I do not own Bleach.
Decided to upload this earlier than usual so people could read it over the weekend. Enjoy! :)
He knocked at the door, though she always told him he didn't have to. He didn't believe her. Maybe their relationship had changed, maybe she had softened over the years in some regards, but he knew despite whatever she said about being a different person, there were some things that would remain the same.
"Enter."
The same cold voice. That, also, had never changed. He pushed open the door and saw his mother sitting behind her desk, looking up and schooling her features into a mask of nonchalance as soon as he came in. He knew it unnerved her to see her son like this, with a stranger's face stretched over his own.
"I'm leaving," Grimmjow said, getting straight to the point. She had never liked time-wasting either, and he had no desire to stay there any longer than necessary.
This time, she couldn't help a faint hint of surprise. "Leaving?"
"Yeah. Tonight."
"Where? Why?" The only betrayal of her concern was the slight fluttering of her hands.
"Things have got...complicated." He decided to tell the truth, or as much of it as he could. It was the only way she wouldn't pry. She, as much as his father, knew what was at stake. "I'm going back."
His mother opened his mouth, no doubt to protest, but she saw the look in his eyes and stopped herself. She knew him better than he thought, he had to give her credit for that.
"I see," she murmured instead. Her posture was ramrod straight; her whole body was still, apart from her hands, which fidgeted atop the desk.
They still had trouble looking each other in the eyes. He had never forgotten what she had said to him, what she had called him, and she knew it.
"I'll contact you when I get there. See ya." He turned to leave.
"Wait."
It had almost been an exclamation. Grimmjow didn't look at her. He just stayed where he was.
"What about...here? Your career. Your life."
He laughed. It came out cold and bitter. "I don't give a shit. I don't have a life. There's nothing here worth staying for, and there never was."
Grimmjow didn't have to look at her to know she was hurt. He didn't care. He knew she would accept it, those cutting, savage words, and the way he had so casually said them. He didn't have a big a heart as Kurosaki Ichigo; he couldn't forgive the people who had hurt him so easily. He made them suffer, and their pain sustained him.
It was just unfortunate that his mother was one of those people. He could only just stand to let her touch him. As a child, he remembered his father's arms around him when he cried, never hers; in that big, empty house he had hated all his life, he had often gotten lost and called out for her, but she never came.
And then one day she had just left.
Even thinking about it, anger speared through him. He turned and looked at her. He could tell she wanted to say something, but she was struggling. He let her. He reveled in her discomfort, the way her eyes darted here and there, the way her mouth twisted.
"Well?" he asked, testily. "Spit it out."
"Please take care of yourself," she replied quietly. "Please don't get hurt."
Grimmjow hadn't expected that. There was a hard lump in his throat but he swallowed it, narrowing his eyes and sneering at her.
"Tch. Whatever."
He slammed the door shut, hoping it made her jump.
A cloud held him up. Or perhaps God's hands were cupping him, holding him gently, finally welcoming him to the heaven he had been running to. He was in a soft, warm, wonderful place. His mind was edged with fuzz and cotton wool.
Am I dead? was his first thought.
I hope so, was his second.
The cotton wool was fraying. Where there had been darkness, harsh light filtered through the gaps. Softness and warmth were being replaced, slowly, by a gradual awareness of his limbs, and how much pain he was in. Every inch of him was aching. He felt blankets covering him. A high-pitched, rhythmic beeping was all he could hear.
Even cracking open his eyes hurt. As soon as he tried, white light blinded him and he shut them again immediately. His head was pounding with the beat of his heart. He didn't know where he was, but he wasn't dead. Anger and hopelessness bubbled through the pool of numbness he was floating in.
Grimmjow slipped in and out of consciousness. He remembered – what did he remember? What had led him to this?
There was orange. A concerned face staring down at him, someone holding his hand.
Holding his fucking hand!
Of course. Kurosaki.
But before that, before the needle and the burning in his veins, there had been something else.
A phone call.
Before that.
Breaking into his father's safe (always so ridiculously easy, as if the man had left it that way on purpose) and something slipping out, drifting gently to the floor. Paper.
Yes, he remembered now. It was all coming back, like mist curling its tendrils over the surface of a lake, creeping towards the shore.
His birth certificate. He had never seen it before; there had never been a reason to. He had never thought about it. Grimmjow had picked it up, had given it only the briefest of glances, and what he saw had made his blood run cold.
A confrontation with his father, who had told his mother, who had called him.
What had she said?
It didn't matter, in the end. It would have made no difference. All he remembered was the tone of her voice, worse than cold, unconcerned and uncaring.
Yes, she had said, it's true. Yes, we lied to you. Yes, we are not your biological parents.
As if she'd been reading from a textbook.
Grimmjow had demanded details. They fought, but she relented and revealed that his mother, his biological mother, had also been a drug addict (how ironic!) who had decided to give him up for adoption. It had been implied that she was a prostitute.
For a while afterwards he wandered around in a daze, disbelieving, before his cravings got the better of him. Then, the more he thought about it, the more it fit. How perfectly apt, that lowlife scum like him would be borne of such a situation. He couldn't have imagined a more appropriate origin. He had been thrown away, not by just one mother but by two, and now here he was, rotting on a hospital bed somewhere, filled with nothing more than the desire to try again and succeed this time.
The one thing that stopped him was the taste of pineapple.
Waking up every day to sterile walls, white sheets, tubes attaching him to a multitude of machines, made him feel hollowed out and empty. He had refused to eat until he saw it – topped by a ring of glistening fruit, the small pastry placed on his bedside table tantalized him even as nurses and doctors insisted he eat only liquid foods. He recognized it as coming from the only bakery his father approved of in the entire town. Almost every time he woke up there was one waiting for him, but he never thanked his father for it.
His father. His fake father. His pretend father. The only person who had come to see him.
Until she did.
He didn't know how long he had been there. It could have been days, or weeks. He still lived in a world that was half painkiller-induced hallucination; when he saw her sitting next to him on the bed Grimmjow thought he was imagining things.
Ah, this time I'm not dead. I've just gone crazy.
She looked the same. Fine blond hair, grey eyes, a tall hawkish nose. They had never looked anything like each other and now he knew why.
He stared at her, wondering why she wasn't fading out of existence, why it looked like she had been crying.
"Why the fuck are you here?" His voice came out a croak. He didn't know what language he was speaking in, but she understood, even if she didn't reply.
"I said, why the fuck are you here?" Louder this time.
"Grimmjow-"
"Don't call me that!" he screamed, satisfied when he saw her flinch. "What the fuck are you doing here? Get out!"
A nurse had run inside the room and was trying to calm him down. It was like the buzzing of a fly. In his tunnel vision, the only thing he could see was the woman sitting next to him, the woman who had lied to him his entire life, who had stripped him of everything. He was shrieking at her, sitting up, raising his arms – he wanted to strangle her, see her eyes bulge as the life drained out of her.
He would kill her and then he would kill himself. He screamed it to her.
She didn't look at him. Her eyes were downcast even as he spat and swore, flailing, reaching out with his hands to grab her skinny little neck.
It took a doctor and two nurses to hold him down while they tranquilized him like an animal. The thought that he had probably gotten that crackhead strength from his birth mother was the last thing that crossed his mind before darkness took him.
After that, she didn't visit again.
It was almost too easy. He had told his landlord he was moving out, taken all his money out of his bank account and arranged to have it shut down, and from there had arranged with Hirako to systematically erase all traces of his sham identity. The whole thing folded like a house of cards, as it was meant to; from the start he had been given a range of covers, in the unlikely situation that he would have to switch between more than one because of an emergency. He had done so at the beginning, besieged by paranoia, but had gradually settled into the skin of his current persona the way mud settled at the bottom of a weed-choked pond.
He was still using that pseudonym now, at the airport. Grimmjow was passed through security without a second glance. The only thing he took with him was a carry-on suitcase that contained almost all his possessions in the world. The journey to Tokyo was unremarkable in almost every aspect apart from the fact that he had decided to fly first class, the way he used to when he had been a child jet-setting throughout Europe with his parents during the summer. He sat next to the window, staring out at the blue sky absentmindedly, pondering if it was normal to be so unconcerned about potentially being spotted and killed by the man he had almost put in jail half a decade ago, but eventually decided he didn't care.
Running from death was no way to live. Perhaps anyone else would have been content to live as another person, shaving themselves of everything from their name to the hair on top of their head, but he had existed as a caged lion, only growing more and more predatory by the day.
The years had passed as a blur. He woke up, transformed into a stranger, went to work, came back home and occupied himself by wearing himself out at the punching bag or out on the streets, jogging until his lungs burned and he could barely breathe, exhausting himself into dreamless sleep almost every night.
He spent his days alone. He spent his nights alone. He was alone, like he'd always been.
There were no friends apart from rare contact with Shawlong and Hirako and the occasional phone call from his father. Days were white, nights were black; even the color of his eyes and hair had been extinguished. The years he had spent in Karakura with Ichigo seemed like a kaleidoscope fantasy in comparison.
Emerald green of the grass next to the river, where they spent hours circling around each other in a dance he recognized in retrospect as that of two nervous boys hopelessly attracted to the other, but too stupid and scared to do anything about it. The blue of the sky they stared at together, lying on that grass, almost touching but not quite. Orange hair, a shade he could never quite find anywhere else.
The red of Ichigo's lips after they had been kissed and bitten, puffy; brown eyes shining in rapture.
The worship in those eyes.
No one else had ever made him feel so wanted.
Ichigo had made Grimmjow realize how much he liked being himself; after years of solitude and self-destruction, spending time with the other boy had unexpectedly revealed aspects of himself he hadn't even known were there. Ichigo had delved into his personality like it was a shipwreck, surfacing with treasures: a twisted sense of humor, or the sweet tooth they shared in common. Being a vegetarian. He discovered somehow that Grimmjow could sing, and that his impressions were uncanny. He had cajoled, wheedled, persuaded Grimmjow to imitate this or that voice almost every night they had spent together after the discovery and it would have gotten old were it not for the awed, impressed look on his face that surfaced afterwards without fail. It stroked Grimmjow's ego immeasurably.
No one else had ever looked at him like that.
Being able to sing or cook or having a sweet tooth – he had never thought of any of it as interesting or worth knowing about. But Ichigo made him feel interesting. He made it worth being alive.
The glass ornament, the panther curled up sleeping soundly, was in his pocket. His thumb rubbed over the smooth glass. Really, it could have been any animal, any simple cat, but Ichigo had insisted it was a panther and so Grimmjow had chosen to believe him.
As long as he's fine, I'll be fine.
People around him didn't give him a second glance. He was a foreigner in a plane full of Japanese people, and the intrigue ended there. The prosthetics dulled his usually sharp features and he hunched over slightly to disguise his height, poking out his stomach to give himself something of a beer belly. He pitched his voice differently and it became nasal and unpleasant, as if he were about to hawk and spit at any moment. This persona was boring, ugly, and clearly unpopular, nothing like the man he had wanted to be. He was so normal he bored himself.
Of course, that had been the plan from the beginning. Grimmjow wasn't stupid enough to cast off the disguise just yet; that was still to come. He was simply biding his time.
The arrival and immigration went smoothly. He ignored the way his heart beat fiercely any time someone gave him a second glance and boarded a train for central Tokyo. He was there within the hour, following Hirako's advice and choosing to stay at a business hotel that saw so many foreign guests come and leave that it was unlikely that they would remember him, and for once he was glad Japanese society was almost strictly cash-based. Not that he was stupid enough to leave a credit card trail behind him, but in a hotel anywhere else in the world handing over a thick wad of notes for several weeks' stay would have raised eyebrows. Not so here.
Hirako had sent him an email during the flight. Grimmjow scanned it carefully after he settled into his tiny hotel room, memorizing every instruction, every date and command. He was to lie low while preparations for his arrival were made and the beginnings of their last resort were set into motion. Apart from that, he was free to do as he wished – within reason.
He started by brushing up on his Japanese. It had gotten rusty over the years, proven by how little he had understood the conversation overhead between Nel and Ichigo, but he was determined to regain his fluency. He found second-hand copies of his favorite books, flicked through magazines, struggled through newspapers. After a while – more than days but less than weeks – it took him almost no time devour them as he once had and he was gratified to see that with just a little time and practice it all came running back. He had never been stupid, after all. Hadn't he won that bet with Ichigo all those years ago to beat Ishida Uryuu and become top of their year?
The thought knocked the wind out of his sails with nostalgia one evening while he was tucked away in the corner of a tiny local cafe, halfway through re-reading one of his favorite plays. It was hard to believe that at such a young age he had been so angry and destructive, so hellbent on breaking down everything around him. In many ways he still was that angry, lonely child, but now that anger had found a channel to run though – now it was his weapon and his greatest strength, instead of being his vice. As a teenager, that anger had flooded him and lifted him up in waves, washing him away; as a man, he had fashioned it into a sword, wielding it with precision and deadly intent.
On the outside he had learned to remain cool and collected even while he was writhing with fury on the inside, disguising hatred with a lazy raised eyebrow or an unimpressed scowl. In his teenage years he would not have hesitated to gut anyone who looked at him the wrong way; now, he reserved his rage only for those who deserved it, only for those strong enough to take it. He had learned: there was no fun, no honor, in taking down any old weakling.
They had to be worth it.
The suits he wore were cheap and ill-fitting to match the character, but beneath them he felt the coiled strength of his muscles. Grimmjow couldn't wait to plant a fist into Aizen Sousuke's smug face, he couldn't wait to see the blood dripping out of those soulless eyes. And there were others who deserved his retribution: Ulquiorra, Nnoitra, Szayel...
At the thought of Nnoitra, the scars on his arms started to itch.
The urge still came upon him from time to time. He remembered how it had felt, enveloped in warmth, floating in the air and not a single care in the world. Nothing had mattered. Not his mother, his loneliness, nothing.
Grimmjow remembered having a special box, made of wood and exquisitely carved. It had been his most precious possession for years, being exactly the right size to fit everything that was needed. He remembered taking it out when he absolutely had to (it was a question of need, never merely of want – after a while, he always wanted) and pulling the elastic around his arm, seeing the veins bulge as he burned his dark, dirty little secret and sucked it all up with a syringe. The ritual of it had been almost as important as the high itself. As soon as he started the process he could feel the excitement rising, cresting at its peak when the needle finally pierced his skin and he felt it run through him, sweet and slow as molasses.
The scars had faded but not completely. Ichigo's lips had pressed over them so long ago, soothing Grimmjow when he had woken bathed in cold sweat, desperate even after several years of being clean. It still happened now, but this time there was no Ichigo to kiss him better.
But it didn't matter.
After Aizen, Nnoitra would pay.
Even the memory of his wide, piano-toothed grin made him itch to pick up the nearest table and smash it into smithereens. No one knew the full extent of what Nnoitra had done to him, what he had forced to Grimmjow to do, not even Ichigo. And hopefully he would take the secret to his grave – but only after forcing Nnoitra into his.
Grimmjow realised he had been staring at the same page of his book for the last several minutes, lost in thought. The sky was darkening. The only thing he had bought was a black coffee and it was now stone cold. He resisted the urge to pull up his sleeves and check his arms, sure that the marks on his skin would be livid and bright like he hadn't struggled to escape their chains for the better part of a decade.
The vibrating of his phone distracted him and his heart jumped. Finally, he thought. Even his blood was shivering with anticipation.
But it wasn't Hirako.
It was worse.
"You there, dumbass?"
He ground his teeth together. Her voice conjured an image of her insolent smirk, the ever-present fang that poked through it, her stupid blonde pigtails. He wished he could rip them right off her head.
"Sarugaki. What the hell are you doing calling?"
"Why don't you shut the hell up and listen to me," she snapped back. "It's time. Make yer move."
"And what move would that be, monkeyface?"
She didn't rise to the bait, unfortunately. Perhaps these years had changed her. When she muttered the instructions to him, her voice dropped and became serious, and it unsettled him.
"You got it?" she said, at the end.
"Yeah."
"Huh. Woulda figured a stupid shithead like you would need another debriefing but OK. Later, asshole."
"You piece of-"
She hung up and he was left cursing at the dial tone, people around him in the near-empty cafe staring at the crazy foreigner swearing in perfect Japanese. He noticed the stares and breathed deeply to calm himself.
His whole body was on edge. Nerves taut, muscles tensed, his mind on overdrive. Everything had been set in place, and now it was up to him to knock over the first domino and set off the chain reaction. He just hoped Hirako knew what the fuck he was doing.
Wasting no time, he went back to the hotel, packed and left for Karakura the next day.
The train he rode there followed a river edged with cherry blossom trees. The water was smothered with pink. He stared at it unseeingly. It was only early April but he was already sweating, humidity wrapped around him like a wet cloak, and it didn't stop even when he reached his destination and stepped outside into the station.
It was exactly the same. Even the vending machines sold the same drinks they had before. He bought a chilled bottle of sparkling water and ignored the waves of homesickness that crashed over him before heading to the noticeboard at the Northern exit, pretending to peruse the ads for everything from local activities to jobs and apartments, until he found what he was looking for: a recruitment poster for a male roommate, aged twenty to thirty-five, to join two others in a spacious and modern house that had been recently remodelled with good access to local transport, shopping and other amenities.
Rent's way too expensive, he noted, it better be a damn nice house.
He called the number and it rang two or three times before a woman answered, clearly chewing gum.
"Yeah."
Just like Karakura station, Yadomaru Lisa obviously hadn't changed either. She still chewed like an obnoxious cow.
He swallowed his disgust and said, "I saw your ad at the station, for a new roommate. I'm interested."
"Oh?" She couldn't have sounded more bored. He heard the flicking of a magazine. Of course, she was probably looking at porn too. Did she even know who she was talking to?
"My name is, uh, Leon Muller...I'm not Japanese but-"
"That's not a problem," she said, "I'll tell you the address now. Be there in half an hour."
She recited it quickly and hung up immediately afterwards, not even having the decency to ask if his poor foreign brain had understood her rapid fire Japanese. Grimmjow found himself grinding his teeth in frustration again; these people had the tendency to do that to him. But he had understood the address and the directions and he knew he could make it in good time.
His feet carried him automatically while his head was filled with a thousand tiny fluttering insects, every shining transparent wing reflecting a memory. The roads, the stores, the houses were the same. It was heart-wrenchingly familiar. He had grown up in this town. He had fallen in love in this town.
He had died in this town.
The sleepy, winding streets were still as incomprehensible and hard to navigate as ever. He saw children coming back from school. His heart jumped in his chest when he recognized his old school uniform, wrenching and squeezing when he saw high school boys the same age he and Ichigo would have been when they had just met each other again and everything had changed.
It was spring. The school year was just beginning; maybe this was even the first day. These kids had their whole lives in front of them, pure and clean and full of possibility, and the depth of his envy surprised him.
He and Ichigo had met for the very first time this day, when they had been six years old – seventeen years ago. Longer than most of these high school kids had been alive.
Grimmjow had spent three years torturing Ichigo and it had ended in pain for both of them. And then six years after that, at the age of fifteen, it had happened again, but those following three years had been so different, their relationship diametrically opposite to what it had been before. That orange-haired idiot he had so long considered his worst enemy had become his best friend, and so much more.
Ichigo had kept his world spinning. Grimmjow would have thrown his life away countless times if it meant keeping him safe.
He missed him.
It felt at once like a hollow and a tumor inside him, a big burning ball of nothingness, emptiness, that spread and pulsed waves of devastation. He missed him so much it hurt. He missed Ichigo's freckles, the lines at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, he even missed Ichigo's noble and often holier-than-thou attitude, his recklessness, his strength, his loyalty, his weird-ass dreams, the way he drooled when he slept, the way he kissed -
Grimmjow pushed through it and kept walking. These thoughts never led to good places. The past was the past and he could not change it.
Keep going, Jaegerjaques. Keep fucking going.
He was travelling to an unfamiliar part of town, an area that had been nothing special when he had lived here last but now seemed to be up-and-coming, judging from several newly built apartment blocks and supermarkets. He avoided the crowds of suited businessmen and women scurrying home after work, trying to hunch over and avoid showing his face without looking suspicious. There was no knowing who might still recognize him, however vaguely, even after everything he had done to disguise himself. Arguably Aizen was even more dangerous now since he had no reason to uphold the pretense that he was a clean-cut, law abiding citizen and Grimmjow was taking no chances. Who knew if he might bump into Nnoitra or one of his cronies on these very streets?
He arrived before the half hour was up. The house advertised was not what he had imagined. Instead of the clean, modern building that had been promised it looked run-down and shoddy, squeezed in between several other dingy apartment blocks and facing a construction site. No doubt it had been chosen for exactly that, in order to discourage people who were actually looking for a place to live.
Even the doorbell was broken. When he knocked on the door he thought he might accidentally put his fist through it. After a beat, it cracked open, and he saw eyes glinting behind wire-framed glasses that had gone out of fashion years ago. No doubt the woman still wore her sailor school uniform despite being her thirties or more. She had always given him the creeps.
"Come in."
The door opened wide. Grimmjow stepped through and slipped off his shoes, a snarky comment about the house looking like shit dying on his lips as he noticed the clean, pleasant interior. Lisa was staring at him, one eyebrow raised. Clearly she suspected what he was about to say.
"Let me give you a tour," she said calmly. "Leave your suitcase here and follow me please."
He said nothing, trailing after her into the kitchen and living area. She pointed out the flatscreen TV, the state of the art kitchen utilities, the wide bathroom with an adjoined laundry room and a door that led to a surprisingly spacious backyard. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and yet another toilet, with storage squeezed into the remaining space. He had to grudgingly admit that despite himself, he was impressed.
And impatient. Grimmjow didn't know what Lisa was playing at, what kind of game Hirako and his gang were teasing him with. He was sizzling with tension. The house was surprisingly nice, yes, he could admit it, but what about everything else?
"How much is the rent, again?" he asked gruffly, when Lisa had finished her tour.
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Oh yeah. Good question. I forgot."
Grimmjow only stared at her, hoping that his face conveyed all the contempt he felt. She gave him a slow, knowing smile.
"Don't worry. My boss will tell you. He's the one who owns this place, he should be here soon."
There was a knock at the front door.
"Huh. Speak of the devil."
With one last pop of her gum she gestured at him to stay in the dining area next to the kitchen and went to open the front door, returning accompanied by a lanky man with a hat pulled low over his eyes and the collar of his jacket turned up, hands stuck in his pockets. Grimmjow stayed where he was, sitting at the dining table, hands balled into fists by his side.
"Well well well." The man slid onto a chair next to him, pulling off the cap and grinning widely. "Hello there. Glad to see you made it safely."
There were many things he wanted to say. What came out, strangely, was, "This place looks like shit from the outside but the inside ain't so bad."
Hirako Shinji laughed. "That was the plan! We spent a ton on it. That's why the rent's so high." He winked. "Of course, we might be able to make an exception fer you though."
"Oh? Depending on what?" He could feel the gears starting to turn. The pace was picking up. Lisa had joined them at the table, looking very serious, while Hirako looked like he was doing nothing more than getting a tan at the beach, long legs stretched out before him and arms behind his head.
"Depending on whether you can do us a lil' favor. Maybe then we can lower the rent."
There. There it was.
Grimmjow took a deep breath. "What do you need me to do?"
The only answer he got was a tilt of the head and a slow, considering gaze. Hirako's eyes were narrowed in thought. Grimmjow had never seen those eyes look anything but razor sharp, and they were slicing through him now, dissecting him, looking underneath the fake nose and the contacts, right into his brain.
"We're in a very delicate stage at the moment, Leon-san. Lemme tell you, planning renovations like this ain't easy. There's a lot of red tape to get through and preparation ya need to do, and if any one thing, one tiny thing, goes wrong, we're all back to square one."
Clearly, he wasn't talking simply about the house. It took a gargantuan effort to Grimmjow to bite his tongue and let the other man continue speaking.
"Luckily I have a contact who's managed to make everything a lot easier for us. He works for someone you might know."
His breath caught in his lungs. Was Hirako saying - ?
"Or you might not know him," he continued, "who knows. He just works in an office, after all, but without him we might not have got the planning permission to get all this work done so quickly. It ain't easy replacing floors and adding rooms and shit to existing buildings, it takes a lot of effort and development, y'know what I'm sayin'?"
"I do," Grimmjow said at last, his voice a low growl. "Get to the point."
"Tch, I was just getting' there!" Hirako Shinji was spinning his cap around his pointer finger, swinging on his chair. Those sharp eyes travelled up to where blue hair would have been. A grin sliced his lips.
"What I need you to do is grow yer hair out. Bein' bald doesn't suit ya, sorry to say. I hafta be honest, it's kind of offending me."
"My...hair?"
"Right. Unless it's just unfortunate genes and you really just lost all yer hair at a super young age? I guess it happens." He ran a hand through his own hair: blond, thick and shining. "Not that I would know."
Once again, Grimmjow had to bite his tongue to stop from rising to the bait. "I can do that. If you need me to."
"Cool. Weird request, huh?" Hirako grinned widely and it almost split his face in half. "Sorry, I just don't like my tenants looking like they might be in a biker gang. Also, get better clothes. That suit looks like it was made from a plastic bag. You need to get on my level."
He pointed out his slick, sharp outfit – stylish gray peacoat, pinstriped trousers, lime green shirt and a skinny black tie, topped off with the cap he had set on his head at a rakish angle. He did look good.
"Better clothes?" Grimmjow asked. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
Hirako tutted. "Such filthy language. I mean, clothes that don't like you got them out a dumpster. Nice stuff. That's why I might be cutting down your rent...I feel sorry for you, man. I know not everyone can look like this but...well. At least you can try."
Another face-splitting grin. The bastard was enjoying this. Grimmjow needed to stop grinding his teeth – he wouldn't have any left if he carried on like this.
"Right. Clothes and hair," he said, in a slightly strangled voice. "Anything else, your highness?"
"Hm. Don't think so." Abruptly the other man rose from his seat, pulling his collar back up to hide the lower half of his face. "I'll get in touch if I need anything else. But I just have to say..."
"Yes?"
"There are parts of this town that are gonna be dangerous fer you." He was deadly serious now. "I don't know if yer familiar with them. Some are nearby. I wouldn't go near them, if I were you."
Grimmjow's heart started beating a tattoo against his ribcage. All he could do was nod in acknowledgment, at which Hirako Shinji put his hand into a breast pocket and pulled out a pristine name card, with his name and contact details embossed in silver. Grimmjow could barely contain his sneer. Of course – almost tacky, but not quite, just like the man himself.
"Pleasure doin' business with ya. If you've got any questions, just get me at this number. Lisa'll handle the contract and the money business, so I'm gonna leave you in her capable hands. Later!"
With a casual backwards wave of his hand he swooped out of the room, coattails flying. Lisa, as promised, went though the contract with him, outlining the payments and conditions. She acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as if the beginnings of a plan that would shake their world to its very foundations hadn't just been put in motion.
Grimmjow could barely concentrate on what she was saying. He signed without thinking about it. His hands were shaking. His ears were ringing.
She left him soon after everything was completed and he realized he was alone in the house. The other two roommates appeared not to exist; he went back upstairs, intending to choose a room even though he had no illusions about the fact that he would probably not be living there for very long. Hirako had been clear about the consequences of their newest strategy, and none of the possible outcomes were particularly favorable for Grimmjow.
But he chose a room anyway. The house was on a hill: the view from the bedroom window was impressive, looking out onto a valley, clusters of houses broken up by trees and wide streets. Beyond were rice paddies and mountains covered in bamboo forest. He thought he could see his old high school in the distance and something stirred inside him. The air tasted the same. He felt it, deep in his bones – he was where he was meant to be.
When he sighed, it felt like it came all the way from his toes. The mattress was thick and squishy and he sank into it immediately when he sat down. Grimmjow scrubbed a hand over his face, trying not to disturb carefully applied prosthetics, feeling almost immediately the effects of the stress he had been trying to run away from for the last several weeks. He lay down, promising himself it would only be a nap, but as soon as he closed his eyes he was fast asleep.
