Well, for those who've been waiting to see this up, sorry for the delay. For the first-time readers, hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it.

Review, please.

*** Apenado Headquarters, Purgatory***

Palido Uspera was not happy. As he gazed out at Purgatory's black sands from the top of the Apenados' home, the White Shell, the peace he had used to go there to find eluded him. He saw the sands, shifting and swirling as though churned by an invisible hand, saw the roiling black clouds over the horizon, even saw the scuttling skull crabs. Nothing was out of place. Everything was as it should have been.

And yet nothing was. Peace had been alien to him for the past three millennia. He sighed and closed his eyes, mourning inwardly as waves of sorrow washed over him in spades, nearly crushing him with anguish. In all his eons of life, he had succeeded in living without regrets. He had never made a decision with negative repercussions, or had to live with them.

Never, except once. And that one decision, that one mistake had set him and the whole of his race on a roller coaster that was catapulting towards an end no one could foresee. And no matter what decisions he made regarding this issue, it seemed the effects would be unalterably terrible. He opened his eyes and gazed out once more at the horizon.

He missed his brother. He remembered all those times he had come here with him to talk and plan and spar and laugh and just be brothers. It did not matter what his pride had led him to become, or what his madness could mean to the entire Spiritual Realm. He missed him. The sands below churned as the sky above roiled, almost in unison, almost as though one was the reflection of the other, each in eternal turmoil, like twin, circling dragons, mirroring each other in an eternal dance, forever in ceaseless conflict.

With Ichigo Kurosaki, he'd been given a chance to right a fraction of the harm his failure had caused, and this time, he would make the right choices.

****

Terrestra Estefuerte was getting tired of babysitting a corpse. What did Palido even see in this pathetic human who'd practically sold his soul for free to the Laughing Man? He was a disgrace who should not have been given the right to wield a zanpakutou, a coward who was afraid of his own power. She looked down at him as he lay facedown on the ground, contempt written deep into every crease of her frown. She drew her own zanpakutou, a beautiful scimitar-like blade, and advanced towards his body with every intention of ending his miserable life. She would have relieved his neck of its burden if Palido hadn't walked into the room at that precise moment.

She looked up at him. "If you had walked in two seconds later he would no longer have had a head," she said as coolly as though she were speaking about cutting her nails.

"Control yourself, Terrestra. Your hate is for the Laughing Man, not him," he said, unfazed by her unfounded contempt of the Shinigami. Really, when Terrestra got something in her head, there was no changing her mind. She thought Ichigo was weak. Short of him single-handedly taking down the whole of the Spiritual Realm, she would never think otherwise. He chuckled, amused by her obstinacy.

"How long have you been watching him?" he asked.

"He's been like this for at least three hours," she said. "How much longer do I have to watch him?" she asked, obviously very impatient.

"It'll only be a little longer. He should have met with his zanpakutou by now; it's only a matter of time before he meets Estruendo," he said as he studied Ichigo's prone figure.

***Karakura Town, three months in the past***

It would really be pushing it to think that it was possible to feel worse than Ichigo Kurosaki was at the moment. It was harsh to lose your memory, wake up as a disembodied soul in Purgatory, get beat by a girl, then somehow end up in the past to discover that you were yourself the cause of your woes, and that your decisions may have led to the destruction of your world as you knew it.

It was very harsh. Even as Zangetsu ported them out of the cemetery, he brood about the recent revelations. There was no point in cursing himself. The past could not be undone. He let loose a heavy sigh, resigned to his situation.

It appeared they were no longer in Karakura Town. They were in a minimalist landscape not unlike his room back at the Apenados' Headquarters, except there was not a single material object in sight. He felt a weird sensation of weightlessness, as if they were walking, or rather floating on nothing. For a while, they floated on in silence. To Ichigo, it began to feel like being in a room so pitch dark you couldn't two inches out. Except this was something like the opposite of that, and he could see. Well, he could see Zangetsu, at his side, as he always was. He was comforted by that. There was still a huge chunk of his memory missing, but he at least remembered enough to know that Zangetsu would always be around. He found a small measure of peace in that knowledge, and was able to smile a small smile.

He'd just turned away from Zangetsu when he noticed a tiny speck in the distance. It stuck out like a sore thumb, so noticeable in the sea of white. It got bigger as they got closer, until soon enough, Ichigo was able to make out that it was a human figure, and judging by his size, evidently a teenage boy about a year younger than Ichigo. He was dressed in black with thick bands of white along the seams and joints of his clothes, the bands curiously parallel and unconnected or overlapping in any areas of the fabric. He wore what appeared to be, at first glance, aviator-style goggles, but which on closer inspection proved merely to be weirdly styled shades. His hair was black, close-cropped and dyed white in parallel bands in the manner of his clothes. A wakizashi that reminded Ichigo of Palido's zanpakutou hung at his left side, a larger, matching katana strapped to his back. He appeared to be waiting patiently for them to reach him. How he got here or what his purpose for being here was were both mysteries to Ichigo, puzzles that he could sense would soon be solved.

They stopped floating a couple of feet away from the stranger. Their minimalist surroundings fell away and were replaced with a setting like any regular dark alley, replete with overflowing dumpsters and four- and six-legged animal life best left unidentified, a perfect setting for whatever dark revelations this boy was harbinger of. Zangetsu stepped forward, his unwavering gaze matched by the stranger's own, as though their locked gazes provided an unseen connection for an intense telepathic discourse that was all their own.

The stranger spoke first. Without taking his eyes off Zangetsu, he said, "Hello, Kurosaki-san."

Ichigo didn't bother to ask how he knew his name. That was unimportant. "Who are you, and why are you here," he asked.

His question went unanswered for several heartbeats until, as though some pact had been sealed between them, he and Zangetsu simultaneously relaxed and broke their iron connection. For the first time, he looked directly at Ichigo, a boyish smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Ichigo was surprised by how intense his eyes were even behind the shades, eyes that seemed to look right through and beyond him. Eyes like Zangetsu's. He approached Ichigo calmly, deftly stepping past the refuse that littered the alleyway. His smile had spread from his lips to his eyes, seeming to take the edge off his gaze, and for a second, Ichigo almost believed that he was merely a boy, just like him, no more different or special than he was. Just for a second. Then he realized who he was.

"You're Palido's zanpakutou, aren't you?" he said as he remembered that Palido had promised his zanpukutou's assistance.

"Correct on the first try. Pretty smart, kid," he said, in a tone that implied he was centuries older than Ichigo. Which he probably was.

"My name's Estruendo," he said as he shifted his steady gaze from Ichigo to Zangetsu for a second. "Quite an interesting zanpakutou you have here, Kurosaki-san," he said.

"His first words to me were a threat to rip out my tongue if I said or did anything out of order," he said, chuckling like it was a good joke, and despite the apparent difference between his and Zangetsu's ages, it seemed to Ichigo that Zangetsu would have had more than a little trouble keeping his word.

As he introduced himself, Estruendo had closed the distance between himself and Ichigo, and now stood only a few feet away from him. "You know, Kurosaki-san, you're a very interesting character." He cast his gaze up at the patch of starry sky above the alley. "My master Palido believes in you," he said, almost whispered as he stared at the cold, untwinkling dots of light above. "He believes in you, even though you do not believe in yourself," he continued, returning his gaze to Ichigo, the smile gone, his eyes every bit as cold as the stars, cutting through Ichigo deeper than any blade ever would. "And I'll be damned if you do not share my master's faith when I'm through with you," he said as he drew his wakizashi and flew at him, literally exploded off the alley floor, throwing up dust and litter and rodents in his wake, his eyes ablaze with a cold fire that would be extinguished only when he'd beaten faith in himself into Ichigo Kurosaki.

***

He'd long since come to swallow the indignity of lying on the floor of his cell, now that the ability to feel humiliation was a luxury he no longer had. His memories were the only reminder he had of who he had been. Him, the great hero of the Shinigami. Him, the only hope of Soul Society and Karakura Town. Him, who had once been looked up to as a hero. Him, Ichigo Kurosaki. He felt disgusted, and the bitter irony of it was not lost on him. He had no qualms about lying wasted on the floor like a spineless drunk, but he was crushed by the realization that he had failed all those people who had believed in him. He had been weak and afraid of his own power, and the memory of how much it had cost him was one he didn't care to hold on to.

He lay on the floor, defeated, resigned to his fate as a prisoner of the Laughing Man, a mere shell of what he had once been.

A pathetic shell. That was all he was now. And until the void within was filled, he was doomed.

==End Chapter 4