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Then
The sky was on fire.
Later, when they dealt with the goons responsible and restored half the city block, Ichigo was sure they’d realize this didn’t even touch the ‘b’ of all the batshit crazy they’d dealt with until that point but then—at that exact moment in history—the sky being on fire was a pretty big deal.
“Altair—incoming!”
Ichigo ducked, muttering a silent curse at Uryu for stating the obvious. A giant, whizzing ball of fire hurtled past them and headed straight towards a sea of onlookers—only to be met with a giant wall of Chad, arms crossed. The fire dispersed promptly, glowing fierce and orange on the edges of Chad’s arms. A series of scorched cars blared. Chad held one thumb up.
“That one was close. We need to get those civilians out of here or they’re toast,” Ichigo muttered, eyes already scanning the sky; a jagged arc of fire was whirlpooling around the sun, dispatching fireballs at random into the city.
“Too bad I don’t like my civilians toasted,” Orihime chirped through the comms and his eyes immediately zeroed in on her, a tiny speck of flaming red hair that loomed closer and closer as she flew along the curve where the city met the ocean. A large, golden dome began to materialize, its blurry shimmer capturing the awe of civilians as they were gently lifted into the air.
“That was awful, by the way,” Ichigo quipped in barely concealed relief, to which she hmph-ed and retorted, “You just have no sense of humor, Ichigo.”
Ichigo smiled.
“Code names,” Uryuu reminded them dryly, and the only thing that stopped Ichigo from shooting off a retort was the second ball of fire heading their way.
Like he said, batshit crazy.
It was later in the day, when the sun had gone down that Ichigo had managed to locate the source—a bunch of stir-crazy arsonists that had gotten their hands on tech that had no business being in their hands--and took them out. Uryuu and Chad had slingshotted a gigantic whorl of water up into the sky by no short of a miracle and Orihime had restructured the charred city back into place like there had never been a fire in the first place. All in a day’s work. Even the President had cheered in robust praise.
That was back then—back when they’d all fall out of their dorms at Kisuke’s Home for Wayward Children, sleepy and grumpy and ready for Tessai’s pancakes at ass o’ clock in the morning. Their suits were still flashy then, still held together by mere spandex and an idea. Feral kittens, Yoruichi would call them, bundling and tripping over each other during morning drills and spar sessions—just anything to expend all that energy and caged power. There were summers where they played basoccer all damn day, the sun in their eyes and skin infused with the whiff of sunscreen and sweat. Afternoons spent strapped to machines and wiring and all sorts of gobbledygook that Hat n’ Clogs tested them with.
At night, they’d drag their sleeping bags out back, bickering about which one of them left the trapdoor open this time (it was Orihime, always Orihime), keeping careful vigil for their guardians. Everything stank of root beer and wet grass, and they’d always have to rouse each other to a start when they’d fallen asleep, scrambling to clean the cans so Tessai wouldn’t find out.
At the time, they were just a bunch of kids—a few sore thumbs eager to put in the time, do some good in the world. There weren’t a lot of people out there who could say they got to kick ass with a marksman who never missed, a giant with imperceptible skin and a meta that could warp space and time itself with...golden pixie light, apparently—but Ichigo could. Ichigo always could.
Then, Aizen happened.
It was a paradigm shift, one that Ichigo honestly wished he could say was sudden, but was a long-time coming. Crime until that point was relatively comical—a bunch of no-gooders who’s most offensive transgression would be a bad one-liner and gaudy green pants (which, in itself, was something only Uryu found offensive). Heroes for Justice had made no permanent enemies and a lot of good friends. It was a golden age. Sometimes he’d wonder if the attack on Reishi City had never happened—if all those people hadn’t died in what they now called ‘a series of worldwide tragedies struck by Aizen Sosuke’--where they’d be. What they’d be doing. He and Orihime talked about it one night, arms crossed over their knees and overlooking the lake.
“College probably,” she whispered, moonlight glistening in her eyes. “Maybe I’d take molecular biology—or something.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Quiver would obviously be doing fashion design.”
He smiled. “Obviously.”
“What would Diablo do?” She tapped her own chin. “Undecided. My intuition says something between music or veterinary science.” She turned to Ichigo. “You’d obviously do English, and then we’d all fight crime and get a big apartment to ourselves in the city. We’d write to Miss Yoruichi about how we miss her drills and Mister Tessai about his pancakes and Mister Urahara about how tight all the suits he designed for us were!”
Ichigo snorted. “You think four of the messiest, loudest people on earth are going to survive living together in the city?”
“Of course!” Even today, he couldn't ever forget the way her eyes sparkled when she looked back at him. “After all, we’re the best four-a-side team to ever do it...”
...aren’t we?
Now
“Get up.”
Ichigo swipes the blood from his chin, eyes still numb from the anesthetic and sodium hydroxide. There’s no point in blinking--it’s just a reflex for his body at this point--but he does it anyway. Every inch he can visibly perceive is pitch black. Rather, it isn’t visible at all. The drug he’s been injected with has a potency of 45 minutes. It renders him blind, crippled with fear and despair, vulnerable to everything Ginjo has to throw at him.
And Ginjo has a lot to throw at him.
“Come on, Altair.” He goads Ichigo’s back sharply with a bo-staff. “That all you got?”
Altair.
The first Altair--the original Altair--had been nothing but a plain-clothed suit and a gorilla cap, making headlines for stopping robberies and assault until his work had been largely outshadowed by other metas in the superhero community. After that, he mostly faded out of the public eye. Few people know what happened to the original Altair. Ichigo is one of them.
After all, he’s fighting him right now.
Ichigo reaches back for the staff and yanks Ginjo forward, snapping the wood in two. His knee makes impact with Ginjo’s jaw, one hand slamming against his chest until he’s forcefully pinned down with a shard of the bo staff to his throat. Ichigo might be blind for now, but he isn’t an idiot. He heard Ginjo coming.
“Good,” Ginjo wheezes and taps out. Ichigo loosens his hold and stands up again, the first blur of vision returning to his eyes. He can make the vague contours of Ginjo’s face out, but he doesn’t need sight to extend a hand forward. Sight deprivation training was the one thing even Hat n’ Clogs refused to touch, but Ginjo doesn’t shy away from anything if it means gaining power.
Ichigo can relate to that. It’s about the only thing he and the original Altair have in common.
“Ginjo,” someone calls, breaking the moment. It’s Riruka, entering the room with a tight frown. She chances a glance at Ichigo, before flushing and adamantly turning away to switch on the giant monitor on the wall. “You have to see this.”
Ginjo straightens, and they both come up beside Riruka to stare at — what seems to be — news footage from the neighboring Shikai City. Citizens scatter in the thousands, screaming, as a gaunt-looking figure struts through the crowd, tail swishing.
“ — the latest prototype among Aizen Sosuke’s creations, calling himself Murcielago,” the newscaster explains. “Citizens of Shikai City were fortunate enough to escape when the Heroes for Justice arrived, taking on the monster while first responders escorted the injured out of the rubble.” Ichigo’s breath catches when the camera pans to Orihime, wild-eyed and focused as she swoops in to rescue a baby from a falling building while Uryuu covers her back and shoots an arrow at the meta. At Murcielago.
“Turn the volume up,” he hears himself say.
“...the combined efforts of Dragonfly, Quiver and Diablo have yet again proved that we may still have a fighting chance against Aizen Sosuke’s relentless siege, but one has to ask — where in the world is their frontman, Altair?”
The screen pauses on Orihime, supporting Uryuu and Chad’s weight on her own shoulders. They’re injured, but if Orihime’s with them…he squeezes his eyes shut, clamps down the guilt. He can trust they’re okay. He has to.
“Is she your girlfriend?” Riruka asks, with an edge of something in her voice and Ichigo tries very hard not to think about it. The inside jokes, the fighting side-by-side, thinking about maybe one day telling her —telling her those pesky little things he knew she wanted to hear, the things he wasn’t ready to say yet.
The prospect of Aizen being out there reminds him of exactly why that is.
“No,” he says, shortly, getting up. “Let’s go again.”
+
The truth is, before it was all of them, it was just the two of them—Ichigo and Orihime. And before her, it had been just him and Urahara, his eccentric scientist godfather who’d made a promise to Ichigo’s long-dead parents to take care of him, should anything happen to them. Urahara had an interest for all things metahuman—particularly children, who were still young and impressionable and needed guidance to hone in on their powers. Ichigo himself had none, but he applied himself to work in the lab and trained with Urahara in combat, in math, and arts and science.
When they heard about Orihime, it was in a news story. 7 year-old-girl brings dead cat to life.
“I could save the kitty,” he heard her explain to Urahara, from where he was peeking behind the door, “but I couldn’t save my brother. His life force had already gone.”
“Is that right,” Urahara replied, exchanging a significant look with Tessai. Before Ichigo knew it, he had a new housemate. Most days, he studiously avoided her on account of the fact that she was a girl and that she had freakishly huge eyes—a sudden shyness that Yoruichi teased him relentlessly about whenever she dropped by—but when he saw her nose-deep in a book in Urahara’s library, he simply couldn’t help himself.
“Hello!” Orihime said, when she saw him step out of the shadows. “Are you a ghost?”
“No, dummy!” he snapped. “I’m a boy. I live here.”
“Oh. Do you like books, too?”
“Yeah,” Ichigo said defensively, shoving his hands in his pockets under her curious scrutiny. Was she judging him or something?
“That’s good,” Orihime replied, thrusting the book into Ichigo’s chest. “Can you teach me how to read? I quite like the pictures in this one, but I can’t understand anything it says.”
What had been simple reading lessons at night turned into a strange and companionable friendship that turned a lonely Ichigo’s life around at the home. When Orihime wasn’t reading or babbling endlessly, she was constantly exploring the house, finding different corners they could play in, and different types of dirt he could stop her from eating.
“My brother said I came from a planet far, far away from Earth, in a ship,” she confessed to him one night, their legs swinging into their favorite lake, “but I don’t remember anything from there. Is that my home?”
Ichigo considered that, and then considered their feet, toes nearly touching. “Nah,” he said, pushing his feet further into the water for emphasis, creating ripples. “This is.”
The smile she gave him was enough to put the sun to shame.
+
Some days, Ichigo misses them so bad it aches. He’s not above admitting he’s thought about it a lot, how they’d dealt with the fallout. Maybe someone yelled. Maybe someone cried. Maybe they were relieved, in some twisted way, that they didn’t have to walk on eggshells around him anymore. They all did it, even if they denied it. It was like they felt guilty about existing around him—around the guy who had no powers, no abilities to his name but a sharp intuition and sharper sense of duty. It stung even back in the day, but it had worsened after the attack on Reishi City.
20,000 people dead. Urahara MIA. Tessai MIA. Yoruichi out of commission, in slings. Uryuu injured. Orihime and Chad battered. All to power up Aizen’s I’m-a-freaking-god-machine. They were lucky they’d gotten out with their lives.
The worst part, he thinks, is that Orihime would forgive him. That night before he’d left—before the only home they’d all ever known was burnt to cinders and Uryuu was bedridden with a tube down his lungs—she’d hugged him tight around his back and traced the contours of the wingless eagle splayed across his chest. Like she knew he was coming back and she was holding him to that promise.
Some days, that’s the only thing keeping him going when all he wants to do is call them and go back home. Wherever that is, these days. Home to him had always been Orihime’s laughing eyes across the breakfast table at something ridiculous Uryuu said or something ridiculous Chad didn't say, and it doesn’t feel right to have that until they fix this. Until he fixes this.
Until then, all he can dream about is her voice, soft, relieved, saying, “Welcome home.”
+
On the two hundred and fifteenth day of Ichigo coming to train with Ginjo and his cronies, there’s a security breach. ‘DANGER,’ the monitors blare. ‘UNIDENTIFIED VISITOR.’ On screen, the CCTV surveillance shows a man in a striped hat and an umbrella, waiting patiently. When he spots the camera, he flashes two fingers up in the air and grins.
Ichigo’s first thought is to wonder if the others are okay.
“Looks like you have a visitor,” Riruka remarks, examining her nails. “Ginjo’s not gonna like that.”
Despite the hopeful lurch in his chest, he can’t help but worry. He’d made it pretty clear he wanted to go off on his own to train, so Urahara’s coming here could only mean one of two things: that something was wrong, or something was terribly wrong.
“I know.” Ichigo abandons his staff and heads to the elevators, chest pounding in anticipation. “I’ll go meet him out—”
The doors swish open.
Urahara Kisuke blinks. “Oh hello,” he greets, when he sees Ichigo. “What a lovely surprise.”
“Don’t give me that! You came here.”
“Did I?” he says, like he’s surprised. “Well. What a lovely coincidence then.”
Ichigo feels his impatience rising. “What are you doing here?
“I figured, if his excellency is done sulking and moping around—”
“People died,” Ichigo cuts in, clenching one fist. “The others got hurt.”
Despite his earlier cheery tone, Urahara’s eyes are dark and serious when they meet Ichigo’s. “And is that solely your responsibility to bear?” Ichigo opens his mouth, but Urahara interrupts him once again. “What about the rest of us? Do you believe we don’t feel the same kind of burden?”
“It’s different,” Ichigo protests half-heartedly. “I don’t have—” Powers, he meant to say. The very thing that holds him back while the rest of the world blurs on.
Urahara is silent for a long time. They stare each other down, and suddenly Ichigo is nervous, only in a way that his mentor is capable of making him feel.
Finally, Urahara speaks again. “If I have ever made you or the others feel that the only thing setting you apart from everyone else was your power, then perhaps I was mistaken in my teaching somehow. What made you super could have been your power, Mr. Kurosaki, but what made you a hero was always your courage.”
“Urahara—” Ichigo cuts himself off, stunned.
“The car is waiting downstairs,” Urahara mentions lightly. “You can say your goodbyes and then join us. Toodles!”
Ichigo watches his retreating figure, the only thing ringing in his head again and again being one single word: us.
+
“—get the first punch,” is the first thing Ichigo hears Uryuu saying when he heads downstairs. He’s spotted them, but they haven’t spotted him yet, busy in conversation.
“No one is punching anyone,” Orihime says firmly, but kindly, “Besides, you aren’t fooling anyone with that act, Uryuu.”
“We know you missed him too,” Chad adds, to which Uryuu squawks indignantly.
“Guys,” Ichigo breathes, awed. They’re tall now—taller—their suits dark and gleaming with new upgrades. Chad’s hair is longer, tied back into a high bun, his eyes warm and relieved. Uryuu’s face is sharper, more critical, but the worry lines around his eyes easen up, too.
Before he even has a chance to look at Orihime, he has his arms full of her, squeezing him tight around his middle. His insides warm up at the contact, embarrassed, but he holds her close, relishing in the way she feels warm, and solid, and real. “Hey,” he whispers, his voice going soft on its own accord. “Hi.”
“Are you capable of speaking only in mono-syllables now?” Uryuu asks, sliding his glasses up his nose, unimpressed. Chad claps his shoulder and suddenly Ichigo is having a hard time swallowing back his emotions.
“Welcome home,” Orihime smiles, and it sure feels like it.
+
Later, they end up in one of Urahara’s safehouses, passed out on identical futons lined up against each other on the floor. Technically, the house has three bedrooms, but none of them feel like spending Ichigo’s first night back away from each other, Chad’s snores loud and rumbling over the whir of the fan. Somewhere, in some other room, Yoruichi, Tessai and Urahara are speaking in low tones, no doubt formulating some kind of battle plan now that the band is back together and recovered from old injuries.
Chad snores again, and when Ichigo’s eyes flick over to Orihime, he’s surprised to find her awake and holding back laughter. His own mouth involuntarily pulls into a grin, and he shakes his head. He’s missed this, them, her.
“Thank you,” he says, and her questioning glance suddenly feels too intimate, so he adds, “You know. For keeping Uryuu from punching me.”
For giving me time and space to get my shit together.
She smiles sadly. “He missed you. We all did.”
Ichigo swallows. “Was he mad?”
Orihime bites her lip, torn between lying and telling the truth. “A bit,” she finally admits.
“Wouldn’t be Uryuu if he wasn’t,” Ichigo acquiesces. Then, “Were…were you?”
Orihime’s eyes flick up, warm and gentle with understanding when she shakes her head. “No,” she replies. “You know I wasn’t.”
He remembers the night he left—the night he silently promised he’d be back, that they’d be a family again. The night he’d told her her home was with him.
“We’ll get him this time, Orihime,” he whispers, and he means it. “I promise.”
Orihime searches his face for the truth, and when she finds it, she smiles. “Of course we will.”
Together.