Masaki Kurosaki, loving wife and mother of three, had died.
People (including Ichigo) would be told that Ichigo had nearly drowned, and that his mother, in saving him, drowned herself. It wasn't an unbelievable story for anyone who knew Masaki Kurosaki, she was a mother everyone had no doubts would do just that.
Young Ichigo, however, knew better than that. The weight of cold steel in his hands, that bone-white mask ... they were undeniably real.
The death of what was no doubt the center of the Kurosaki family affected each of its members in different ways.
Isshin Kurosaki, having lost his wife meant the end of any romantic life he could ever have, Masaki was his one and only, there would never be another in his heart, and felt proud to show this fact by making an enormous poster of his wife that he put on the living room of their home, a picture of Masaki smiling at the camera looking every bit as beautiful as she always was with the letters "Masaki Forever" evidencing Isshin's feelings on the matter. He had to take a more active role in raising their children, albeit with a different approach than that of Masaki's.
After all, if he tried to replace her in any way, he'd never be able to forgive himself.
Karin Kurosaki, the twin that resembled more her father (Physically so, everyone doubted there would ever be someone like Isshin), became cold, or well, colder than usual. She was always a girl with a strong character, and the defense mechanism that her mind came up with was to not show anything and bottle it up inside, show no weakness and eventually, perhaps, the pain would go away.
Yuzu Kurosaki, the twin who looked much more like her mother, and the one everyone was sure would suffer the greatest shock of the two, was, to everyone's amazement, the one who took over her mother's duties around the house. She would make sure her father would be up in time to open up the clinic or go to whichever appointment he had, she cleaned around the house and made sure that everyone had their meals in time.
For Ichigo Kurosaki, the change was perhaps the most extreme. He didn't show much outwards (Other than what had apparently become a permanent scowl on his face), but on the inside, Ichigo's mind and heart were in enormous turmoil, half because he had, in his little mind, failed.
Failed to protect someone he loved, failed to see the danger approaching, and failed when he put someone else in a danger that was, by his own stupidity, his.
The other half was troubled by what he had seen, heard and did. His father believed Ichigo had bought the story he had given everyone else, but Ichigo had seen what happened, and heard what was said afterwards in his mother's funeral.
The last day that Kurosaki Ichigo cried.
His father was talking to some odd people he had never seen before, presumably old friends of his coming to give him their condolences, but their grim faces spoke of something else, and Ichigo found himself placing his attention on them.
The first one, a tall, thin man with strangely gray hair (strange because he seemed far too young to have lost hair coloration), wearing glasses and a face that said he didn't really want to be there, but stayed because he felt it was necessary.
Ichigo felt it too; he could tell it meant a lot for his father that he was there.
The second one was probably the strangest (and perhaps most intriguing) of the group. He was a tall man with pale blond hair that somehow managed to look as serious as the situation demanded, and at the same time look every bit as eccentric as anyone could be.
Who wears geta sandals coupled with a suit anyways? The bucket hat looked kind of cool, though.
The third, and last person of the trio of unknowns, was a dark skinned lady with purple hair and yellow eyes, Ichigo took note of her strange features and the fact that she seemed even more uncomfortable in the clothes she was wearing than the geta-wearing man.
They were having a quiet conversation with his father, and Ichigo couldn't help but eavesdrop, this seemed relevant to what he needed to know at the moment.
"How are you holding up, old friend?" The geta-wearing man asked, and Ichigo felt it was a stupid question, but then again, what does one say to a man who just lost the love of his life?
"As well as I can be, Kisuke." Now he had a name to add to the hat and the geta, Ichigo just needed to listen more closely in order to learn all he could about the people his father apparently knew very well, yet he had never heard of before.
"If there's anything we can do, let us know, okay?" Now it was the lady's voice offering her support, and Ichigo felt more than heard that the woman was honest, he was a very perceptive kid.
At that point, the conversation somehow grew even more quieter, and Ichigo could only hear snippets of their dialogue.
"... Hollow mask... zanpakuto... possible Quincy influence... White... "
They definitely knew what had happened to him on that night. But these terms were unfamiliar to him; he needed more information.
Ichigo decided that if he wanted information, he couldn't look for it using conventional means, this was, after all, territory that obviously no one else in history (normal history, anyways) could know anything about.
So he looked into the most obvious source of information, his goofy and oblivious father.
Ichigo figured that if his father had had a past life involving all those things he had learned, there must be some evidence of it somewhere, so he took every little chance he was left at home taking care of the twins to look through his father's things, from his underwear drawer to under the bed, he didn't turn up anything until he accidentally slipped on sweaty sock (Yuzu had yet to pick up his room that day, his father was pretty much lost without her), and landed painfully on his left elbow.
He didn't bother to spend much time registering the pain; he had heard a hollow sound where his elbow hit the floor.
He ran out to the kitchen to get a knife, which he easily slipped underneath the unnoticeably loose floor board, and revealed its hidden contents.
It was a bunch of papers, he noted with disappointment, though he wasn't quite sure what he was expecting, but then he saw one of the words he had promised himself to look into, written in a plain-looking book partially buried beneath the scrolls and papers.
ShinÅureijutsuin (Spiritual Arts Academy)
Academy for Shinigami.
Shinigami. That word again, was it something you studied for? He didn't think it actually meant that those who referred to themselves by that name were actually Death Gods; maybe it was a cult thing? The idea of his goofy, moronic and laid-back father being a god nearly made double over in laughter.
Then he remembered how he was during the funeral.
Perhaps it was something serious, and deserved looking into, and the source of information was right before him. So he got to reading and committing every single word to memory.
It seemed, at first, like a work of fiction, an encyclopedia for imaginary things and subjects, but then he saw the scribbling, the hand-written notes with a calligraphy that could belong to Isshin Kurosaki, very few could write as bad as he did and even fewer could decipher it.
Maybe it's a doctor thing.
Things like 'it works better when you point two fingers instead of three at the end of the incantation' and 'not looking underneath the Hollow's mask is made a rule because there's some very ugly people out there' written with in his father's characteristic hieroglyphs made him realize that this was the real deal, that everything here was true and that his father knew all about it.
From then on he kept reading, every time his father was out of the house he'd sneak into his room and commit more things to memory, he learned that his father was a Shinigami, a Death God, he learned about, and made sure to memorize, all that there was written about the four disciplines of the Shinigami, how Shinigami did their jobs, what Hollows were, what a Plus was, the Gotei 13, the Soul Society (which he now knew was the Afterlife), the Seireitei, and a wide array of different terms and subjects that he was pretty sure no one else (on the Human World, at least) had the slightest idea about.
AN: Zangetsu and his Quincy counterpart will make an appearance next chapter.
