Fic: Monism
This story hurt coming out. Kinda like puking broken glass. Thanks, brain, for turning my plot bunnies rabid. Now shut up and let me get a decent night's sleep.
Apologies in advance if anyone seems OOC; I tried to keep them IC in a difficult situation. We'll see if that worked at all.
Title: Monism
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Bleach
Character(s): Hollow Ichigo, Ichigo/Ishida, appearances by Ryuuken and Shinji
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: I no own. Is all Kubo Tite’s. Please no sue.
Summary: Uryuu predicted it himself: “Someday he would need to protect Ichigo, and he wouldn’t know how because Ichigo had refused to tell him. And it would be his own fault.”
Author's Note below cut.
Author's Notes: Spoilers through chapter 214 of the manga. Third and final “-ism” story; like the other two, it can follow in a linear timeline ( Pluralism, Dualism, Monism) or it can stand alone. This is significantly darker than the other two (although now that I look back I can see how they progressed towards this end) and I’m giving it an NC-17 rating partly for consistency but mostly for a raw depiction of bodies, as well as sexual violence. No smut.
There’s also a bit of a creative timeline here. In the manga, Ishida was already training with Ryuuken the night before that morning that Ichigo went out to visit the spot where he, Chad and Inoue had fought Yammi and Ulquiorra. I’ve tampered a tiny bit by making Ichigo and Ishida accept training from their respective unlikely masters, the Vaizard and Ryuuken, on the same day.
Also, I listened to a very specific playlist on repeat while I wrote this, and the music has become so ingrained with the story in my mind that I thought I'd share a bit of it, so you can get some idea of the mental state in which this was written. (I didn't want to include lyrics in the fic, as it interrupted the flow and felt contrived. The tone -- exhausted violence -- of the music itself is just as important as the lyrics, in this case.)
Playlist:
Down With the Sickness - Disturbed (as others have agreed, THE quintessential Hollow Ichigo song - this is the uncut version with the rant towards the end), Rape Me - Nirvana (a little heavy-handed for this fic, maybe, but still accurate and disturbing), Passive - A Perfect Circle (great Hichigo/Ichigo conflict song; "my perfect enemy"), Blood (Hidden Track) - My Chemical Romance (song starts exactly 1 & 1/2 minutes in; if you were wondering why I obsess over blood in this fic...), ruiner - Nine Inch Nails (played on repeat while I was writing the longer segment on Uryuu), Something I Can Never Have - Nine Inch Nails (this is pretty much the tone and pace of the end of the story, and a good reflection on both Ichigo and Uryuu)
These should be available for 100 downloads over 7 days, starting today (Jan 15).
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Monism
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There was a spot on the kitchen wall. It was so unlike Uryuu to let something like that slip. His apartment wasn’t upscale but it wasn’t a dump either, less than what Uryuu’s father had deemed appropriate when he’d agreed to pay for anything Uryuu wanted, but more than Ichigo could ever hope for outside of his spartan bedroom above the family clinic. It was a nice apartment. Uryuu made good use of space, his decorations were well-crafted if a bit monotone (after a while one blue-and-white cross pattern looked like every other), and the walls were all painted a pristine white, clearly Uryuu’s doing judging by the water-damaged wallpaper in the rest of the building.
Except here. Here there was a some kind of stain, reddish-brown, misshapen. A damned spot, maybe, or maybe Ichigo had been studying his Western Lit book too hard. He’d been studying more than usual recently, but his grades kept falling. Uryuu’s were sliding too; he was third in the class now, and it was Ichigo’s fault. If Uryuu wouldn’t spend so much time with him -- less fucking, more being responsible young adults --
You’re trying to make it crude. If you make it sound bad enough you’ll convince yourself that you don’t want it. That you don’t want to get up right now and go out there and finish what we started.
“You,” Ichigo muttered, studying the spot on the wall so hard his vision began to blur. “What you started.”
Images of Uryuu in the bathroom came to mind. That’s where he was; Ichigo had heard water running in the sink before he’d found himself sitting in here. Uryuu at the sink, still naked. Corner of the counter biting into him as he fell, hip torn, bruised everywhere, orchid-like, veins flowering. Blood. Black hair against the white porcelain, crack. Falling.
Instant cutback, no, no blood. Uryuu’s knees on either side of the sink, a precarious balancing act with both of them mostly on the counter, Uryuu’s hands pressed splay-fingered paper-white with death pressure against the mirror, jerking a little with each thrust, black hair pulled back, look up, look up, watch yourself. Bruised knees, tearing, deeper, deeper, death grip -- mirror, hair. Mirror flower water moon.
Blood.
No.
Ichigo stared at the spot on the wall, tears welling in his eyes because blinking was darkness was an opening for it, for him, for me. Don’t take over. Don’t. No illusions. Spot on the wall. No illusions.
In his mind Ichigo watched Uryuu watch himself with broken sobbing hatred over his shoulder in the bathroom mirror and Ichigo realized that his eyes were a sick vibrant yellow glow in pools of nothing and his grin was a dead thing’s rictus mouth frozen in glee.
“Leave me alone,” he moaned softly.
No.
Someone else was speaking. It took less than a second for the intruder’s reiatsu to register and it to react with violent joy and Ichigo snapped his body into a tight ball and held himself down. “No,” he repeated back to himself.
“Ichigo.” The voice registered along with the reiatsu this time. “It’s me.”
“Go away,” Ichigo muttered, fingers tightening in his own hair. Orange not black. (Not white either. You are not me.)
Something stifling settled around his shoulders. “This is shock, Ichigo. You’re in shock. Calm down.”
“Not cold,” Ichigo muttered, shifting his shoulders to throw the thing off. Blue and white quilt, that’s what it was.
Of course we’re pretty familiar with throwing that quilt off.
“You weren’t there those times,” Ichigo whispered. Pulling the quilt up over Uryuu’s shoulders after they’d made love in every sense of the phrase and watching the moonlight bleach him of what little color he had. Those times had been pure. Hadn’t they?
Always with you, majesty.
“Feel your forehead.” A hand picked up one of his hands and moved it to his own face. His sweat was icy. Ichigo jerked his hand free and tried to turn his face away to wipe the sweat off on the corner of the quilt not facing the open room and the white light and the one person he couldn’t stand to see him like this and take care of him and touch him so gently.
“You haven’t cleaned up, Ichigo.”
Ichigo’s eyes strayed to his hand that had just touched his face and the blood not quite dried on the fingers there. It was probably on his face now. Smeared into his hair down to the scalp where he’d gripped hard. Abstract patterns of red on his knees drew his gaze inexorably down.
Tch. Not enough, king. The art isn’t art until it’s finished.
“I think I might throw up,” Ichigo said blankly.
It wasn’t a lie, but the nausea lessened when the reiatsu around him lifted and he wondered if he hadn’t just said it to make Uryuu go away.
But he was back a second later with a trash can. Ichigo distantly watched him walk back and forth around the kitchen, picking up a clean dish towel, going to the sink to soak it in hot water, wringing it out. He wore a bathrobe tied tight and closed high at the neck, no V for Ichigo’s eyes to dip into, no temptation. His feet were still bare and there probably wasn’t anything under the robe.
Check out that limp. Even that Mayuri bastard couldn’t lay him that low. Not that he could pull that Heavenly Wind Puppet Suit shit now. That’s probably your fault.
Ichigo was suddenly very aware of his own nudity and started to reach for a corner of the quilt to pull it further around himself, but his hands were bloody and he didn’t want to touch the clean fabric. Uryuu had probably made this quilt himself.
Warm wet cloth pressed against his forehead, gently wiping away cold sweat and the smear of blood on his cheek. He kept his hands still. The nausea was back, reiatsu drifting in what he supposed was supposed to be a comforting way around him but it just invaded his mind and pores and wormed its way into his veins. He could smell Uryuu, warm and close, a little soapy, with that disgustingly familiar raw iron tang beneath the mask of cleanliness. Ichigo wished in vain to not be so used to that smell. But he’d seen too many friends and loved ones torn nearly to shreds and smelled their insides and seen the muscle flexing beneath the skin and he’d cut living things open from stem to stern and even Hollows had their hallucinogenic smell of blood and bile before they vanished, because they had been human once, too.
Aw, king, didn’t know you cared.
You were never human, Ichigo thought desperately. Uryuu’s damp cloth was on his hands now, cleaning between the fingers but trying not to let skin touch skin. You were never human because here I am, I’m still alive, and you can’t be a transformed human because you can’t be me.
You died, Ichigo. Urahara gutted you like a fish and cut your chain of fate and it devoured itself right through your chest. You felt it. You felt yourself let go of this mortal coil, and you felt my birth because it was your birth, too. And here I am. The part of you that stayed dead. I am you, scar tissue in your soul, surgery gone wrong. Live with it.
Something pulled at his heart and it was such a familiar agony. The chain, the chain, it had eaten his heart. He’d felt it stop beating. He’d felt it burst. It hadn’t been flesh, it had only been his spirit body, but it still functioned with slippery organs in a mockery of life and it still felt pain, and he’d died that day. He could taste the dense unhardened mask material at the back of his throat and remembered not being able to breathe because every orifice had been leaden and packed with the stuff and it had come out of his eyes, God, it had been like crying tears of white-hot molten iron.
Uryuu’s cloth had moved on to his legs. The warmth was fading from it. It was pink all over now with absorbed blood.
Now that’s love. The little bitch is touching us right where we want it, even after all that complaining earlier.
Uryuu was saying something. “-- hurt anywhere?”
“What,” Ichigo croaked.
“Is any of this blood yours, Ichigo?”
He struggled to bury the memories and return to the present. “I -- don’t --”
HERE FEEL IT AGAIN MAJESTY
Ichigo shrieked. He couldn’t even move but the sound tore out involuntarily because it had squeezed his heart, physically forced his brain to override the electrical impulses that kept his heart beating normally and told it to contract instead and keep contracting and not release no no no oh god oh god I’m going to die like this I’m going to die again don’t want to die
“--chigo? Ichigo! KUROSAKI!”
He wasn’t sure if he stopped it or if it let go of its own will but the next beat of his heart spiked white agony through his veins as blood screaming for movement pumped through in a rush.
The voice crowed and raged at once.
You never think of anything, king! You still don’t even throw Zangetsu by the hilt wrap even though it’s the only possible ranged attack you could make, you fucking moron! It doesn’t even occur to you that I could get at you any way other than through the old man or the Quincy brat!
“Ichigo, are you hurt? Answer me!”
Blood was flooding Ichigo’s senses. His vision was blurry and his heart was pounding so loud so loud and the blood still pumping out of Chad’s torn veins and arteries still so normal so human so young under the armor too powerful for a simple good man like Chad who couldn’t do anything but lie there and stay alive with his arm torn off and Inoue’s ribs exposed and her arm flayed to the shoulder, too much too much of the inner workings of the human body, he’d seen everyone everyone even his own mother bared to nothing -- everyone except Uryuu, seen beneath the skin of everyone except the one he got beneath the skin of every night, and in the last hour he’d gotten so close to tearing Uryuu open and seeing the veins and muscles beneath, no Quincy pride there, under the skin everyone was the same even fucking Aizen and his fucking Arrancar and even himself and his Hollow
You called me by name. I’m proud of you.
“Gonna,” Ichigo gasped in a voice that sounded nothing like his own. He reached up to push Uryuu away. “Gonna puke.”
He did. At least Uryuu had brought the trash can over; Ichigo thought he was going to break it with his death grip. He hadn’t eaten anything in hours and it was all acid. It left just as much poison as it got rid of. He didn’t feel purged, he felt more dirty. There was still blood on his abdomen and cock and now there was bile on his lips and he wanted to die.
Again.
“I have to leave,” he said, and his voice sounded thick and awful even to his own ears. “Now.”
“Look, y -- no. No, you can’t go anywhere. Maybe to a hospital. Ichigo --”
Ichigo reached out a shaking hand and pulled the bloodstained cloth out of Uryuu’s hands and wiped his mouth with it. The taste didn’t go away.
“Not going to your father’s hospital,” Ichigo managed to say. “Live at a clinic. I’ll be fine.”
“If I let you out that door there’s no way in hell you’re going to go straight home, if you can even walk!”
Ichigo put a hand to the wall and levered himself shakily to his feet. The quilt slid off his shoulders and to the floor. “Be fine,” he muttered, not looking at Uryuu.
“Damn it, Kurosaki, you won’t be fine! You aren’t fine! I can put you under restraint if you’re afraid you can’t control your Hollow, but you can’t get help like this --”
Uryuu made the mistake of reaching out to touch him and Ichigo didn’t know if he was the one controlling the hand that grabbed Uryuu’s forearm so hard that he could feel the two major bones there creaking dangerously under the pressure. Uryuu’s face instantly drained of what little color it had regained.
“You don’t understand,” Ichigo said and his throat hurt just from saying it. “He’s already in control.”
“Let go,” Uryuu whispered. His arm did not look right under Ichigo’s hand.
Ichigo did. He looked down at the cloth in his hand, walked over to the sink, ran cold water over it and wrung the bloody excess out. It was all Uryuu’s blood, anyway. He took a minute to finish cleaning himself up, ran more cold water over the cloth and watched the pink swirl down the drain for a second before he put his cupped hands under the flow and swished the taste of death out of his mouth. He spat, but didn’t take another handful to drink. He was afraid that if he put something in his stomach he’d throw up again. Uryuu’s reiatsu was still there behind him, an uncomfortable pressure against his back.
Ichigo didn’t look at him as he left the kitchen, shaky legs recovering inch by inch as he put them to use, mechanically walking into the bedroom and finding his clothes scattered all over the floor and furniture. He got dressed.
The voice in his head remained silent.
Uryuu was standing in the kitchen door when he walked back out of the bedroom, standing as straight as he could and cradling his twisted arm against his chest. The bathrobe sleeve covered up the bruises Ichigo knew were already spreading across the pale skin.
I’m sorry, Ichigo wanted to say. But he didn’t know what he meant by it, so he didn’t say it.
It’s me who wants to see him flayed, Ichigo thought numbly. It’s me who watched Chad and Inoue spill their guts on the ground for me and it’s me who wants Uryuu to do the same. Not the Hollow. He couldn’t care less what happens to them all.
Somewhere inside himself, he thought he heard or felt a purr.
Ichigo turned and walked out of the apartment without another word.
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He couldn’t sit down. That was the most humiliating thing, not least because it was so cliche. But there it was, the bottom line (awful pun intended blackly if at all): he couldn’t sit down because it hurt too much, and he’d probably tear open and start bleeding again if he so much as bent at the waist. And now his feet hurt from standing. Life would be so much easier if bodies didn’t get in the way.
There wasn’t anything to do. He spent a long time standing in the kitchen door, looking at nothing much, using the frame as support. He couldn’t bring himself to blame Ichigo, not really. He didn’t know if that was right or not, but... the connection between Ichigo and any kind of anger or fear on Uryuu’s part just wouldn’t click.
Of course, Ichigo and his Hollow were in many fundamental ways the same being, and maybe others would tell him that neither one could really do any action that the other hadn’t at least subconsciously thought of at some point. Maybe a part of Uryuu even believed that. Ichigo’s Hollow said and did things that weren’t all that unlike the boy himself, his natural attraction to violence merely heightened and twisted.
But Ichigo had a capacity for compassion and tenderness that Uryuu adamantly believed the Hollow had never touched. Ichigo protected that core of humanity with his whole being. And Uryuu couldn’t blame Ichigo for what happened when, in the course of holding tight to that core, his grip on the rest of his mind slipped.
After a while he stepped out of the kitchen door and walked towards the bedroom. With every little movement, his body protested his own rationalizations. He stood in the center of his bedroom, more recently his and Ichigo’s bedroom, comforted a little by the fact that the point at which it had become a place for nothing but sex and sleep was also the point at which it had stopped being a quiet refuge. There were other places Uryuu was more attached to now, for reading or quiet contemplation. Yet... the stillness was ethereal after the pain and madness that had blurred the last hour.
He felt surprisingly little reaction when he stepped over to the dormant hulk of the bed and looked down at his own white sheets, fresh-washed and crisp only two hours ago, now rumpled and strewn all over. He reached out as if to touch the bloodstains -- cold now, but still damp. His fingertips stopped just short.
He didn’t want to tell Ichigo that it was becoming more than just a personality change when the Hollow slipped into dominance these days. Yellow eyes laughed at him from his memory, and he thought he could feel the echo-touch of fingernails much too sharp to be Ichigo’s bitten ones. Had Ichigo even been aware enough of his surroundings to notice the cuts down Uryuu’s thighs and arms or did he still think all the blood was from anal tearing alone?
Suddenly Uryuu thought he felt the ghostly touch of claws again in passing and spun around, heart thudding sickly against his ribs, once, twice... A rush of adrenaline made his eyes water and his head feel light. Nothing there. No white shadows. Nothing hiding in the light.
“Damn it,” he whispered, just to hear his own voice. But he didn’t sound like himself, and it made things worse.
He made himself close his eyes. Immediately the afterimpression of vibrant yellow irises superimposed themselves over his own. He shoved the image down, along with the echo of hysterical laughter that had sounded too much like a Hollow’s mindless shriek. Too much like the sound Zangetsu made when it cut the air itself to shreds. Instead Uryuu focused on breathing deeply and evenly.
After a few minutes his heart was beating normally and the silence was just that. Empty silence.
From somewhere outside himself he watched as he picked up all his scattered clothes and folded them, and took the sheets off the bed and carried them to kitchen sink, which was the only sink big enough to hold them. Souken had told him a long time ago, along with a lot of other practical things, about how blood would only come out with cold water. Sometimes he wondered what had gone through his grandfather’s mind when he’d told Uryuu that. Souken knew the kinds of lives the Quincy lived.
Souken. He’d not only have approved of Uryuu’s alliance with the shinigami, he’d have been delighted at Uryuu’s acceptance of a partner and a lover, regardless of gender. But Hollows had killed Souken. Hollows controlled by renegade shinigami.
And Uryuu was only lying to himself if he didn’t admit that Ichigo was as much Hollow as he was shinigami. Maybe the only remnant of mortality and humanity left in him was that core of compassion he guarded so closely.
After a while Uryuu realized that his hands were shaking badly. He hadn’t felt it at first because the cold water had numbed them completely. With a little difficulty he got the last of the stains cleaned out and the blood rinsed from the sides of the sink, and picked up the whole soggy pile to take into the bathroom.
Everything hit him at once just after he hung the last pillowcase on the only remaining empty towel rack. He turned to leave, to go do something else, maybe take the trash out, and his reflection in the mirror stopped him dead in his tracks. He’d cleaned up in here, of course, and he’d seen the bloody mess he’d been. That was one thing. He was used to blood, for better or worse, especially his own.
But he wasn’t used to having lasting injuries. His Quincy powers had helped him heal a little faster, and of course everyone from the fourth division members to Urahara-san had treated him immediately after his other life-threatening fights. He wasn’t used to being this... ugly. This beaten. Not with physical injury, really; that was all contained between his navel and knees, for whatever good that was worth, but...
He looked like shit. As bad as he felt, if not worse. Pallid, skin paper-white and paper-thin. Lank hair. Reddened eyes behind glasses perched on a nose that suddenly looked fragile, along with all of the structure of his face; he’d never thought of himself as looking delicate before, but now that that he looked broken he guessed it was impossible to deny that there was a fragility to his slim frame. A brittleness that had clearly been easy to take advantage of.
Without his powers he knew he couldn’t measure up to Ichigo in a fight against Hollows or other shinigami, but... he still had strong arms from years of drawing the bow, and he was still muscular for his size...
He hadn’t thought he was so weak.
Uryuu touched the one scratch on his neck. He tugged the robe open a little, hesitantly, as if afraid to look at himself and see more fragility where before he’d only seen the wiry strength of an archer. Had he ever really been a match for Ichigo physically, or had he just been fooling himself? He’d bottomed in sex so often because it just seemed to fall out that way; he loved being filled, being fucked, and Ichigo loved to give him what he wanted. But maybe there was something to that hate-talk about the real fag being the one who acted like the girl. Maybe...
He fumbled at the sash at his waist blindly, needing to see, needing to know. His glasses were fogging up a little and he kept telling himself he wasn’t going to cry even as the tears started flowing. There. There. A body he was so used to that he’d never given it a second thought. A body that until now had always been as strong as he’d needed it to be. The bruises and ugly cuts barely registered next to the thinness, the small bones, the vampire-pale skin. They’d always been there, marking him out as a target, and he’d never let himself notice.
Uryuu stumbled backwards against the wall and sank down, losing himself from the mirror and staring at the cabinets beneath instead, face contorted in the kind of wretched sobbing that was so hard it was silent. He felt a sharp pain and a fresh trickle of blood down his thigh as he bent forward over his drawn-up knees, but he couldn’t care anymore. He just held onto himself and tried to stay alive for each passing second.
An afterimage of yellow eyes followed him into his personal darkness.
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He could feel the Hollow in every breath now. With every step he took, the echo of another rippled through his muscle memory. The Hollow was walking along behind him, beside him, within him. If he looked ahead he could see white shadows in his peripheral vision, trickling into the darkness.
Always with you.
It was early morning now, maybe five or six. He’d left Uryuu’s apartment late. Midnight, or something close. He wasn’t sure where all he’d gone since then... all over town. In and out of the abandoned warehouse where Chad and Inoue had trained, to stare at the broken glass and the hole in the wall where Chad had finally mastered the armored arm he’d later lose. Over to the high school, to stand across the street and map out each scrap of graffiti on the low wall that surrounded the school grounds, remembering which of it was his and Keigo’s and Tatsuki’s. Down to the park. Mom had pushed Yuzu and Karin on the lowest swings. They’d had so little time together, mother and daughters. Ichigo was afraid that he’d never understood some of the things Mom had told him because he hadn’t been a girl, and since he’d taken her away from his sisters so early, they’d never be able to understand and explain it to him.
He missed her so much. So much. It was a hollowness all of its own, and he hated it as much as he hated all the other hollow parts of himself.
Be still, my king, said the voice, low and almost caring. Let your mind be still. I’m so hungry for your hate. You don’t know how I’ve felt like a drowning man dying of thirst. Hate me and let me drink.
Ichigo shook with it. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt his whole body ache with the force of his hate, increased tenfold because it played into his desires.
The sky was greying. Ichigo made his way blindly back to the warehouse, kicked some rubble aside and went to sleep curled up in a dusty corner just as the sun rose. He didn’t see the glorious bloody display of rich light filtered through the dirty, broken windows.
It was already well past noon when he woke up. He visited the spot where the Arrancar had first attacked, stood and stared out over the broken ground and the rusty stains where two of his closest friends had nearly bled out. All because he’d felt the sick power inside him rising, and he’d frozen up. He hadn’t been able to protect his friends from the Arrancar, and he hadn’t been able to protect himself from his Hollow. He’d never known such fear.
... except when he’d screamed and clawed his way back into control only to find Uryuu tangled in sheets, crying and yelling at him to get out, and when he’d looked down he’d seen the blood on his hands...
It wasn’t really that hard to find the Vaizard later that day. He’d made up his mind a long time ago.
Dozens of pairs of oddly bright eyes (a brightness he’d seen more and more every time he looked in the mirror) stared down at him from the piles of industrial trash inside the Vaizard headquarters. Shinji put one foot forward with a soft, solid echo in the empty air.
“So, kid. Finally ready to become one of us?”
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“I can give you your powers back.”
There had never been a moment in Uryuu’s life when he hadn’t known where to find his father. Their reiatsu was so close to identical, theirs the only two pale blue reiraku left in the world. And as much as Uryuu hated it, there was a bond between them closer than kinship. Closer than shared pride. What the Quincy were was greater than the sum of their parts, and now that there were only two parts left, that old blood memory seemed stronger than ever.
“I can give you your powers back. I have only one condition...”
Ryuuken was waiting for him at the hospital, standing straight and tall outside the front doors as if nothing was out of the ordinary. His gray hair was immaculate, and his pale suit matched his funereal expression.
“You look pathetic,” he said to his only son.
“You promised me power,” Uryuu replied coldly. The short sleeves of his school uniform displayed the disfiguring hand-shaped bruise on his arm.
A few minutes later he was sitting stiffly in the passenger seat of his father’s Mercedes, not really watching the scenery become steadily more unfamiliar as it flashed past. The only thing on his mind was the oath his father had just forced him to make on Souken’s memory, knowing it was the only kind of oath Uryuu could never break. He’d already whispered his farewells to the emptiness in his apartment.
“I have only one condition.”
“... What is it?”
“Swear to me that you will never associate yourself with a shinigami again.”
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Apologies in advance if anyone seems OOC; I tried to keep them IC in a difficult situation. We'll see if that worked at all.
Title: Monism
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Bleach
Character(s): Hollow Ichigo, Ichigo/Ishida, appearances by Ryuuken and Shinji
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: I no own. Is all Kubo Tite’s. Please no sue.
Summary: Uryuu predicted it himself: “Someday he would need to protect Ichigo, and he wouldn’t know how because Ichigo had refused to tell him. And it would be his own fault.”
Author's Note below cut.
Author's Notes: Spoilers through chapter 214 of the manga. Third and final “-ism” story; like the other two, it can follow in a linear timeline ( Pluralism, Dualism, Monism) or it can stand alone. This is significantly darker than the other two (although now that I look back I can see how they progressed towards this end) and I’m giving it an NC-17 rating partly for consistency but mostly for a raw depiction of bodies, as well as sexual violence. No smut.
There’s also a bit of a creative timeline here. In the manga, Ishida was already training with Ryuuken the night before that morning that Ichigo went out to visit the spot where he, Chad and Inoue had fought Yammi and Ulquiorra. I’ve tampered a tiny bit by making Ichigo and Ishida accept training from their respective unlikely masters, the Vaizard and Ryuuken, on the same day.
Also, I listened to a very specific playlist on repeat while I wrote this, and the music has become so ingrained with the story in my mind that I thought I'd share a bit of it, so you can get some idea of the mental state in which this was written. (I didn't want to include lyrics in the fic, as it interrupted the flow and felt contrived. The tone -- exhausted violence -- of the music itself is just as important as the lyrics, in this case.)
Playlist:
Down With the Sickness - Disturbed (as others have agreed, THE quintessential Hollow Ichigo song - this is the uncut version with the rant towards the end), Rape Me - Nirvana (a little heavy-handed for this fic, maybe, but still accurate and disturbing), Passive - A Perfect Circle (great Hichigo/Ichigo conflict song; "my perfect enemy"), Blood (Hidden Track) - My Chemical Romance (song starts exactly 1 & 1/2 minutes in; if you were wondering why I obsess over blood in this fic...), ruiner - Nine Inch Nails (played on repeat while I was writing the longer segment on Uryuu), Something I Can Never Have - Nine Inch Nails (this is pretty much the tone and pace of the end of the story, and a good reflection on both Ichigo and Uryuu)
These should be available for 100 downloads over 7 days, starting today (Jan 15).
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Monism
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There was a spot on the kitchen wall. It was so unlike Uryuu to let something like that slip. His apartment wasn’t upscale but it wasn’t a dump either, less than what Uryuu’s father had deemed appropriate when he’d agreed to pay for anything Uryuu wanted, but more than Ichigo could ever hope for outside of his spartan bedroom above the family clinic. It was a nice apartment. Uryuu made good use of space, his decorations were well-crafted if a bit monotone (after a while one blue-and-white cross pattern looked like every other), and the walls were all painted a pristine white, clearly Uryuu’s doing judging by the water-damaged wallpaper in the rest of the building.
Except here. Here there was a some kind of stain, reddish-brown, misshapen. A damned spot, maybe, or maybe Ichigo had been studying his Western Lit book too hard. He’d been studying more than usual recently, but his grades kept falling. Uryuu’s were sliding too; he was third in the class now, and it was Ichigo’s fault. If Uryuu wouldn’t spend so much time with him -- less fucking, more being responsible young adults --
You’re trying to make it crude. If you make it sound bad enough you’ll convince yourself that you don’t want it. That you don’t want to get up right now and go out there and finish what we started.
“You,” Ichigo muttered, studying the spot on the wall so hard his vision began to blur. “What you started.”
Images of Uryuu in the bathroom came to mind. That’s where he was; Ichigo had heard water running in the sink before he’d found himself sitting in here. Uryuu at the sink, still naked. Corner of the counter biting into him as he fell, hip torn, bruised everywhere, orchid-like, veins flowering. Blood. Black hair against the white porcelain, crack. Falling.
Instant cutback, no, no blood. Uryuu’s knees on either side of the sink, a precarious balancing act with both of them mostly on the counter, Uryuu’s hands pressed splay-fingered paper-white with death pressure against the mirror, jerking a little with each thrust, black hair pulled back, look up, look up, watch yourself. Bruised knees, tearing, deeper, deeper, death grip -- mirror, hair. Mirror flower water moon.
Blood.
No.
Ichigo stared at the spot on the wall, tears welling in his eyes because blinking was darkness was an opening for it, for him, for me. Don’t take over. Don’t. No illusions. Spot on the wall. No illusions.
In his mind Ichigo watched Uryuu watch himself with broken sobbing hatred over his shoulder in the bathroom mirror and Ichigo realized that his eyes were a sick vibrant yellow glow in pools of nothing and his grin was a dead thing’s rictus mouth frozen in glee.
“Leave me alone,” he moaned softly.
No.
Someone else was speaking. It took less than a second for the intruder’s reiatsu to register and it to react with violent joy and Ichigo snapped his body into a tight ball and held himself down. “No,” he repeated back to himself.
“Ichigo.” The voice registered along with the reiatsu this time. “It’s me.”
“Go away,” Ichigo muttered, fingers tightening in his own hair. Orange not black. (Not white either. You are not me.)
Something stifling settled around his shoulders. “This is shock, Ichigo. You’re in shock. Calm down.”
“Not cold,” Ichigo muttered, shifting his shoulders to throw the thing off. Blue and white quilt, that’s what it was.
Of course we’re pretty familiar with throwing that quilt off.
“You weren’t there those times,” Ichigo whispered. Pulling the quilt up over Uryuu’s shoulders after they’d made love in every sense of the phrase and watching the moonlight bleach him of what little color he had. Those times had been pure. Hadn’t they?
Always with you, majesty.
“Feel your forehead.” A hand picked up one of his hands and moved it to his own face. His sweat was icy. Ichigo jerked his hand free and tried to turn his face away to wipe the sweat off on the corner of the quilt not facing the open room and the white light and the one person he couldn’t stand to see him like this and take care of him and touch him so gently.
“You haven’t cleaned up, Ichigo.”
Ichigo’s eyes strayed to his hand that had just touched his face and the blood not quite dried on the fingers there. It was probably on his face now. Smeared into his hair down to the scalp where he’d gripped hard. Abstract patterns of red on his knees drew his gaze inexorably down.
Tch. Not enough, king. The art isn’t art until it’s finished.
“I think I might throw up,” Ichigo said blankly.
It wasn’t a lie, but the nausea lessened when the reiatsu around him lifted and he wondered if he hadn’t just said it to make Uryuu go away.
But he was back a second later with a trash can. Ichigo distantly watched him walk back and forth around the kitchen, picking up a clean dish towel, going to the sink to soak it in hot water, wringing it out. He wore a bathrobe tied tight and closed high at the neck, no V for Ichigo’s eyes to dip into, no temptation. His feet were still bare and there probably wasn’t anything under the robe.
Check out that limp. Even that Mayuri bastard couldn’t lay him that low. Not that he could pull that Heavenly Wind Puppet Suit shit now. That’s probably your fault.
Ichigo was suddenly very aware of his own nudity and started to reach for a corner of the quilt to pull it further around himself, but his hands were bloody and he didn’t want to touch the clean fabric. Uryuu had probably made this quilt himself.
Warm wet cloth pressed against his forehead, gently wiping away cold sweat and the smear of blood on his cheek. He kept his hands still. The nausea was back, reiatsu drifting in what he supposed was supposed to be a comforting way around him but it just invaded his mind and pores and wormed its way into his veins. He could smell Uryuu, warm and close, a little soapy, with that disgustingly familiar raw iron tang beneath the mask of cleanliness. Ichigo wished in vain to not be so used to that smell. But he’d seen too many friends and loved ones torn nearly to shreds and smelled their insides and seen the muscle flexing beneath the skin and he’d cut living things open from stem to stern and even Hollows had their hallucinogenic smell of blood and bile before they vanished, because they had been human once, too.
Aw, king, didn’t know you cared.
You were never human, Ichigo thought desperately. Uryuu’s damp cloth was on his hands now, cleaning between the fingers but trying not to let skin touch skin. You were never human because here I am, I’m still alive, and you can’t be a transformed human because you can’t be me.
You died, Ichigo. Urahara gutted you like a fish and cut your chain of fate and it devoured itself right through your chest. You felt it. You felt yourself let go of this mortal coil, and you felt my birth because it was your birth, too. And here I am. The part of you that stayed dead. I am you, scar tissue in your soul, surgery gone wrong. Live with it.
Something pulled at his heart and it was such a familiar agony. The chain, the chain, it had eaten his heart. He’d felt it stop beating. He’d felt it burst. It hadn’t been flesh, it had only been his spirit body, but it still functioned with slippery organs in a mockery of life and it still felt pain, and he’d died that day. He could taste the dense unhardened mask material at the back of his throat and remembered not being able to breathe because every orifice had been leaden and packed with the stuff and it had come out of his eyes, God, it had been like crying tears of white-hot molten iron.
Uryuu’s cloth had moved on to his legs. The warmth was fading from it. It was pink all over now with absorbed blood.
Now that’s love. The little bitch is touching us right where we want it, even after all that complaining earlier.
Uryuu was saying something. “-- hurt anywhere?”
“What,” Ichigo croaked.
“Is any of this blood yours, Ichigo?”
He struggled to bury the memories and return to the present. “I -- don’t --”
HERE FEEL IT AGAIN MAJESTY
Ichigo shrieked. He couldn’t even move but the sound tore out involuntarily because it had squeezed his heart, physically forced his brain to override the electrical impulses that kept his heart beating normally and told it to contract instead and keep contracting and not release no no no oh god oh god I’m going to die like this I’m going to die again don’t want to die
“--chigo? Ichigo! KUROSAKI!”
He wasn’t sure if he stopped it or if it let go of its own will but the next beat of his heart spiked white agony through his veins as blood screaming for movement pumped through in a rush.
The voice crowed and raged at once.
You never think of anything, king! You still don’t even throw Zangetsu by the hilt wrap even though it’s the only possible ranged attack you could make, you fucking moron! It doesn’t even occur to you that I could get at you any way other than through the old man or the Quincy brat!
“Ichigo, are you hurt? Answer me!”
Blood was flooding Ichigo’s senses. His vision was blurry and his heart was pounding so loud so loud and the blood still pumping out of Chad’s torn veins and arteries still so normal so human so young under the armor too powerful for a simple good man like Chad who couldn’t do anything but lie there and stay alive with his arm torn off and Inoue’s ribs exposed and her arm flayed to the shoulder, too much too much of the inner workings of the human body, he’d seen everyone everyone even his own mother bared to nothing -- everyone except Uryuu, seen beneath the skin of everyone except the one he got beneath the skin of every night, and in the last hour he’d gotten so close to tearing Uryuu open and seeing the veins and muscles beneath, no Quincy pride there, under the skin everyone was the same even fucking Aizen and his fucking Arrancar and even himself and his Hollow
You called me by name. I’m proud of you.
“Gonna,” Ichigo gasped in a voice that sounded nothing like his own. He reached up to push Uryuu away. “Gonna puke.”
He did. At least Uryuu had brought the trash can over; Ichigo thought he was going to break it with his death grip. He hadn’t eaten anything in hours and it was all acid. It left just as much poison as it got rid of. He didn’t feel purged, he felt more dirty. There was still blood on his abdomen and cock and now there was bile on his lips and he wanted to die.
Again.
“I have to leave,” he said, and his voice sounded thick and awful even to his own ears. “Now.”
“Look, y -- no. No, you can’t go anywhere. Maybe to a hospital. Ichigo --”
Ichigo reached out a shaking hand and pulled the bloodstained cloth out of Uryuu’s hands and wiped his mouth with it. The taste didn’t go away.
“Not going to your father’s hospital,” Ichigo managed to say. “Live at a clinic. I’ll be fine.”
“If I let you out that door there’s no way in hell you’re going to go straight home, if you can even walk!”
Ichigo put a hand to the wall and levered himself shakily to his feet. The quilt slid off his shoulders and to the floor. “Be fine,” he muttered, not looking at Uryuu.
“Damn it, Kurosaki, you won’t be fine! You aren’t fine! I can put you under restraint if you’re afraid you can’t control your Hollow, but you can’t get help like this --”
Uryuu made the mistake of reaching out to touch him and Ichigo didn’t know if he was the one controlling the hand that grabbed Uryuu’s forearm so hard that he could feel the two major bones there creaking dangerously under the pressure. Uryuu’s face instantly drained of what little color it had regained.
“You don’t understand,” Ichigo said and his throat hurt just from saying it. “He’s already in control.”
“Let go,” Uryuu whispered. His arm did not look right under Ichigo’s hand.
Ichigo did. He looked down at the cloth in his hand, walked over to the sink, ran cold water over it and wrung the bloody excess out. It was all Uryuu’s blood, anyway. He took a minute to finish cleaning himself up, ran more cold water over the cloth and watched the pink swirl down the drain for a second before he put his cupped hands under the flow and swished the taste of death out of his mouth. He spat, but didn’t take another handful to drink. He was afraid that if he put something in his stomach he’d throw up again. Uryuu’s reiatsu was still there behind him, an uncomfortable pressure against his back.
Ichigo didn’t look at him as he left the kitchen, shaky legs recovering inch by inch as he put them to use, mechanically walking into the bedroom and finding his clothes scattered all over the floor and furniture. He got dressed.
The voice in his head remained silent.
Uryuu was standing in the kitchen door when he walked back out of the bedroom, standing as straight as he could and cradling his twisted arm against his chest. The bathrobe sleeve covered up the bruises Ichigo knew were already spreading across the pale skin.
I’m sorry, Ichigo wanted to say. But he didn’t know what he meant by it, so he didn’t say it.
It’s me who wants to see him flayed, Ichigo thought numbly. It’s me who watched Chad and Inoue spill their guts on the ground for me and it’s me who wants Uryuu to do the same. Not the Hollow. He couldn’t care less what happens to them all.
Somewhere inside himself, he thought he heard or felt a purr.
Ichigo turned and walked out of the apartment without another word.
---------
He couldn’t sit down. That was the most humiliating thing, not least because it was so cliche. But there it was, the bottom line (awful pun intended blackly if at all): he couldn’t sit down because it hurt too much, and he’d probably tear open and start bleeding again if he so much as bent at the waist. And now his feet hurt from standing. Life would be so much easier if bodies didn’t get in the way.
There wasn’t anything to do. He spent a long time standing in the kitchen door, looking at nothing much, using the frame as support. He couldn’t bring himself to blame Ichigo, not really. He didn’t know if that was right or not, but... the connection between Ichigo and any kind of anger or fear on Uryuu’s part just wouldn’t click.
Of course, Ichigo and his Hollow were in many fundamental ways the same being, and maybe others would tell him that neither one could really do any action that the other hadn’t at least subconsciously thought of at some point. Maybe a part of Uryuu even believed that. Ichigo’s Hollow said and did things that weren’t all that unlike the boy himself, his natural attraction to violence merely heightened and twisted.
But Ichigo had a capacity for compassion and tenderness that Uryuu adamantly believed the Hollow had never touched. Ichigo protected that core of humanity with his whole being. And Uryuu couldn’t blame Ichigo for what happened when, in the course of holding tight to that core, his grip on the rest of his mind slipped.
After a while he stepped out of the kitchen door and walked towards the bedroom. With every little movement, his body protested his own rationalizations. He stood in the center of his bedroom, more recently his and Ichigo’s bedroom, comforted a little by the fact that the point at which it had become a place for nothing but sex and sleep was also the point at which it had stopped being a quiet refuge. There were other places Uryuu was more attached to now, for reading or quiet contemplation. Yet... the stillness was ethereal after the pain and madness that had blurred the last hour.
He felt surprisingly little reaction when he stepped over to the dormant hulk of the bed and looked down at his own white sheets, fresh-washed and crisp only two hours ago, now rumpled and strewn all over. He reached out as if to touch the bloodstains -- cold now, but still damp. His fingertips stopped just short.
He didn’t want to tell Ichigo that it was becoming more than just a personality change when the Hollow slipped into dominance these days. Yellow eyes laughed at him from his memory, and he thought he could feel the echo-touch of fingernails much too sharp to be Ichigo’s bitten ones. Had Ichigo even been aware enough of his surroundings to notice the cuts down Uryuu’s thighs and arms or did he still think all the blood was from anal tearing alone?
Suddenly Uryuu thought he felt the ghostly touch of claws again in passing and spun around, heart thudding sickly against his ribs, once, twice... A rush of adrenaline made his eyes water and his head feel light. Nothing there. No white shadows. Nothing hiding in the light.
“Damn it,” he whispered, just to hear his own voice. But he didn’t sound like himself, and it made things worse.
He made himself close his eyes. Immediately the afterimpression of vibrant yellow irises superimposed themselves over his own. He shoved the image down, along with the echo of hysterical laughter that had sounded too much like a Hollow’s mindless shriek. Too much like the sound Zangetsu made when it cut the air itself to shreds. Instead Uryuu focused on breathing deeply and evenly.
After a few minutes his heart was beating normally and the silence was just that. Empty silence.
From somewhere outside himself he watched as he picked up all his scattered clothes and folded them, and took the sheets off the bed and carried them to kitchen sink, which was the only sink big enough to hold them. Souken had told him a long time ago, along with a lot of other practical things, about how blood would only come out with cold water. Sometimes he wondered what had gone through his grandfather’s mind when he’d told Uryuu that. Souken knew the kinds of lives the Quincy lived.
Souken. He’d not only have approved of Uryuu’s alliance with the shinigami, he’d have been delighted at Uryuu’s acceptance of a partner and a lover, regardless of gender. But Hollows had killed Souken. Hollows controlled by renegade shinigami.
And Uryuu was only lying to himself if he didn’t admit that Ichigo was as much Hollow as he was shinigami. Maybe the only remnant of mortality and humanity left in him was that core of compassion he guarded so closely.
After a while Uryuu realized that his hands were shaking badly. He hadn’t felt it at first because the cold water had numbed them completely. With a little difficulty he got the last of the stains cleaned out and the blood rinsed from the sides of the sink, and picked up the whole soggy pile to take into the bathroom.
Everything hit him at once just after he hung the last pillowcase on the only remaining empty towel rack. He turned to leave, to go do something else, maybe take the trash out, and his reflection in the mirror stopped him dead in his tracks. He’d cleaned up in here, of course, and he’d seen the bloody mess he’d been. That was one thing. He was used to blood, for better or worse, especially his own.
But he wasn’t used to having lasting injuries. His Quincy powers had helped him heal a little faster, and of course everyone from the fourth division members to Urahara-san had treated him immediately after his other life-threatening fights. He wasn’t used to being this... ugly. This beaten. Not with physical injury, really; that was all contained between his navel and knees, for whatever good that was worth, but...
He looked like shit. As bad as he felt, if not worse. Pallid, skin paper-white and paper-thin. Lank hair. Reddened eyes behind glasses perched on a nose that suddenly looked fragile, along with all of the structure of his face; he’d never thought of himself as looking delicate before, but now that that he looked broken he guessed it was impossible to deny that there was a fragility to his slim frame. A brittleness that had clearly been easy to take advantage of.
Without his powers he knew he couldn’t measure up to Ichigo in a fight against Hollows or other shinigami, but... he still had strong arms from years of drawing the bow, and he was still muscular for his size...
He hadn’t thought he was so weak.
Uryuu touched the one scratch on his neck. He tugged the robe open a little, hesitantly, as if afraid to look at himself and see more fragility where before he’d only seen the wiry strength of an archer. Had he ever really been a match for Ichigo physically, or had he just been fooling himself? He’d bottomed in sex so often because it just seemed to fall out that way; he loved being filled, being fucked, and Ichigo loved to give him what he wanted. But maybe there was something to that hate-talk about the real fag being the one who acted like the girl. Maybe...
He fumbled at the sash at his waist blindly, needing to see, needing to know. His glasses were fogging up a little and he kept telling himself he wasn’t going to cry even as the tears started flowing. There. There. A body he was so used to that he’d never given it a second thought. A body that until now had always been as strong as he’d needed it to be. The bruises and ugly cuts barely registered next to the thinness, the small bones, the vampire-pale skin. They’d always been there, marking him out as a target, and he’d never let himself notice.
Uryuu stumbled backwards against the wall and sank down, losing himself from the mirror and staring at the cabinets beneath instead, face contorted in the kind of wretched sobbing that was so hard it was silent. He felt a sharp pain and a fresh trickle of blood down his thigh as he bent forward over his drawn-up knees, but he couldn’t care anymore. He just held onto himself and tried to stay alive for each passing second.
An afterimage of yellow eyes followed him into his personal darkness.
-----------
He could feel the Hollow in every breath now. With every step he took, the echo of another rippled through his muscle memory. The Hollow was walking along behind him, beside him, within him. If he looked ahead he could see white shadows in his peripheral vision, trickling into the darkness.
Always with you.
It was early morning now, maybe five or six. He’d left Uryuu’s apartment late. Midnight, or something close. He wasn’t sure where all he’d gone since then... all over town. In and out of the abandoned warehouse where Chad and Inoue had trained, to stare at the broken glass and the hole in the wall where Chad had finally mastered the armored arm he’d later lose. Over to the high school, to stand across the street and map out each scrap of graffiti on the low wall that surrounded the school grounds, remembering which of it was his and Keigo’s and Tatsuki’s. Down to the park. Mom had pushed Yuzu and Karin on the lowest swings. They’d had so little time together, mother and daughters. Ichigo was afraid that he’d never understood some of the things Mom had told him because he hadn’t been a girl, and since he’d taken her away from his sisters so early, they’d never be able to understand and explain it to him.
He missed her so much. So much. It was a hollowness all of its own, and he hated it as much as he hated all the other hollow parts of himself.
Be still, my king, said the voice, low and almost caring. Let your mind be still. I’m so hungry for your hate. You don’t know how I’ve felt like a drowning man dying of thirst. Hate me and let me drink.
Ichigo shook with it. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt his whole body ache with the force of his hate, increased tenfold because it played into his desires.
The sky was greying. Ichigo made his way blindly back to the warehouse, kicked some rubble aside and went to sleep curled up in a dusty corner just as the sun rose. He didn’t see the glorious bloody display of rich light filtered through the dirty, broken windows.
It was already well past noon when he woke up. He visited the spot where the Arrancar had first attacked, stood and stared out over the broken ground and the rusty stains where two of his closest friends had nearly bled out. All because he’d felt the sick power inside him rising, and he’d frozen up. He hadn’t been able to protect his friends from the Arrancar, and he hadn’t been able to protect himself from his Hollow. He’d never known such fear.
... except when he’d screamed and clawed his way back into control only to find Uryuu tangled in sheets, crying and yelling at him to get out, and when he’d looked down he’d seen the blood on his hands...
It wasn’t really that hard to find the Vaizard later that day. He’d made up his mind a long time ago.
Dozens of pairs of oddly bright eyes (a brightness he’d seen more and more every time he looked in the mirror) stared down at him from the piles of industrial trash inside the Vaizard headquarters. Shinji put one foot forward with a soft, solid echo in the empty air.
“So, kid. Finally ready to become one of us?”
-----------
“I can give you your powers back.”
There had never been a moment in Uryuu’s life when he hadn’t known where to find his father. Their reiatsu was so close to identical, theirs the only two pale blue reiraku left in the world. And as much as Uryuu hated it, there was a bond between them closer than kinship. Closer than shared pride. What the Quincy were was greater than the sum of their parts, and now that there were only two parts left, that old blood memory seemed stronger than ever.
“I can give you your powers back. I have only one condition...”
Ryuuken was waiting for him at the hospital, standing straight and tall outside the front doors as if nothing was out of the ordinary. His gray hair was immaculate, and his pale suit matched his funereal expression.
“You look pathetic,” he said to his only son.
“You promised me power,” Uryuu replied coldly. The short sleeves of his school uniform displayed the disfiguring hand-shaped bruise on his arm.
A few minutes later he was sitting stiffly in the passenger seat of his father’s Mercedes, not really watching the scenery become steadily more unfamiliar as it flashed past. The only thing on his mind was the oath his father had just forced him to make on Souken’s memory, knowing it was the only kind of oath Uryuu could never break. He’d already whispered his farewells to the emptiness in his apartment.
“I have only one condition.”
“... What is it?”
“Swear to me that you will never associate yourself with a shinigami again.”
--------