certain length.
This one though, loops around and around her torso and then puddles at her feet, fading off only after it trails off a few feet away.
"Well? Are you just going to stare all day?" A dry voice asks, and Ichigo jumps, eyes skipping to her face. She has a raised eyebrow but there's no amusement in her face. At least, it doesn't seem that her constant anger is pointed towards him.
He turns away and tucks his hands in his pockets. There's no way he's going to talk to her.
"Talkative fellow, aren't you?" She says with a raspy laugh, before he catches her fading away in the corner of his eye. That's also something new, and he snaps his head back towards her.
Where she was leaning there's nothing but a slightly trampled patch of grass.
He frowns.
It takes him a while to realise that most ghosts don't move. Can't wander away from their site of death. That they can't touch things, or most people.
The ones that can usually mean bad business. Those are the ones with the short chains and the manic eyes, who claw at their own body like they claw at anything that comes close.
Those ghosts just confirm his own determination, his own hatred of spirits.
And yet, he thinks about the woman with her long chain and angry eyes and trampled grass. Thinks about her leaning against swings and sitting on walls.
He stops thinking about it.
Time passes.
His sisters grow fast, but it's hard to tell by the way he himself is growing. He's taller now, has a longer reach. In karate he's winning his matches more and more, although he still hasn't won one over Tatsuki.
He moves up a grade, shows a new batch of bullies that he might take a pounding but he can dish one out too, forgets for a time about ghosts and chains and the feeling when he saw the woman for the first time.
Doesn't forget his mother and her killer.
His father continues to go through extremes. There's now a poster of Ichigo's mother on the wall and that he'll collapse under at the slightest provocation. This seems like one of the more tolerable of habits.
The flying kicks are less tolerable.
He wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of rattling. He blinks against the darkness and sits up, rubbing at his face. There's a weight on his chest and a stillness to the air, but it's the sound that really wakes him up.
At first, he thinks it's his window. He latched it before bed though, and it remains securely shut. His second thought is to his father, sneaking in the middle of the night to surprise him.
The sounds of the house are quiet though, and after careful listening he can hear his father's snores drifting from down the hall.
Something rattles again, and he pushes the blankets off and stands up. He has to stand on his tiptoes to see over the window ledge, but he can see the whole street when he does.
It's dark, the number on his clock ticking closer to 3am, but the street lamps on the road are shining strong. In the corner of one alley a shadow detaches from the wall.
The ghost slips into the street trailing her chain like a wedding veil, arms as full as she can make them and dragging her heavy burden. There's a sudden scream from far off.
He flinches away from the window.
The pressure in the air is increasing, and it tries to press him down. His mind is conjuring up for him that night at the riverbank, and he fights against the feeling to peer back out.
If the girl from the river is back, he wants to see her. He wants to stop her. He doesn't know if he is strong enough yet, but he will do it. Before his sisters or father get killed too.
Outside, the woman stops in the street and seems to be waiting patiently. She cradles her chains and stares off into the direction of the scream, still as the grave.
There's a trembling in his limbs that he thinks is first nerves, but turns out to be fine tremors in the ground. His clock vibrates off his desk.
One of the street lamps flicker, and from one breath to the next there's a monster standing in the street.
He's stuck, eyes wide at the large mass of — something.
It's scaly, an oily sheen to its white skin. There's a mass of arms and as it moves he realises with a sickening jolt that it has two heads, with ten eyes between them. It has a bone white mask on both heads, connected by sweeping horns that merge together, but the eyes all look out from different angles.
Ichigo clamps down on a scream.
The ghost woman says something that he can't hear, and the monster howls, raising one clawed hand to swipe at her.
He flinches away, covering his eyes out of instinct, but forces himself to look back right after. He is strong enough for this, and even though he doesn't like ghosts he also wants to know if he should go down and help, somehow.
It doesn't look he will need to though, since by the time he looks back again the monster is a bloody heap on the ground, a great gouge in the pavement bisecting where it is cut in two. A broken mask starts dissolving into the air.
Waving gently in the air the woman's chain drips red, fanning out from where she stands, unmoving. One end of the bloody limb is still stuck in the slowly disappearing flesh of the monster.
He stands staring at her, before whimpering from the room next door has him stumbling away from the window. His limbs are shaky, but he still has the strength to burst through his sisters' door with enough force that the door thumps against the wall and they wake up.
"…ni-chan?" Yuzu murmurs sleepily. He leans back against the wall and breathes in relief. He should have been in their room at the first hint of something strange, instead of uselessly watching from his window.
"Go back to sleep." He says softly, climbing into the bed that the two girls share. He pushes at Karin's spread limbs and settles at the headboard.
He's not sleepy anymore.
He avoids the woman after that.
Now that he is knows they're there, he sees the monster everywhere. He sees them in the missing spirits, in ghostly stains on the pavement, in flickering shadows.
Sometimes he feels their hungry eyes following him. There's an animal hunger to them, where as most ghost just feel sad and lonely.
He tries not to let it get to him, knowing that there's something out there hunting spirits. He knows from class that predators are important to ecosystems, and tries to think about it like that. Like population control.
Like ghosts aren't people.
He worries Tatsuki with the amount of time he spends on karate, his brain still stumbling over the monsters. For once he just wishes he had someone to talk to about all of this.
In his mind the girl from the river is superimposed over the woman with chains, and he can't figure out whether that means she is a monster too.
The only thing he does know is that he needs to get stronger. No matter what.
After a while Ichigo realises just like how the monsters hunt the ghosts, something is hunting the monsters. At first he thinks of the woman and her chain, and although he catches her hunting them, there's something else.
Something a little less precise.
Signs of battles that others ignore, far off cries in the distance, flashes of black in the sky.
He never does catch a look at what does it.
A month passes. Then two.
He sees plenty of the woman. She seems to have a territory she wanders, the borders of which he pass every day for school. Some days she wanders further, hunting one thing or another.
Some days the blood on her hands is fresher. Some days she limps away.
Some days she sees him watching her and smiles at him with teeth, pale and gaunt and still angry.
One day, he runs into her with blood on her lips and she stops to look at him, a strange look in her eyes.
He's on his way to school again, late because his sister's have been complaining about nightmares and he's been staying up late with them, and he doesn't have time for the ghost woman.
He tries to dodge her but she steps out in front of him, close enough to touch if she was alive. His heart jumps into his throat but he scowls at her anyways, refusing to back down.
"What?" He snaps. Her smile widens.
"I was wondering, but you do see, don't you? More then just shadows and shades, you see everything. No wonder hollows follow you like little ducklings, you must smell delicious." She says.
His nose wrinkles, and he backs up a little warily. That sounds like something they warned them at school about when talking about adult predators.
She just laughs at him.
"Be careful with who you let realise you can see, little boy. More then just the monsters in the dark will go after you then. For now, the rise in hollows you bring is a benefit for me, but should you bring something else…" Here her smile fades, and she looks just as angry as always.
He backs up even more, but she just drifts away without finishing. He watches her chain follow her until he can't see her anymore and shivers.
He can't tell if that was supposed to be a warning or a threat.
He's out with his sisters and father when Karin, hanging by his hand, stops and points to the end of the street. Yuzu and his father are looking at displays a few feet away, so he dutifully turns to see what she's pointing to.
"What's that?" She asks, squinting a little.
He squints himself, looking for what would have caught her attention, but seeing only the street and the bustle of the market. And a ghost.
"What's what?" He asks with apprehension. She tugs his hand with a huff and points again.
"That!" She is definitively pointing to the ghost. His heart leaps into his throat and his first instinct is joy. Someone else who sees the spirits, who he can talk to about it and not sound crazy. And then the fear sets in.
Karin will have to learn how to tell between living and dead. Will have to deal with teasing in school if she messes up, taunts about imaginary friends. Will have to deal with the dead's grasping loneliness.
Will have to deal with the monsters.
Ichigo tugs her hand down from where it's pointing and turns her around to face the other way.
"It's nothing. Come on, let's go see if dad will buy us ice-cream." He entices, hustling her away. She lets herself be distracted.
He thinks about what the woman in chains said, about monsters and sight. About the dangers of it.
Before it felt like something he could ignore, even if it did attract the monsters. He was the only one in danger.
But if seeing truly is dangerous, then now it's not just him who's in danger. And that's unacceptable.
He goes looking for the woman. It's not as hard as he originally thought it would be, since her territory is rather small, and he knows the borders of it rather well. He stops by at the end of classes, choosing to skip karate so he can walk the route he sees her wandering normally.
Ten minutes in and he sees her, sitting on the railing of a bridge on a quiet residential street. She's swinging her legs languidly, chains falling into the rushing water, but her expression is still frozen in rage.
"Well this is new." She says without looking at him as he walks up, stretching so he can hop on the curb of the railing. "Normally you run away as soon as you see me."
"I don't." He scowls at her. She laughs. He frowns harder, to which she just waves off.
"Well, what do you need from this poor damned soul?" She asks, hoping down from the railing and turning, chain rising up to provide a foothold so she can hang in the air in front of him.
Ichigo doesn't let her unnerve him, frowning at her malevolent amusement.
"The monsters. What are they?" He asks. He didn't want to know before, but now he needs to. Even if it means talking with the ghost woman.
"The hollows? They're the corrupted souls of the old dead. They feed off of those newly dead. Or naïve young boys with too much power and not enough sense." She says drifting closer.
"Seeing is power?" Ichigo asks sharply, a little confused. Seeing is seeing, it's never given him anything but trouble.
She laughs, a cackling, resounding sound that echoes across the waves.
"Oh child, did you think that seeing was all you could do? No, no. You must have been so lucky to have not been eaten before now." She pauses. "But that is not why you are here. You did not care about the power before. What changed?"
He grimaces and shuffles back. He's not about to answer that.
He goes to turn around but is stopped when the ghost flips over, chain coiling like a cobra around him and forcing him still.
"Oh no, you can't leave now that you are talking to me! It gets so dreadfully boring here without any company." She says, circling him as he struggles to jerk his legs out.
"Let me go! I was just curious." He yells, pulling at the thick links.
"Hmm. I don't think so, you're not one to do something out of pure academic interest, are you? No, it would have to be a personal reason. But not, I expect, a personal power issue." She says, watching him.
He frowns at her and tugs one last time at the chain.
"You want to be powerful, yes? But not for purely selfish means. So a relative, or a friend?" She continues, laughing delightedly when he flinches.
"You don't have to worry about me knowing about your dear loved ones. I have no use for those of flesh and blood." She says with a bloody smile, leaning her head on one hand.
He squints at her in suspicion and bites his lips. He doesn't trust her, doesn't want to take the risk.
"I can tell you more, I can tell you how to defend yourself and others from the hollows. But only if you tell me." She coaxes, circling him.
He huffs.
"My sister is starting to see." Ichigo says finally, following her with distrustful eyes.
"Oho, now that is a pickle! I'm assuming by your big brother act that she's younger? Which would mean she also will grow into quite the powerhouse one day. No wonder this side of town is so full of reiatsu." She laughs, loosening the chain so he can step out.
"Reiatsu?" He asks, shifting away but keeping his back straight. He doesn't want to get caught again.
"Spiritual energy. It's what allows you to see spirits. It is also what allows you to fight them, if you are strong enough." She says. She taps on finger to her lips and smiles.
"It is unusual for a human to be able to use it before their deaths, and even spirits need age and experience to be able to have any large amount."
He doesn't respond because he spots someone coming their way, and doesn't want to deal with someone thinking he's talking to air. The ghost bares her teeth at the incoming person and shifts down so she's standing on the ground bare foot.
"Come on, I know a place a little more deserted then this that we can talk. I can even show you some tricks to help with that power of yours, for a price." She says, tugging a tuff of his hair and walking away as he splutters.
He blinks at her and then runs to catch up.
The man they pass is wearing a dark coat and an odd striped hat. For some reason the man is wearing geta sandals and using a cane, even though he doesn't look old enough for that sort of thing. When he sees Ichigo he slows to a stop.
The man blinks at him, and for a second it looks almost like his eyes flicker towards the ghost before they pass him.
They don't have to go far, this side of town being as disserted as it is. For a second he wonders if he is walking next to the reason for that. But then again, he's never seen the ghost woman attack living humans, only the monsters.
She stops in the park that they first really interacted in, by the swing set he found her leaning on.
"Now if anyone hears you talking to thin air they'll think you're just playing." She says, with a tone of wry frustration.
He huffs, and crosses his arms.
"Impatient are you?" She says, using her chain to hook onto the swing's bar and fashioning a sort of makeshift swing between the existing ones. It means she's passing through the bar in the middle of the swing set as she does so, but that doesn't seem to be bothering her.
He wonders if she can control what she is able to touch, or if it's restricted to certain things.
"I just need to know how to keep my sister safe." He says.
"Oh child, you'll learn that is impossible, even if she didn't have the power of sight. The world is dangerous to humans, young girls even more so." She replies, ignoring his frown.
"But as for Hollows, I think I can help you there." She says with a grin. It sends shivers down his spine for some reason, looks for a second similar to the hungry grins of the masked monsters.
"I just need you to do me a little favour."