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He's new. Blonde hair, blue blue eyes, bright aqua when the sun hits them, and they shine like the shallows at the beach on sunny, summer days, when it's calm and peaceful and you can see right through the water to the sand below, all cool and welcoming. Ichigo hears the dock workers hail him Grimmjow as he moors his house-boat, calloused fingers on the ropes. And he knows- he knows. He needs to stay away from this one, within the first minute of knowing he exists.
The ocean bleeds into Grimmjow enough that if you could wring out his words like a rag you'd get sea-salt. His voice resonates like bells through deep waters, and his laughter is the high crash and fizz of foam-capped waves.
Ichigo hungers. The hole in his chest aches and twinges, a yawning hollow space, and suddenly the docks no longer seem like a safe place to spend his days after working in the town. Proximity to the ocean with the susurrus of workers and sailors coming and going flags and withers when the exchange might be proximity to him.
Even so, Ichigo comes back the next day like clockwork. Sits off one of the ladders on the pier, dips his feet in the sea and closes his eyes. Grimmjow's water-voice carries above the rest and Ichigo knows it , it calls to him the way the ocean does at night when he looks out his window and sees the moon dappling over the surface of it. All he can hope for is that the man leaves, soon, that he isn't staying. Gone with the tides in a few days.
He thinks about his father- he doesn't like to , and most of the time he can keep his mind far away from those dark twisting pathways, but Grimmjow makes him volatile, and it's only been two days of him being here.
He thinks of his father's teeth, needle thin, in his mother's throat. Ichigo is only ten years old. Isshin cries, around her jugular, holds her lifeless body tight to his chest and breathes through the gaps in his ribs instead of through his mouth or nose.
" It was so hard, " his voice filters through Ichigo's memories like sand through fingers, "- so hard to resist for so long. Shiba eat what we love, we just can't help it. I wasn't strong enough. We mate for life, but not our life. "
He was far too young to understand, back then, what could possibly compel his father to kill and eat his mother. Masaki was everything, to their little family unit. Warmth and life and love. He still thinks of her, when he walks across the beach in summer, sun-warmed sand under his feet. Karin and Yuzu don't remember her, but Ichigo can never forget. Taking her last name was a promise, to himself, that he would never become his father. Never succumb to that twisted need- never be that weak.
But he had underestimated the pull of it, he realises now. Didn't know what, exactly, Isshin was fighting all that time. Ichigo thinks of Grimmjow's wide grin, from over ten feet away, and how his teeth itched in his gums and he'd had to swallow before he'd drooled down his chin with hunger. Imagining that, in close quarters, for years- maybe his father wasn't so weak after all.
The webbing between his toes vanishes when he lifts his feet from the water- along with the extra joint that lengthened each digit, the hard black claws replaced by unassuming nails. He rests them on one of the ladder rungs instead, the lapping of the waves changing and releasing them in turns when the water washes over them briefly. Further down the dock, Grimmjow is laughing, talking loudly with some of the other locals. His words are indistinct at this distance, over the sounds of the ocean and general hum of civilisation, so Ichigo can't make out what he's saying , but just the sound of him makes his ribs ache around the void they contain.
Ichigo thinks about his sisters back at home, and Isshin in his study, and the fact that he doesn't have to work. They have plenty of money. But the motions he goes through every day give him reason to keep his nails round and soft, keep his hair short and ginger instead of long, iridescent gold and copper, matching the scales and fins and webbing between his fingers-
His humanity leaks through his grasp like liquid through a sieve. Grimmjow's voice gets closer- walking along the wooden boards, approaching, and Ichigo slips off the ladder into the water before he can think better of it, needing to get away. The salt sears his ribs open, a burn so delightful he relishes in it as he breathes through his unsealed gills, and he barely spares the time to mourn his clothing as spikes and fins shred it apart to make way for themselves. Fully submerged, breathing like this, his legs seal together (it feels so easy, switching from fumbling limbs to one winding, serpentine tail,) instead of permitting the partial transformation he tries to keep himself to, generally.
He lets himself rest, for a moment, held in time by the current; then he recalls how close he is to the dock, to the humans, and he snakes down to the sand, peers up through the water. A head of blonde hair catches his attention, the human standing at the top of the ladder Ichigo slipped down from, but he can't tell if Grimmjow is looking down at him or out at the sea with how the view distorts through the liquid.
He slips into the maze of supports keeping the pier up, staying under the walkway as he winds his way down, hidden from the humans above until he reaches deeper waters, slides himself away from the sunlight and the moored boats to hunt. No sense in wasting the time spent in this form- he had best make the most of it. Later he will find his way to one of the more secluded sea-caves he and his family frequent, haul his lithe form up onto the rocks to split apart and slough out of the flesh and scales that cling to him, watch them dissolve in the brine. He'll find one of the stashes of emergency clothing he's left behind, buried in boxes in the sand, and make his way barefoot back into town, well-fed and peaceful.
(Tomorrow he will go back to the docks after work, perch on his ladder and listen with equal parts want and hunger to Grimmjow, until he either leaves this town or comes too close to ignore.)