Familiar Face

After everything, Grimmjow couldn't believe when his phone rang early Monday morning and Officer Ochi told him to remember to go to his classes that day. He honestly hadn't have even remembered that he was supposed to be a teacher after the last couple of days. He had barely slept that night as his mind turned over the events he'd just been through, trying to make sense of them, and trying to forget his last kiss with Ichigo.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Grimmjow rasped into the phone, rubbing at his eyes sleepily.

"Of course not," Officer Ochi said. "You're still required around another 40 hours of community service according to my logs."

Grimmjow groaned and agreed he'd be at the college.

Honestly, it had been kind of nice to have something distract him. The last couple of weeks would have been hell if he hadn't been able to spend his time pouring over student projects. Nnoitra was annoyingly perky whenever Grimmjow saw him. Grimmjow knew he was still seeing Ichigo's cousin Shiro, but he couldn't make fun of him for it because whenever he did Nnoitra would simply point out that at least he was getting some and hadn't been make an idiot of.

The last day of school, Grimmjow looked out over his last class with a sigh. Ichigo's friends had still attended of course. He had already asked them where Ichigo was, under the pretense of finding a wayward student who had stopped attending classes. Of course, he had already told the students he could care less if they actually attended as long as they got their projects in. Renji had told him Ichigo had gone on vacation to the United States to visit family there.

"He told you that or someone else did?" Grimmjow had asked.

Renji had just looked at him weird and Grimmjow pretended to not notice that Renji didn't answer the question. He suppose it didn't really matter.

"Alright class," Grimmjow said, standing up from behind his desk. "I assume you all got your final project done so there's no real reason for you to be here. Make sure it gets on my desk or in my office by the end of the day and get the hell out."

The students grinned, happy to get out class early, and filed out.

Grimmjow leaned back and closed his eyes after the last student had left. His phone rang, jolting him slightly. Not that many people had his number. He wondered if it was Officer Ochi again.

"Hello," he answered.

"So is the school falling apart without me?"

"Gin? Why the hell are you calling me?" Grimmjow asked. "Where are you?"

"Is that any way to talk to your new boss?" Gin said.

"My new...shit, really?" Grimmjow groaned. "Too bad Ichigo didn't shoot a couple of inches to the right or the left."

"My Ichi would never do that," Gin replied.

"What? Seriously, what the fuck is going on?" Grimmjow questioned his superior.

"I'm sure it'll all be clearer to you pretty soon," Gin answered. Grimmjow heard a click and stared at his phone in disbelief. It took a lot for him to not smash the phone into the ground. After almost a month, that's all the explanation he was going to get?

I didn't even get a chance to ask about Ichigo, Grimmjow thought to himself. He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn't hear the door creaking open. A student threw a disk onto his desk.

"You look stressed."

Grimmjow's eyes went wide and he looked up. "Ichigo?"

"So are you more curious or angry?" Ichigo asked casually, with a small smile tracing his lips.

"What the fuck Ichigo!" Grimmjow jumped up. "What the hell are you doing here? You know that I'm still being tracked by the police, and now you probably have the whole intelligence department on your ass too. Get the hell out before they come for you!"

"Concerned more than anything, huh?" Ichigo said. "That's actually incredibly sweet."

"Are you insane?"

"I'm clear," Ichigo replied. "You think I'd come back here if I thought I was going to be locked up?"

Grimmjow was standing now, arms distance from Ichigo. Gin...he had to have known. The call was so close in timing.

"Before you decide anything," Ichigo said. "At least let me explain myself."

Grimmjow clenched his fists, and could feel his jaw tighten.

"Please, at least a chance," said Ichigo.

Grimmjow nodded, and allowed himself to be led down the hall. He still didn't say anything as Ichigo drove him to a fancy hotel, bypassing the front desk and going straight up to a room.

The door closed and Ichigo and Grimmjow were alone, Grimmjow still staring at the back of Ichigo's head. Ichigo turned swiftly, pressing into Grimmjow with a passionate kiss. Grimmjow almost lost his balance and wrapped his arms around Ichigo to steady himself, Ichigo still insistently moving on his lips. Grimmjow groaned and kissed back with abandon, pulling Ichigo towards him even more tightly. He felt himself being pulled towards the bed and walked forward, collapsing onto it as Ichigo pushed him down.

"N-no," Grimmjow got out as their mouths finally separated.

Ichigo was ignoring him, his hands under Grimmjow shirt. Grimmjow quickly grabbed those caressing hands, holding them still in his own.

"Talk first," Grimmjow stated, still panting.

"Are you sure?" Ichigo said with a smile, his knee pressing into Grimmjow's growing arousal. "You seem like you missed me."

"I don't know that I can trust you at all," Grimmjow replied.

Ichigo's smile faded. "Yeah. I'm sorry. Let's talk first. Um...tea?"

"Fuck tea."

Ichigo raised an eyebrow at Grimmjow's vehement reaction.

"Aizen loved tea and would force us to drink it all the time," Grimmjow explained. "How about coffee?"

Luckily the hotel had provided a small packet of coffee to be brewed by the small coffeepot in the kitchenette. The two sat at the small table in the hotel room, nursing their warm drinks.

"Where to start?" Ichigo asked.

"Who do you work for?" Grimmjow asked.

"Interpol."

"Inter...what the hell? When you were under Szayel's drug you said that you didn't work for any government agency," Grimmjow sputtered.

"You think that I've been hanging around someone like Kisuke Urahara and had never learned how to deal with drugs like the one I was given? I've been trained in how to resist questioning. Besides, Interpol isn't a government agency last time I check."

"Your drug addled brain could really make so fine a distinction? Besides, you spilled about the Hogyoku encryption," Grimmjow pointed out.

"Which I had already told you about," Ichigo stated.

"None of the intelligence officers, people that were even your friends, knew anything about it," Grimmjow said.

"Director Yamamoto knew. Why do you think he drew me to a private room for questioning when I showed up wounded? Why would I have been allowed to go to the raid in the first place? And do you really think that Yamamoto is so lax in his standards that he'd let a close friend or family member into his private office when it's illegal to allow anyone under top secret clearance even into the building?" Ichigo asked.

"You're so young though," Grimmjow said. "Does this mean that Urahara is with Interpol too?"

"No. He's the one who recruited me after finding out that I had cracked his code, but he doesn't work for them. You could say he has close connections with some of the higher ups in the organization though."

"Who do you report to?"

"Well, I was obviously working with Director Yamamoto on this case, but in general I report to Yoruichi Shihoin," Ichigo told Grimmjow as he took another sip of coffee.

"Fucking..." Grimmjow was starting to get pissed. "Hey, should you even be telling me all of this?"

"I thought you wanted to know."

"Well, yeah, but..."

"Well as long as you keep your big mouth closed we'll be ok," Ichigo told the espada.

"So you guys were after Aizen? What did he do? I know that you guys can't get involved in anything political."

"Actually, we weren't after Aizen after all," Ichigo admitted.

"What?" Grimmjow was shocked.

"You see, our trails all led to Aizen, but as we got closer, or more specifically as I worked with Gin, I realized that it wasn't Aizen that we wanted."

"Why the hell did you shoot Gin anyways?"

"In a minute," Ichigo waved away the question. "We've been seeing signs of tampering for some time now. Guns given to militias, coups planned way more effectively than the troops that took over could account for, rebellions supported, uprising in normally peaceful areas, drug traffickers assassinated with expert precision in their own homes."

"Why would you care about drug dealers getting picked off?"

"Well, someone was doing it. It's still murder," Ichigo shrugged.

"And it wasn't Aizen?"

"It was someone close to him," Ichigo said.

"And not Gin?" Grimmjow was more shocked about that fact than the fact that it wasn't Aizen.

"It was Kaname Tosen," Ichigo told him.

"We caught him," Grimmjow eyes narrowed. "He was arrested during the raid."

"DNA proved that to be a double. So, I've actually failed my mission so far."

"You're kidding," Grimmjow said.

"Not only that, but evidence points to the double having been there instead of Tosen for at least a month."

"How the hell did he know that you were coming after him?" Grimmjow wondered.

"That...is a very good question," Ichigo said grimly.

"A leak then? Or did someone somehow get access to your files?"

"It's not like we're a very big organization. I really hope it wasn't a leak," Ichigo stated. "But it's not like a information drain would be any better."

"If Gin isn't in on this, why did you shoot him?"

"Gin knows who I am, I told him almost right away."

"That seems pretty stupid to me," Grimmjow complained.

"I happen to know that Gin has a very personal reason to hate Aizen, and at the time we still thought that he was our big bad baddie. Even after we realized that it was Kaname Tosen that we wanted, we offered up our information to Yamamoto to help them remove Aizen. Just because he wasn't the international war criminal we thought he was, doesn't mean he wasn't a completely dangerous person. We made a deal with Director Yamamoto. We give him Aizen, we would get Tosen. Actually, the United States would get Tosen, since we don't keep prisoners. The CIA had him high on their hit list and were dying to get their hands on him, assuming we could prove that he was who we said he was."

"Still haven't heard why you shot him. He didn't seem angry about it when I talked to him," Grimmjow said. "Which is truly bizarre."

"You know that people like us, we have a sixth sense almost. A sense that someone wants us, like a danger alarm that goes of in our head when we're around someone with murderous intent," Ichigo stated.

Grimmjow nodded. They had all felt it the second that they had walked into Aizen's office, which is why both he and Gin had frozen in place, trying to figure out where it was coming from.

"I was closer to Aizen than you two were," Ichigo said. "You know that huge brass relief that Aizen has over his desk?"

"I've always told him that it would kill him during an earthquake," Grimmjow said with a grin. The thing looked like it weighted a ton and covered almost the whole wall. Grimmjow had thought it a little egotistical for Aizen to have it, like his office was a temple or something.

"I saw a glint coming off of it."

"So what? The whole thing is metal," Grimmjow mentioned.

"No, I knew it was a gun. I could see a slight protrusion," Ichigo replied.

"That's a big leap to make."

"I hate guns, I know when one is being pointed at me," Ichigo said.

Grimmjow remembered how shocked the intelligence directors had been that Ichigo had shot someone, saying something about how they thought he was scared of guns.

"So you shot Gin?"

"The hole was small, only a limited firing range. I knew that the sniper was after either after Gin or I, both of us being well within range. Shooting Gin was a distraction. Either the person was after Gin Ichimaru, and would think he was taken out by me, or the person was after me and would be taken aback by my shooting Gin and moving quickly out of range."

"You hid behind me? What if they had shot me too you idiot!" Grimmjow said angrily.

"You were behind a pillar, remember? You ducked there the second I fired on Gin, acting out of instinct. We were both protected, even assuming that somehow the sniper was able to get that far to the right or left, which I highly doubt."

"So fucking chancy," Grimmjow groaned.

"Remember the off site team? Team 5?"

"Yeah..."

"All my own men," Ichigo stated. "I had them free Lilynette to use as an exchange for Starrk, and then leave her in the front for him to pick her up."

"I remember that, but I didn't know that those guys were yours."

"The intelligence guys probably assumed that they were counterintelligence, and you guys assumed it was more intelligence men," Ichigo said with a slightly smug smile. "They moved in quickly after leaving the girl."

Grimmjow remembered the panic after Ichigo shot Gin. Nnoitra and Byakuya's teams had closed in fairly soon after, they had arrested Aizen, Gin was getting emergency care on the ground, and Ichigo was in cuffs surrounded by men. Grimmjow could vaguely remember Ichigo talking to one of them.

"You gave them orders to go after the sniper?" Grimmjow guessed.

"Yes, but she was already long gone. She had even abandoned her weapon, so we were able to trace who it was."

"She? So it was..."

"It was Tia Hallibel, the third espada," Ichigo stated, his eyes flaring slightly, his lips drawn into a grim line.

"You know her?"

"You could say that I have a very personal grudge against her."

"How is that?" Grimmjow asked.

"She's the one that killed my mother."