Part 9! Thanks to Q and B for pre-reading and editing.
Grimmjow was seated on one of the high square pillars that dotted the atrium, waiting.
Aizen had called them all to witness the birth of one of their new brothers or sisters, what bullshit—Grimmjow had little patience for the atmosphere of sibling-hood and family the shinigami tried to foster. Didn't matter to him who the newest addition to their ranks was, personality-wise; Grimmjow only gave a shit about power, and if this new little prick turned out to be strong, fuck, he wanted to see it and know how to beat it. No one was taking his new position from him, not without a good goddamn fight.
The creature itself was bound in bandages and contained in one of Aizen's kidoh cells; it wasn't moving, but then none of them did before the hougyoku transformation. Captured or coerced into service—Grimmjow could remember when it'd happened to him. He'd gone willingly, when Aizen's reiatsu beckoned like a flame that they all crouched around for warmth, and the promise of power. He wasn't too proud to admit that the rapid metamorphosis from adjucas to arrancar was what he'd craved for years, and Grimmjow held no regrets for going through the procedure.
From his vantage point, he watched as Kurosaki walked into the wide audience chamber, just easy-as-you-please, not even giving a look to where Grimmjow was sitting. He was surprised the shinigami even came; Grimmjow hadn't pushed him around about watching the show, and imagined it was probably Neliel's doing. Wanting to show off; she'd just put it in different terms so she'd come out smelling like a rose.
Grimmjow'd been chewing on a rough fingernail, and spat a fleck to the side. "Hey," he called, and that got Ichigo's attention as the vaizard's scowling eyes fixed on him. "C'mere."
"Fuck you," Ichigo said, and propped himself up with one shoulder against a corner, his back half-turned to Grimmjow.
It made Grimmjow smile, a bit in annoyance and a bit in satisfaction; it was a good thing that Ichigo never broke against him. But it was irritating, having to drag the little brat around behind him with other people watching. Grimmjow preferred to have Ichigo be the one chasing after his heel and didn't mind pounding on him when he forgot his place, but the judging glances from Nel, Ulquiorra, and even Aizen were enough to make Grimmjow want to beat the little shit until he finally caved.
Having Kurosaki as a constant counter-balance would never get old, Grimmjow just wished they didn't have an avid audience for it. It was fun when he tore the little fucker apart, but Grimmjow knew it drew his rank into question when Ichigo resisted.
"Eh, shit-for-brains," he said, voice carrying through the open room. "Get your ass up here."
"No."
"I'll make you do it."
Ichigo's eyes flicked to his momentarily, before fixing on the bound figure in the center of the room. He shrugged, "Then make me."
Grimmjow snickered; that was an invitation. Grimmjow used a quick sonido to put himself right in the little bastard's face; Kurosaki's eyes widened in momentary surprise before Grimmjow snatched his throat, fingers closing as he slammed the other man up against the wall he'd rested against.
"Here's the deal, you little fuck: I know your brain's thick as mud, but maybe you can process a single word if you hear it often enough, yeah?"
Kurosaki's lip curled as he tried to say something, but Grimmjow jerked him forward, holding him by his throat. He grinned, right in Ichigo's face, "Obey."
Then he threw the shinigami over his shoulder, bounding back to where he'd been seated. He dropped Kurosaki in a pile at his feet. "Think you can do that, huh?"
The shinigami was a spluttering heap as Grimmjow crouched down in his previous position. "Don't think you can just toss me around like your personal punching bag, dickhead," Kurosaki snapped, righting himself indignantly.
"Maybe if you didn't make it so easy," Grimmjow shot back over his shoulder. Kurosaki was on his feet, his face flushed and angry; it was a good color on him. Grimmjow was glad, selfishly, that they were the first two in the audience chamber. Just then, Ulquiorra entered the room and Grimmjow knew he didn't have the patience to suffer under any of the other Espadas' glares. Rank numero dos was going to Ulquiorra's head, and Grimmjow knew the prick would enjoy rubbing it in over how he couldn't control his own subordinates.
Fraccion were only as useful as they proved themselves to be, which was why Grimmjow'd never bothered with them in the first place. Pathetic, sniveling arrancar who weren't confident enough with their given rank, and had to seek out stronger masters to serve; they disgusted him. Grimmjow could remember the way Apache had gone around, horn in the air, so proud and sure of herself after Halibel took her in, and the memory rose a sour taste in his mouth. Apache just couldn't stand being ranked so low; faster to get somewhere when you latched onto a person of power, and let their strength speak for you, even if you were subservient.
The difference between Grimmjow and his shinigami was that he'd chosen Kurosaki as a servant—wasn't his fault if the little shit was terrible at it, and frankly, Grimmjow didn't care. He wanted someone strong. He wanted someone fearless, who wouldn't bend against him but had to be constantly taught his place; that was Kurosaki to the core.
The shinigami shifted beside him, leaning his shoulders against the rising marble pillar that broke off from the platform they rested on, leaving a small landing. "What the fuck d'you care if I'm here or there?" he muttered.
"Matters t'me," Grimmjow said. He didn't have to look at Ichigo to know he was scowling. "Gotta keep you close. You'll forget who you belong to otherwise."
"You only say it like that to remind yourself, jackass—"
Grimmjow's sniggering interrupted him, "D'you even know what you're here about?"
Kurosaki said nothing in return, and a quick glance showed him scowling and irritated. Just the way he should be. Grimmjow was fundamentally a creature of chaos, but he did like certain things to be just-so. He tilted his head to the side and resumed chewing on his thumbnail, "We're gonna sit back on our heels, and watch real admiringly as Aizen-sama pretends he's god and makes a new creature outta clay, that's how he works. And this is where I always sit when he does it; it's the best spot in the house, and it's mine."
Kurosaki didn't say anything for a moment, before echoing Grimmjow's statement, "So this is your spot."
"Damn right."
"You have your own spot." He could hear Kurosaki folding his arms across his chest as he leaned heavily against the wall behind him. "You're so fucking weird."
What did he care of what Kurosaki thought? Bad company was better than no company; in fact, bad company was good company in the absence of any company at all. That was how it'd been with Shawlong and Il Forte and Nakim—they were all dicks, but having them around was better than being all on his lonesome, in Grimmjow's mind. And they never gave up their rank, never turned into crawling fraccion…he'd never have taken them like that, even if they'd offered it up.
Come to think of it, he was the only one without bitches to cater, aside from Ulquiorra, and you could probably blame that on the former-fourth Espada's personality alone—
Grimmjow was snickering at his own private joke, and Kurosaki groused, "What's so goddamn funny?"
"Your fucking face," he sneered, and Ichigo made a move to kick him but stopped; Aizen was coming into the room. Grimmjow'd been watching the other arrancar shuffle in with their attendants, and now the show was about to start. Ichigo must've caught on as well, because he stopped and settled back to where he'd been before as Aizen approached the dias where the bound creature was.
"It pleases me that so many of you were able to join us," their lord and master was saying, as though he were preaching to a choir of many, instead of a handful. "Today we will witness the first birth since the fire. The first addition to our line, and we have Neliel to thank for this."
The green-haired girl was standing not too far from Aizen, and her sycophancy made Grimmjow's stomach roil. "Hey Neliel, you got something brown on your nose," he called out to her.
"Better than having a face as green as yours," she returned, smiling, and then smiling at Aizen as he beamed towards her.
Fucking bitch. "What the fuck's that even s'pposed to mean," he muttered.
"Envy," Kurosaki said, as though Grimmjow expected an answer.
"You're full'a shit if you think I'm jealous of her," he snapped to the other man, but Kurosaki was watching the show intently. It was annoying.
Aizen raised the Hougyoku up on its platform and did whatever it was that made the damn little ball do its magic; it crackled and hissed under Aizen's hand, and then there was a burst of power—sheer reiatsu pouring from Aizen to the Hougyoku to the creature, and the barrier surrounding it burst like shards of glass.
Grimmjow squinted against the sudden brightness, but he could tell instantly that this thing wasn't much to speak of at all. Nel might've come back from scouring the desert for possible arrancar, but this new sibling wasn't Espada-strength; it wasn't even in the top twenty.
When the light and dust cleared, there was a naked girl standing in the center of the room; Grimmjow could see her quaking from where he sat. She couldn't look more than twelve, with hair the color of fresh-cut lavender; Grimmjow couldn't tell where her mask-fragment was but her hollow-hole gaped widely on the left side of her chest, biting into the side of one mal-formed, prepubescent breast. Even if she did look like an innocent little thing, Grimmjow knew better; age and form weren't exactly linear when it came to arrancar.
The girl was staring at her hands, horrified it seemed.
"Tell us your name," Aizen said, like he always did. Like they all had names before they had minds.
Instead of a name, the girl-thing just started bubbling, with a shaking voice, "My arms, what happened to my arms?"
"It's alright—" Nel had approached her, putting a reassuring hand on her shoulders, but the little naked brat continued to cry.
"I had so many, so many of them, my tentacles—what happened to them?" She was shrieking now, her voice rising in pitch by the syllable, and it made Grimmjow's ears hurt. And then she just started to fucking scream, falling down on her knees and wailing like the whole goddamn world was ending—
"Fuck this," Grimmjow snarled, and rose. Kurosaki was rigid beside him, watching. Grimmjow grabbed his upper arm and pulled him along. "We're leaving, it's another fucking broken one."
"What?" Ichigo seemed rooted to the spot. "What's wrong with her?"
The brat was still screaming, tearing at her hair with fingers she'd never had before, rocking back-and-forth while Neliel tried to calm her. Aizen wore his typical, benign expression though under it, Grimmjow could sense his disappointment.
"She's a fucking dud, what more is there to it!" Grimmjow jerked the other man into walking, dragging him behind. The little bitch's screams were starting to piss him off; Grimmjow'd shut her up faster than Nel would, and it'd be kinder than letting her live like she was. "The transition happens like that sometimes, when they're not ready for it. It's Nel's goddamn fault, bringing a brat like that in. C'mon!"
They leapt down from where they'd been watching; Grimmjow knew a quick exit from the room, but the girl's shrieks reached them, echoing into the antechamber beyond. Grimmjow sighed gratefully for the relative quiet, propping his hands on hips as he continued away. He glanced behind to make sure Kurosaki was following; the vaizard had a hand pressed against his mouth as though he were about to be sick.
"Stop worrying so goddamn much. She's crazy but she'll live, if you call that fucking living," Grimmjow snapped.
"Does that happen…a lot?"
Grimmjow shrugged. "It happens. When they try to put too much power into something not ready for it, what d'you expect? Like something that can't hold it all, so they crack and break."
Kurosaki still looked deeply upset, his brows pinching in a pained expression that Grimmjow wasn't familiar or comfortable with. It was too compassionate to his liking, disgusting. It was the way Ichigo had always looked at Nel when she'd been like a toddler. It was the same way Ichigo had looked at him, when he'd thought Grimmjow was defeated.
"Look, okay? It's fine. She's nuts now but someone—probably fucking Nel, since she got the little bitch into this in the first place—someone'll take the brat in and make her fraccion, then she'll have a place and a purpose," Grimmjow said. He wasn't sure why he bothered, making Kurosaki feel less horrible in a place so close to hell it could easily've been called that. "Stop fucking…stop looking like whatever the hell that is you've got on your face."
That seemed to snap the shinigami around, like a rubber band. "What d'you mean by that, asshole?"
"You look all sad, like we just kicked a goddamn puppy," Grimmjow snorted. "That thing's killed more'n you'd think, just remember that. Crazy now, but fuck, she probably ate more human souls than you ever known to get there."
He stopped, hands still on his hips and fucking pissed. Grimmjow wanted a decent goddamn show, and instead they were all treated to psycho-fucking-theater. He'd seen it more than he liked, and it still creeped him out. "You could tell it was junk the second Aizen started pouring juice into her. You get more garbage than anything worthwhile, anyway."
"And you'd know." Kurosaki was getting his familiar scowl back; it was nice. Grimmjow realized he liked that expression best of any.
"Fuck yeah, I would," Grimmjow smiled, wolfishly. He threw his shoulders back. "When they brought me into this world, I fucking blew all the pillars down; they had to rebuild the whole goddamn room."
"Just for you," Kurosaki muttered, snorting derisively as he said it.
"Damn right."
Grimmjow didn't like when other people made his plans for him; he liked it even less when those plans started to make sense.
He wasn't sure when the idea started to sound like a good idea, just that it did, and then it was all he could think about. Grimmjow wasn't exactly the type to contemplate plans for very long before acting on them, but he thought about this one—it was, after all, just what Aizen had wanted him to do, but so fucking what if it was? Grimmjow could feel himself going crazier by the second, stuck in Las Noches without much of anything to do. Even Kurosaki was avoiding him, like a spurned little brat, and it was irritating.
Grimmjow could've forced a confrontation easily, but he knew that'd lead to them blowing through the palace and taking half of it with them. Wouldn't really be satisfying if things amounted to less, but Grimmjow knew it'd be his ass on the line while Aizen was breathing down his neck.
He knew a better way to make them both happy, to get him and Kurosaki out and alone—they could destroy anything they could find in the desert—and if what they didn't destroy they captured, well, then Aizen wouldn't have quite as much reason to be scowling at him, would he?
It all made a whole lotta sense in Grimmjow's mind. Nel always got in good with the shinigami because she did whatever he said, no questions asked—Grimmjow wasn't quite that much of a bootlicker. But he could recognize something that'd make his whole life a little less of a pain in the ass: go out, find a hollow for Aizen to experiment on, and while Grimmjow did it, he'd have Kurosaki all to himself.
No Nel to chastise him for breaking his toys. No Ulquiorra to mope around, determined to suck the fun out of any situation he could find. No Aizen to scold him over fighting for no reason. And only Kurosaki, glaring and hateful and his; the two of them together, the way they were meant to be.
When Grimmjow made up his mind about something, it was damn hard to change it, even if he himself wanted to—which he didn't, in this case. He couldn't exactly see a downside to his plan; all he had to do now was drag the little fucking shinigami prick along with him. Kurosaki had been stumping around with a wounded-looking expression ever since he'd watched that little arrancar bitch get transformed, and Grimmjow found that most irritating of all. Too much compassion in a place that all but rejected the very concept. The shinigami would get over it; he'd get over it quicker if he was forced to find and conquer a new arrancar recruit.
To make it through a transition meant any hollow ready for it would put up a fight, and Grimmjow was anticipating it with every fiber; his mouth watered just thinking of the battle to come. Ichigo would get over his naïve notions of compassion and humanity fast enough when he was the one fighting the creatures strong enough to be made arrancar.
Grimmjow sensed where the little bastard was and found him, sweeping through a doorway, full of caged energy. "Here you are, shit. I've been looking for you all over."
"For what?" Ichigo was standing beside an open window that looked out onto the desert; it worked out perfectly. Now they wouldn't have to go far to start their trip.
"I got this great idea," Grimmjow said, and knew his voice sounded like it was bubbling with excitement, but he wasn't bothered enough to stop it. "Great fucking idea, wanna hear it?"
"I've had nightmares that started this way."
"Fuck you, you'll love it," Grimmjow snapped, smile not even faltering. "Guess what? We're going hunting."
"What?" Kurosaki looked confused, scowling to cover it.
"That brat Nel brought back got me thinking. It got me thinking about how I could do the same thing, but better. And how'd that be, yeah? All Aizen wants these days is more, and we're gonna give it to him." Grimmjow drew himself up to his full height, hands on his hips and grinning. "Nel's always shiny like a diamond in Aizen's mind, and I'm always shit, y'know? But it don't gotta be that way; we just have to give him what he wants."
"It's taken you this long to figure that out, huh?" Ichigo said, crossing his arms. "I hope this isn't supposed to impress me."
"Y'know, you're gonna be stuck with me out there, without anyone around to look after your ass, so you might wanna not piss me off too bad," Grimmjow snorted, derisively. "At least not yet, anyway."
"So when do we leave?" Ichigo turned, expressionless. But Grimmjow caught the slight tension in his shoulders—excitement; the shinigami wasn't afraid at all, of Grimmjow or whatever they were setting off to find. That suited Grimmjow just about perfect.
"Che, knew you'd be into it," Grimmjow smiled widely, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Wanna go now, eh? Think you can?"
"I'm ready whenever the fuck you are, bastard," Kurosaki snapped.
"You'll need this, then." He'd had the little prick's zanpakutou, stored off in a place the shinigami wouldn't ever be able to find, and he tossed it to Kurosaki now.
Ichigo caught it automatically, staring at the sword without recognition. "What the fuck is this?"
"It's your sword," Grimmjow said simply. "Can't you tell even that? Fuck."
Though it looked like only a simple katana, it was the little bastard's own—Grimmjow wouldn't let a prize like that out of his grasp, same as how he wouldn't let Kurosaki himself go. But Aizen had insisted on placing a seal over it, so the shinigami couldn't release his bankai—more cautionary bullshit that Grimmjow had no time for. He'd rather have the sword as he knew it in Kurosaki's hands: long, black, and deadly. But this simple, unreleased thing was the best that they both could hope for now; Grimmjow would give Aizen his concessions as long as it meant Kurosaki got a sword at all.
"Aizen put a limiter on it so you can't use it against me," Grimmjow said simply. "But it's yours. The one I took from you. I'm taking it back after this, but no sense in going off on a chase and having you helpless. I wanna see you fight, shinigami; I'm not about to play nursemaid on this mission."
Kurosaki scowled at the comment, but regarded the sword carefully. "As if I ever needed you to watch out for me," he snapped spitefully, but fastened the sheathed sword at his hip.
"You always seem to need someone," Grimmjow sneered. "So c'mon; we're gonna find the best fucking bitch we can, someone Aizen can't refuse. And then I can have a good time off from appeasing the asshole, and it'll look good on us both, right?"
Grimmjow shoved Kurosaki's shoulder as he passed by him, jumping onto the windowsill before leaping from it. It was an easy three stories, and falling made Grimmjow's stomach lurch excitedly. He landed in a crouch on the ground; dusty sand billowing up around him. Grimmjow sneered up at the shinigami from where he watched, high above, and hoped his smirking teeth showed through the haze.
Kurosaki didn't hesitate another moment, and sprang after him from the windowsill in a shallow dive. He used the side of the building to slide down before jumping off the wall to land soundlessly beside Grimmjow.
Little fucking show-off.
"Che, how graceful," Grimmjow sneered.
"Something you could learn."
"What, you rather be with someone dainty? I ain't Ulquiorra—"
"Thank fuck—" Ichigo interrupted, and Grimmjow smiled.
"See? You don't hate me after all."
"I wouldn't go that far," Kurosaki muttered, and half-shrugged a shoulder. "Just…better than the alternative."
"Works for me." And Grimmjow stared out, hearing the shinigami fall into step behind him.
Grimmjow wasn't exactly sure where he was headed, really—there was a lot of wide, open space all around Las Noches; it'd been full of hollows at one point, just like the rest of Hueco Mundo. Aizen's strength drew them all in, the promise of something phenomenally powerful, and any that dared to approach the complex were either snatched up as specimens or disposed of easily.
It'd been a long time since Grimmjow was sent out to find new hollows for the transformation; he knew they'd have to go for a ways before they found anything of real power. They could be like Nel, sure, and pick up some immature creature that held promise, but would break as soon as real power got thrust into it. Grimmjow had his eyes on something bigger; they'd have to go at least a couple of days to find hollows unswayed by Aizen's mere presence alone.
Grimmjow wanted something strong, something with its own mind. A hunt with a hint of danger was the best kind; tracking after something that could easily kill you if you let it. Grimmjow glanced over his shoulder and met Kurosaki's icy stare; he realized he had such a thing already.
Yay, adventure time!
