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“I don’t like ‘im,” the hollow said, wrinkling his nose.
“He’s a baby, of course he doesn’t fight like you do!” Shion glared back at him.
“’E coulda bitten King’s nose right off if ‘e wanted!” the hollow protested. “No instinct for killin’, that one. What a waste.”
“Like I said, he’s a baby! I’d be more concerned if he had a killing instinct! Do you want Ichigo to become yako?”
“I want Ichigo to become strong! I don’t care what that looks like!”
“Ichigo is strong, that’s the point! Your misguided alpha male hollow bullshit doesn’t make him any stronger!”
“Say that to my face, hag!”
Zangetsu raised an eyebrow at Kohaku. “Should we intervene, do you think?”
“They will wear each other out again, and be the better for it,” Kohaku, or Red, advised.
Zangetsu deferred to them, turning his back to Shion and the hollow’s fight in favor of watching Ichigo with Zanshi. It was strange to look on his soul’s newest resident from the perspective of an outsider, but right now that’s what he was. Shion and Kohaku would fade, eventually, but Zangetsu would be there as long as Ichigo lived, perhaps just out of reach. Especially if all his watchports kept getting blocked by the baby’s flowers.
Ichigo was different like this, he thought. Being a kitsune was good for him. Ichigo flourished when he had someone or something to protect, and that something being in his soul seemed to make him that much more self-aware, that much less reckless.
It hurt, of course, that Ichigo had never been able to do it for him. Or that he’d not wanted to, for all that he clearly felt enough for Zangetsu to name another part of his soul after him. Perhaps it was in part growing up. His wielder had been rather on the young end of things. Not matured, if not quite as young as the kit he was watching.
But it was good too. Zangetsu felt the weight of Kohaku’s regard, but didn’t turn to meet their eyes, preferring to watch the greenery grow beneath Zanshi’s paws.
“Ichigo has enough love for us all,” Kohaku said aloud. The words hung in the air like they’d been inscribed in stone or clay.
“He always has,” Zangetsu agreed.
At that moment, Shion and the hollow fall into Kohaku, and then Zangetsu. They go down in a heaped tangle, yowling as hair and fur got yanked and Zangetsu’s rod bent under Shion’s weight.
“What’s that even made out of—ow, my back!” Shion grumbled, looking at Zangetsu’s stick.
“Memories,” he said, nothing less than the truth.
“Even when we’re mostly dead?” Shion squinted at him like they were expecting something different.
Unfortunately for them, Zangetsu lived to protect and advise, to empower and behold, not to tell the truth under any circumstance. “Especially now. It’s how I know I lived.”
“You will again,” Kohaku predicts.
The hollow preens, but Zangetsu only nods solemnly. “And you?”
“We’ll live through Zanshi, as we are meant to,” Kohaku says. Zangetsu shudders. It wouldn’t be enough, not for him, even when he was someone else’s Zanshi inside Ichigo, someone else’s psychic child there to empower and manipulate.
Maybe Zanshi and the kitsune could protect Ichigo from the people Zangetsu brought along with him. At the very least, looking at Kohaku and Shion, he was sure they’d try. But, for now, they could all watch Ichigo’s endless patience with the baby fox and wish it were them out there. Although maybe not as a fox---communication skills, what he had of them, wasn’t something Zangetsu was up for giving up so easily.