The first time Kisuke meets him, he's barely reached his first century.
Kisuke is all skin, bones and ragged clothes he'd ripped off drying lines years before. There's bruises peaking out from his torn left sleeve, in the distinct shape of finger prints, but his stomach doesn't hurt with hunger so much from the prize he'd won at the cost of them. The bread had been dry and brick hard, but it was better than the nothing he'd had before.
The nothing he had now.
Kisuke can recall roughly ninety years, or what he thinks is ninety. Time tends to blur when he's focused solely on the years of survival. He was a child when he first found himself in outer rukongai, newly dead with puppy fat rounding his cheeks and curiosity that nearly got him killed in his first decade.
Now he's coming into adolescence, not yet big enough to be a gangly teenager but no longer small enough to be a child.
Kisuke is at a strange precipice when he finds the river. And the stranger who sits at her banks.
The river is not so remarkable that he would remember it later, besides as a source of water that is cleaner than most in these upper districts. There doesn't look to be filth floating through it, or carnage from Zaraki tinting the waters red and pink.
Enough for him to remember the location of clean water. Not enough to really make an impression.
The man is.
He's sitting by the water, a very young man with hair that burns like candle light in the broad day sun. His Yukata, a blue so dark it was nearly black, hung loosely on his body. Kisuke thought he might have been a shinigami. He had a sword at his side, and Kisuke could see a smaller dagger tucked into his clothes.
There's something about this man that doesn't belong here. Not a horrible wrongness, or a threat that would make Kisuke's hair stand on end. It's like seeing the moon in a daytime, pale in the blue sky, and knowing that that is not where it's supposed to be.
It takes Kisuke a minute to realize he's been caught staring.
Brown eyes. They should be plain, but they're nearly fathomless, the darkness of the night somewhere within them. It feels like looking into a ravine and not knowing what waits at the bottom. A river? Stones? A bed of clover?
Kisuke takes a step back.
The half smile, tinged with sadness that crosses the man's face stops him in his tracks.
There's not a lot of things that can stop Kisuke from running when he feels he must. He hasn't lived this long by being stupid, or by being so stubborn that he won't duck out when he's outmatched.
It's still, to this day, his curiosity that gets him in trouble. His mouth which always asks 'why?' and 'how?'. Now he has a million questions and he doesn't know how to ask a single one, just by looking at this man.
Why is he here? Who is he? Why does he carry a sword? Why is there also knife? Why does the air around him ripple like the street in the summer heat?
Why does he look at Kisuke with fondness?
No one does that.
Kisuke is just another skinny little shit from the rukongai. If anyone looks their way it only means trouble, as he knows all too well.
There's nothing threatening about this man.
Even though he's armed, even though Kisuke and physically see the power trying to leak out from his pores, nothing about him makes Kisuke want to run away and save his own skin.
Maybe that's why.
Or maybe his curiosity, his want to know all there it, to pick things apart by their threads and drag the answers out of the seams of the world, finally overtakes his common sense.
He walks forwards. Towards the river.
The nearest settlement is a half days travel to the east. If anything happens, no one will hear him scream.
Not that they would help if they did.
"I was wondering if you were going to sit with me," says the man, turning a smile of incomprehensible fondness towards Kisuke.
He tries to understand. He does.
But he can't. The closest he'd ever known was the leering of older men when he strayed too far towards the redlight districts. This holds none of the oil-on-his-skin feeling, it does not make the threads in his chest stitch up and his fingers itch for a knife to drive between their ribs.
This is what Kisuke imagines friends look at eachother like.
"I don't even know who you are." The words feel strange on his tongue. He does not know this man, but this man looks like he knows him. Had they met before and Kisuke couldn't recall? No, he would remember that flaming hair and the power that threatened to sear Kisuke when he came close enough. He stopped just shy of the heavy air that sunk around the stranger.
The smile grows sadder.
"No. I guess you don't. I'm Ichigo."
"Ichigo," he turns the name over. It's a girls name. He doesn't say as much to the man with two blades and a blanket of power around him.
"How did you know I was there?" Kisuke asked then, those dangerous questions burning across his tongue. He waits, tense and ready to take a blow that doesn't come. Ichigo's eyes, plain brown compared to his brilliant hair, catch the tension in his shoulders and the hard lines in his legs. Ready to bolt, like a deer.
"I could feel your reitsu," Ichigo says. "You have a lot of energy, you know. You could be a shinigami."
"How can you 'feel' someone?" Kisuke frowns, trying to puzzle it out.
Ichigo shrugs. "I just do. I'm not sure how to explain it. It's like…. Hearing, and smelling, and feeling something against your skin all at the same time."
Ichigo's head cocks and something pushes against Kisuke. A weight of some sort, the heavy press of darkness on summer nights. It's not cold or oppressive or the fear of the dark.
Kisuke swallows thickly. The weight settles across his shoulders like a blanket.
It disappears after just a moment.
"Did you feel that?" Ichigo asks.
Kisuke can only nod mutely. His stomach tightens. The stale bread is gone and his limbs feel weak without the blanket of power pressing down on his bones.
"Good. That's what I could sense with you."
"You could not," Kisuke snaps immediately, and bites his tongue as soon as the words are out of his mouth. He knows he doesn't have as much power as Ichigo does, he knows because Ichigo looks like a wolf and he a rabbit at his side.
"Could so," Ichigo says. It sounds so normal that Kisuke gapes at him. Ichigo cracks a faint smile.
"Not that much, no, but you have the potential to be powerful. It's there. Trust me."
"Trust is for fools, blinded by faith."
He can't fathom why that makes Ichigo look so terribly, horribly sad.
"Maybe." Ichigo produces a loaf of flatbread from a handkerchief in his yukata. Without even seeming to think about it he breaks off a piece and hands it to Kisuke.
Kisuke freezes for all of a second before he snatches it from his hands.
(Sword calloused, long fingers, every single aspect of him speaks of power)
"We didn't make any deal," he says swiftly, before shoving the bread into his mouth. It was the softest thing he'd ever tasted, and it makes the hard brick he's scrounged up earlier even worse.
"Nope." Ichigo agrees. He turns his attention away from Kisuke to look out over the river while he eats. On anyone else Kisuke would be irritated by the fact that Ichigo thinks him so little a threat he'd turn his back on him. On Ichigo, it's not an insult. Kisuke would turn his back on a butterfly too.
The wind changes, and Ichigo stands slowly. He brushes his dark clothes off and looked back at Kisuke over his shoulder.
"I'll be seeing you."
Kisuke watches his walk off into the shadows of the trees.
He's not wrong. They will see eachother again.
Kisuke is nearly grown when he comes across Ichigo again.
He's different now, Kisuke is, dressed in the uniform of the Shihoin clan, and the onmitsukido who serve them. The dark clothes cover every inch of his skin save his eyes, and a small flash of pale bangs. Shihoin Yoruichi, the princess herself, sees something in him. She beats him into the ground daily, tosses him into walls and laughs at him where he can't keep up with her.
Yoruichi is a whirlwind and too casual for decency, but there is a wall between them that Kisuke can never let himself cross, that she won't let him cross either, even though they've known each other for almost a century now. Flashes of smiles, teasing pokes on the cheek and slaps on the shoulder, but she is still a princess and he still-
Well.
Perhaps Kisuke is not so different as he imagined himself, for he strikes down hollows with instincts learned in the rukongai not in the Shihoin household, dodging and hitting weakpoints without the fluid control and perfect angles he's expected to know.
His instructor would beat him bloody for it.
His instructor lays dead behind him, along with two thirds of the little group that he'd come with.
They'd been sent to Hueco Mundo, to hunt a particularly devious hollow, one that can multiply itself, and now he stand surrounded by a half a hundred copies, and more on the ground at his feet, while his fellows steadily fall.
Then the sky goes black.
The moon vanishes entirely, like a blanket had spread across the entire world. The white sands fade to grey and Kisuke and the hollow both freeze in their tracts as an ocean falls upon their shoulders.
It curls around Kisuke, familiar and flowing and it teases at the strings that hold his chest together. Benihime hums in his hand, shining red in the darkness. She is a riot of blood against the black of night.
Deeper red curls closer, visible to him now, and familiar too.
Kisuke follows the threads of energy to his left, where they lead to a flash of orange hair and a dark black overcoat that trails behind its owner.
It's impossible to mistake those brown eyes.
"Ichigo."
"Take a step to the left, would you?"
Kisuke complies, breathless and exhausted, but it fades into exhilerations when the black-red energy spikes past him. The hollows evaporate into nothingness, shards of energy that vanish, and Kisuke is left standing between two canyons in the sandy floor.
He's the sole survivor now, and Ichigo grimaces when he steps over the bodies of Kisuke's fallen comrades.
"I was late. Sorry about that." The sword in his hand is dark and hollowed out, and he holds it as if it isn't half as long as his body. Kisuke looks down at his fallen comrades. He didn't know their names, they all operated in code, and he is too old now to have cared for them. Grief cuts deeper than swords, and Kisuke keeps both at arms length at all times.
"Where did you come from?" Kisuke asks, looking at Ichigo. A small creature, a six legged dog with a hollow mask, bounces at Ichigo's heels and nips at the edges of his coat, as if Ichigo hadn't just slaughtered fifty some-odd of it's own kind in a blink. Ichigo doesn't seem to notice, or mind the creatures presence.
"Here and there," he says vaguely, waving his free hand. The hilt of the knife he'd had all those years ago sticks out of his overcoat.
"That's not an answer," Kisuke shouldn't push the man that just saved his life, he knows that, and he treats Ichigo to a glare that even Yoruichi would chide him for but-
Kisuke is not afraid of this man.
(Is a man or a monster in human skin? He'd killed them all, his power is dark and heavy and it wraps around Kisuke like it had all those years ago, cool and warm equally somehow, like sunlight in winter)
Ichigo cocks half a smile and lays his sword across his back.
"You'd get bored if I gave you all the answers at once, you know. C'mon," he taps the air beside him and it splits neatly into the gaping maw of a garganta. "I'll take you back to the seireitei. Unless you'd like to stay here longer?" A fiery brow raises and Kisuke shakes his head.
"I should return." He doesn't tell Ichigo that he is tempted to accept that offer. He's curious by his own nature, he still wants to unravel the threats of the world and find all their secrets, and that includes hollows and this desert that he has barely seen. But Kisuke had just suffered a brutal reminder that though he is one of the most promising trainees, and though the Shihoin heiress herself has taken a vested interest in his future he is still green, he is still young, and he cannot survive here on his how.
(Which begs the question, how does Ichigo? Does he? Or was he just in the right place at the right time? Only hollows live in hueco mundo)
"Are you a shinigami?" he asks when they step into the gap between worlds.
Ichigo doesn't answer immediately. He makes a sound like he's thinking very hard about what to say. The hollow dog is still at his heels, trotting amiably beside him. It's the most docile creature Kisuke has ever seen.
"It's complicated. Do you want me to tell you?"
"Yes."
"I was a shinigami. And I will be again. But I've never been only that."
It's not an answer at all and Kisuke feels jittery in his skin. Ichigo has just handed him a riddle and challenged him to solve it, and the flash of a smile tossed over his shoulder says he knows exactly what he's done. It's gone a minute later. The smile come like spring rains, swift and gone a second later.
Ichigo still looks at him with that strange fondness, and it makes Kisuke's stomach tighten again, but it's not hunger there this time.
They step out into the rukongai.
The river they'd met by rushes past.
"I'll see you around, Kisuke."
Kisuke watches Ichigo step back into the inky blackness of the garganta, and he knows now that it's the truth. Even if Ichigo does not come to him, Kisuke will find a way to meet again. He wants to know Ichigo, and why Ichigo acts like he knows him too.
The first time Kisuke meets Shiba Kaien he nearly has a heart attack.
He's two paces behind Yoruichi, his head dipped up instead of dipped in a way that borders on insubordinate and they walk into the Shiba compound together. Kisuke has met Kukaku Shiba dozens of times, would even consider her to be a friend of sorts if he was pressed (as much as he has any friends, in any case) but those were all at Yoruichi's behest. Now they come to call on her, the middle daughter of the clan head, with a rather official invitation to a party for all of the Great Clans and several of the smaller ones.
The paper the invitation is written on is thick, the ink sparkles like it was written in actual gold, and just one sheet is worth more than anything Kisuke has ever owned in his life.
He lays Benihime carefully on a rack of other zanpakutou when they enter, and walks behind Yoruichi unarmed. It wouldn't stop him from fighting, or killing, but let the Shiba think they had blunted his teeth.
Kukaku greets them in the courtyard, her wild hair tied back while she pours something that smells like blackpowder and pepper into a firework.
It's not her who catches Kisuke's attention though.
Sitting on the other side of the courtyard with their young brother, Ganju, and a sweet looking woman, is a familiar face.
The coloring is all wrong. Black hair instead of fiery orange, crystal blue eyes instead of calm brown, but the resemblance is unmistakable and impossible.
"Ah, little Kisuke," Kukaku grins at him. "Are you admiring my big brother? And in front of his wife, no less!"
Kisuke startles out of whatever trance he'd fallen into, feels heat rush across his skin and wishes it wasn't so stark a contrast.
"Forgive me," he bowed, like he was supposed to, and it was no surprise when Kukaku slapped his shoulder.
"Forget it. All Shiba are too pretty for our own good, don't you know?"
Kisuke offers her a helpless smile and resigns himself to the fact that Yoruichi is going to tease him for the rest of the decade about him.
"Do many look like your brother?" he asks, swallowing his pride and ignoring the way Kukaku howls with laughter at him.
Still, she humors him. "He's got the main branch look, so yeah a good few of us."
And that.
Can't be right.
But it explains a lot.
Ichigo was a powerhouse, and the Shiba are known for it. He said he "was a shinigami. And will be one again." So perhaps a Shiba sent out on some specialized assignment? Or a deserter from the main branch?
Even a bastard would explain quite a bit.
Yoruichi pokes Kisuke's cheek suddenly, snapping him out of his thoughts and he goes still lest he accidentally lash out at her.
"Awe, I think he's got a crush. He sure looks like it."
Kisuke ducks his head, sheepish and just a little stung when the pair of them laugh like its the cutest thing they've ever heard.
(Why wouldn't it be? Kaien is the married heir to one of the greatest clans in their world, and Kisuke still had dirt under his nails and rukongai blood)