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When he wakes he is wrapped in darkness; shadows unable to hold him, and he falls through their ethereal grasp without a sound. His being is heavy – heavier than it should be, he is sure, but he cannot place why – and the thunderous rushing around him is the air parting for his arrival as his body plummets from some unknown distance. He cannot see where he is falling to – where he will land; splatter perhaps; die. (Can he die?) He isn’t worried either way. Maybe he should be, maybe he shouldn’t. Certainty is over-rated, and he doesn’t think he will die, so that might be enough in this empty world of indecisions and –
Water explodes around him.
Cold and deep and dark and endless it feels against him, swallowing him, turning him about to ask who are you and where have you come from; answers he would like to know himself. The question he shouts back is sucked away and drowned for a better time, and the deafening roar that remains is icy water gushing into his mouth. It tears his throat as it devours air and life inside of his chest. His heart and lungs rage in panic as he twists and turns through the bottomless deep, his fingers and toes (ten of each! He’s human?) grappling for something in the nothingness that consumes him.
He’s scared. (It’s nice to be certain of something). His eyes won’t see and his ears won’t hear; his body, gasping, refuses to breathe.
His soul is screaming.
This isn’t it! I’m not dying without knowing my name!
And from somewhere far beneath the last of his consciousness, salvation rises up like a tower, pushing him up, up, up and out of the water, and up to the sky above.
Ichigo breathes.
“Holy shit,” he gasps, rolling over and retching onto the platform. “Holy fucking shit.”
He presses his face into the metal earth that saved him, smooth and new under his hands, and decides that lying there to catch his breath is probably a good idea. He gulps down air to quell the rush of dizziness in his head. He closes his eyes to appreciate the sound of the breeze through his hair, and the wind’s sigh of relief makes the short strands upon his head quiver like a thousand tiny flames.
The cloak holding him together seems endless in its layers, and Ichigo has a suspicion he adds another crease to hundreds when he flops over onto his back and squashes the robe beneath him. He would tug it out and apologise were it not for the fact that there is bright blue sky above him – and clouds! Black and white in contradiction but clouds nevertheless – which distracts him from finding the rest of his limbs in the infinite shawl.
(Moreover, the robe seems to move and shimmer with a weird black light. It’s as if his cloak is a dark pool of sentience crawling all over him and Ichigo’s not sure how he feels about that).
Fighting back the last of his heaves, he pushes himself up. The sky appears to go on endlessly into the distance, boundlessly blue and speckled with the occasional monochrome cloud. Ichigo rises to his feet, wobbling, and stumbles over to the edge of the platform. It takes a good ten, twenty paces before he’s risking a glance off the side, but it’s still a dismally small area to call home.
Spying the expanse of water raging at the bottom of the pillar, Ichigo promptly reconsiders that thought. Better up here than down there, he reassures himself, frowning at how far down the ocean is. He’s come a long way up, he realises, and he’s still not sure exactly what he’s standing on.
Just before he pulls away from the edge to do a bit of investigating, a rapidly darkening section of water catches his eye. The human-spirit-thing (whatever he is) drops to his knees so he can lean out further, gripping the edge of the metal like a lifeline, and squints brown eyes at the distortion below him. If any sound is being made it is inaudible from such a distance, but Ichigo can imagine the surge of water as it tries to consume whatever object or entity has just come into existence at the bottom of the ocean.
His frown deepens. What if there’s someone like him down there? Shouldn’t he help?
But… How would he get them both back onto the top of the tower?
Tearing his eyes away from the water, Ichigo scans the side of the pillar. There isn’t much to hang onto by the looks of it – consisting of a million panels of glass, the building’s windows reflect miles and miles of sky. The clouds, too, seem to duplicate as they glide past, and it is as Ichigo watches the vastness stretch out before him that he realises a fair number of things aren’t quite making sense.
The world tips.
Ichigo yells and grapples for the ledge, willing his feet to remain cemented to the roof. His stomach rolls. He plasters himself against the side (the side!?) of the building, his heart bursting out of his chest. Slipping out from under him, the shadowy shawl drops towards nothingness, hanging from the quake of his bones. The clouds continue aimlessly into the horizon, drifting so close to the spirit that he could reach out and touch them if he wasn’t hanging on for dear life onto some crazy gravitational building –!
The ocean erupts.
“This is not my fucking day!” Ichigo cries as the world around him shakes. Whatever has broken free of the water’s icy confines is big – bigger than a person that he might need to save (and what a ridiculous thought that had been) – and the ginger being curses wildly. The glass of the building chinks as it trembles, the colossal force climbing out of the water approaching with a thunderous whoosh. Ichigo almost dares not peak over the side of the roof (top? Floor? He doesn’t know anymore!) but his gut is clenching and his legs are moving before he’s had the chance to think rationally. He turns over, never once letting go of the ledge lest he fall into the sky, and peers along the length of the tower.
Rising out of the water isn’t a person, or a monster, or anything remotely helpful actually –
It’s another skyscraper.
His gaze widens as the second building drives itself forward, exactly the same in appearance to the original but twice as wide and twice as tall. Like a great, ominous shadow, its presence seems to swallow Ichigo’s tower; the young spirit ducks as it escalates past him, its endless concrete foundations like the ground, and its own shine of glass like the sun. Just an arm’s throw away it rests, reflecting back Ichigo’s staggered expression in its windows; like a house of mirrors, the two buildings glare at each other, as if assessing their authority. Ichigo remains dumbstruck until the ocean below settles back into deadly silence, and it is only then that he lets his mouth fall shut.
Where the hell is he?
How did he get here?
And why are two skyscrapers having a dick waving competition?
“Okay, okay Ichigo,” he mumbles reassuringly, breathing slowly through his nose. There’s nobody else around to reply to his questions, so the spirit figures he has to go searching for answers himself. It’s probably better than hanging off a building for the rest of his life, he muses, but Ichigo isn’t entirely certain he’s ready to let go just yet. The water below isn’t very inviting, but unless some earth and rock are lobbed out of the ocean at some point, the buildings are the only place he can go.
“Great,” Ichigo grumbles, peaking over at the larger skyscraper warily. For some reason he doesn’t completely trust that building, so he decides to stay on his own one for the time being. Taking a deep breath (because there’s really nothing else for it), the shadowy being carefully lifts to his knees, then his feet, and mutters a prayer before letting go of the edge.
Nothing unexpected happens (unless one counts standing sideways as unexpected).
Doubtful Ichigo waits, tight as a bowstring.
And waits.
And waits.
The breeze flutters past, congratulating him on his success. Disbelieving, the youthful being tries waving his arms about to see what happens. When his body stubbornly remains exactly where he wants it to, Ichigo lets out a sigh of relief and allows a wicked grin to spread across his face.
He cheers, jumping up to fist bump the cloud, and promptly falls right off the side of the building.
The scream in his throat only lasts as long as it takes for Ichigo to crash into another building – shorter than the first two, growing silently from the sea – and the metal punches the air from his body. To minimalise the damage he rolls, grunting as his legs take the brunt of the fall. He doesn’t know which way is up anymore, the world a blur of blue and grey around him; he misjudges the size of the platform, roars in terror, and scrambles for safety as he veers off the edge –
Glass smashes around him. Steel creaks and concrete groans. His midnight shawl whips about him, tangling around his arms and face. He blinks the sentient darkness for a second, blind to all but the shadow of his being, and then everything comes to a stop with a rain of diamond razors and dirt in his mouth, crawling up his nose.
“God,” Ichigo hisses, almost grateful for the feel of gravel beneath his hands. His side throbs anger and he knows it’s going to bruise into a venomous purple of pain. He’s not dead though, which answers one of his many questions, but he’s definitely going to feel rubbish in the –
Gravel? Dirt?
Ichigo pushes himself to his knees. Warily, the spirit glances around at the dirt path he’s sitting in the middle of; there’s grass on both sides and a great, towering forest leading off into the distance. The sky is blue here too, but the clouds are simple and white, and the ginger youth spins around as he rises, taking in the flowers and the birds and the immense building standing proud before him, walled off by strict regimes and surely not inside a skyscraper?
His feet trek through nothing but dirt as he steps forward – no glass, metal or steel. In fact, there’s not a single piece of evidence to suggest that he had fallen out of the sky. The only thing that seems out of place is him – even the dark haired man walking towards the Shino Academy (whatever that is) looks like he belongs there.
Young but not old, the stranger is wearing an aloof, pensive expression amidst the stubble on his face. He walks calmly with no rush, but he appears a man who likes having things to do. White robes contrast Ichigo’s endless black, but where the spirit is highlighted orange, the man is tinted blue; the trimmings of his clothes are neat and crisp, as if the outfit has hardly been worn.
(Ichigo’s has hardly been worn but look what he’s already put it through).
The stranger approaches.
Ichigo isn’t sure why, but he desperately wants to know the man’s name.
Yet when the older man is barely feet away and the spirit opens his mouth to ask, the words stick on his tongue and the moment is lost; unaware, the stranger continues forward and steps straight through Ichigo.
“H – Hey –!” the ginger splutters, blood rushing out of his face.
When he turns to call after the man, the building is gone. The trees are walls again, the grass is concrete flooring, and the fluttering of the birds is the ocean raging outside; the wind howling in through the broken window. The room he landed in is small – definitely not large enough to put a forest in it – but though he cannot explain it, Ichigo is convinced what he has just seen is real.
The man had looked real.
He had felt real, even as he passed through Ichigo’s body like a ghost.
(Funny. Ichigo has a feeling that he’s the wandering spirit out of the two of them).
Sighing, he clambers over to the site of his magnificent entrance and pokes his head through the shattered window. Outside, the clouds are as black as they are white, and the forest that grows in this world is one of buildings, big and small and soaring over a ceaseless ocean. The sky is the same colour though; bright and a hopeful blue. Ichigo takes comfort in this as he shoves open the broken window to sit in the frame, his feet sticking out to hang over the sideways horizon.
Loose shards of glass tumble down into the sea. The spirit grips the building tightly, just in case he befalls a similar fate again.
He’d much rather fall into the stranger’s world than this one.
This one is… lonely.
Ichigo sighs and hugs one of his knees. His robe seems to wraps itself around him more tightly, as if trying to offer some comfort. It’s a pitiful effort but Ichigo smiles anyway, appreciating the attempt even if he’s not convinced his kimono doesn’t have a vendetta against him.
“Thanks,” he mutters anyway, because he might as well try to make conversation. There’s nobody to talk to but himself, but maybe the weirdness of this world will talk back to him if he gets desperate enough. It’s already saved him from drowning and grown humungous buildings in its spare time, so Ichigo doubts there’s much of a limit to its abilities.
The spirit wonders briefly if he could control this world – or at least offer his ideas. If he truly is the only soul dwelling in this vast domain, then wouldn’t that suggest this place is catered towards him? (The buildings are pretty cool, in an odd I’m-not-sure-you-make-sense kind of way). Unless he’s just an unfortunate soul who shouldn’t be here, but something in the back of his mind swiftly denies that thought; you belong here, it whispers, this is your home.
“Yeah?” Ichigo answers, tilting his head back to watch the clouds. Making shapes out of them would pass the time, he supposes, and maybe he can actually make them into shapes if he were to try hard enough?
He laughs at the absurdity of the idea but finds himself squinting fiercely at the monochrome puffs anyway.
It’ll kill time.
And maybe by the time the nameless man makes his reappearance, Ichigo will finally have some answers for them both – he guesses the stranger will have lots of questions too.
(The first one will be “What is your name?” and the happy ginger zanpakuto will laugh at the irony of the question and push Zangetsu off the building just because he can).