Partway through lunch, yet another scream cut off abruptly. Naruto appeared on the roof's fence in a scarlet blur, the hems of his robes settling from the speed. He waved, then turned and vanished over the side of the building.

Ichigo packed his trash, made an excuse, and headed downstairs. Naruto was waiting in the shadow near the dumpsters, where the smell warded off students who might have otherwise preferred eating in the secluded corner. Ichigo tried not to breathe as he walked over.

"Sorry 'bout that," Naruto said.

Ichigo could taste faintly a tang of iron on his tongue. Now that he knew to look for it, a prickling sense of unease pressed down, giving off an impression of the same color as the platforms beneath Naruto's sandals. He'd watched this kid force a monster to its knees without lifting a hand, and he remembered all too clearly that whatever Naruto had done, it hadn't been constrained to affecting the dead.

For all that, Naruto had said he wasn't going all out. Even if the claim had been a bluff, he was still the single most dangerous person Ichigo had ever met. The single most dangerous person Ichigo had ever met, and the kid looked like he was bracing to be yelled at.

Ichigo let out a breath. Naruto didn't meet his eyes. "What are you apologizing for?"

"Yesterday. The hollow wouldn't of come 'f I hadn't talked to you."

"You didn't force it to show up," said Ichigo.

Naruto's eyes nearly closed in a frown. "Oniisan's not mad anymore?"

"I wasn't mad about that in the first place," Ichigo said, tucking his hands into his pockets. It wasn't a complete lie. He had taken more issue with the way Naruto had run off without explaining anything. "You didn't do whatever you did to me on purpose. And it's because of you that nobody at the school's been attacked today, so. Thanks."

Naruto scratched the back of head. "No problem. Um, 'bout your reiryoku, I found some people who know how to fix it." Because apparently a literal alien could find more ghost-seeing people in twenty-four hours than Ichigo could in almost sixteen years. If Ichigo was a completely different person, he might have suspected a conspiracy. "They said they'd be at the gate after school lets out, but— are you goin' back ta class now?"

"Why are you asking?"

"Tails-san's been hangin' 'round since morning. If you wanna get it over with quicker."

"Who's this Tails person?"

"Someone who wants to help you, 'ttebayo," said Naruto. At Ichigo's frown, he added, "She knows you."

"You said her name is Tails?"

"Mmhm."

Actually, that conspiracy idea? Back on the table. A woman who knew him, knew more about spirits than Naruto, knew the instant something went strange with Ichigo's ability to see ghosts, and was using an obviously fake name—that wasn't shady, that was castle-on-a-mountain-during a-lightning-storm-set-to-the wails-of-a-dying-pipe-organ levels of ominous.

"Mmhm," Naruto hummed again, more emphatically. "Wanna talk to her?"

"...Yeah," said Ichigo. Trying to dodge the shady conspiracy when it finally saw fit to reveal itself never worked out well. He might as well see what it was about. "Where is she right now?"

"Over by the toy shed."

"The what?"

"Y'know, the one by the track."

"Oh, toys. That's sports equipment." Ichigo started in the direction of the shed, and Naruto followed beside him.

"But 'ey're just— oh, that's what they were doing in training. That's a sport?"

"It's called soccer. What were you expecting?"

Naruto shrugged. "Blood."

There wasn't any conscious decision involved; Ichigo's feet just stopped moving of their accord. He didn't say anything. There were no words.

"Soccer's boring to watch, but I think I still like oniisan's sports better," Naruto mused, not slowing.

Ichigo started walking again. "There's something wrong with the place you're from."

Naruto nodded.

As they neared the shed, the metal-sheeted canopy over the walkway shuddered in time with an animal's footsteps, and then a cat dropped down to land on the concrete. Aside from that, there was no one there.

Ichigo started to say something, but Naruto was faster. "Hi, Tails-san. Were ya sleeping?"

Ichigo slowly looked away from Naruto to stare at the cat. The cat stared back with yellow eyes. Maybe there were cat people in Naruto's dimension, so he thought it could talk back. After hollows, surely nothing could surprise Ichigo anymore.

...No, that was still strange. Probably not cat people.

Then the cat opened its mouth and said in a deep, scratchy voice, "I wish. It's not easy to take a nap with all that screaming. Thank you for your hard work, Naruto-chan." It turned its head to Ichigo. "You must be Ichigo. I'm Yoruichi."

"You're a cat!" said Ichigo. Naruto snickered.

It—he? She? Naruto had called it a female, but it was using old man pronouns and that voice was in no way feminine. And what was he doing, trying to tell a cat's sex by its voice? Well, it was either that or looking at its— wait, would that count as checking it out if it could talk? If it was male, would that count as checking out a guy? Ichigo didn't think he was gay, but if he was, this was not how he wanted to find out.

"Yes, I am," said the cat, its tail waving languidly. Ichigo tried desperately not to think about what was under that tail. "Now, tell me how much you know about what's happening with you."

When a cat strolled up and told you to do something, you didn't ask questions. "I'm bringing in hollows," Ichigo answered, "because my reiryoku is growing."

The cat glanced at Naruto, then turned its attention back to Ichigo. "That's the gist of it. The growth is beginning to slow, but it's unstable. You don't have any control over it. The way things are going, you'll pass on your issue to the people who you spend the most time near. Your family, your classmates, your teachers, your neighbors. You can see how that would be unfortunate," it said.

He hadn't known it was contagious. (His family.) "But you can fix it."

"I know a sketchy shopkeeper who can," it said. "He's willing to see you any time, but it would be better if you handled it—"

"Now."

"That's for the best," the cat agreed. "I'll take you there. You might want to get your things, first—it won't be a quick fix. And wrap this around your wrist." It slid a claw beneath its collar, which split at the top and fell loosely to the ground. "It'll hide your reiatsu until we get there."


Naruto slid open the door of the candy shop. Yoruichi slid beneath his feet to be the first inside. "Kisuke!" the cat called.

"He's downstairs with Ururu," said the boy behind the register. He caught the two strangers' eyes and scowled.

The cat nodded. "Come on, the basement is this way."

Ichigo had skipped school to follow a talking cat for twenty minutes to a candy shop in a back lot. He could take another leap of faith. Although, that was… really far down. The ladder had to have nearly two hundred rungs. "This can't be legal."

Yoruichi laughed. "That's the part you're worried about?"

"Where's the light coming from?" asked Naruto.

"There's an artificial sun in one of the walls somewhere."

This was surreal. Ichigo lowered himself onto the ladder, and as soon as the top of his head cleared the floor a furry weight settled in his hair. Right, the cat could talk but couldn't climb ladders. Naruto sat in the air next to him, swinging his legs, and sank at a pace to match Ichigo.

At the bottom, a man with a striped bucket hat, grey and green coat and robe, and clogs met them. The traditional clothes looked a bit disconcerting on someone who was clearly a foreigner; Naruto didn't have that effect so much, as his features could easily pass for mixed blood. The man's clothes, his hair color (although he was blond rather than Naruto's near yellow), and something about his expression and the way he carried himself all reminded Ichigo of Naruto. It didn't bode well.

"Well, now that you're here, we can get started," he said, and turned away slightly to look at the deep pit dug not far away into the rocky landscape. So that was what he shared with Naruto: neither of them ever wanted to explain anything.

"Wait," said Ichigo. "I followed Yoruichi-san this far without asking any questions, but I'd like some answers now."

The man blinked and faced him again. "That's fair. What do you want to know? I can't promise an answer to everything, but I'll do what I can."

"How do you know who I am?"

"Yoruichi-san chanced to come across your encounter with the hollow yesterday. It's not all the time you find a living human who can see the dead. Admittedly," he added, looking out from under the shadow of his hat's wide brim, "that's largely due to anyone with reiryoku developed so far being a prime target for hollows."

"Alright. So who are you?

"Oh, merely a humble shopkeeper. The name is Urahara Kisuke."

"Humble shopkeeper," said Ichigo flatly.

"As you can see," Urahara said, while standing in a terraformed bunker that could comfortably fit several football fields, "this is a perfectly normal basement to a perfectly normal candy shop."

"Oh, come on, your basement has an artificial sun in it. That's not even a real thing!"

"Kisuke," said Yoruichi, draping a paw into Ichigo's line of sight as its tail tickled the back of his neck, "he's going to need to know these things. Explain properly, will you? You can be weird and sketchy another time."

Urahara sighed. "Very well, Kurosaki-san, you are correct. This is not, in fact, a normal candy shop." He waited a moment, as if to give his audience time to digest this astonishing claim. "Urahara Shoten also carries merchandise from Soul Society."

"Where's that?"

"The afterlife."

Naruto perked up. "'at's right, I was goin' ta ask, 'ttebayo. Do you know what your afterlife's like?"

It was Yoruichi who answered. "There are three places it's possible to end up at. There's Hell. That's for people who've committed some kind of serious crime in life, although what crime exactly can land you there seems to be arbitrary. Nobody knows what it's like, because the ones who get sent there don't come back."

"What counts as serious?" asked Ichigo.

"Murder seems to be the low bar," said Yoruichi. "Most people don't have to worry about that possibilty. The second one is Hueco Mundo, the Hollow World. Then there's Soul Society. If we're going by the Christian view, Hueco Mundo would be something like Purgatory, while Soul Society would be Heaven. It has its own problems—not a small number of its own problems—but it's inarguably the best of the three. If you die in Soul Society, you get reincarnated back in the living world to start the cycle over."

"You sell retail from Heaven," Ichigo summarized. "Who are your customers?"

Urahara tapped his cane lightly on the ground. "You can ask that, but I honestly don't know what to say to you. I think I should mention that this shop's existence breaks a few of Soul Society's laws."

Ichigo, at least, wasn't the only one that statement alarmed, although it turned out Naruto's reasons were different. The boy asked, "Soul Society has enforcers?"

"They're called death gods," said the humble shopkeeper, and watched Naruto make a face at the name. "They also have the task of fighting hollows and ferrying the recently departed to Soul Society. I take it they have a different role where you come from?"

"There's just one Shinigami," said Naruto. "The afterlife is his."

Urahara paused. "A single entity manages the entire afterlife?"

Naruto nodded. "People can't visit or leave there on their own, and we get way less hollows 'an you do. It's probably easier." His eyes squinted in a frown. "'sides, the ones you call death gods—they're like me, right? But our Shinigami's an actual god, 'ttebayo. 's a bit different."

"It does seem that way."

"Can we get back to the part where you sell black market from Heaven?" said Ichigo. "How do you know so much about the afterlife? What are you?" Urahara started to open his mouth, and Ichigo added, "And if you give me that 'humble shopkeeper' line again—"

"Ah, you think so little of me." He raised his head up slightly, considering. Then he looked back down at Ichigo. "Have you been able to see the dead from the beginning?"

Ichigo, after a moment, shook his head. "From when I was a few years old."

"We're different there, then. I could see them from the time my memory begins. Due to circumstances that aren't important to mention right now, I had some difficulties with the living world. As such, I turned my attentions to the afterlife instead. This..." He made a short gesture with his cane. "...was eventually the result."

Ichigo glanced at Naruto. From his expression, the explanation, such as it was, didn't bother him. Ichigo, for his part, wasn't sure what to think. Sure, the man was being about as vague as it was possible to be, but what right did Ichigo have to drag his life story out of him? He'd already answered most of what he'd been asked.

"That's all I have."

"Good. Since that's settled for now..." He turned away. "Ururu! That's deep enough!"

A dour-faced little girl with pigtails and red cheeks climbed out of the pit, dragging a shovel taller than her, and wandered over to droop beside the shopkeeper. Alright then. Ichigo wondered what the boy manning the register was. Maybe a wizard. It fit with the grumpiness.

"The issue with Kurosaki-san isn't your reiryoku," said Urahara. "You're hardly a drop in the bucket compared to Naruto-san. Rather, the problem lies in your living soul. Only the dead can fully contain the level of spiritual ability you're showing." He said it so evenly that the implication nearly flew past Ichigo's head before he caught it. Urahara noticed his expression from the corner of his eye, and a faint smile turned up the man's lips. "Relax, Kurosaki-san. I asked you here to help you. Well, I say that, but you'll be helping yourself for the most part.

"There are four types of souls: the living; pluses, who you know as ghosts; hollows; and those like Naruto-san, who we call death gods. Since living is out of the equation, we'll simply have to turn your soul into a different type."

"This is still sounding disturbingly like you want to kill me," said Ichigo. He realized that he had involuntarily shuffled a foot back while the shopkeeper had been talking.

"We will have to cut your chain, yes," said Urahara easily.

"Oh." Naruto wasn't looking at any of them, only watching his fist slowly curl and uncurl in his lap. "So that's what— oh. That— that'll work."

"No, it won't! What part of that sounds like it'll work?" Ichigo snuck a glance at the ladder, but there wasn't any going out that way. Naruto could catch up to him easily at any point on it, and he still didn't know what was up with the kid upstairs.

"Neither pluses nor hollows have the ability to possess uninhabited bodies. Death gods do," said Urahara. "Since a body can survive indefinitely even after its soul is no longer connected, the goal is to have you possess your own body as a death god."

"It doesn't sound the best right now, but you won't notice any difference," Yoruichi offered. "You'll start feeling a little disconnected in a few years, when your soul doesn't keep aging with your body, but that's the only side effect."

"Is that what you people are?" asked Ichigo.

Naruto looked up as Urahara rapped his cane against his own shoulder. "Well done, Kurosaki-san. Although Jinta and Ururu aren't."

"Still, I can't just agree to—"

"Kurosaki-san," said Urahara, "how many hollows have attempted to attack you since yesterday?"

Ichigo stopped talking.

"How many," the shopkeeper continued, "have attempted to attack you while you were with people you care for?"

It was blatant manipulation, but it was manipulative because it worked. Ichigo remembered last night too well, laying in bed and trying to figure out in which direction and how far away the screams were, up until at some point when they had stopped coming. And then school, when he had watched the second hand tick on the clock, waiting for the next hollow to show up. He hadn't seen anything when he had looked out, except for once when the scream was more a roar and a massive eel coiled in the air, the fan of its tail scraping against the window at the rear of the classroom, had sent a small red blur crashing into the street just outside the school's gate. Ichigo had excused himself to go to the restroom just as crackling electricity shrieked down from the hollow's spines; by the time he'd made it outside, though, there'd been nothing there.

If nothing else, Naruto had spent all of that day and the night before killing monsters to protect Ichigo. Ichigo didn't know if death gods needed to eat or sleep, but either way, even though the kid didn't look any worse for wear, that must have taken a toll.

On top of that, some of the hollows had put up an actual fight. If one showed up that was stronger than Naruto, there'd be nothing Ichigo could do for himself or those he was with. His name meant "protector". His parents hadn't given it to him so he would put others in danger for his sake.

Ichigo said stiffly, "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to sever your chain of fate. Then it'll be up to you either become a death god or go hollow."

"Go hollow?" Right, that was a possibility for ghosts. "How am I supposed to become a death god?"

"I can't give specifics. Every person goes through it differently. But I can tell you this: your power won't be like physical strength or intelligence. It is a part of you, but it's distinct from you as well. You'll recognize it when you find it."

"Great. How am I going to find it?"

That was definitely a smile on Urahara's face. "Climb out." He raised his cane, the end pointed at Ichigo's face, and Ichigo just had time to notice the odd logo on the bottom before it touched his forehead and then kept going.

Ichigo landed on his feet, the chain extending from his chest clinking as his limp body fell bonelessly to the ground, with his backpack cushioning the fall enough that he didn't think it was going to bruise. Yoruichi touched down lightly beside it. Before he could get his bearings, the cane came down on the chain near his body, and the link it landed it shattered without resistance.

The little girl he hadn't seen move picked him up. "Hey, wait—"

And then he found out she'd been digging a pit for as she threw him. For long seconds, the walls raced past. When he hit the bottom, he should have broken every bone in his body, but instead it only sent a few jolts of pain through him.

He sat up, wincing, and looked at the circle of sky above. The other peered down at him. Naruto had an odd look on his face that Ichigo couldn't read, Urahara was clearly serious, Ururu's expression hadn't changed, and Yoruichi was a cat.

"Three days, Kurosaki-san!" Urahara shouted. Suddenly, Ichigo's arms twisted behind his back. Panicked, he twisted around to look and saw a set of metal cuffs holding his wrists together. How had the crazy shopkeeper—? "Make the most of it."

"How am I supposed to get out without using my hands?" he yelled back.

"I have faith in your desperation."

He and Ururu left. Yoruichi called, "Don't panic! That will speed up the hollowification. I'll stay here. Tell me if you want something to eat or drink."

Then Yoruichi retreated from the edge as well. Naruto said nothing as Ichigo gritted his teeth and started looking for footholds in the walls.