Chapter Text
The taste of Quincy, Grimmjow learns, is something close to oblivion. Spiritform bloated so richly with reishi that the first time Grimmjow sinks his teeth into some screaming, witless footsoldier, he gags. His body rejects it entirely at the first taste: thick and heavy, laden with every particle of the power they’ve stolen from Hueco Mundo’s very essence, as terribly delicious as it is cloying. It nudges out faint memories buried in the depths of a soul making up the weave of his being: some fat-slicked cut of meat, some repugnant delicacy. Nearly satiation in just one bite.
He tears the next Quincy apart with his claws.
"Coward," Grimmjow snarls. The arrow in his shoulder burns; he's lost sensation around the three in his gut. He'd never fought Kurosaki's archer himself, but he'd seen the damage done to Cirucci, to Szayelaporro's fracciones-cum-test-subjects, to Las Noches itself. He hadn't seen anything like this.
"Like a rabid animal," the man says, and smiles faintly over his glasses. The look in his eyes. Grimmjow feels rage burn hotter than the skyshock-blue of reishi flame these Quinces have used to devastate his home. "You'd make such a wonderful specimen for His Majesty, but alas–” He turns away. Grimmjow wants to cleave open his back; he’d tear himself in two with the movement. "–such an attitude will not be tolerated. Please die promptly, Hollow abomination. We'll leave you to it."
The curtain of fire closes behind his back. Grimmjow rips the sparking arrow out of his shoulder and howls his rage. Seconds later another arrow parts the flame to punch clean through his other shoulder, like someone on the other side thinks they've gotten the last word.
Pantera returns to his hand with the fresh surge of pain, her tip resting in the sand. He is filled with frigid fear, surrounded by flame that he has watched devour bone. The arrows dig like shards of glass into his stomach. It's almost thoughtful, the way they've missed the broad scar that stripes his chest. He grabs all three in one hand and shatters them. Pantera wavers; his fingertips shiver and fade to black, just for a second.
This isn't enough. This isn't it. He is painted by the weight of shadows cast by his fracciones, solemn. This shape is a farce.
He wants to destroy this false skin and rip himself apart until he can remake himself the way he’s supposed to be, in tooth and claw and sharp eye. The mask on his jaw weighs so heavily it makes him want to scream and so he does, the sand shivering away from him in perfectly circular ripples. Pantera burns in his hand. Reishi-blue fire licks closer. He wants to tear through the world until it can’t hold him anymore. This skin is wrong, all wrong. Fire slinks ever closer, hot enough to incinerate him and scatter every scrap of his souls across the worlds. The air chokes him, worse than anything he's ever felt. His world is dying. This mask feels so heavy. Pantera is so light, like a whisper.
His hand moves as if unburdened.
Pantera's hilt shatters the teeth of his mask; the force of the blow cracks both his jaw and Pantera’s pommel. His own reiryoku flares with such intensity it brings him to his knees, palms sinking into the sand; his breath rasps heavily through the cavity in his chest that mimics lungs.
He stares down at the fragments of his mask between his palms, nestled gently in sand dotted by his own blood. His sword is gone. He’d fallen with it in his hand; it had bruised his palm, the wrecked pommel digging into the meat of his hand. There’s nothing under him now but soft sand. His reiryoku thunders through his body, thick and dense, and he knows this feeling, he knows this feeling, he knows—
It wrenches an animal scream out of him anyways, desperate fear-fuelled fire burning ice-cold through every single particle of reishi that makes up his body. He feels his bones shatter and his own reiatsu explodes to fill each space between the shards; binding through unbearable heat until the next beat of his hollowed-out heart echoes through him like a blow, shattering his bones over again.
His fingertips are velvet black when he is finally capable of enough movement to dig them into the sand beneath him. The forearm before him is free of bone. Emotion rushes through him, untethered, as if the maelstrom comprised of all the souls he’s ever devoured has settled into a chorus rather than an unending scream. He opens his mouth; the scent of reishi, ash, fire, Quincy settles heavy on his tongue alongside bitter iron. Their cloying grasp has permeated everything.
Grimmjow stands on feet that feel more like his own than they have in years. Not even Resurrección has he ever felt so complete. He flexes his hand; Pantera’s steel is echoed in scorched-carbon claws and the resolute tempered flex of his chest as he exhales. He curls his fingers once more into his palm, then out. There’s a sensation under his skin he can’t quite shake. The scar hasn’t ached in years and it still doesn’t now, but the skin over his chest pulls, mnemonic, as he hauls in another breath and looks around.
The superheated flame has guttered out around him, leaving the eternal-night air free to press against his skin, cool with comfort. He’s lost time somewhere, somehow. Doesn’t matter. Persistence is a valuable skill as a predator. The Quincy army is on his turf, not the other way around. He can taste all the wrongnesses where they step, now; all the tiny quivers across Hueco Mundo where reishi moves as it shouldn’t.
Persistence. A new shape. A sharper maw. He’ll whet these claws on anything that stands in his way, destroy them before they destroy this. The taste of that Quincy leading them was stagnant, bound, nothing like the endless plunge he saw first through Ulquiorra’s eyes what feels like only days ago, in reality was maybe years ago; no terrifying capacity for growth here. No kind-eyed Soul Reaper with a Hollow’s hunger for him to chase. Just an army of nothing but stale fodder to chew through, and a self-righteous bastard at the top suited only to be the last to fall.
Wind sings gently against his ears as he moves, the air parting before him like water, sand blurring in his vision. There’s a sickly lightness on the horizon, a false dawn birthed by the wrong fire.
When his mask reforms – eventually, after miles and miles and miles have flown by beneath him, drawn back by exhausted rage – it feels light enough to be gossamer.