Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
Spoiler Alert: As usual, the manga/anime up to the Lost Agent arc, and the Fade to Black movie for this chapter in particular.
A/N: I got some remarks in the last chapter that I had skimmed over the DiamondDust rebellion a little too quickly. I didn't have time this week, but sometime in the future I may go back and re-write that scene. The reason I didn't spend much time on it, however, is because I didn't consider it important to my story. For both the movie and the Amagai arc, Ichigo gave the appropriate people the information and isn't going to have much more to do with them during the time-period I'll be covering. (The only part of the Amagai scene that I considered significant was the conversation between Yamamoto and Ichigo about the Central 46.) Since there are plenty of people who just read the manga who might have been confused, I described the movie covered in this chapter in considerably more detail. However, I won't be describing much of the Bount arc. I haven't seen most of those episodes and have no real desire to change that. It will be covered off-screen in the next chapter.
Warnings: General bad language. I write characters swearing fairly freely; the hollow in particular has a foul mouth. The T rating for this fic is what I considered appropriate for the level of violence and sexual references, but a reviewer pointed out that swearing should be taken into account as well.
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On the morning of the ninth day after Aizen's betrayal, Ishida glanced at the door as Ichigo walked into the room in the shinigami's shihakusho and hakama.
"In uniform, Kurosaki?" The Quincy was reading on his top bunk, waiting for the other two to finish dressing so they could go to breakfast.
"They grabbed your shirt to wash it," Ichigo answered as he pulled his red chain over his torso.
"There are two more on the windowsill. I finished them last night."
"Thanks. I'm going to be training after breakfast, though. They'd just get ripped." Ichigo had just gotten Renji's response to the hell butterfly Hanataro had helped him send to the Sixth. Renji had agreed to meet him, and mentioned that he would invite Ikkaku because 'he hadn't cut loose in a while'. Ichigo wasn't sure what Renji meant, but had no objections. "So that's where you went?"
"It is where I have been spending the majority of my free time, Kurosaki."
"So it wasn't because of…" Ichigo twitched a hand in the vague direction of Ukitake's room.
"It is all ancient history, and I am not sentimental. It was a momentary curiosity, nothing more." Ishida's gaze was studiously fixed on the page in front of him.
"Ah. Good." Ichigo ran his hand through his hair, and finally just decided to blurt it out. "You know we'll back you up, right? Whatever you do."
Ishida remained quiet for several seconds before glancing at him and raising an eyebrow. "I assure you, I will not need it."
Ichigo snorted. The bastard was fine. "Never mind."
"Why were we talking about this again?" Ishida's lips were twitching slightly.
"Yeah, pretty dumb, right?" Ichigo grabbed his cleaver on the way out the door. Ishida hopped off of the bunk bed to join him as Orihime arrived wearing a new dress, also courtesy of Ishida's sewing spree, and the three headed to breakfast together.
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"Hoooo…" Ikkaku looked around the underground training cavern, eyebrows raised. "Who the hell makes something like this?"
"At least it's just empty space above here." Ichigo landed lightly behind Renji and Ikkaku. "The one under Geta-boshi's shop has got to violate the building codes."
The vice-captain snorted in aggreement. "So, what're we doing that you need to train against a bankai for?"
Ichigo reached across his face with his left hand, and pulled. In front of him, both shinigami stiffened, hands automatically landing on the hilts of their swords. They had both been present for the Espada lecture, and had seen his image with the mask on several times. The visuals, however, did not prepare them for the real thing. Ichigo's reiatsu, constantly flowing gently around them like a warm ocean current, turned darker, more powerful, and unmistakably hollow-like. Decades of training and every instinct they had told them that at their backs was an enemy, and urged them to attack instantaneously.
As one, they forced themselves to relax their grips without drawing. As they turned, Renji muttered, "Warn a guy, will ya?"
"Sorry." They couldn't read his facial expressions anymore, and it was a little hard to hear emotions in his echoing tones, but they got the distinct impression that he wasn't particularly repentant. "I didn't show you guys the rest of the fight with Ulquiorra."
That instantly got their attention. Speculation had been running rampant through the more junior captains and the vice-captains about what had actually happened. Most of the upper ranks were aware that Yamamoto and his vice-captain, at the least, had observed Ulquiorra's defeat. Unlike most of the rest of the footage of Ichigo, however, the only copy of that fight in Soul Society resided with Yamamoto, who had declined to release it.
"You gonna show us?" Ikkaku asked.
"No." Ichigo's voice was flat again as he walked past them towards the center of the room. "Not ever. And I don't have the projector anyway; Renji thought it'd get broken." Behind him, Renji shook his head at Ikkaku and mouthed 'tell you later'.
Ichigo continued, "After he hit me in the chest with a Cero, I went berserk, hollowified completely, and ripped him apart."
Renki raised a tattooed brow. "…and?"
"I need to do that again. Without going crazy. So I need to train."
"You want to become a hollow?" Renji asked incredulously.
Ikkaku shrugged, more sanguine about the prospect than anyone not currently in the Eleventh would likely be. "His is OK. I've hardly ever seen Taicho that cheerful. If you did it 'cause of a Cero to the chest, though, I dunno if we're gonna be able to help."
"I don't want to become a hollow." Ichigo didn't have any problems about admitting that- the avatars of his power were correct. Really, who would? "The old man thinks that might change if I need the power from my resurreccion badly enough. I'll only be using my mask- I won't release my sword."
"Last time you said a resurreccion was like a bankai, right?" Ikkaku unsheathed his sword and slammed it against the end of its scabbard. "Grow, Hozukimaru!"
"Howl, Zabimaru!" Renji's blade extended into segments as, next to him, Ikkaku's sword lengthened into the naginata of its initial shikai form.
"Kind of. The power-up is the same, anyway. You ready?" Ichigo got into a guarding stance in preparation.
"Does that mean that when you pull on your mask, it's like when you release your shikai?" the third seat continued his line of thought.
Ichigo turned his sword, permanently in the first release, and let the light flash off it in illustration. "How the hell would I know?"
Renji snorted, and Ikkaku shook his head before finishing. "It feels like you got about twice as strong. So you're basically adding the power of another shikai to what you've got without the mask, right?"
Given that when he used his mask in bankai, his power was also at least doubled, Ichigo was pretty sure that wasn't how the math worked. "Not really…"
Renji smirked, getting where Ikkaku was going with his line of thought, and not really listening to Ichigo. "So, twice the power of a shikai, against two bankai."
Ichigo blinked. "Eh?"
In unison, the two men pointed their weapons at him, and their battle auras flared. "BAN-KAI!"
The mask prevented the two men from seeing the shock on Ichigo's face as he stared at Ikkaku and finally put several of Renji's cryptic comments together. However, he didn't have a clue why Ikkaku kept it hidden, or why Renji thought Ikkaku had told him about it. His eyes narrowed, as their respective clouds of wind and dust cleared and he saw the three oversized weapons that comprised Ikkaku's bankai for the second time. Hozukimaru had wielded them in the fight against Ikkaku when he had been under Muramasa's control, just as Zangetsu-no-ossan had once fought against him with the black daito of his younger self. Strangely, Ichigo had never wondered why the spear had altered forms.
Ichigo decided he would never admit he hadn't known. Right now, it would just make the training session more effective.
Ichigo pulled his right hand across his eyes, then felt his mask after his vision darkened. The visor wasn't perched over the eyes like he had thought it would be. "Hey, what does this look like?"
"You're gonna fight us blind?" Renji's bankai coiled around him, and Ichigo could feel the skeleton head of the serpent rising high above their heads, preparing to strike.
"Why do people keep asking that? Yes, I've gotta train. What does my mask look like?"
"White, two stripes down, and a new stripe going across where the eyes were," Ikkaku summarized briefly. He began to twirl the giant axe blade with both hands as the other two segments of his bankai spun around him and the carved dragon that Ichigo couldn't see began to slowly fill with red light. 'Lazy bum…'
Renji knew enough about the limitations of Ikkaku's bankai to take the lead as his friend's spirit pressure began slowly rising. He opened the fight by sending the snake-head directly at Ichigo, who caught the open jaw on his upright sword. Ichigo was pushed halfway across the training grounds before bracing his feet and pushing back against the bared teeth of the serpent.
As the dragon on Ikkaku's weapon reached a quarter of the way full, Renji withdrew his snake and sent it whipping towards Ichigo from the side, forcing him to jump back repeatedly as the skull forcibly knocked the rocks of the training room aside to follow its target.
"You just gonna keep on dancing, Ichigo?" Renji yelled mockingly. In response, Ichigo jumped high into the air and sent three black scythes of energy at the joints of the snake following him up, without calling out the attack name. Hihio Zabimaru broke apart into a scattered collection of vertebrae that fell to the ground of the training room with a crash.
The glow at the ends of the fragments was visible through the dust as the bones began to levitate and snap back together. Renji laughed. "That's not gonna work, Ichigo! His joints are connected together by my reiatsu! I intentionally separated the sections to dodge your attack. You can't cut them!"
"I know that, idiot." The echoing voice came from directly behind him. Renji froze, eyes wide. As he began to turn, the blunt edge of Zangetsu came to rest against his neck. "Watch your back."
The shinigami jumped away and sent his bankai at the Vizard now visible through the settling dust. Ichigo timed it carefully, and flash-stepped slightly to the side to grab the red mane of the snake head with his left hand, riding it as he had done in the heat of battle several times already.
"Crazy bastard!" Renji swung Hihio Zabimaru high up into the air to try to dislodge his passenger as Ichigo grunted, almost losing his grip. In response, Ichigo stabbed Zangetsu into the joints between the bones of the snake-head, giving himself two handles instead of just one.
Renji's eyes widened. 'Shit…'
"Getsuga Tensho!"
The dark energy blast, now named and with considerably more power, sliced through the snake-head, separating the jawbone from the rest of the skull and the skull from the vertebrae. The entire snake collapsed as Ichigo landed lightly on the ground with pieces of bone falling like rain around him. Once again, the snake reformed itself, but this time as the pieces reconnected there was a noticeable lag between the reattachment of the joints. The snake tried to raise itself up, collapsed, then finally managed to begin twisting again as the front part raised itself slightly above Renji's head.
Ichigo frowned behind the mask. "What's wrong?"
Rather than answer, the redhead sent the snake after Ichigo once more. Ichigo dodged the strike, which was slower now that half of the snake couldn't raise itself off the ground, and struck at the joint two vertebrae below the head. It cleaved apart, and the head lay on the ground with pink sparks connecting it and the still-mobile body. Instead of levitating the head of the snake to reconnect it, Renji whipped the body towards the disconnected head, physically connecting them. With a pull, Hihio Zabimaru came back to coil around him as he stood in the center, breathing heavily.
"Is this just the second time you've used it?" Ichigo thought back; Renji had fought Byakuya, and had just gotten out of the hospital three days ago… it probably was. In the future, the vice-captain had clearly done some serious training before being stationed in the living world.
"So what?" Renji was still sweating from the effort it had taken to use his reiatsu to reconstruct the snake.
Ichigo turned from him to the third-seat waiting patiently. Ikkaku had never been a man to interfere in a one-on-one fight. "You'll be able to control it longer eventually, and you'll be able to fire an energy cannon and use the reiatsu between the joints to tie stuff up. Sorry."
"We're not finished!" Stung at the implication that he had been overestimated, Renji managed to send Hihio Zabimaru forward one more time. Ichigo didn't even bother to use his sword to block, just caught one of the fangs in his hands and braced himself. He grunted, straining against the pressure, before hauling the head to the side and slamming it onto the ground.
"Take a breather, Renji." Ikkaku pointed the weapons in his hands at Ichigo. "I'm almost glad you found out. I've wanted to try this since I heard you'd gotten Bankai."
"So why didn't you use it in our first fight? You'd have won easily then." Ichigo knew Ikkaku had thought he was going to die, but still hadn't fully released his sword. That took determination. Or stupidity.
"'Cause it's a secret. Obviously. Otherwise I'd go around telling people about it, and then they'd want to promote me or something." Ikkaku charged at Ichigo, swinging both the oversized guan dao in his left hand and the spade in his right at Ichigo, who caught the weapons on the blade of his sword. They strained at each other for a second before Ikkaku smirked and flared his reiatsu, pushing forward.
Ichigo's eyes behind his sightless mask opened in an involuntary gesture of surprise as the edges of Ikkaku's weapons began to cut into the edge of Zangetsu. 'Shit!' He instantly disengaged and jumped back, but Ikkaku had been expecting the movement and jumped after him with a yell, swinging the polearm in his left hand and catching Ichigo on the face with a glancing blow.
Ichigo flew back, eyes tightly shut, as the upper left quarter of his mask shattered. He landed in a crouching position, one knee on the ground. 'Lots of destructive power in his weapons, and more reiatsu, but no greater speed or defensive ability.' He felt Ikkaku flying in at him from above, both weapons pointing downwards, and swung Zangetsu at him one-handed with his eyes still closed.
"Getsuga Tensho!"
Ikkaku swatted the energy blast away with the spade, but the trajectory of his jump was changed enough that he landed a fair distance away from Ichigo. They paused, facing each other, gauging the damage to their opponent and themselves.
Ichigo spoke first. "Feels like your blades are brittle." The last Getsuga had taken a chunk out of the spade Ikkaku used to block it.
"Yours is looking a little chewed on too. And that mask ain't invulnerable either. What's the time limit on it again?"
Ichigo ripped his left hand across his face, and the mask reformed completely. "What time limit?"
They charged at each other, clashing repeatedly and driving each other back and forth across the training grounds. Both men were wielding their ridiculously oversized weapons without apparent effort. Ichigo found Ikkaku to be just as fast when using his bankai as when he was just fighting with a sword and scabbard. He did not try to catch the blades with his own again, and instead turned or deflected the strikes with his own sword and retaliated when he could. Soon, both men were covered with a dozen small cuts, and Ichigo knew better than to let up the pressure of the fight so that Ikkaku could heal the cut streaming blood into his left eye.
In the back of his mind, he fleetingly recognized the irony of their current positions- his mask protected him from the cuts to the face that had plagued him in their first fight, and even if blood were to cover his eyes it could no longer hamper his vision. As the thought occurred to him, however, he reached the limit of his ability to sense the area around him, more than twenty minutes after he had blocked out his vision, and the world disappeared.
He grunted as Ikkaku landed the first serious wound of the fight, a slashing cut to the torso that glanced off of his rib cage and kept going to lay his right arm open to the bone. Ichigo instantly flash-stepped back blind, but what had worked with Soi Fon the day before in a bare training hall failed him now. He tripped over a rock, flew head-over-heels to land in a sprawled heap across the training grounds from Ikkaku, and got go his knees groaning.
"HIKOTSU TAIHO!"
Ichigo turned towards the voice in shock and raised his sword, still blind, barely in time to shield himself from the brunt of the Baboon Bone Cannon. He flew backwards as Renji whipped his considerably-shortened bankai after him.
The snake-head caught Ichigo in mid-air with an audible crunch. His left arm snapped from the impact of the two front left fangs, and the right upper fang was pierced through Ichigo's stomach. His legs and his right arm, still with a death-grip on Zangetsu, were pointed down the snake's throat.
"Shouldn't have told me I could do that," Renji called, clearly exhausted despite the long minutes of rest he had gotten while waiting for the opening. "The snake's still got a grudge against Zangetsu. The monkey too. They're holding us together."
"What the hell are you doing?" Ikkaku snapped furiously.
"Shaddup. This ain't a fight for pride," Renji growled back. "The point's to beat him down 'till he can't take it anymore. Think you can handle your part now?"
"Dunno if he's gonna be able to keep-" Ikakku cut himself off and turned back to the center of the training grounds as Ichigo spoke.
"Getsuga… Tensho." The energy blast from the sword pointed down Hihio Zabimaru's throat shattered the jaw once more. As the snake-head shattered once more, the skull, the vertebrae, and the teen still pierced between the fangs fell to the ground. Renji hissed at the pull on his power, and finally left Bankai, completely drained. He sat on the nearest outcropping of rock to watch the fight finish. Neither of them questioned that it would continue. Ichigo was, after all, still conscious.
Ichigo staggered to his feet, leaning on his sword, as the fangs inside of him disappeared. The energy blast had shattered part of his mask, exposing his chin and mouth. Blood was streaming from the hole through his stomach and from the cut in his right arm and torso, and his left arm hung at his side, mangled and useless. He raised his sword singlehandedly into a guarding position.
"You think you can win like this, Ichigo?" Ikkaku raised his own weapons, considerably more chipped than they had been at the beginning of the fight, but still quite functional. "What was it that one guy said? Something like 'you got the crap beaten out of you by the other guy, and I'm stronger than him. You're dead.' It's still true. And that mask of yours ain't gonna last much longer. If you've got anything left, better pull it out now."
Ichigo coughed up a mouthful of blood. "I said…"
It was Renji and Ikkaku.
"…what time limit?"
They were friendly rivals, training partners, friends.
"The mask, Nnoitra…"
They'd stood and would have stood against the entire Seireitei for him.
"…they're not the things about those fights you should be remembering."
They'd trusted that he was doing the right thing even if they didn't understand what or why.
"What you should be remembering…"
He'd fight beside them. He'd die with them. He'd never regret a minute of it.
"… is that all of those fights…"
But fuck if he was going to lose to them.
"... happened months ago."
He reached. He pulled. His hollow's howls of glee echoed within his mind as his battle aura flared around him. For the first time he called on a power he'd never touched consciously.
The mangled arm at his side twisted and snapped into place, healing completely. The blood dripping down his torso and from his arm stopped and the cuts sealed smoothly without a scar.
The hollow's laughter turned to a scream of frustration as Ichigo jerked his left hand across his face, repairing his mask once more.
Ikkaku and Renji stared in disbelief as he raised Zangetsu once more, both hands on the hilt, the only evidence that he'd been fighting them at all the chips in the blade of his sword and the drying blood on his arms and ripped shihakusho.
"…that's just unfair." Renji was out of the fight and knew it, but stood up anyway, with Zabimaru still in Shikai in his right hand.
"High-speed regeneration, huh?" Ikkaku grinned, raising his polearms once more. "If you win this fight, I'll do you a favor and not mention that to Taicho. He'd never leave you alone."
"What do you mean, if?" Ichigo faced him across the training ground for a frozen moment. At an unseen signal, they flash-stepped towards each other for one final pass, and blurred into stillness on the opposite ends of the clearing from where they had started.
Ichigo grunted, leaning on his sword with one hand at his side. The cut had passed between his hips and ribcage. Under his hand, the wound sealed.
Ikkaku stumbled, unharmed. The hilts of his two polearms stayed in his hands as the blades dropped, cut cleanly below the bases in a single strike, exactly where Ichigo had aimed. 'Shit…'
Ichigo dissolved his mask, and opened his eyes to daylight for the first time since they had begun. "Thanks for the fight. There's a hot spring in the rocks behind you. The water in it heals minor wounds."
Ikkaku sighed, dropping out of bankai and sealing his spear back into a katana. In the back of his mind, he felt Hozukimaru grumble as the dragon curled up and went back to sleep. "That's useful. You coming, Renji?"
Renji shook his head. He had not attacked Ichigo with anything but his bankai, and was unscratched since Ichigo had turned his blade the single time he had struck at Renji directly. "I'm gonna get back to the Sixth. I'll see you both tonight."
"Ichigo?"
"Gotta talk to the old man. I'll get the blood off in a few minutes." Ichigo raised his hand in farewell as Renji flash-stepped up into the air rather than attempt the ladder leading to the entrance, despite his exhaustion. Ikkaku nodded and headed in the direction Ichigo had indicated as Ichigo sat on a convenient outcropping of rock.
Ichigo opened his eyes onto a sunny day. As he saw the white fist headed for his face he flash-stepped back, his reflexes still singing from combat. "That's not gonna work twice. What's your problem?"
"IDIOT!"
"His 'problem', Ichigo, is that you chose to heal yourself rather than enter Resurreccion." His sword was in his customary position on top of a nearby flagpole.
"Chose? I didn't even know what I was doing!" Ichigo snapped back defensively.
"You followed your instinct! That's what it means to be a hollow!" The pale teen had subsided after his first attack, but his sword was still unwrapped in his hand. Ichigo wasn't sure he remembered that they couldn't hurt each other with them anymore.
The boy continued, "You reached your power, and then you didn't fight with it! You just healed yourself!"
"I can heal now, though," Ichigo pointed out. "That was your problem when we split up, wasn't it? There's not gonna be much that can injure us anyway, and we'll heal any damage we do take."
"And when we're combined we won't be able to use anything else. Because you're scared." The word dripped with all of the scorn the hollow could stuff into his doubled tones.
"I'm not scared. It was just the first try."
"Instant regeneration will make an attempt to force you into complete hollowification almost impossible." The zanpakuto's tone was expressionless. "With just your mask on, you approach the power of a bankai. The addition of high-speed regeneration means you will be able to survive long enough to outlast most of the final releases of both shinigami and arrancar."
In Ichigo's opinion, that pretty much solved the problem of involuntary hollowification. He was smart enough not to say so, however. He could picture the lectures on fighting instinct and fighting with all his strength that he'd get from both of them. "So when this is over I'll find Ulquiorra again or something. He might even find me. He'll probably want revenge for Aizen."
"That is… a possible solution," Zangetsu-no-ossan agreed neutrally. "Until then, attempt meditation. It may have an effect now that you have consciously used your hollow powers."
"It'll take more than that to wake up his fighting instinct," the hollow sneered. "Because of this, even a sword through the stomach ain't gonna work."
Ichigo rolled his eyes as settled into the meditation position once again. Except for the fact that he couldn't use his bankai until he had hollowified, he really didn't have a problem with that.
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After lunch, Yoruichi stood with Ichigo at the entrance to a white maze of hallways interspersed with periodic doors. She handed Ichigo a thin metal circle. "Here. A typical kido-based monitor, probably pretty close to what Aizen's got in Las Noches. Make sure you can recognize the feel of them. Once you're within range of the spell, it will transmit your movements to an identical plate at a central station; Soi Fon's at ours right now. After you find her she'll let us know where you screwed up."
Ichigo felt the plate, then extended his reiatsu senses down the closest corridor. "The ceilings of the corridors. There are… six of them in this one."
"Good. The limitations are that the kido doesn't pass through walls, and that they're motion sensors. If there's movement within the range of the sensor, the monitoring station generally switches to the view from that circle automatically. However, there hasn't been a motion sensor yet that can pick up flash-step. If you can move too fast to see, you can move too fast for the sensors to detect, as long as you don't stop within the range of one." She took the monitor back and shoved him into the doorway.
"Are there any safe places to stop?" Ichigo extended his senses as far as they would go through the maze, finding Soi Fon's spirit pressure near the center. She was doing double duty as the judge and the target; he would be homing in on her reiatsu in practice for following Aizen's.
"Figure that out yourself, kid," the shapeshifter answered, grinning. Ichigo grimaced and began flash-stepping through the maze, taking twists and turns that let him in the general direction of Soi Fon's monitoring station. He paused once inside of a small room without any monitors that he could sense, catching his breath after the sequence of short flash-steps, before heading onwards.
Finally, he reached the center. Soi Fon barely glanced up as she manipulated the monitor to call up several places where Ichigo had been caught on camera. "Pathetic, Kurosaki. You pause for far too long between steps, particularly when choosing directions. Do not hesitate. Go to a different entrance, and try again."
Ichigo sighed and flashed out without saying a word. It was going to be a long afternoon.
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As the three left the mock-up of Las Noches, Yoruichi waved Soi Fon on ahead and grabbed Ichigo's shirt before he could flash-step away. "Hang on a second. We need to talk."
Ichigo followed her as she walked into the woods and settled onto a tree stump. "What's up?"
"You know I saw your father last night, right?"
"Yeah."
"Have you thought at all about what your family thinks about all of this?" Yoruichi was regretting starting the conversation already, she'd never been good with heart-to-heart talks…
"I know being away from home can't be great, but it won't be for much longer," Ichigo answered, confused. "Are they OK?"
"Yeah, they're fine, he's just…" dammit, she wasn't going to get anywhere like this. "Isshin is pretty sure he never told you about being a shinigami. Is that right?"
"It's fine," Ichigo told her. "If he had a good reason, he'll tell me about it eventually."
Yoruichi blinked. She'd expected some irritation, not calm acceptance. "O..kay. You might want to let him know that. Just because they'd know anything you have to say doesn't mean you shouldn't say it anyway. It's not just your father. Your sisters would like to hear from you too."
Ichigo shrugged. "Sure. Unohana-san will probably let me borrow her cell phone. What time is it in Karakura now?"
Crap. She'd known this was a bad idea. No-one was sure how Isshin felt about the monitoring, but the girls and Chad would tell Ichigo he was being spied on the second they were in contact with him. "The phone was meant for Unohana's use only. I doubt you'll be able to pry it away from her. But I'm heading back to Kisuke's tomorrow morning to pick up some stuff he's made for these simulations. I can take any messages you have, or any memories you want to share."
Ichigo froze suddenly. "Through the Senkaimon?"
"How else?"
"Be careful. Inoue was kidnapped when she was heading back to the living world from Soul Society. They're not secure." How the hell had he forgotten?
Yoruichi's golden eyes narrowed. "Huh. I wonder how they manage that. I'll let the right people know, but I'd pity anyone who tried to kidnap me."
As he thought more about it, Ichigo couldn't help but agree. "I'll put something together for the girls before you go."
"If you've got any memories of Isshin acting like a responsible adult, include those too," Yoroichi suggested.
"That'll be harder."
"Try anyway." She flash-stepped away.
Ichigo sighed, pulling out the memory projector and flicking it to 'record'. "Like he's ever acted like a responsible adult." With no one around to ask questions or narrate to, he just let the memories flow.
/ Glad cries of welcome as he stepped into the house for the first time in a month, grateful to be home despite his injuries./
/ "I want to know why Ichi-nii's hurting."/
/ They crept into his room as he drifted in and out of consciousness and ate dinner next to his bed, and Karin tried to cheer Yuzu up with a story about a recent victory in a soccer game, and the boy who had played with her, with white hair and green eyes./
To fulfill a promise, he remembered a fireworks display that he'd never seen the equal of in the living world.
/ "What's the occasion?"
"The birth of a boy and twin girls to the Shiba family. You'd better be there, Shinigami."
"I'll send the memory to my sisters."/
Finally, he turned his mind to the parts of the fight with Aizen he had not shown the Shinigami.
/ "Think carefully about why Aizen went to Karakura Town within Soul Society. If you don't go, then not just the people you want to protect, but everyone in Karakura will die by his hands."
"Dad… open the Senkaimon."
The older man looked at him in askance.
"…I don't need you to tell me to do that."/
The instruction for Jinzen and his sword's final attack.
/ "In a place like this I'll be able to teach you."
"Teach me what?"
"The final Getsuga Tensho."/
And, as the last memory, the one that had come first.
/ "You aren't mistaking me for anyone else. No matter how hard you look."
"…so it seems."
"I know you probably have a million questions. We'll put them all together and-"
"I don't. I have nothing to ask. If you didn't tell me up until now, you probably had a reason. And that's your problem. I don't know how to ask about that. I don't know a good way to ask without trampling over and putting shame to your feelings. That's why I'll wait. Until you feel like you want to tell me. Until you feel like it's alright to tell me. Until then, you don't need to."/
More than two hours after she had left him, he found Yoruichi, and pressed the record into her hand. As he walked away, he called out over his shoulder, "Tell him it's still true."
The next day Isshin and his daughters would watch the transmission. By general agreement, none of the rest of the occupants of the warehouse would be around. And the girls would watch their father walk away, eyes glistening, for once completely silent.
"…daddy…"
"Not bad, old man."
It didn't last.
"MASAKI! OUR SON DOESN'T HATE ME! I'M A GOOD FATHER!"
"… idiot."
HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM
Rukia glanced up from her dinner as the noise in the dining room of the Thirteenth quieted significantly. Seeing the familiar orange hair, she raised a hand so that Ichigo could see her past the shoulders of the group of unseated shinigami surrounding her. The chatter picked up again as he came across the room towards her, and Rukia narrowed her eyes at several groups of women glancing over at him and whispering behind their hands.
The calendar had gone on sale at the beginning of the day, and, with the free publicity from rumors still being swapped between the divisions, the noble houses, and the academy, the first small printing had sold out before lunch. Matsumoto had convinced Hisagi Shuuhei to use the presses in the Ninth to print a rapid second run, which was moving off the shelves just as quickly. If they stayed in the mess hall, it would be just a matter of time before some idiot came up to ask for an autograph.
Rukia finished the final bite of her meal and met him halfway. They exchanged greetings as she brought her tableware to the front of the room, and had moved halfway down the hall before she asked why he had come.
"The meeting in an hour is gonna be mostly about some kids you were taking care of in the Rukongai a long time ago," Ichigo answered. "I thought I should let you know about them before anyone else."
Rukia frowned. "Everyone I ran with in the Seventy-eighth is dead, except for Renji. We came to the Academy together."
Ichigo winced. "Yeah, the kids are also dead. That was kind of the problem. They'd been merged with a hollow that possessed people and stole their memories, so you forgot them. The kids didn't forget about you and came back. You'd promised to give them names."
Rukia was now even more confused. "… maybe if you started from the beginning?" She glanced around, trying to think of a place where they would have some privacy without going all the way to the Kuchiki mansion. "Ukitake-taicho may allow us to use his garden."
The captain was still catching up on work from the previous day, and had not left his office. Upon hearing Rukia's request, he gave them permission to use it, and then added, "You may also join us at the meeting, if you desire."
"Excuse me, Taicho?" Rukia wasn't sure that she would be welcome at a meeting for the captains and vice-captains.
"Kenpachi-taicho has been including his men, and has set something of a precedent," Ukitake explained. "Kiyone and Sentaro will also be joining me, and I have invited the third seat of the Fifth. With Aizen's betrayal and Hinamori still unconscious, I'm afraid they've been left out of the loop. Their morale has been terrible."
Rukia bowed. "Thank you very much, Taicho!"
She and Ichigo went into the garden, and he leaned against a tree next to the small koi pond as she sat on the bank. Ichigo decided to show mostly the more personal stuff, rather than what he was about to show in the meeting. She stilled at the projected image, of a familiar hillside where too many friends lay buried. Her double, clad in a kimono rather than a uniform, stood behind a scythe-wielding young man with dark hair and next to a pale blond girl with striking green eyes. As Ichigo's image, with a little stuffed lion sitting on his shoulder, demanded answers from the two strangers, Rukia strode forward to confront them.
/ "Who in the world are you? How do you know my name?"
"What about me? You remember me, don't you, Nee-san?" the lion wailed.
"Silence, you strange creature!"/
"How strange that I would forget Kon."
"Just Kon?"
"You are entirely forgettable," she answered loftily.
"Brat." Ichigo let the images continue as Rukia's double suddenly clutched her head and curled up in pain. The young man attacked Ichigo while the girl transported her surrogate sister away, and Ichigo ended the projection. "Do you remember them?"
"No. Seeing their faces… I feel as though I should, but nothing else."
"For Renji, it took a while. It might come if you went back to where the hollow attacked you three."
Ichigo skipped forward to the confrontation between the children and Ichigo. Rukia's grip on her uniform tightened at seeing the three of them fuse and attack Ichigo as he avoided striking back at them. Her pale double displayed more speed and power then she had ever hoped to wield. As Ichigo's image dodged and blocked, she could not help but remember the first time she had seen him, when he had clumsily attempted to attack a hollow with a baseball bat.
/ "That man… we must reap that man's memories. Then no one will be able to remember Rukia any more."
"That's it. Then we will be the only ones Rukia cares for." Both voices came from the same being.
"You lunatics!" /
Her eyes widened as her brother appeared just in time to save Ichigo's neck from the scythe.
/ "Byakuya!"
"If what you said was true, then I should be the one to finish this."/
"Nii-sama…" Rukia bowed her head in thanks. "He is an honorable man."
"You're both crazy," Ichigo informed her. The scene continued around them as Ichigo asked the captain of the Sixth to allow him to take a final attempt. Rukia froze at his final act, her hand involuntarily rising to her chest, while in front of her Ichigo's black daito went cleanly through the heart of her double.
The surroundings returned to the peaceful koi pond as they both remembered a hollow on a dark night, the plea of his younger sister, a final desperate attempt to save all of their lives. Finally, Rukia spoke. "There was never a debt. I did you a disservice. I destroyed any chance you had of a normal existence forever."
Ichigo snorted, thinking of final techniques and a road not travelled. "Trust me, I could go back to the normal life if I wanted to. I don't think I'd like it much. I'm not sure I could enjoy having peace until I die."
"You might have been able to, once." Rukia sighed. "What happened to the children?"
Ichigo raised the projector once more, and they watched the final goodbye.
/ "I remembered your names. You're Homura and Shizuku. Back-to-back, you shine brightly… together."/
As Rukia's image screamed into the sky over their dead bodies, Ichigo ended the projection.
Rukia sat in silence, trying to remember two children she had obviously loved. Finally, she shook her head. "Nothing."
"It'll come." Ichigo glanced up at the sliding door to Ukitake's quarters. "Looks like he's ready to go. You still coming?"
"I would not dare miss it." Before they joined her captain, she paused. "Your cousins taught me that some debts can only be paid forward. If you cannot accept that I do not need repayment, remember that the actions you take are my responsibility, and live your life well."
"That was almost profound, midget."
"It is the accumulation of my far greater experience, cretin." The conversation turned down well-travelled paths as they walked across the bridge to join the waiting shinigami.
HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM
In the first division, Ichigo opened the meeting by giving a brief summary of the disaster from the explosion in the Research and Development Institute and Mayuri's and Rukia's memory loss.
"The problem was a couple of weird hollows that used to be kids that Rukia took care of when she was in the Rukongai. They erased Mayuri's memories, but he's got a copy of his memories in an artificial brain so everyone else could still remember him."
Mayuri sniffed at the incredulous looks he was getting from the rest of the room. As Kurosaki had just shown, it was a perfectly reasonable precaution.
"Since he couldn't remember anything, though, he went nuts and destroyed his lab. It released some kind of weird living-spirit-particle sludge that buried a third of the city." The image showed Ichigo standing with Hisagi and a group of shinigami from the Ninth as giant worm-like creatures rising from the advancing white ooze attacked them.
Yamamoto decided that an audit of the current experiments at the RDI was in order.
"Rukia didn't have her memories stored or anything, so she forgot everyone and everyone forgot she existed. Except for my Gikon, for some weird reason. I remembered her after a few hours, and went to Geta-boshi's to figure out what was going on. He didn't remember her either, but he had his records. All of the physical stuff was still there. That's one of the reasons Byakuya started believing me, since she was still registered as part of the Kuchiki family."
/ "I see I've got her name down right here," the shopkeeper murmured.
"See?"
"But I'm sorry… I really don't remember her."/
"That is unfortunate for Kuchiki, Kurosaki, but memories about an unseated officer are not critical to the Seireitei. We need to know how to stop the spirit particles from spreading if the explosion happens again," Soi Fon said coldly.
"Me telling you how won't help- that's the problem. If this happens again, you won't remember me telling you how. You didn't just forget her. You forgot everything she had been involved with. She made me a shinigami, so no one knew me." Their surroundings turned to a street in the Seireitei, and Komamura blinked to see himself jump in front of Kurosaki's image.
/ "You're not getting away!"/
A group of shinigami led by Renji and Hisagi ran up from the street at back of the room, and the projected Ichigo chose to retreat rather than fight them. Komamura's image went into Bankai, and his massive samurai swung at the boy in the air. Komamura winced as he noted that his image's attacks were doing considerable damage to the already-battered Seireitei. The fight continued until the black-clad boy released a barrage of energy scythes at the figure swatting at him. As the giant fell, his final strike took Ichigo's image unaware, and they both plummeted.
"Renji trained to reach the final release to save her, so he forgot he'd gotten there."
Kuchiki Byakuya's eyes narrowed as the surroundings turned to a darkened evening in a very familiar garden.
/ "BAN-KAI!" The night exploded into wind and blue light. "What's keeping you, Renji?"
"Damn it!"
"Aren't you going to use your bankai?"
"Me… use bankai?"
The vice-captain attacked repeatedly in the first release and was effortlessly batted away as his opponent demanded he remember what he was capable of. As he flew away the final time, the man in black turned to face the owner of the mansion.
"Scatter…" They stood across from each other for a frozen moment. There was no fear in either man's eyes.
"…Hisana was from Inuzuri in Southern Rukongai, District 78."
"Thanks." The surroundings blurred around him as he flashed away./
Rather than speak again, Ichigo shifted the surroundings back to a scene that most of the people present had already viewed.
/"Oh, yes, Kuchiki Rukia. When you were discovered in the world of the living, the first thing I did was eliminate the Central 46."/
"Their desertion happened because Rukia was supposed to be executed, so you forgot you were at war."
"And we didn't notice that we were missing three captains?" Hitsugaya asked skeptically.
"Kenpachi had tried to stop Mayuri and was stuck under his sludge. As far as I know, you thought the same thing had happened to the other three."
"Did Aizen make any moves during this period?" Yamamoto's focus was on the greater threat, that of a potential attack while they were unaware should Aizen find the hollow-children and use them early.
"No. I don't know what he remembered, or when he got his memories back. He might not have remembered he had Urahara's Hogyoku."
"Did distance have an effect on the memory loss?" Mayuri asked curiously. He was already planning to hide certain experiments from the audit that would inevitably follow these revelations.
"I…I'm not sure. Urahara-san didn't remember her, but except for the thing with the Hogyoku he might not have had a reason to. I remembered that I was a shinigami- I didn't think anything was weird about Kon being around. I just didn't remember how I'd become one until I fell asleep and started dreaming."
"Possibly distance, possibly Kuchiki's effect on your life, possibly some combination…" Mayuri started speculating about ways to test the effects of the hollows if they were captured as Ichigo continued the projection on the same hill he had shown Rukia earlier, starting with the scythe-wielding boy's attack on him. He continued until they disappeared in order to give the watching shinigami some idea of the hollow-children's capabilities and fighting style.
"The day continued to suck." The scene shifted to images Hitsugaya, Ikkaku, and Yumichika staring down at him from a grouping of rocks as a squad of shinigami surrounded Ichigo and his image. Hitsugaya stepped slightly to the left so that he was not actually standing inside of the image of the squad leader, whom he recognized as his eighth seat.
/ "You won't escape this time. We're taking you in, ryoka. Don't try to resist!" /
As the brief exchange with Ikkaku began, Hitsugaya rubbed his forehead and asked, "Did it ever occur to you to simply surrender and explain what was going on, Kurosaki?"
Ichigo scratched his head. "…no. Why, do you think you'd have listened?"
The observers watched resignedly (and, in Toshiro's case, with considerable satisfaction) as the youngest captain's image took over the fight and hit his opponent with a high-level binding kido. Ichigo was actually standing within the tree his image was bound to, and couldn't see Renji's interception of Hitsugaya's ice attack. Annoyed, he skipped forward a few minutes. The images of Yamamoto and his two students watched impassively as Soi Fon ordered the Onmitsukido to move in, and the true observers looked up in shock as they were intercepted by Benihime's red light.
/ "Long time no see, Captain-commander."
"How did you manage to return?"
"Oh, I've always known how."/
"And it would've been nice if that had stayed secret," Yoruichi remarked dryly from the back of the room. Ichigo shrugged in apology.
"Urahara-san let you guys know what was going on while Renji and I went after Rukia. Renji started getting his memories of Rukia back when we were in the Rukongai."
"Familiar surroundings," Mayuri muttered, adding the information to his mental notes… which he would be backing up tonight as soon as he went to his lab.
"I was defending you even though I didn't remember you?" Renji asked, bewildered.
"You remembered in your gut. And I think you'd talked to your sword- when stuff started exploding you were able to go into Bankai." The scene shifted to one of Ichigo and Renji riding on the giant snake as sections of the Seireitei fell down around them. "We followed Rukia's spirit ribbon to where the kids had taken her."
Everyone familiar with the vice-captain of the Sixth, including Renji himself, concluded that the 'we' referred solely to Ichigo. To find a particular spirit ribbon, particularly in the high-reiryoku environment of the Seireitei, was an advanced technique that Renji had never shown a great deal of aptitude for. The scene shifted to the children's fusion with their surrogate big sister and Dark Rukia's subsequent activation of the mechanism in Mayuri's lab that released the spirit particles that had overrun Seireitei.
Ichigo let the fight run once more, and they watched as ichigo's image danced around the lightning-fast scythe without retaliating, yelling at Rukia to take control. As his image fired off a high-level binding kido, Kuchiki Byakuya noted the minute expression on his own face as he first saw the little sister he could not remember, and realized that he was comparing her appearance once again to that of his dead wife. As the illusionary nobleman stepped up to do his final duty as the head of the Kuchiki family, the boy behind him intervened.
/ "She sacrificed her own life in order to protect mine and my family's. She risked everything for me. I refuse to give up."
"Do as you will." /
Byakuya sighed slightly. Declining to attack him in his garden, allowing him to interfere in his final duty… apparently, he hadn't found the boy nearly as irritating when he couldn't remember their first set of meetings.
For the first time in that fight, Ichigo's image retaliated, and the final pass ended with Ichigo's sword through Dark Rukia's heart, accompanied by the strangled cries of half the room. The screams of the hollow that originally had possessed the children echoed in the observer's ears as the surroundings around the images exploded.
"You crazy-" Renji began, incensed, before being interrupted by his captain.
"Silence, Renji. If he had failed, both would have died. He repaid his debt."
The images that followed showed Byakuya and Renji destroy the building with the out-of-control mechanism that was covering the Seireitei. Urahara arrived as Rukia ran to where her former charges lay.
/ "But when I came to, you were both gone… and then I forgot…"
"That's probably because the hollow reaped your memories." The former captain of the Twelfth approached her from the side. "And additionally, these two have a special ability that allows them to teleport. I think they place the hollow inside of themselves just before they died so they could protect you. When the hollow realized that it had accidentally possessed a pair of dead children, it probably panicked and ran back to Hueco Mundo. But while there, they took control of the hollow, and then came back because of their strong desire to see you again."/
Ichigo ended the projection there. "Once he'd gotten his memories back, Mayuri knew how to dissolve the stuff, so you got the trapped people out from under the gunk pretty quickly. There actually weren't too many fatalities, but I think most people gave their share of the cleanup to the Fourth."
"What were their names?" Isane asked quietly. Rather than answer, Ichigo looked at where Rukia was standing behind her captain.
"The girl was Homura. The boy was Shizuku." Rukia's voice was as low as Isane's had been, but was still clearly audible throughout the room. "I cannot remember them yet. In time, I hope that will change."
"Well, this is simple enough to prevent," Mayuri announced. "I will make a duplicate of the girl's brain as well, so no one will forget her when they come. They will be caught easily."
The room fell completely silent. Ishida, watching from the back of the room, experimentally pulled out one of his sewing pins and listened as it dropped to the floor. Rukia was visibly nauseated at the suggestion, and the stillness was finally broken by the shift of metal against wood as both Byakuya's and Ukitake's hands fell onto the hilts of their swords.
"Your willingness to contribute is appreciated, Kurotsuchi-taicho," Yamamoto rumbled, "but we will explore less extreme alternatives first. A trap can be put in place on the appropriate day."
"A foolish proposition." Mayuri had never been one to care about lèse-majesté. "The timeline has been changed, and the effects will be felt in Hueco Mundo long before the time they would have come here. Because those children died a century ago, the sequence of events has begun, but there is no guarantee that they will arrive on the same day, or even in the same year. It is a simple operation, and regular updates will ensure that there is very little information lost."
"It would be more prudent to eliminate the machine that caused the damage," Byakuya stated coolly. "If the Seireitei had not been buried under spirit particles, the intrusion of an unknown warrior would not have caused the alarm it did."
"There are a dozen things they could have used," Mayuri snapped. "Be grateful the one they chose was relatively nonfatal!"
Yamamoto decided to make that audit a priority. "Nevertheless, that particular machine will be eliminated, and a trap will be set. Kurosaki, when you return from Hueco Mundo, I will provide you with a letter of introduction. If the trap fails, it will inform me where in the records to look for the information you have shown us, and will give you the authority to commandeer aid to hunt them down."
Ichigo blinked, mildly surprised that he was being given that much official power, even under the limited circumstances. "OK."
"Dismissed!"
Ichigo had learned from past experience that the order did not include him, and said good-night to his friends as they filed out.
Just before the gate of the first division, after the crowd had broken into little clumps murmuring quietly in the torchlit night as they prepared to travel back to their respective divisions and homes, Soi Fon called out to Ishida and Orihime. Unohana and Isane stopped as well to wait for them.
"Yes, Soi Fon-san?" Orihime asked her politely.
"The… unusually personable artificial soul that Kurosaki called Kon. The one in the stuffed lion. Have you seen him use it before?"
At her words, the night became quiet enough to hear the crickets chirping. Rukia, walking with her brother and Renji directly ahead of them, froze. Byakuya turned his head back slightly to glance calmly at the scene. Ukitake and Kyoraku, who had been chatting quietly as their subordinates trailed behind them, turned around completely. Behind the group from the Fourth, Hitsugaya narrowed his eyes as Gin and Matsumoto also paused to listen.
"Yes, he used it when-" Ishida stopped himself before the words 'I broke the hollow bait' left his lips. If they weren't going to bring that up, neither was he. "-the Menos Grande attacked Karakura a few weeks ago."
"It is likely the one currently inhabiting his body, then?" The question did nothing to alleviate the tension that suddenly permeated the night air.
Orihime looked around them. "Is something wrong?"
Similar trains of thought were running through the minds of the observers that had recognized what Kon's non-standard-issue personality meant. The mod-souls had been ordered to be terminated. It would be pure foolishness for Kurosaki to stand against an army for a piece of Soul Candy that he clearly considered to be annoying. However, no-one was willing to wager that he would not… and Soi Fon was as renowned for her obedience to the rules as Kurosaki Ichigo was becoming for his lack thereof.
"I was merely surprised at the change in personality," Soi Fon answered, a razor-sharp smile on her face. "It was clearly on it's best behavior when we retrieved it from Kurosaki's house."
"Soi Fon-taicho…" Rukia dared to murmur, stepping back with a hand outstretched slightly. Soi Fon cut her off with a disdainful glare, and turned her attention back to the humans.
"Keeping a Gikon in a stuffed animal is eccentric, but not illegal. Everything Kurosaki showed… Kon…" and the word was said with dry disdain, "… doing tonight was well within the physical capabilities of any artificial soul."
"Is there a reason it wouldn't be?" Ishida asked for himself and Orihime both, becoming more bewildered by the second.
"No. None at all." Soi Fon walked past them, her confused lieutenant trailing behind her. "Instruct Kurosaki to keep it that way."
The various groups relaxed, grateful that the diminutive captain had bent enough to allow a don't-ask, don't-tell situation to fall into place. Ishida turned to Unohana as they continued out the gate. "What was that about? Is there something wrong with Kurosaki's lion?"
"I have not observed anything unusual, Ishida-san," Unohana answered serenely. "I am quite confident that none of the other captains have either. Perhaps it would be best to address those questions to Kurosaki-san in private."
Ishida adjusted his glasses, intrigued. "…I see."
HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM
Back inside the first division, Ichigo faced the ancient man halfway across the meeting room. "Are you going to tell me I should have turned myself in too, Gramps?"
"You were not attacking any of the men attempting to apprehend you. What initially began the conflict?"
Ichigo showed his use of the combined power of his mask and bankai to attempt to fight the sludge-worm. It split down the middle where he cut it and separated around him, but then went on towards the direction of the South Gate as the men from the Ninth surrounded Ichigo's masked form.
"You guys had seen it before. I didn't know the mask would make Hisagi-san freak out," Ichigo explained.
"If we already knew you were partially a hollow, turning yourself in might have made the situation worse." Yamamoto sighed. "If these events occur again, it would be wise to use only your Bankai."
"Sure." If he even could by the time this rolled around… "Do you think you'll listen to your letter?"
"No," the old man answered. "I will not. Handwriting can be forged, records can be planted, even the seal I will put on the letter could have been stolen. The writ I will give you will allow you to ask for any aid you want from the Gotei 13 and have it given to you. It will be an authority many would kill for."
It would be a test of Kurosaki's judgment more than anything else. That much power over others was likely not necessary. Seeing the boy's use of it, however, would be.
"I won't need it, jii-san. Just tell yourself not to hunt me down."
"You will have it anyway. Better to plan for the unexpected." He was silent for a long moment, thinking back through the centuries. He glanced down at the white flecks surrounding the stone in Ichigo's hand, deciding to erase the entire conversation from the record personally. "Yamamoto Kasumi."
"Huh?" Ichigo asked in confusion.
"A password that I would believe. Remember the name."
"…right. Yamamoto Kasumi." Ichigo knew he sucked at remembering names, but 'Kasumi' was common enough that he didn't think it would be a problem. He hesitated, but finally gave in to his curiosity. "Who was she?"
"A good woman. She lived a fulfilling life and died in her sleep, unremarked upon by history. No one else now alive remembers her." Yamamoto's gruff rumble was quieter than Ichigo had ever heard it.
The teenager uncomfortably took the hint and did not ask again. He handed over the evening's record and left the room with a muttered farewell, for the first time finding himself pitying the most powerful man in Soul Society. Ichigo had his family and the friends he had grown up with. Mother, sister, wife, daughter… who the woman had been didn't matter. The old man likely had a dozen names he could have used.
Behind him, Yamamoto walked the short distance to his office and began writing the first draft of the letter they had been discussing. His brush paused as he became aware of a presence in front of him, one that had become familiar in the two days they had waited for Kurosaki to wake up after the treachery.
"Your wielder gives you a great deal of freedom."
"He has need of eyes he can trust."
"Does he? And is he aware that you are here tonight, Zangetsu?"
Ichigo's sword smiled slightly. "No. I have come with a... proposition for you."
HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM_HeM
A/N
The scene with Ikkaku and Renji was lots of fun to write. I try not to make Ichigo too kick-ass. Really I do. Then I re-read parts of the manga and that just goes flying out the window. Hopefully it came out as somewhat true to the canon story.
I hope the Fade to Black sequence was more understandable to those who have not seen it than the DD Rebellion scene was. Although I didn't attempt to fit it into the manga continuity, I did extend some of the ideas in the movie to what might have happened if the screenwriters had acknowledged that Aizen existed. The 'you'd forgotten you were at war' bit was not in the movie, but I decided that it's what the shinigami at my meeting would be concerned about.
The next chapter will be up in two weeks, sometime on the weekend. (Or, as the pattern seems to be going, very early Monday morning, but I hope to have it up before that). For what I've got planned, I don't want to rush writing it.
The teaser:
"Is that the last of the memories you are going to show us, Kurosaki Ichigo?"
"…yeah. That's… that's everything."
"You sound uncertain."
"Yeah… I just feel like I'm forgetting some-"