Archive of Our Own ^beta

Call it Yomi, or Hell, or Faerie. Call it otherworld, or an alternate dimension, a Hollow Dimension, if you’re scientifically minded. Call them gods, or hungry ghosts or yōkai or demons or, if you’re undiscerning, just monsters.

It’s all the same at the end. Once you’ve crossed the river, broken through that mirror’s surface, eaten of the food on the other side—once you’ve touched the other world, you cannot undo it. You cannot return, for it has touched you in turn.

Stare until your eyes bleed and your brain melts out of the sockets like runny candle wax. Weep through the pain at its unnamable beauty, both wonderful and terrible. It will stalk your dreams and nightmares all the same. 

You can run. You can turn your back and pretend that you’re still the ignorant ant, still blissfully unaware of the true nature of reality, but you will not last long. You will stand in the sun and still feel that nameless chill. You will kiss your lover and taste nothing but ash. You will run and find that there is nowhere to go.

Your world will not take you back. 

===

“I want you to find my husband.”

Kurosaki Orihime had the determined look of someone not yet resigned to the cruelties of the word. A bright-eyed, hopeful creature who probably didn’t deserve to be forced to set foot in a place like Grimmjow’s office, with its excess of empty beer cans and perpetual pall of stale cigarette smoke. If that bothered her she didn’t show it.

Grimmjow swept a disinterested gaze over her, and stabbed his cigarette into the empty beer can, waving a dismissal with the still smoking butt.

“We’re a supernatural investigation agency,” he said, “We don’t do missing persons.”

“But—”

“Besides, it’s usually just that the husband ran off with a mistress,” he continued, feeling spiteful. Though, looking at Mrs. Kurosaki’s not unappealing face, he was pretty sure this wasn’t one of those cases. “Or maybe he got drunk and fell off a bridge.”

Her face flushed, but her lips pressed together. “I was assured by the nice lady on the phone that you would take my case.”

Grimmjow bit back a groan. Fucking Nel. He remembered a vague comment from her about a case, right before she’d run off to Nagasaki for a Nogitsune exorcism. As if mocking him, a post-it on the door caught his eye, the words written in Nel’s sloppy handwriting:

Missing husband case for Grimm

Kk town, possbl. connection to L. N.?

pbly unrelated, but check out just ic.

IMPORTANT!!!

Whatever the hell that meant.

He’d ask Harribel to take this case, but she was tied up with the messy incident with the summoning cult in Kyushu, and he knew better than to interrupt her when she was on a hunt.

“Do I look like a nice fucking lady to you?” Grimmjow said, flicking the cigarette butt towards the trash can. It missed by a few inches, and he snorted, turning away.

She turned to him, shoulders squared, the brown depths of her gaze burning with determination and the promise that she’d drag him along with her, willing or not. 

“Mr. Jaegerjaquez,” she said, pointing a finger between his eyes like a weapon, “You are an unhygienic, mean-spirited, petty man. But I’ve driven three hours to Kyoto to find a detective, so you will at the very least hear me out.”

He wasn’t usually swayed by a pretty face, but the way she glared like she could soften him up by punching holes in him with her eyes was, somehow, working. At his hip, Pantera’s wrapped hilt nudged him in the side, like a cat in want of feeding, and he smoothed a hand down her sheath to settle her. She’d always know his answer before he did.

He sighed and righted the chair, taking his feet off the desk and planting them onto the floor.

“Fine,” he said, shifting his elbows onto the desk, “I’ll hear your damn case.”

===

It wasn’t until Grimmjow found himself loaded up into the old minivan that Kurosaki Orihime (call me Orihime, Mrs. Kurosaki sounds so old, and I’ve only been married for half a year anyways) had rented, Pantera in one hand and an overnight pack of equipment in the other, that he even bothered to ask where they were going.

Karakura town.

His stomach churned. There was a name he never thought he’d hear again. And the note made a sudden sense— Karakura town, with a possible connection to Las Noches .

What the fuck. He was going to fucking murder Nel once she got back for springing this on him. He glanced over at Orihime in the driver’s seat, oblivious to his sudden crisis. She hummed a song under her breath, something upbeat and peppy, eyes on the road.

It was too late to turn back without looking like a jackass, or explaining his complicated history with the place to a total stranger. Grimmjow would rather be swallowed up whole by the Hollow Dimension than do the latter, and though he usually had little compunction for the former, something about Orihime’s earnest demeanor made him hesitate.

He hunched his shoulders, glaring out the window. His fingers itches for a cigarette.

So he was headed to Karakura. That didn’t mean the case was related to Las Noches, which was a whole day’s hike from the town proper. And he’d never even set foot in the town anyways, not even after everything all blew over. He could do this without bringing the past back. He’d dig around the town a bit, help this woman find her husband, and leave. It was just like any other case.

“Do you want to listen to the radio?” Orihime asked, “Kyoto has a punk rock station! We only have pop songs and old men talking about the weather  in Karakura.”

Grimmjow stared at her until her hand left the radio dial. “Before we start destroying our eardrums,” he said, digging out a notepad from his duffel, “why don’t you answer a few questions about the case.”

The drive from Kyoto to her hometown was long, so Grimmjow asked the routine questions as the city transitioned slowly to the fields and forests of the countryside outside the window, scratching out notes on his battered notebook as best as he could with the motion of the car. By the time they took the exit ramp to Karakura, he had the general outline of the facts.

Kurosaki Ichigo, age 25, loving husband who gave the best hand massages when you’d cramped up after kneading industrial amounts of dough each day at your bakery job. Went to a big city college for a degree in English literature, but came back to his hometown to work as a translator for foreign speculative fiction. Last seen three weeks ago, in the morning before Orihime had left for the bakery. Nothing disturbed in the house, it was like he’d evaporated off the face of the earth.

“Was he doing anything suspicious before his disappearance?” Grimmjow asked.

“Well, he was at the library a lot, for research. Learning about local history and legends was a hobby of his,” Orihime said, a touch of wistfulness in her voice, “he wanted to write a book about it one day.”

“What kind of local history?” Grimmjow asked. 

“It’s pretty fascinating,” Orihime said brightly, “Karakura town used to have a shrine up on the summit. They left offerings there to appease the local mountain god and keep it from spiriting people away,  but it fell out of use after a landslide demolished the road up in the forties.”

“Great,” Grimmjow said. He had a sinking feeling in his gut, like a cold wind rattling through the loops of his intestines. “What are you, an occult nut?”

“I met Ichigo in the occult club in high school,” she admitted without batting an eye.

Grimmjow curled his lip. It fucking figured. It was always the self-assured assholes and the amateurs, playing with fire and things they should stay away from. Like the mad scholar Urahara Kisuke and his research into the Hueco Mundo—the Hollow Dimension—right before his mysterious disappearance. Or the goddamn clusterfuck at Las Noches manor twenty years ago.

“And did you know we had our very own Shinshūkyō cult back in the eighties?” she added, inordinately cheerful, “One of the new age religions. They built a giant house on the grounds of the old shrine. Supposedly they had secret rituals in the woods, but twenty years ago there was an earthquake that destroyed the whole thing. It was like the earth itself swallowed them up.”

“Guess that explains why you need a paranormal investigator,” Grimmjow said. His eyes flicked out to the window, scanning the trees as if he could actually see the supposed ruins, though he knew they were nowhere near the road.

He held Pantera horizontally across his stomach and traced the blue cord wrapping on her grip with his thumb, trying to ward off the growing headache. Her blade vibrated against his hand, barely noticeable above the rumble of the car engine, but soothing nonetheless.

“Ichigo was looking into the ruins right before he disappeared,” Orihime said, “We should check it out. There could be clues.”

“Who’s the actual detective here?” Grimmjow said, scowling.

“Sorry,” she said, unapologetically, “What do you suggest then, Mr. Big-City-Detective?”

He glowered. “First, I look through his notes on all his research.” He was certain someone planning to write a book would be taking copious amounts of notes. And maybe there’d be something in there to prove he’d just been offed by the local crime syndicate or something totally mundane and not supernatural. “Then, I go look for him in his last known location. Alone.”

Orihime’s lips thinned. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go alone.”

Grimmjow slid a look at her, but she was staring straight ahead at the road, her previous good mood gone. He’d been a detective long enough to know that clients always had things to hide. So long as it didn’t affect the case, or the payment afterwards, he couldn’t care less.

“Good thing I’m the one investigating then,” he said, leaning back into the seat.

Orihime chewed on her lower lip, fingers clenching and unclenching around the steering wheel. After a moment, she spoke, softly, and with none of the false cheer she’d been putting on so far.

“I just want to help my husband.”

If it had been Nel or Harribel who’d gone missing, Grimmjow knew he’d be scrutinizing every clue thrice over, dogging whoever was supposed to be finding them with a borderline obsessive fervor. So he could kind of see where she was coming from. Still, he couldn’t have an amateur mucking up his investigation, if he was going to actually find the missing husband. Especially if her suspicions were correct about where he’d gone.

“And I want you to stay alive long enough to pay my fee,” Grimmjow said at last.

That startled a chuckle out of her, and for some reason it felt more genuine than the smile she’d worn the whole trip before.

“Alright,” she said, “I’ll follow your lead, Mr. Detective.”

He didn’t like every client—hell, he didn’t like most of them—but this time, he hoped more than usual he wouldn’t let her down. Pantera jumped in his grip, eager for the hunt, and he calmed her with a thumb along her hilt.

Orihime glanced over, and he had a moment of panic, wondering if she’d seen the movement, but she turned back towards the road, expression only mildly curious.

“You know, I was wondering,” she said, waving one hand towards Pantera, keeping the other on the steering wheel. “A sword isn’t a typical piece of detective equipment, is it? I mean I’m not a detective, but I’ve never seen one using a sword, unless they’re a samurai. Are you expecting to sword-fight someone? Maybe an old samurai ghost?”

“Bet the others aren’t looking for the kind of trouble I’m used to,” Grimmjow said. But he obligingly shifted Pantera in his lap, one hand on her sheath drawing up the blade an inch to show the glint of the moon-white blade and the first carved sigils on her spine in stark, inky black.

“Ceramic,” he said, which was not true but close enough for the layperson who’d probably freak out if he mentioned bone, “And her name’s Pantera. She’s got enough banishing wards on her to send any otherworldly fuckers back to their own plane of existence.” A fond smile stretched his mouth wide, and he snapped it shut quickly, before she could glance over and notice.

Orihime made sounds of appreciation, and Grimmjow might be distrustful of clients and people in general, but he wasn’t above smugness.

“She’s my partner and right hand,” Grimmjow continued, and it was a little less figurative than he might be letting on, but Pantera was beautiful and should be appreciated. “Couldn’t do my job properly without her.”

Orihime smiled, a bright curious grin that lit up her face again. There was a dimple in her cheek, giving her a look of childish excitement. “You talk about her like she’s alive,” she said, something like awe in her tone.

“She’s as alive as me,” Grimmjow replied. The corner of his mouth twitched upward at the inside joke.

“That’s…kind of endearing,” she said.

His mouth slanted back down. “I ain’t endearing,” he snapped.

“Right, of course not,” she said, still with the faint smile lifting the corner of her lips. It wasn’t free of concern, but it lightened her entire face, like a sudden glimpse of sunlight through the clouds.

Grimmjow turned away, struck by the thought, stewing in the way it made his chest ache with a sudden pang. What did he care whether or not she smiled? He was here for a job, not to wonder about what she might look like if he did bring her husband back from whatever hole he’d fallen into. If she might smile without shadows beneath her eyes, teeth shining in the sun.

===

Karakura town lay cradled between the mountains and Toyama Bay, blanketed in the late evening fog coming off the water. The dense, old forest canopy of bay laurel and oak blocked out the sun from behind, leaving the salt-laden air stinging with the winter’s cold and a faint trace of ozone and gasoline from the road.

As they turned the bend around the mountain road, the rooftops of Karakura came into view, a mixed bag of pre-war era historical buildings with their sloped eaves and red-tiled roofs and newer developments of glass and steel that rose uneasily out of the surroundings like new teeth. An industrial district filled with boxy warehouses surrounded the docks, which extended into the ocean like long, skeletal fingers.

Grimmjow felt the cold trickle of foreboding down the back of his neck, raising the fine hairs there.

He gripped Pantera’s hilt tighter, trying to shake it off. It was probably just the thoughts of the mountain and what it lay buried on it. There shouldn’t be any activity left. Maybe the missing husband had just fallen and hit his head, and never even made it to the ruins.

He knew in his gut though that his luck had never been that good.

Ten minutes later, they were pulling into a small driveway, and he shoved the ominous thoughts to the back of his head. Detective work first, and then worry about what ruins he may or may not need to search.

The Kurosaki house sat at the outskirts of Karakura town, backed up against the edge of the mountain forest.  The two story building was painted a pale pastel yellow, like a summer’s day. Even in the slanting light of evening, it seemed to glow with the warmth of a well-loved home.

Orihime gestured him in, and he stepped over the threshold, feet suddenly clumsy, like he was treading on sacred ground that didn’t want him.

The home was quaint. Nel would have called it cozy, with its hydrangea bushes and white-painted window frames, like something out of the home decor magazines she kept leaving on his desk like the most obvious goddamn hint. He’d run them through the document shredder, to her irritation and his immense satisfaction.

There was a short covered driveway and a flower bed dotted with orange pansies in place of a lawn. A few artfully pruned maple trees, branches bare in the winter, stretched out above them. It was a well-loved home, built for making sweet memories full of laughter and cookies and shit.

It felt utterly alien to Grimmjow.

He took off his boots in the foyer, and followed Orihime inside to the kitchen, neatly organized and labeled shelves, a coffee maker, a generously sized pantry and fridge. The kitchen table had four chairs, though only one of them was pulled out, looking strangely forlorn in the otherwise tidy room.

A wedding photograph took the prime spot on the wall: Orihime in a white dress, holding the arm of a man with bright orange hair that looked almost artificial in its vividness, both of them beaming at the camera, teeth white and smiles perfect. Golden sunlight poured on them from above, resinous and bright, a moment of time frozen in amber.

“That’s Ichigo,” she said when she noticed his attention. Her smile was wistful, but it didn’t quite hide the tension beneath her eyes, “He complained that the suit itched all throughout the fitting, but on the day of our wedding, he didn’t say a thing. He didn’t want anyone to worry about him.”

Grimmjow stared at her face for a beat before turning away. “Looks like a delinquent,” he said, squinting at Kurosaki Ichigo’s smiling face.

Orihime laughed, a staccato burst like it had been startled out of her. “He kind of was, in high school. He got into a lot of fights, but his grades were always high. And he mostly stopped after he joined the occult club. We were too busy planning trips out to the local haunted places.”

Grimmjow scowled. He scrutinized the face again, wondering if he’d any good in a fight. He shook that thought away. He didn’t think Orihime would want him to fight her husband, though, even if he was still in any fighting shape.

“Anyways, this is the guest bedroom,” Orihime said gesturing towards a door down the hall, her smile back in place, “You can stay here for the duration. Ichigo used it as an office, until…”

She trailed off again, her eyes going unfocused for a second before she shook her head, slapping her hands over cheeks.

“Sorry! You must think I’m a terrible host, with how distracted I am,” she said brightly, “How about I’ll let you settle in for now, while I make something for dinner?”

She hurried away, trying to hide the wet shine in her eyes. Grimmjow watched her go without comment. Kurosaki’s photo seemed to glare at him with disapproval.

“I’m not the one who made her cry,” he muttered, glaring back. Of course, the photograph didn’t reply. Grimmjow shook his head, vaguely disgruntled at his own actions--the hell was he doing here, talking to photographs like they could understand him?--and pushed open the door, stepping into the bedroom.

The guest bedroom had obviously not functioned primarily as a bedroom for a while. There was a bed, yes, with freshly laundered sheets and recently-fluffed pillows, but the bookshelf was stuffed haphazardly with books on history and literature and an earmarked guide of local landmarks. There was a thin layer of dust over the desk, and a dumb-looking stuffed lion toy on the chair, leaned against the back as if it were keeping the seat warm while it waited for someone to return.

He sat on the mattress and breathed in the smell of chicory and faint ozone. Coffee and lightning. He wondered if the last occupant had liked to tinker with electronics despite his English degree, maybe some amateur ghost-hunting equipment. He imagined the orange-haired man from the photograph outside, hunched over the desk in the night with a soldering iron. Or head drooping over a book, a yawn interrupting his reading, pouring over foreign language texts.

At the opposite side of the room from the desk, there was a large window looking out on the mountainside. It made him uneasy, like having an invisible eye on him, though he could see nothing there except the dense old-growth forest. Grimmjow strode over and stared out into the trees for a long while, before snapping the curtains shut.

He sat down on the bed, throwing his duffel across the covers and staring blankly at the wall. What the hell was he doing here? His skin prickled, every nerve telling him that this wasn’t the kind of place he belonged. Too nice, too soft, too human.

His skin felt too tight, his tongue heavy, his scalp fuzzing over with nervous energy. If he’d been anywhere else, he’d be lighting up a cigarette, or reaching for a beer to numb the feeling of being out of place in his own skin. Instead, his fingers itched around Pantera, who buzzed in his grip, feeding off his restlessness.

He stood up again, and turned to the desk, desperate for something to occupy his thoughts. It was as good a place as any to begin his investigation.

A search through the drawers turned up nothing but English novel manuscripts with neat handwritten notes in the margins, unremarkable stationary, and a dog-eared copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest , pages well-worn with use. The bookshelf yielded up a slim tome of Lovecraft and a few volumes of Junji Ito works, nothing out of place for someone with a passing interest in the supernatural.

Nothing, and still the faint trace of ozone, the unnerving energy beneath his epidermis. He paced, from the door back to the bed, trying to walk it off. The third time, he overshot and his foot hit something underneath the bed. He paused.

The corner of a thick, leather-bound book stuck out from underneath the bed, out of place among the storage boxes there. He crouched down and shifted the boxes out of the way. Another stack of books. He moved to shift those away too, but when he looked at the titles, a trickle of foreboding shivered down to his stomach.

The cover of Death and Divinity: the Rise and Fall of the Shinigami and the Seireitei Cult stared up at him from the top of the pile. He shuffled through the spines, skimming the names; Heptameron by Pierre d’Abano, Wandering Shinigami, a History , by Kuchiki Ginrei, Zanpakuto Theory, by Ōetsu Nimaiya. Summoning Basics: the Hollow Dimensions and Their Denizens by Urahara Kisuke.

His hand paused on the last title. Urahara Kisuke, the mad scholar. The disgraced Shinigami, who’d been kicked out of Seireitei for his experiments. Even Grimmjow had heard of the man, for all that he despised reading and Tosen’s lessons on occult theory back at Las Noches.

The genius scholar, too smart for his own good, who’d designed a revolutionary summoning circle, just so he could call up ghosts and gods and creatures of the Hueco Mundo just to ask them questions. Fat lot of good it’d done him in the end. There were theories as to where he’d gone: some said he’d been pulled in by a hungry creature, the way sealed behind him with no one left to work his circle. Some said he’d gone mad and thrown himself into the sea. Some said he’d been betrayed by his own disciple, and lived still in exile. Aizen had never mentioned it, one way or the other, and Grimmjow hadn’t cared enough to ask.

Seeing that name in front of him now, in Kurosaki’s room of all places, sent a icy spike of dread through him. What were the chances Kurosaki hadn’t gone to see the last place Urahara Kisuke’s theories were put to practice?

“Shit,” he muttered, “Just my fucking luck.”

At the bottom of the pile, a notebook peeked out, the black plastic cover conspicuously plain among the leather-bound tomes. He flipped it open to the cover page, where a neat hand had written the words: Notes on a History of Karakura Town. Kurosaki Ichigo.

He glared at the words for a long moment, as if he could figure out just what the idiot had been thinking. After a moment and no obvious reply, he began to flip through the pages. The same neat handwriting laying out a brief timeline, along with copies of newspaper clippings, printed and taped to the notebook— Shrine Land Sold to New Age Religious Sect Despite Protests of Historical Society—Construction Finished on Mysterious Manor: Eccentric Owner’s Summer Home or More Sinister Intentions — Localized Earthquake Takes Town by Surprise, 13 Casualties in Mountain Manor —

He flipped forward, barely skimming the articles. It was nothing he hadn’t pored over himself, years ago when the papers were freshly printed. On another page filled with neat handwriting, he read:

Otherworld myths of Karakura. The liminality of space in Karakura has long been established. In the Edo era, the shrine on the neighboring mountain was said to signify the border of the human world and the supernatural—

He skimmed forward, frowning.

Historically, Karakura town has experienced unusually high incidents of kamikakushi, the spiriting away of humans by gods, perhaps as a result of its proximity to a place of dimensional convergence. Some victims disappear forever, and some return. But there are consistent records regarding the survivors, the way they never seem to come back the same—

Modern scholars and proponents of a unified folkloric theory of the otherwold have proposed another realm, the Hollow Dimension, Hueco Mundo, that exists alongside our own. But few have put theory to practice— 

Grimmjow stopped as something caught his eye. There, on one of the later pages, a diagram spanning the breadth of the notebook, squirming lines converging on the centerfold, like insects crawling over the page.

He drew in a sharp breath.

The pattern was unmistakable, the sigils along the edges for binding and confining a summoned spirit, the knife-cut of a dimensional distortion field: Urahara Kisuke’s Hogyoku Summoning Circle meticulously copied down from some forbidden tome.

Notes in Kurosaki’s neat hand were written below.

Hueco Mundo appears to be a parallel universe. The source of all the otherworld myths of Karakura?  This could explain the disappearances in the town’s history, though not the issue of those who returned. The implications for theology and ontology are fascinating.

I hear a voice

Why was it banned? Some experimentation may be required. How often does this kind of opportunity turn up? She’s warned me not to meddle too deeply, but I can’t let this go.

This might be what I’ve been looking for.

The rest of the page was scratched out in a fit of violent penmarks, inscribed with enough pressure to rip the paper. Grimmjow traced the raised stroke of one such mark with a finger.

“Idiot,” he hissed, under his breath. 

There were always people like that, like Aizen and Urahara and Kurosaki—the insatiable, the ambitious, the dreamers, the ones who chafed at the confines of the world and tried to claw a way out. The problems always came when they succeeded.

A yokai or a demon might be banished back to their own worlds, but once you touched the other world of Hueco Mundo, it never let you go. It left a low hunger under the skin, a long ache, life long.

Grimmjow’s stomach clenched. He would know.

He turned the page again. Here the notes were messier, haphazard, as if the person who wrote them hadn’t been fully focused on the words.

Missing element, containment insufficient. Something’s come through. It’s calling me, it sounds like

Locations of power, near Karakura. Must attempt a reverse summoning (c.f. Summoning Basics, pg. 215). Dangers are clear, but I need—

The sentence ended abruptly, trailing a long line of ink.

“Fuck.” Grimmjow said out loud. If Kurosaki Ichigo had attempted the circle, in Las Noches of all places, his prospects weren’t good.

He flipped forward again, but the next page was blank, as was the one after that. He’d reached the end of Kurosaki’s notes, which didn’t confirm why he’d disappeared, but Grimmjow had a pretty good guess. Why was it always the amateurs with the worst ideas?

 He stood, pinching the bridge of his nose to ward off the headache that was already brewing. What he wouldn’t do for a fucking drink right now. A soft knock jolted him out of his thoughts, and he tensed.

“Dinner’s ready,” Kurosaki Orihime’s voice filtered in through the bedroom door.

Grimmjow glanced down at the incriminating notebook. Had she read it before hiring him to come? Had she known about his past here—but that was impossible. After Nel had dragged him out of the ruins, they’d run and never looked back. Even after they’d found that Harribel had made it out too, the past remained a locked door, a scabbed over wound that they spoke of in oblique references and half-finished questions. He preferred to keep it that way, instead of ripping the wound open again.

“Jaegerjaquez? Grimmjow?” Orihime called out again, “Are you asleep already? I can leave some for you in the kitchen.”

He shoved the notebook into the first desk drawer he saw and shut it with more force than necessary.

“I’m awake,” he said, “I’ll be right out.”

===

Grimmjow dreamed, sometimes, of the past. His past, or some other version of himself, he wasn’t quite sure, but it was before Aizen and Gin and Tosen, before the vertiginous lurch out of nothingness and precipitous drop into the vessel of flesh and blood and bone.

He remembered--images. Flashes of maybe-real, probably hallucinated bits of an alien world that his brain’s wet electricity could not make sense of.

This was what he saw: an endless white desert of sand, piling dunes upon dunes, each grain a shard of bone, femur and fibula and metacarpals, rib and jaw and xiphoid process. A curved moon like a carnivore’s tooth, laid out on the velvet pelt of the ever-night, turning always away from the earth.

And when he woke, he found Pantera shuddering under his chest and his face wet with tears he didn’t remember shedding.

It hardly constituted a past, never mind a home, but he clung to it nonetheless. Because in those half-remembered dreams, what he remembered most of all was a mouth full of sharpened teeth, and the whispering sand beneath his four paws, warm, welcoming and whole.

===

Grimmjow snapped awake at the sudden coldness in his body. He was slumped over the desk, notebook open, face pressed against Kurosaki Ichigo’s neat handwriting. He grunted, the thickness of uneasy sleep coating his throat. After the dinner of leftover bakery breads with a variety of sauces and condiments he’d barely tasted, he had come back to the guest bedroom to pour over the notes again.

It had been a summoning circle alright, down to the detailed sigils of protection and binding. But the notes were right too; it hadn’t been complete. There was enough of a gap for something to slip through, or…

Something pricked at the edge of his senses. He raised his head, looking around the dark room, the tightly shut curtains. The smell of ozone was stronger now, creeping in through the door. His heart rate spiked. This wasn’t just the remnants of someone’s tinkering with electrical circuits. He should have known better.

He’d grabbed Pantera in one hand and slammed open the door before the thought had time to complete itself, and was halfway to the kitchen before adrenaline even kicked in.

Orihime stood by the window, back turned towards him. She wore soft flannel pajamas, and her feet were bare. She raised a hand and pressed it against the glass, palm flat and fingers splayed in a gesture of longing.

A pervasive cold crawled down his spine, pooling in his gut, above his pelvis. He recognized the membrane between dimensions stretched to its limits like a balloon blown to its rupture point, and the cold of the Hueco Mundo seeping into reality.

A long-forgotten feeling stirred in his chest, like fire, and he squashed it down mercilessly.

“Kurosaki?” he said, cautious, “Oi. Orihime.”

She didn’t reply. Through the window, something moved, sinuous and inhuman, a blacker shape upon the black of night. Orihime was still standing there, oblivious to the writhing dark. In the faint light of the crescent moon outside the window, her face was calm, her eyes closed, her posture unnaturally still.

And then he saw the darker pool of shadows beneath the window sash, the branching lines radiating out along the glass, like cracks in the fabric of reality, lapping at her fingers. The hairs all along the back of Grimmjow’s arms stood up on end. Pantera juddered in his grip, bucking against the confines of her sheathe. What—?

She spoke at last, in a voice almost too soft for him to hear. “...Ichigo?”

The shadows shivered. Abruptly, they swelled, turning inwards, aiming right towards—

“Get back!” he roared, grabbing her by the shoulder and wrenching. She came without resistance, limp as a wet rag, and he caught her in one arm.

With his other hand, he drew Pantera in one smooth motion. She blazed out of her sheath, sigils glowing a white so bright it ran into the electric blue end of the spectrum. Her howl, a rising shriek of metal on bone rang out in the kitchen, rattling the window panes.

A sound like distant thunder rumbled up from the ground in response, and if there were words in there, he couldn’t tell over the din of shaking pots and pans and glass. There was no mistaking the stink of Hueco Mundo, thickening the air like a physical pressure on his skin.

The shadow was a nightmare of twisted shapes, constantly changing. In the shifting contours, Grimmjow thought he saw flashes of recognizable objects, signs of his flesh-and-blood brain trying to put pictures to the incomprehensible: a flash of a long, curved horn, a single golden eye with sclera the color of dried blood, the square block of jawbone and exposed teeth, grinding together at impossible angles. Against his mind, he felt the brush of dread, the incipient madness of staring too long into the void.

It reached through the boundary between worlds and met Pantera’s bright edge. Grimmjow felt the cold chill of the other world creep up his arm, like fingers of frost gripping him tight.

Darkness writhed against Pantera’s edge, shadow against light. In the shapes they made, he saw the sleek outline of a large bone-plated panther, lowered in a predator’s crouch, tail lashing with the rattle of Pantera’s blade. Its teeth sank into the dark tendrils still radiating out from beneath the window.

The eldritch creature jolted back. Grimmjow smiled, a ferocious grin stretching his face.

Pantera shuddered in his grip, her excitement bleeding into him in a bright beat of exhilaration, halfway between bloodlust and bare-toothed excitement. How long had it been since he’d needed to call on her like this?

The creature was strong, despite only being half in this world, and it set Grimmjow’s blood alight, fire coursing down from his throat to his navel. How long since he’d gone all out, cut loose without thought of consequence or cost? How much stronger would it be on the other side?

Grimmjow ached to chase it down the shadowy pathways. He’d done it before, tread those in-between roads, and the memory of the dark called to him, ozone-scented and with the unmistakable feel of home .

Except—a hand grabbed him, fingers digging into the flesh of his arm. Orihime, with her eyes scrunched shut, her mouth screwed tight in pain, clutched at his arm, grounding him in the flesh and blood of his human flesh.

Shit. She trembled in his grip, like a leaf trying to keep from being torn apart in gale winds.

He pulled back. Pantera growled her disappointment in a guttural screech of bone against glass. The window shattered in a single, sharp ringing sound. Instinct moved him to turn away, his back towards the glass, shielding Orihime from the shards with his shoulder across her face. The tough fabric of his jacket kept him mostly unharmed, save a few scratches on his cheek and forearms.

When he turned back around, there was only the utterly mundane darkness of a moonless night.

Grimmjow breathed heavily through his nose, loosening his white-knuckled grip on Pantera. The strong scent of ozone faded, and the roar of blood dimmed in his ears.

The warm body leaning on his left arm shifted.

“Grimmjow?” Orihime blinked, turning her head to look at him with a half-dazed expression, “What are you doing in my room? Is this one of those things I’ve read in romance novels?” She reached a hand out, and pressed a soft finger against his forehead, “don’t frown so much, it’ll get stuck like that.”

The pad of her finger felt warm against his forehead, chasing away the chill left by the eldritch encounter and trickling down into his chest cavity. His stomach gave a twist, like some large invisible hand wringing out his insides.

He dropped her, and she squeaked on impact with the floor. By the time she sat up, rubbing her head, he was already halfway across the kitchen, flicking on the lights.

“You’re in the kitchen,” Grimmjow said, heart pounding, though there was no danger to warrant it, “Also you’re married.”

Orihime squinted blearily in the sudden brightness. She looked around at the kitchen, with the shattered window and the chairs all skewed out of place, empty save for the two of them. Abruptly her face fell, confusion replaced by a forlorn look.

“I thought—” she said softly, lowering her face. The curtain of her hair hid her expression. “I thought I heard Ichigo’s voice.”

Grimmjow’s jaw tightened. “What do you remember?” He said. His heartbeat was slowing, returning to its regular plodding rhythm against his ribs.

Orihime looked up at him again. “I fell asleep, and then I dreamed someone was calling me. Ichigo was calling me. I don’t remember leaving my room, or ending up in the kitchen. I thought I heard something roaring, like a big cat. But there aren’t any panthers in the forest here. And the window—” She trailed off, staring at it in surprise. “What happened to the window?”

Grimmjow sheathed Pantera, and shrugged. “Take it out of my consultation fee.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, dubious, but nodded. “We should probably sweep up the glass. And tape a trash bag over the window, in case it rains and—“

“Go get dressed” Grimmjow said, lifting her by the back of her flannel pajamas and placing her safely out of range of the glass, “it’s cold.”

She squeaked at the sudden movement, and then smiled sheepishly down at herself.

“Right! I’ll go do that!” She said, speed walking back to her room, her cheeks a faint pink. Grimmjow heard the slam of her bedroom door, and sighed, reaching for the broom and dustpan.

Halfway through sweeping up the mess, something beneath the table caught his eye, chillingly familiar. He crouched down and picked up a particularly large shard of glass. On the cracked surface, written in messy, rust-colored streaks, was half a sigil of the summoning circle.

He rose to his feet, jaw tight.

“Fuck,” he muttered, clenching his fist tight enough around it that the edges dug grooves into the palm of his hand.

This hadn’t been an eldritch creature taking advantage of an opportunistic crack, or even Grimmjow’s own presence attracting strange things.

Someone had called it here.

Pantera hummed in her sheath, picking up on his unease. Questions ran through his mind. Who? Was he the target, or Kurosaki Orihime? Or had it wanted something else in the house? His mind flashed back to the notebook, full of knowledge that was better kept hidden. He’d have to burn that, before he left, but first he had to figure out—

The sound of Orihime’s footsteps drew his thoughts away. He slipped the glass shard back into the pile. If someone was trying to summon creatures from the Hueco Mundo, then the last thing he needed was an ignorant human woman trying to muddle through the clues on her own.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” Orihime said, with a grateful smile. She wore a hoodie two sizes too big, probably her husband’s, thrown on in a hurry, a worn, comfortable skirt, and house slippers on her feet in the shape of little smiling rabbits. Her hair was pinned out of her face with the two blue six-pointed hairpins.

“But I’m grateful for your help,” she continued, “For this and…coming to help with Ichigo.”

“‘S fine,” he said, sweeping the last of the glass into the dustpan. By now, the sky outside the broken window was a pale fish-belly white with the first light of dawn.

She wavered, question plain on her face. “May I ask…last night, what happened? It was supernatural wasn’t it?”

“A breach from another world,” he confirmed, “we call it Hueco Mundo, or the Hollow Dimension. The creatures there are hungry, and this world is full of crunchy, appetizing things. It must’ve found a crack in the world, and come through.” He saw the way her eyes widened, and added, “But it’s gone now.”

Orihime rolled the hem of the hoodie in her hands. “I don’t really remember. That is, how did you…”

Grimmjow’s grip tightened on the broom, one hand straying to his hip, searching for familiarity. She didn’t know. She didn’t remember his near loss of control, the way the wild impulse to let go of everything that made him human had burned through his veins. She hadn’t seen his eyes turn blue-black in the light of another world, and the longing reflected in them.

He was surprised to find that he didn’t want her to know. He ran a finger down the knotwork around Pantera’s hilt.

“I found a clue,” he blurted, then bit the inside of his cheek. Fuck, he hadn’t meant to let that slip, but he hadn’t been able to think up another explanation.

It worked as a distraction, though. That only made it worse. It wasn’t that no client had ever looked at him like he was the last piece of dry land in a flood, but the look of hope that bloomed on her face at his words twisted his stomach with a combination of relief and smoldering guilt. 

“About Ichigo?” She said.

He’d just exchanged one disappointment for another, because once she realized what Las Noches meant, and Grimmjow’s connection to it, that look of hope would turn to terror. Besides, her husband was probably dead, or worse if he’d succeeded in his summoning.

Still, faced with her hopeful face, he could only nod and say, “Not everything, but I know what I need to do next.”

“Then, what do we do now, Mr. Detective?” She said, energized.

“Now,” he said, “I go to Las Noches. Alone.”

The words out loud jostled loose something in him, letting out an unspoken tension. An admission or a promise, he wasn’t sure. But now that he’d said it, there wasn’t any going back. Deep down, he didn’t think there had been any other option. Ever since Nel had taken that phone call from Orihime and written him the note, the path to here had been inevitable, like some siren’s call dragging him back to Las Noches, and everything that it represented.

He stared out of the broken window, up the mountain just beginning to turn golden with the light of morning.

A sudden laugh broke him out of his thoughts. He glanced sharply over at Orihime, who looked startled at her own reaction.

“Sorry, you just remind me a lot of Ichigo for a moment,” she said, touching a hand to her lips.

“What?”

“That look that you have on,” Orihime said, her smile tinged with melancholy, “he looked like that too, sometimes, like he was searching for something that was always just out of reach. Like if he could just find it, he’d be where he belonged.”

“That’s—” Grimmjow’s stomach gave a strange twist at the way her gaze seemed to go right through him. He steeled his face, trying to hide whatever expression had given him away.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he finished, and the look she gave him told him that it hadn’t convinced either of them.

Orihime said nothing, but her eyes were bright, resolute, and steady as steel in the morning sun just beginning to pour in through the window.

“I’m coming with you,” she said, in a tone that held no room for refusal, “We are going to save Ichigo together.”

===

“What the hell are you wearing?” Grimmjow said.

Orihime glanced down at the loops of rosaries and prayer beads around her neck, dangling crosses and little buddha carvings and paper talismans of protection, and grinned.

“It’s for protection!” she said, patting her belt. On one side, there was a plastic water gun, and the other a leather bag. “Holy water,” she said, tapping the respective items, “and purifying salt.”

Grimmjow scoffed. “That ain’t gonna protect you from anything that comes out of Hueco Mundo.”

“It doesn’t hurt to be prepared,” she said philosophically.

“You shouldn’t need to be prepared, ‘cause you shouldn’t be coming with me,” Grimmjow said, though the argument had hardly worked half an hour ago, when he’d first tried it.

“I’m coming,” she said, tone firm, and slung a bulging canvas hiking bag over her shoulders.

Grimmjow eyed it skeptically. “You can’t possibly have that many bullshit talismans.”

“This is the supplies for lunch,” she said, brightly, “It’s a long hike to the old ruins.”

“You won’t make it halfway without collapsing from exhaustion,” Grimmjow said, trying again to discourage her.

“I won’t,” she had that stubborn look on her face again, the one that said she’d drag herself up the mountain by the elbows if that’s what it took. He’d seen that kind of look on Nel’s face, when she was nagging him to come back from whatever case he’d been on for to spend some stupid human holiday or other with the her and Harribel. Nel could never be reasoned with in that state.

Orihime smiled, suddenly, a small, tight smile. “You know,” she said, “You remind me a bit of Ichigo. He was always trying to protect me from things by keeping me away.”

Grimmjow’s next argument caught in his throat, like a splinter. There was a challenge in her eyes, daring him to try.  He might’ve just knocked her out and left, if he wasn’t sure that she’d just follow him. It wasn’t like she didn’t know where he was going. And it was better that he was there to keep her from doing something stupid like her husband.

Also, he probably wouldn’t get paid if he knocked her out. Though at this point, it was more than just a case. Las Noches, no, Hueco Mundo was a constant call in the back of his mind, growing louder with each step he took closer to its ruined husk.

“Fine,” he said, after a moment, “But if you fall behind, I’m leaving you.”

“I won’t,” she said again, but her smile widened, and she hiked her backpack higher over her shoulder.

They set out just past sunrise, their breath white in the chill morning air. Grimmjow set a punishing pace and watched her struggle to keep up, though he stopped just short of offering to help. Maybe if she realized how hard it was, she’d turn back. But, by the determined look on her face, he doubted that.

“Why did you become a paranormal detective?” Orihime asked, when they were a good ways up the path to the ruins of Las Noches. The road hadn’t been maintained over the years, and the trail had been lost in underbrush and leaf litter. Roots had grown between the cracks of the stone pillars that marked the path, and the vines twined across them in lacy whorls of dried tendrils.

Still, Grimmjow knew the way, directed by some unseen internal compass that had always been pointed in that direction.

“What kind of question is that?” Grimmjow said, eyes fixed on the forest floor.

“I mean, I wanted to be a detective when I was little,” Orihime said, breathing hard with exertion, “It sounded so exciting! Saving people from scary things like ghosts and demons, seeing strange sights, hearing the gratitude of relieved families when you lay their loved ones to rest.”

Grimmjow scoffed. “People are never grateful,” he said. Not when they realized what had saved them.

Orihime thinned her lips. “I am grateful,” she said, “for what you do, and what you did last night. You should take more pride in your profession.”

He snorted. His profession? It had just been something Nel had done, when the realization that there was no going back had just started to set in. They—Harribel and Nel, and Grimmjow dragging reluctantly behind—had started trying to live like humans, learning the joys and fears, hopes and disappointments they’d never been allowed at Las Noches. Nel had never been able to refuse an appeal for help, whether it was a request to exorcise some nuisance yokai or demon, or put a spirit to rest, or even to help weed a garden or shovel a driveway in winter. And he wasn’t about to let her get them all found and killed by shinigami or other hunters of the unnatural, so he’d tagged along, and then Harribel had to come as well to limit the property damage.

Slowly, they’d grown a reputation for solving the thornier supernatural cases, until one day someone asked for their business card, and eventually Harribel had set up a proper office space and door sign, and Espada Investigations had come into being.

In all the years since, he’d never really wondered why he did it, besides for the pay and as something to pass the time, waiting for—

For something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. For the past to catch up. For something to finally drag him out of the limbo of the human world, where he’d never felt like he belonged.

“It’s just a job,” he said, “it pays the bills, and I’m good at it.”

Orihime said nothing. For a long moment, he heard only the sound of her labored breaths, and when he glanced back, she was glaring at him with stubborn determination.

“You know,” she said, “when I was in high school, my brother went missing. He was my last remaining family, and the one who raised me from when I was a kid. I looked all over town and organized a search party to comb the woods outside as well. It was like he’d evaporated off the face of the earth.”

Kamikakushi. Kurosaki had written about something like that in the notebook. Guess he knew why the idiot had such an interest in it now.

“The only person who was able to help was a woman who’d arrived in town a week later,” Orihime continued, “She was an exorcist, though she called herself a shinigami, and she said she could help me find my brother.”

Grimmjow’s stomach flipped. The fact that Seireitei shinigami had shown up so close to Las Noches didn’t sit well with him, even if it had been ten years too late. But there was also the fact that Orihime had not apparently been naive of the supernatural before she’d come to find him. That piece of information lodged in his mind like a splinter, though he couldn’t quite parse the implications. Instead, he looked back at her, searching her face.

Her cheeks were a blotched red, not all from exertion. She still had that dogged, stubborn look in her eye as she continued, “She—she went somewhere. I don’t know where, just that it wasn’t somewhere I could go. But I know she found him. She gave me these,” Orihime pressed her hands to the hairpins at the sides of her temples.

“They were the hairpins I’d been asking him to get for me. That’s how I knew--” she broke off, taking a moment to collect herself. “She couldn’t save him, but she gave me something important too. Answers, and closure, and the only thing I have left to remember him with.” Her voice was hoarse, from more than just the hard hike, and her eyes had turned red-rimmed.

“What are you trying to say?” Grimmjow said, turning around to face her, jaw tight.

“I’m saying,” Orihime said, with a vehemence that bordered on vicious, “that to the people you help, it isn’t just a job. So don’t discount the work you do and the impact it has.”

Grimmjow looked away, words suddenly drying up in his mouth. He wasn’t what she thought he was. If she knew—

“I’m no goddamn hero,” he said at last. “I’m not the fucking person to swoop in and save you. Once the job’s done, I’m out. You’re paying me to find your husband. It doesn’t mean anything more than that.”

Orihime opened her mouth, about to argue, but a look of complicated emotion flitted over her features, before settling down into exhaustion. She deflated, hunching her shoulders, and said nothing more.

It was better like this, Grimmjow thought, turning back towards the hike. This job, this woman, this whole fucking mess was doing weird things to his mind. Pantera rumbled gently at his hip, and he ran a finger over her guard.

Once this job was done, he’d get the hell out of here, for the second time in his life, and never look back.

===

The wreck of the Las Noches manor looked like the carcass of some huge beast in the darkening light of evening; the broken ribs of it’s cross beams, the membranous remnants of curtains draped across the windows, the charred black teeth of crumbling furniture. 

Grimmjow stopped at the threshold of the courtyard, his feet frozen to the ground.

Twenty years. Twenty years since he last set foot on the ground of the manor, since Nel had dragged him out from the burning rubble. The air no longer smelled of smoke, but the faint ozone of dimensional disturbance remained like a persistent miasma.

“Is this…” Orihime came to a halt next to him. She’d been quiet for the last half of the journey, as she concentrated on the hike, and he’d been glad for it.

“Las Noches,” he said.

She made to take a step forward, and he held out a hand in front of her, blocking her path.

“Stay,” he said. When she opened her mouth to argue, he shook his head, “if there’s something in there like last night, you’ll only get in the way. Let me do my job and clear the place before you make any rash moves.”

She wavered, and finally nodded. “Scream if you need anything,” she said, raising up her armful of rosary and prayer beads. “I’ll be right here.”

He snorted, one hand on Pantera’s handle. “I’ve got all the protection I need,” he said, “You stay put.”

And then he stepped forward.

There was no cold surface of a barrier, no warning sigils or protective circles around the perimeter, nothing to stop him from crossing what was left of the threshold. All the protections around Las Noches had failed when the manor had sunken half out of this world, so many years ago. And even if they hadn’t, he was half sure that the place would still welcome him back with open doors. It had been a home, of sorts, for all that they’d all lived in trepidation of Aizen’s mercurial temper and Kyoka Suigetsu’s illusory gleam.

His feet crunched on fallen branches, leaves and twigs slowly covering the ground. But no weeds grew here, no gnarled roots buckled the tiles, no scurrying insects made their nests beneath the ruined floorboards. It was as if the forest had decided to stay out of this place, leaving it to rot on its own.

The ground here angled downwards and inwards, towards the lowest place in the house, where they’d built the inner sanctum.

His feet took him along paths he long thought forgotten. The memory of ten years in these halls had sunken into his muscle and flesh, even if it had long fallen out of his memory. In one of the long hallways headed towards the grand staircase leading down to the basement, his boot hit something hard with a clank and he froze, looking down.

There, below his left foot, was the top half of a sword. Bone white, with familiar sigils carved into the crumbling edge. Pantera shook once in her sheath, uneasy.

He knelt down, brushing the dust and dirt off of it. He wondered whose it had been, perhaps Ulquiorra’s Murciélago, the coldest of all the bound spirits in this place. He could have made it out, Grimmjow was sure, but the batty bastard had been one of Aizen’s most loyal, staying till the end. Or Szayel, who had probably been in on the crazy experiment that caused it all, or even Starrk, who might not have bothered to run in all his apathy.

Grimmjow wondered if the rest of the Espada had made it back to the other side, or if they were rotting somewhere in the ruins too.

Finally, he reached the staircase. It had collapsed into splinters, leaving a dark hole gaping like a mouth, edged with sharp, rotting edges. A fetid breeze wafted up from below, laden with the cloying scent of decay.

He stood at the edge for a second, breathing in. There was no sense in delaying. He knew what lay at the bottom; the altar of the old shrine, where Aizen had regularly breached the barrier between worlds, until the day the otherworld had breached it back. He could smell it now, sense it in the balls of his feet, the tingle of his vertebrae, faint but ever present.

He leapt.

At the bottom, the odor of ozone abruptly intensified, until it was nearly smothering. He froze, Pantera rattling in a low rumble. All the fine hairs along his arms and back raised up, and he put a hand on her hilt. The floor was uneven, the hardwood floor was splintered and warped with age and damp, and the floor above blocked out most of the evening light. In the dimness, he saw a circle of summoning lay sketched out on the ground, the stubs of candles long cold.

It was recent—more recent than twenty years, at least. 

He walked up, his stomach feeling hollowed out like some large, cold hand had wrapped around his middle and squeezed. The poor, dumb bastard Kurosaki Ichigo had done it after all.

Then the shadows shifted, and Grimmjow turned to find himself face-to-fucking-void with a familar shadow. Darkness without end shivered up from all corners of the room, like fast-growing vines branching into fractal thorns, aiming all for him.

It was beautiful in its own, dark way, he thought, as he drew Pantera with a burst of light. He recognized the shapes, the oil-slick feel of dimensional warping, the presence of something that should not exist in this reality.

“Glad to see me, you slippery bastard?” he taunted in a hiss through clenched teeth.

The creature—there was no mistaking that same thing that had attacked the night before—slid around Pantera’s blade, lashing out at Grimmjow, leaving a line of bright, cold pain across his forearm.

Grimmjow’s blood ran cold, then hot. It was stronger here, where it had been summoned, where the barrier between worlds was thin as rice paper. He cracked his mouth in a ferocious grin.

The fight last night had woken some part of him, a hunger that had nothing to do with the fleshy, human part of him. It was all Pantera, her predator’s craving, their fighter’s thirst. He wanted to finish what they’d started, and now there were no bystanders to get in the way.

“Pantera,” he said, already tasting steel on his tongue, feeling the sharpness of fingers that were not quite human, “ Gri —”

Pain flashed in the back of his skull.

He had a brief moment to think—he was sure that Eldritch beings from beyond the veil of dimensions did not use blunt weapons—before his all too mortal flesh gave way, and he plunged into blank unconsciousness.

===

Grimmjow opened his eyes to the sight of faint moonlight dappling his field of vision, the edges of the broken floor above. He blinked his eyes, adjusting to the darkness, trying to figure out why his head ached like the morning after a night on town with Nel after a bad case. And he was in the well of Las Noches’ inner sanctum—

Then the last memory before he’d passed out rushed back, and he jerked, trying to sit up. But his arms wouldn’t move, or his legs. He craned his head to look and found it was because all his limbs were tied to a goddamn slab of stone, spreading him out over the altar like a lamb for the slaughter.

“What the fuck?” he said.

He swung his head around to see his surroundings, stuck as he was. He caught sight of Pantera still in her sheathe, leaned against the nearby wall—thank fuck—but when he tried to reach out for her along the thread of thought between them, he found the connection blocked, stifled like a stone door slammed shut in his face. A wild-eyed look down at his chest revealed the glowing line of binding sigils drawn across his chest, and he cursed, tugging even harder.

The crack of a branch alerted him to another presence. He glared up, a barrage of curses ready on his tongue and froze.

Stepping into the room was Kurosaki Orihime, dressed in a white cultist dress, puffy sleeves and high-collared neckline, and the long, pallid skirt that flowed like liquid moonlight in the darkness. Also a bare midriff and a slit along the front that bared the center of her chest, just barely contained within the cloth. What fucking asshole designed that dress?

The spark of amusement quickly died out though when he saw the knife. Wickedly sharp, glinting a dull red-black in the dim light, it looked bizarrely out of place in her tiny hands, white-knuckled around the hilt.

She walked closer, her steps slow and deliberate. The look on her face was mournful, apologetic. Not that it helped with the sharp stab of betrayal that shot through him.

“You knew,” he said, hoarsely, “You fucking knew the whole time who I was.”

She nodded, miserable as she approached him. He bared his teeth in a facsimile of a smile, more rage than humor. The one fucking time he took a bleeding-heart job, and it was a fucking setup. Hadn’t she brought it up in the car on the way over? Was her husband actually even missing?

“You wanted me to come here for whatever sick charade you’re planning,” he said. He tried to lift his torso up, but only managed a few inches before a sharp stabbing pain in the back of his head slammed him back down. Fuck. 

“I am so, so sorry about this,” Orihime said as she raised the ceremonial knife high above Grimmjow’s chest.

Grimmjow struggled, hands pulling uselessly at the rope. If he could just reach Pantera—but the binding sigils on his chest glowed in the darkness with unholy light, keeping him trapped on this cold stone of the altar. He glared at the descending knife. 

Behind her, in the shadow of the broken floorboards, something darker stirred. The smell of ozone abruptly poured over the altar, and the eldritch creature was there, looming over her shoulder.

Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“Last night, the creature—you summoned it?” he said. That was a fresh handful of salt in the wound. He hadn’t thought she had any knowledge of the paranormal, had been actively trying to keep her safely out of it, but apparently he’d been wrong about that as well.

The tragic, sad-eyed guilty look only fanned the rage in him. How fucking dare she look like she was the one who was getting the short end of the stick. Grimmjow sucked in a breath. If this was the end, game over, lights out, he wouldn’t go gently or quietly. The good night could go fuck itself.

“Fuck you!” he shouted, “Go eat a bag of fishhook dildos, you shadow-fucking bitch!”

The mass of shadows behind her writhed in sudden distress, a tangled nest of dark tendrils that made him dizzy to look at directly. He couldn’t see a shape, but he could feel the chill in the air, taste the scent of ozone that emanated from it.

From inside it, a voice issued forth, deep as the sky on a moonless night. The sound made Grimmjow’s ears ring, like he’d stood too close to a speaker blasting feedback. His head throbbed, and his spine burned white-hot with agony, and he could just about make out the words, each one a drop of acid along his nerves.

The words said: “Don’t talk to my wife like that!”

Grimmjow blinked the static out of his vision, feeling something warm and wet dripping out of his ear canal. “Your—what?”

There was no response, just swirling shadows, and he wondered if he should ask again. But his last words were already shitty enough, no need to go out like a half-deaf old fuck trying to understand the fundamentally unknowable.

Speaking of which, he’d been braced for the final blow, but it still hadn’t come. He looked up to make sure, and yeah, still a knife raised above him ready to fall, except now it trembled, the tip shaking erratically.

“Just fucking do it,” he spat. He’d come back to haunt Nel, for signing him up on this bullshit case, right after he haunted the cultist bitch for, you know, killing him.

But the blow never came. Instead the knife fell from the Orihime’s nerveless hand, clattering off the stone altar and onto the floor. Orihime sank down onto her haunches and lowered her head into her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said, words muffled by the meat of her palms “I don’t think I can do this after all.”

A shadow fell on her shoulder, one of the dark tendrils curling around, tracing her collarbone beneath the white dress. Another carded through her hair, brushing the hair out of her forehead and tucking it behind the hairpins.

Grimmjow craned his head to stare at her on the ground.

“It’s okay,” the terrible voice said, though it was smaller this time, less terrible. The words merely raised the hackles on the back of Grimmjow’s neck, like he was standing next to a strong magnetic field. He glanced between her and the creature whose shape he could not stare at directly without an ominous pain behind his eyes. But a strong suspicion was forming beneath his ribs.

“You’re…not going to sacrifice me to open the gate to Hueco Mundo, so this creature can come out to terrorize the human world?” he said, hardly believing his luck.

Orihime sniffed. “Sorry,” she said, lifting her head to look at him apologetically, “Yes, I tricked you into coming here. But I wasn’t going to--to kill you! We just wanted things to go back to normal!”

She gave another sniff, wiping at her eyes with the heels of her hands. A shadow tendril patted the back of her hand, consolingly. 

Grimmjow sank back down onto the stone altar, his limbs going weak with relief, while his mind worked furiously, trying to make sense of the entire event. What the fuck. Nel had said he had the worst kind of good luck when it came to cases, but this was really taking the cake.

“You did your best,” the terrible voice sighed, “don’t worry about it, Orihime.”

The suspicion clicked into certainty in Grimmjow’s mind. He looked at the eldritch creature in something that might have been awe, despite the fact that it felt like staring at an oncoming sandstorm without any eye protection.

“You’re Kurosaki fucking Ichigo,” he said.

“In the flesh. Or shadow—whatever it is I’m made of now,” the creature said, and it looked almost sheepish to Grimmjow’s watering eyes. “For what it’s worth, we’re sorry. And I wasn’t actually trying to eat you.”

“Thank fuck,” Grimmjow said, letting his head thunk back down onto the stone, “but you owe me a goddamn explanation for all of this.”

===

With the ropes untied, though the binding sigils still remained—they’d need to be washed off with fresh blood at some point, but that was for later, when he had time to catch some unfortunate woodland creature—Grimmjow felt a lot better. More human. He cracked a grin at the irony.

On the floor of the inner sanctum, a good six feet away, Orihime sat, legs folded underneath her with a coltish grace. Kurosaki Ichigo sat—stood?—loomed behind her, tendrils flared protectively across her back. It made Grimmjow’s eyes bleary to look at him directly, but then again he was hardly one to talk shit about being an eldritch abomination.

“Tell it to me from the beginning,” Grimmjow said, propping his sword on the ground. It wasn’t like Pantera would help much in their current state of disconnect, but the motion made him feel better, so fucking bite him.

Orihime nodded and spoke. “I told you, my husband had gone missing. And I know you found the notebook--it wasn’t exactly hidden securely.”

Grimmjow’s shoulders hunched, spine tense. Had that been a setup too? But Ichigo’s tendrils spasmed in shock. “You read my journal?”

“Hide it somewhere better than the place most people put their porn mags, if you’re so concerned,” Grimmjow snapped, pain spiking behind his eyes at the sharp crack of annoyance in the eldritch voice.

“The truth is,” Orihime said, with a pointed look at the Ichigo, who quailed under her mild gaze, “that was not his first contact with Hueco Mundo. Ten years ago, when my brother went missing, Ichigo was the one who followed the shinigami to find him.”

Grimmjow stiffened. “You’ve been across the veil?”

That would explain a lot. The obsessive research, the indescribable pull, the constant search for something that could never quite be named. 

“Afterward, I always felt a pull in the back of my mind,” Ichigo said in a low, staticky rumble, “I thought it would fade eventually, but it didn’t, not really. I thought that if I tried to summon the path again, I could, I don’t know, fix it somehow.”

Grimmjow ran a hand down Pantera’s sheath. “There’s no fixing it. It never really goes away.”

“It was getting worse,” Orhime added, “He was not eating, losing focus. I found him sleepwalking, trying to climb the mountain in the middle of the night. He told me eventually, and we asked--someone who knows this kind of thing, and he said that something followed us. We had to send it back. I was here that night, helping Ichigo with the reverse summoning. But it didn’t quite work the same. The portal opened, but it dragged him through.” she shivered.

Grimmjow wasn’t surprised. “You got fucking lucky the first time.”

Kurosaki seemed to shrink behind Orihime, as guilty as a pile of darkness and immaterial shapes could look.

“I’ve been trying to get Ichigo back ever since, but the door won’t open,” Orihime said, patting one of Kurosaki’s tendrils absently, “I tried the ritual with some of my own blood, but it could only summon him briefly into the world, and, well..”

She twisted her hands in her lap.

Grimmjow rolled his eyes. “Can’t exactly go on dates and shit with him being all primordial ooze and all, right?”

Orihime nodded, and the shadowy tendrils spasmed, as if embarrassed.

“He’s solid here, but if we try to summon him in town, he’s all--smoky, and I can’t understand his words as easily.”

Grimmjow looked around. “The world’s thin around here. Product of the experiments that Aizen and his crew was doing, before they fucked it up and it swallowed them and most of the house.”

Orihime didn’t reply, but she looked at him with brows drawn together, her eyes big and sad, an expression that made his spine crawl with uncomfortable awareness.

“The hell is that look for?” He said.

“You used to live there too, didn’t you?” she said. “Before your home was swallowed up. Urahara--”

Grimmjow stiffened. It hadn’t been his home, not really, but it didn’t mean he hadn’t missed it in some twisted kind of way. The stability, the certainty that the next day would be the same as the present.

“Urahara,” he interrupted, wrenching his thoughts away, “As in Urahara Kisuke the mad scholar. Who went missing thirty years ago after.”

Orihime nodded. “He owns a traditional candy and sweets store in town, and doubles as the local occult expert. He told us about what happened here twenty years ago. And he told me the key to reversing whatever happened to Ichigo was with you,” she said. “I thought that meant your blood, because of the ritual for opening the door.”

“I am going to gut him,” Grimmjow said, vehemently, “I am going to rip out his intestines and use them as jump rope. I’ll mount his fucking dick on a spike in front of his shop and—"

“Alright, alright, we get it,” Kurosaki Ichigo’s voice bubbled up like tar from the shadows, snapping out like a physical blow, “But let’s keep things on topic here.”

Grimmjow shook himself, as if he could dislodge the annoying sense of otherworldly terror. It felt like when Harribel got really angry, her face a thundercloud and Tiburon rattling by her side. But he refused to quail in front of this idiot human who’d played with forces beyond his reckoning. He steeled his spine and kept his gaze firm.

He glowered, his pride the only thing that had kept him from flinching, though his hand on Pantera was white-knuckled. “Cut the fucking otherworldly talk. I can’t block it out with these binding sigils.”

“Oh,” Orihime said, glancing down guiltily, “Here, I’ll wipe them off.” She reached out a hand and, before Grimmjow could stop her, rubbed vigorously at the binding sigil directly over his left nipple with the heel of her palm. He froze.

She realized what she was doing and squeaked, pulling her hand back quickly, like she’d touched hot iron. “Sorry! I—um, I’ve got some wet wipes with me, if you want to use that instead.”

“Won’t work. Need blood to wash off a binding sigil,” Grimmjow said, throat dry, “so unless you’ve got a squirrel stuffed up your dress, I’ll deal with it later.”

Orihime bit her lip, frowning. Then, her gaze turned determined. Before he could stop her with his stupid, slow human reflexes, she’d already put a thumb between her incisors and bitten down. Blood welled up on the pad of her thumb.

“Here,” she said, reaching out again, “this should work.”

“Are you insane?” Grimmjow said, wide-eyed. He watched like a man entranced as her tongue flicked out and licked the speck of red off her lower lip and teeth.

“I can’t just leave you like this,” Orihime said, shoving her bleeding thumb towards him, “I’m the one who did this to you, so please let me help!”

He glared at the offending appendage. Crimson beads of blood pooled in the whorls of her thumbprint. It felt almost obscene, the redness of her blood, freely offered. But he still couldn’t feel Pantera, close as she was, and the cold stillness of her bothered him more than any offering Orihime could make.

Finally he jerked his head in a sharp nod. Orihime’s face cleared, and she scooted forward, hand outstretched.

Grimmjow held himself very still as she carefully smeared the blood across the first sigil with her thumb. It winked out, punching a relieved sigh out of him. She froze for a brief second at the feeling of his breath over her face, a quick, embarrassed laugh erupting from her, before she collected herself and moved on to the next one, painting over it in careful strokes. When the sigil was covered, she wiped it off with the cuff of her sleeve, uncaring that it stained the white fabric a rusty brown.

Finally, when the last one was gone, Pantera rattled in his hand, a mixture of anger and relief.

Orihime’s eyes went wide. “It moved!” she squeaked, jumping back. Kurosaki’s tendrils splayed over her shoulders protectively.

“Relax,” Grimmjow said, flexing his shoulders with renewed vigor, “she’s just pissed you cut us off with those sigils.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Orihime said, with a frown.

“Ya know,” Grimmjow said, “With how little you know about sigils and the other shit, I’m starting to think you’re not a real cultist.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Orihime admitted, “I got the sigils from Urahara, actually. He gave me these—” she reached into the neck window of her low-cut dress and withdrew a string of temporary tattoos, except each one was a sigil of binding.  Grimmjow reared back, and so did Kurosaki, all his shadowy tendrils flailing.

“Careful with that shit!” he hissed, Pantera held out in front of him as if it would protect him from the words of power inscribed on a kid’s accessory.

“Sorry!” she said, quickly stuffing them back into her dress. She ducked her head, apologetic.

Grimmjow huffed out a breath that was definitely not relief. “If this ain’t your guilty pleasure, then where’d you get the cultist getup?”

Kurosaki drew his shadowy limbs closer, also curious.

Orihime pinked. “Um. Urahara-san said…it was traditional?”

Grimmjow barked out a laugh. “Ain’t any tradition I know.”

Kurosaki’s tendrils flailed again, in consternation. “That pervert. I’ll kill him.” Grimmjow was pleased to note that the voice no longer grated against his mind.

“Looks great on you though,” he added, with a smirk.

Orihime’s cheeks flared even brighter red. One of Kurosaki’s shadow tentacles slapped him across the forehead, lightly enough that it only ruffled his bangs. He blinked, wondering when he’d let his guard down enough for the eldritch creature to come so close to him. 

“Keep your tentacles to yourself,” Grimmjow muttered, hiking Pantera higher on his shoulder, glaring to hid his unease.

Kurosaki shrank back, as if just realizing what he’d done, retreating into the solid core of whatever passed for his center now.

“Sorry,” a hint of a voice wafted out.

Fuck. 

“We would have made it work,” Orihime said, melancholy again, “shadowy tentacles and all, but recently, Ichigo’s been feeling off.”

“I don’t remember what it’s like,” the shadowy creature said, sounding almost wistful, “the sun, having hands, what bread tastes like. Every time, it’s harder for me to come back.”

Grimmjow tensed. “The longer you’re there, the more it changes you,” he said.

“I remember,” Orihime said, “when my brother went missing, the shinigami found him, but she said that he couldn’t come back. Because fell through the world, and he’d stayed too long.”

“You can use my blood to open the way to Hueco Mundo, but it ain’t as simple as dragging him back,” Grimmjow said, gesturing towards Kurosaki’s shadowy tentacles, “Does he look like he’d fit nicely in a human body? The other world’s already got its claws in him.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Orihime asked, biting at her lip. “I know I haven’t been the best host, or the most honest, or--I know I’ve lied to you and hurt you, but please. Ichigo is the one person I have left.”

Grimmjow groaned, running a hand through his hair. Was he seriously considering it, after everything she’d done to him? But the way she looked at him, like he was worthy of trust, despite knowing who he was--what he was--it made his stomach ache, and the dumb muscle beneath his ribs pulse like it was on the verge of bursting.

And Kurosaki, who’d fought him in the shadowy form he hadn’t even fully integrated with, who’d managed to hold on to his human consciousness for over a month after falling through to Hueco Mundo. The thought of someone like that--someone like him and Nel and Harribel--intrigued him more than he wanted to admit.

He must be mad to even consider agreeing. But Harribel had always called him the loose screw of the well-oiled machine that was Espada Investigations.

“Fuck it,” he said, “you did hire me to find the asshole. I want hazard pay for this.”

Orihime looked up again, and there was that goddamn hopeful look again. “Of course!” she said, “I will give you a free pass to the bakery for the rest of your life.”

That was not at all what he fucking meant, but Grimmjow rolled his eyes and nodded. He reached down to unzip his jumpsuit. “When that fucking hack Urahara said I had the answer, he probably meant this.”

Orihime yelped, slapping her hands over her eyes. “Please, I’m a married woman, Jaegerjaquez-san!”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Grimmjow sneered, “And I can fucking see you peeking through your fingers.”

Orihime lowered her hands, smiling sheepishly.

“This,” Grimmjow said, pointing at his stomach, “I’m talking about this.”

Orihime’s eyes widened at the sight of the binding circle etched around his navel. Grimmjow knew the pattern by heart, remembered every knife stroke that had carved it into the meat of his stomach, the first thing he ever felt in the human world. The Hogyoku binding circle, conceived by the mad scholar Urahara Kisuke and perfected by Aizen Sosuke, who then used it to bind ten Creatures of Hueco Mundo to the mortal realm, in prisons of flesh and magic.

“That looks like it hurt,” Orihime murmured.

Of course it did. No birth was ever bloodless, and his involved more knives and human sacrifice than most.

“No shit,” he said, “it hurt like a bitch. Aizen’s work, and he wasn’t too concerned about making it comfortable. But the important part is that it keeps my otherworldly soul from bursting out of my mortal flesh like a knife through a wet spleen.”

Orihime scrunched up her face at the comparison, but her expression smoothed out into curiosity.

“May I?” She asked, reaching out a tentative hand.

Grimmjow opened his mouth in preparation for a quick dismissal, but he paused. He still had her blood drying on his chest, so what was a little extra bit of touching? He nodded.

She touched it, tracing the outline with a gentle finger. At the same time, the shadow tendril of Kurosaki snaked around her wrist and spread across Grimmjow’s stomach as well, and it felt—it felt like having all his breath sucked out of his lungs, like electricity shooting straight down his spine and—lower.

The sound Grimmjow made embarrassed them all.

Orihime drew back her hand, cheeks red, and Kurosaki’s tendril shrank back into her sleeve, like a startled anemone.

“Oh,” she said, “I—sorry!”

Grimmjow coughed, swinging Pantera around so that she rested across his knees. It was scant protection, and she jumped in her sheath, in a shudder that felt like laughter. “That’s—let’s just get this over with,” he muttered.

They set up the ritual circle in silence. Grimmjow pulled Pantera out an inch and slid her sharp edge along the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, letting the blood drip down into the center of the circle. Orihime squeezed another drop or two out of her thumb. The blood mixed there, the same shade of red.

“Do you remember?” she asked, as they sat across from each other before the summoning, “What it’s like on the other side?”

Grimmjow cracked a grin. He couldn’t forget, and that was the whole fucking problem. Kurosaki’s shadowy tendrils wavered at the edge, fading slowly.

“I remember enough,” Grimmjow said, “Now let’s get this thing done already.”

Orihime nodded, the crease between her brows still there. “Just—promise,” she said, “promise that you’ll come back.”

Grimmjow looked at her, the earnestness plain on her features. For all her deception, she still had a remarkably honest face.

“I’ll try my best,” he said, and found that he meant it.

===

As Grimmjow set foot on the pale white dunes of Hueco Mundo, four paws against the coarse sand of another world, breathing in the electric air, feeling the delicate pieces of dark brush against the bone-plated armor of his back, it felt like coming home.

Pantera howled, low and long in the back of his mind—their mind, the way it had been before they’d been split between flesh and blade, when they’d been one being, free and unrestrained.

The world shifted here, in ways that would have scraped against the edges of a human mind like a serrated spoon, but now, reunited with the majority of their power, they basked in it, pressed their outline against the familiar waters of this world that had birthed them first and wash off the filth of the other side.

A pressure in their center stopped them. Like a molten thread hooked into their flesh. With it, a thought, a promise woven into a net, blood and words to keep them bound to that other world.

There was something Grimmjow needed to do.

He saw the figure lying among the dunes quick enough. It was the only static thing in the ever-changing world, a constant where there should be none. He walked closer, and there was no doubt that it was Kurosaki Ichigo’s body there in the sands.

A young, pale face slack in unconsciousness, the same vividly orange hair as that photograph in Orihime’s living room, longer, dark shirt half disintegrated covering his chest. But the man was not unchanged. White shards of bone clung to his face, flowing together in sheets to cover his face like a mask on one side. A long forward-pointing horn like a bent rapier protruded from the side of his head, the flutter of his eyelids revealing sclera the color of dried blood. His chest heaved, unused to the air of this world, but it still rose and fell. Still alive, for now.

And above, the soul of Kurosaki Ichigo hovered, a shadow to the pale, corporeal figure on the sand.

In Hueco Mundo, the amorphous mass of tendrils resolved into something more humanoid, at least in the logic of the other dimension. Long black hair, rippling in an unseen wind; one arm cloaked in dark flames, the other starkly pale in the light of an otherworldly moon; a face half-wrapped in shadows, leaving only the eyes like bright embers, staring out at Grimmjow.

“It’s looking pretty bad, huh?” Ichigo said, voice echoing across the sands. “I tried to move it--me, but I can’t quite touch.”

He waved a hand that passed immaterial through the pale face on the sand, and shuddered. “I really hope I’m not accidentally giving myself brain damage, or something.”

Grimmjow chuffed, a sound like laughter. That was the problem with things from another world, they never quite belonged, like the immiscible interface between oil and water, sliding off each other.

“Do you think it’s even possible for me to go back?” Ichigo said, a sudden cast of melancholy to his voice.

“Things aren’t done until they’re done.” Grimmjow said, through his panther’s teeth. “We’ve got the sigils and the circle. Have a bit more faith.”

He took the body’s collar between his teeth and started dragging him back towards the portal.

The shadow of Ichigo’s soul smiled, eyes curving above his shrouded face. “I guess you’re right,” he said, walking up beside them. He left footsteps in the dunes, bones crumbling beneath his steps into voids in the shape of human feet.

They made their way back, until the sun-bright glimmer of the human world fluttered before them, across the humming portal. On this side, it looked like a mirror’s surface, limned in light that danced and rippled at the edges. In the darkness of Hueco Mundo, it blazed, a beacon for anything hungry and desperate enough to make the leap.

Grimmjow stopped in the sand, letting Ichigo outpace him. There was a strange feeling brewing in the hollow of his gut.

“Do you want to go back?” he said abruptly.

Ichigo paused, the shadowy form of his soul wavering like a heat mirage as he looked back. “What?”

Grimmjow didn’t know why he’d mentioned it. He’d barely known Kurosaki Ichigo for more than a few hours, and besides once Ichigo was out, they’d part ways, each to their own diverging future. But he’d read Ichigo’s notes, knew that he’d touched Hueco Mundo more deeply than any normal human, and knew exactly what that meant.

“That world, it’s never going to feel like home,” Grimmjow said, “You’ll wake up in the night and wonder why you feel so empty. You’ll find yourself looking out into the blackness between stars, wondering if that’s where you might belong instead.”

Ichigo didn’t say anything, his face blurry with dimensional distortion. Finally, he looked up, and despite all the distance between dimensions, his gaze was still firm as solid earth. That fucking determined look, like Orihime’s when she’d asked him to help her. And when she’d asked him to come back. It dug deep, right to the pit of his stomach.

“I know exactly where I belong,” Ichigo said, softly, “I know it won’t be easy, but Orihime is waiting for me.”

Then he turned, facing Grimmjow fully, and holding out a shadowy hand. “Will you come?”

The sands lay quiet around them, shifting in slow fractal patterns. It whispered sweet promises against Grimmjow’s feet.

He could stay.

He could leave this waking corpse here, and go back to the sands, live in the world that should have been his.

It should be an easy decision. If Grimmjow were to ask himself what he wanted, underneath all his sharp-edged cynicism, the truth writhing in the wet labyrinth of his viscera, it would be this: He wanted to go back.

He’d watched Nel and Harribel make their own attempts at humanity, in hopes that he’d be able to make sense of it. Nel traveled across the country and watched her history documentaries, as if she could fill their own empty past with ancient Roman ruins and bloody Sengoku-era battles. Harribel planned and budgeted and organized, from a phone line in their shared hovel of an apartment to the office they shared in the heart of the old capital city, she’d carved out a job, a career, a calling.

Grimmjow knew better. No matter what he tried, the truth was unavoidable: always the yawning void, always the vast, hungry, hollow space between his ribs.

Bar fights and smoking didn’t fill it. Drinking liquor until his hands shook and his head felt like rusty iron at its fracture stress didn’t fill it. Hunting with Pantera held it at bay. Wild chases in woods with Nel and Garmuza helped, sparring with Harribel and Tiburon helped, but again it returned, threatening to tear him open like a dimensional rift. Home was not a building, or a nice little office on the way to some respectable career; home was somewhere in the unreachable past, was a humming portal to a different world, from where they’d been ripped out and flensed of armor and bone, given these human forms, and told that the wobbly legs and blunt teeth were a blessing and not a goddamn curse.

What did he have left on the other side? What did he owe the woman with the sun-bright hair and tender brown eyes? What did he owe the man at his feet, whose face he had never seen in the light of the sun, save for that single photograph over the mantle?

So what if Nel would cry, if Harribel would keep his desk untouched like a memorial? Nel had always hated tears. He hadn’t seen her cry since they’d left what was left of Las Noches. And Harribel couldn’t sleep if she was waiting for them to come back from a job. He’d seen her stay up late in the night for Nel, and the circles under her eyes when he returned late.

That hollow feeling in his stomach deepened, knife-sharp.

Deep down, he recognized that could feel it here too—that unnamable pull, the thread connecting him to Nel and Harribel, to that woman Orihime and even the idiot Kurosaki.

He’d spent so long chasing this world, he hadn’t noticed what he’d left behind in the other. He sighed, breathing out flakes of delicate darkness on his breath. So many years and he’d almost forgotten the immutable truth: once the other world touches you, it will not let you go.

With one last look, he stepped through, onto his two feet, hand on his scabbard, back into the sun.

===

“I cannot thank you enough for what you’ve done,” Orihime said, one shoulder under Grimmjow’s armpit, her arm curled against his waist. Over Orihime’s other shoulder, Kurosaki Ichigo had also slung his arm, leaning against her as he awkwardly tried to maneuver his feet like a toddler just learning how to walk. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Grimmjow said, feeling lighter than he had in years. Though, that could have been blood loss and lack of sleep.

“Really, we mean it,” Ichigo said, “I like being human-shaped again.”

The flesh of Ichigo’s chest was an inflamed red, where they’d carved the modified Hogyoku circle there to seal his soul inside his mortal flesh. His clothes had disintegrated the moment they’d stumbled out of the portal, so he wore Orihime’s jeans, which rode low on his hips, ended halfway up his calves, and left nothing to the imagination. Orihime was still in her ritual white dress, though the white had turned grey-brown with the dust of the hiking trail, and the skirt was ragged from catching on branches. Grimmjow was probably the best dressed in his jumpsuit and jacket, Pantera looped through a belt, but his hair was a tangled mess, and he was pretty sure he still had blood smeared on his face, though whose it was he didn’t know.

Together, they stumbled out of the woods in an ungainly, dirt-streaked, weary huddle, giddy with the excitement of being alive.

“We’re almost home!” Orihime said, giggling, half-delirious with exhaustion.

“Not my home,” Grimmjow muttered. The next moment, he felt a cold, oozing touch at the back of his neck. He slapped at it with Pantera, and Ichigo yelped, a tendril of darkness receding into his hair.

“Put that away,” Grimmjow snapped.

“Sorry,” Ichigo’s throat was hoarse, his words slurred. His voice still had the slightest edge of an uncanny echo, and Orihime scrunched up her nose.

“You sound like--like a karaoke machine that’s malfunctioning,” Orihime said. Grimmjow snorted, but Ichigo smiled down at her, like she’d said the most wonderful thing in the whole world.

“You’re gonna need training,” Grimmjow said, looking away from the brightness of that smile, feeling suddenly out of place, “gotta be able to pass as human, or shinigami’ll be swarming all over you.”

“I am human,” Ichigo protested, “see! I’ve got all ten fingers and ten toes.”

He raised his hands in front of his face, letting go of Orihime’s shoulder, and splayed out his fingers. He tried to lift his feet too, and stumbled. Grimmjow caught one arm, and Orihime the other, and then they were holding each other in a circle, faces pressed close, breaths mingling. Something cold touched his wrist, and Grimmjow looked down to see another one of Kurosaki’s stray tendrils, twining around their arms.

“Yeah, definitely human,” Grimmjow said, running a thumb across the tendril. It shivered beneath his touch. Ichigo would need something to put all that power in, maybe a sword, like Pantera. And if he ever learned how to spar with it, he’d be a terror, in the best possible way. Grimmjow couldn’t wait.

“Why don’t you teach me then?” Ichigo said, an edge of challenge to his voice.

“What, you think you’re gonna be able to keep up with my lessons?” Grimmjow said, rising to the utterly transparent bait. “I’ll fucking whip you into shape, you slacker.”

Ichigo grinned, like a kid who’d just gotten away with the cookie jar. “Will you stay then?” he asked, extending a hand. 

Grimmjow stared at it, the firm palm, the long fingers, nails in need of clipping. It was lined, like his, and completely, undeniably human.

“Stay,” Orihime echoed, placing her hand above Ichigo’s, palm up as well.

Grimmjow swallowed. He had given up a whole other world to be here, standing in the light of the morning sun with them. But maybe, he thought, they were offering him something equal in value. In the light of morning, their smiles were genuine, welcoming, warm like the first swell of spring. He felt something crack open inside him, a pale, new thing breaking out.

Pantera nudged his hip, vibrating with a purr that he was sure they could all feel where they were pressed up against his side. She’d always been more honest than him.

He grinned, reached out a hand and took it.