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Humans measure time in the movement of the sun, Grimmjow learns.
Humans measure time in the vibration of atoms, in the swinging of a pendulum, in the falling grains of sand. It's futile beyond the limits of his comprehension, trying to define change in terms of the constant.
Kurosaki's body is a topography of time. It flows down the rise and slope and fall of his back, pools in his eyes when they light up with a smile, slows down at the junction of his neck and shoulder. Memoirs of time are engraved all over his body— in the numerous scars scattered across his skin, in the calluses etched into his palms from the patterned grip of his sword.
Grimmjow's skin, covered by a protective organ engineered to perfection, doesn't bear any witness to the relentless journey of time.
°•°•°•°
Karakura changes. A huge apartment rises behind the shōten. It cuts off all the sunshine that used to fall on the yard. Streetlights change, flickering yellow to steady fluorescent. Grimmjow is an outsider to this domain of ephemerality, as he is to the Human World. Change is their only constant, and Grimmjow feels like he's watching everything play out from afar— a lone person in the theatre watching the reel slowly turn and turn and turn.
The girls grow up. It's a weird sort of transition, but then, Grimmjow figures human children must grow up differently than Nelliel does. Slow changes, little changes accumulating over time, like bedrock being worn smooth by the force of a young river.
However, Grimmjow doesn't understand when Karin's hair grows long enough to become a bun at the nape of her neck, or when Yuzu grows up from reaching barely till his hip to nearly touching his shoulder.
He'll never get used to this, he thinks, the sudden force when it all hits.
Kurosaki changes.
He needs to catch his breath after a couple hundred flash steps and when Grimmjow snarls at him, he apologizes for hindering their fight. “It's nothing really,” Kurosaki forces a grin and says, “Just give me a moment.” Grimmjow has many things to say so he says none of them. He buries Pantera in the sand instead and looks away while Kurosaki is stooping forward with his hand fisted over his sternum.
Give me a moment, Kurosaki says, the phrase bouncing inside Grimmjow's hollow body. If a moment is yet another unit of time, Grimmjow has too much of it and Kurosaki has too little and every heartbeat is a countdown.
°•°•°•°
“What's happening to Kurosaki,” Grimmjow finally asks one evening at the shōten. The room falls deathly quiet as soon as he enters, the bang of the shoji door closing behind him cutting through the stagnant air like a whipcrack. Yoruichi looks at him with something in her eyes that looks dangerously close to sadness. It looks odd on her.
Nobody looks him in the eye, nobody's saying anything. In the silence, the clock on the wall ticks unbearable seconds.
When Grimmjow fists a hand in Urahara's haori and pushes him back against the nearest wall, Pantera's edge millimeters away from the unshaven skin of his throat, Urahara doesn't resist.
“What. Is happening to Kurosaki.” Grimmjow bites out through gritted teeth bared in a snarl. Grimmjow doesn't unsheathe his sword for unworthy causes, but nobody ever answers him otherwise.
“Kurosaki-san,” Urahara begins, averting his eyes like it's an apology, “Is aging. He's human, after all.” He adds. Grimmjow takes a step back, the words like directionless shrapnel inside his body.
After all, Urahara says. After all the battles, after all the unfaltering courage and unrelenting stubbornness, after saving the world every other weekend. After all the pretense, after all the bravado. After killing God, twice. After everything, after all the dust settles, Kurosaki is human. He bleeds when he's cut and he changes as days go by.
The corners of Urahara's mouth twitch. His jaw is tight and his eyes don't meet Grimmjow's. “It's what will happen to any living being with time.”
“But—”
“But we, Grimmjow-san, we those who are around him, most of us, we're Soul Reapers, not humans. The Vizards, neither are they.” Urahara cuts through sharply, gray eyes heavy with something Grimmjow can neither name nor feel. “You. Nelliel-san. We don't change like humans do. Of course the contrast is striking.”
Grimmjow's tongue is heavy in his mouth as the realization churns inside him like a rusted knife sinking deeper into flesh.
“And Kurosaki-san, he's been through a lot of,” Urahara winces, his face looking more ashen by the second, “physical and emotional duress. He's a lot of things together. Too many. He's tougher than most, than all of us, but his body can only handle so much—”
“But his friends—” Grimmjow forces the words out of his mouth and then loses the rest of what he wants to say, and hopes that his desperation conveys his point— there was other humans with him, Grimmjow knows that for a fact, other mortals who have been through the same hell that has forged Kurosaki Ichigo. Maybe they haven't stepped directly into the fire, but they surely have been touched by its heat. They surely have been singed.
“His friends are human too, the quincy and the woman,” Grimmjow asks, tightening his grip on Urahara's haori despite the way his voice quivers, because this façade of ferocity is all he's got. “Why haven't they been changing?”
“Oh, but Grimmjow-san,” Urahara says, softly, like the words might hurt Grimmjow if spoken any louder, any faster. Like he knows something that Grimmjow doesn't. “Who else do you look at so closely?”
He steps away when Grimmjow's fist in the front of his robes goes lax.
°•°•°•°
It's so easy to forget.
By design, not by default, Kurosaki makes it so easy to forget— with his bright smile and the confident set of his jaw and his fierce determination and his habit of looking danger right in the eye and then coming out on top— that beneath all of it, beneath the mask of bone and the mask of disarming confidence— there's just a man whose skin will wrinkle with time.
It won't last.
When Kurosaki falls asleep in the healing spring in the training bunker, Grimmjow holds his breath while looking at him. Kurosaki takes longer to heal these days. Grimmjow doesn't pull his punches but he sits with Kurosaki till he's all done healing. But Kurosaki never heals completely— the water doesn't heal the alien strands of hair that hide among Kurosaki's proud orange locks; the ones that look like they've been spun with the lifeless cold moonlight of Hueco Mundo.
°•°•°•°
The topic surfaces on a Sunday morning at the breakfast table, over freshly brewed coffee and golden toasted bread and Kurosaki ends it as soon as it begins.
He laughs into the receiver of his phone, “Dad, I'm not even thinking of marrying.” There's an agonised wail from the other side, some kind of cacophonous lamentation about the lack of grandkids, followed by Yuzu's high-pitched yelling and Karin's murderous footsteps that Grimmjow can hear even sitting so far away from the telephone. Kurosaki laughs and laughs and then he ends the call and stops laughing.
He stands motionless for a long while. Grimmjow doesn't keep track of time, but he feels an uneasiness coiling at the back of his throat, growing into a larger knot the longer he has to go without seeing Kurosaki's smile, the longer Kurosaki stands facing away, shoulders hunched and leaning heavily on the counter— like he suddenly can't bear his weight any more.
Grimmjow stirs his coffee anticlockwise. The only time when time meant anything to him was when the links of his chain were eroding. The only measurement of time he remembers is in units of pain, in thunderclaps of agony after every three links turning to dust.
Time moves differently for Kurosaki. Humans like leaving milestones in their finite path, they commemorate anniversaries, they celebrate year-ends. Kurosaki tells him, “It's been six years since I've moved to this place, come over.”
°•°•°•°
Hueco Mundo is timeless, eternal.
Hueco Mundo might make Kurosaki age slower but Grimmjow knows that Kurosaki will not stay here. This place where the ground is made of bone dust and the air made of endlessly reverberating shrieks of scalar hunger, will never be able to contain all the life inside Kurosaki Ichigo. Kurosaki was not made to be contained, not by place, nor by person. Not by time.
Grimmjow watches the not-phases of the moon in the forever nightsky of Hueco Mundo. Grains of sand slip out between his fingers, even if he clenches his fist tight enough that his nails leave semilunar imprints of carmine etched deep into his palms.
Kurosaki will not stay.
°•°•°•°
They get invited to a wedding, one spring.
Once upon a time, Grimmjow would have had to ask the meaning of the word. Now, he knows what marriage entails. He knows it's the same thing that drains the light out of Kurosaki's eyes, that drags the corners of his mouth down so that the stamp of time on his face becomes unbearably evident.
Maybe Kurosaki's averse to the idea of being tied to one person for the rest of his life. Grimmjow never asked for the details and he's sure Kurosaki wouldn't tell him anyway, but Grimmjow knows this, there's no heart that could contain all of Kurosaki.
People still keep asking when he's thinking of settling down— old ladies at the park, the shopkeeper two blocks from the clinic— even if his family doesn't, even if his friends don't, even if it's plainly evident that he is unhappy talking about it. Humans want to live their lives in circles, Grimmjow thinks, humans want to build a place to return to. Hollows only have an origin, the rest of their existence is scalar. Life is a vector in its flow towards death. The dead do not have any lighthouses— there are no shelters, there are no warnings.
Grimmjow's also learnt from his time in his place, most humans are absolute shit at understanding Kurosaki.
He, with his broken-bone heart and bloodstained sword and predator talons concealed under skin, understands Kurosaki far better than any of them ever will. There's nothing to make of this realization, and Grimmjow doesn't dwell on it either, but it remains, nestled in an obscure corner of his hollow chest.
So he frankly refuses to budge, but Kurosaki laughs and pulls him along by the wrist. It's not uncommon knowledge that Kurosaki's self-preservation instincts are practically non-existent, and also that he is just really fucking stupid.
“Why the fuck does it matter?” Grimmjow grumbles on the way. “You yourself don't wanna marry anyone anyway, why d'you wanna see two other people get hitched?”
Kurosaki's looking out the train window and Grimmjow can't see his face. The long line of Kurosaki's throat undulates when he swallows.
They go to a church, where people are sitting in neat rows and everything is studded with flowers, rich with color and life.
The Quincy stands at the altar, white rose clipped to the breast-pocket of his white suit and The Woman walks down the aisle, her gown the color of fresh snow trailing behind her, a blue hibiscus radiant in her hair. They stand facing each other and say lots of lines that Grimmjow doesn't hear— because Kurosaki's hand is brushing against his between the press of their bodies and Kurosaki's telling him that those are the vows and it sounds so sacred in his mouth— and then there's a lot of clapping and up at the altar, they're kissing, soft and chaste and shy.
Kurosaki is warm beside him.
Afterwards, everyone says what a beautiful ceremony it is. Grimmjow doesn't know, can't say, because all he looks at is Kurosaki, in his black tuxedo, tie trinity knotted and hair windswept, amber eyes shining like a young sun as he claps for them. His skin crinkles around his mouth when he laughs softly. Kurosaki, oh yes, Kurosaki does look beautiful.
There's a part inside Grimmjow that's fitted all wrong, a part that's awed into a realisation as quiet and swift as a swallow taking flight. This is a different kind of happiness, coloured by sunlight streaming in through stained-glass windows, written in the relaxed, easy lines of Kurosaki's smile and brightness in his eyelashes, and Grimmjow wants Kurosaki to have that happiness too.
°•°•°•°
Kurosaki's fingers tremble. It's a fine, regular tremor that makes his hand quiver when he holds a pen, but not when he grips the sword. Grimmjow looks at his unguarded face when he's leaning his head back against the flattened stones that fringe the circumference of the healing spring, and watches time carve the likeness of wind-crafted lines of sand beside the angles of his eyes.
Grimmjow can't offer Kurosaki a church in spring studded with his favorite flowers, sunlight through stained-glass windows, a lifetime of happiness. Grimmjow is already dead, and time doesn't exist in his not-life. Grimmjow can't offer Kurosaki vows because nothing is sacred in his mouth, and Kurosaki doesn't want to take anyone to an altar.
Kurosaki blinks his eyes open and turns his head to look at Grimmjow.
Then he smiles, soft and slow— the kind that lights up the heart of his eyes and Grimmjow prefaces his attempt to smoothen the wrinkles with a bloodied thumb by an annoyed click of his tongue.
Grimmjow doesn't know what they are, he only knows what they can't be. Time has left him behind when the last link of his chain exploded into an agony of nothingness.
Kurosaki laughs, the sound bright in Grimmjow's veins.
°•°•°•°
Kurosaki gets spectacles one summer. They're circular pieces of glass rimmed with a golden frame, hideous over the delicate bridge of his pointed nose. Grimmjow loathes it. It's like a rift between them— a wall where there should be nothing between their eyes on the battlefield; a vulgar thing whose absence makes Kurosaki defenseless.
Kurosaki, however, carries it gracefully, and makes it look beautiful with the same effortless smile with which he carries everything— the weight of the three worlds, the fate of millions of lives thrust upon his young shoulders, the misplaced guilt for the lives he couldn't save.
Grimmjow pretends to look away and the glasses catch the light of the afternoon and shine. The hair over Kurosaki's temple has been thinning. Kurosaki's flash steps are slowing down.
°•°•°•°
“Grimmjow,” Kurosaki says one afternoon, when the air is saturated with the languid heat of the sun, the bees too drunk with pollen to fly and time too heavy to move, “Promise me something.”
°•°•°•°
Kurosaki talks about his mother some days and Grimmjow listens. Grimmjow knows death intimately. He was born from it. Kurosaki's mother has died too, he gathers from what Kurosaki says.
Do humans mourn their dead? Grimmjow doesn't know mourning, and he thinks he wouldn't understand the concept of it even if it was explained to him.
But Grimmjow does know death. He was prepared to kill Kurosaki once, he had wanted to fight this man till annihilation, he'd longed to plunge Pantera's blade into the delicate column of Kurosaki's throat, directly into a carotid, the spray of warm carmine streaking across the death-white bone of his jaw. What other kind of death is there?
Yes, Grimmjow was supposed to kill Kurosaki Ichigo. Yes, he was prepared for slaughter, but not for this— the slow unravelling, the unbecoming. As it turns out, in all this time, Grimmjow is the one who hasn't yet understood the very thing that created him.
The proof is there, unforgettable, the piece of flesh cleaved out from inside him— the curse that he will bear for the rest of his eternal life, that he can only cause, but never understand death.
°•°•°•°
Kurosaki falls down one autumn afternoon. Graceless, too quiet on the bedroom floor until Grimmjow steps in through the window in a flurry of sonido, and hauls him up over his shoulder. Something is wrong with his face, one side suddenly older than the other. Something is wrong, drool slipping past the corner of his mouth. Something is wrong. He stays limp against Grimmjow's body, too light.
Hours later, Kurosaki lies unmoving on a hospital bed, paler than the starched white bed sheets, amidst the acrid smell of disinfectant.
He stands behind a glass door, jaws clenched. This place is crawling with souls, and it sets his every last nerve on edge— the sight of their silent sobbing beside their lifeless bodies, the cries of animal agony as their chains erode, the colossal stench of fear, the dismal waiting. Some of them become aware of him, but their awareness is short-lived since it's followed by near-simultaneous dissipation owing to the absurd spiritual pressure difference. Grimmjow used to be the sixth Espada even when he didn't have a second release form, and they're merely souls who would've become hollows anyway. If this method of their disposal tilts the cosmic balance somehow, Kurosaki isn't there to say anything to him.
No one else here really sees him. Some of them can, like the Quincy doctor, his son, the gigantic man standing like a statue carved of granite in the adjacent waiting room, but none of them are looking at him.
°•°•°•°
“Promise me something.” Kurosaki says, and Grimmjow feels everything in front of his eyes flash into white. For a split second, he's back in the heart of Hueco Mundo, he's still an Espada and Kurosaki still a substitute Soul Reaper, and Kurosaki is making him a promise. Kurosaki is changing him forever.
Then there's a terrible acceleration, all the colours fading and merging into a sad, sad gray. Grimmjow's back to the present with a jerk that makes him feel like he's landed partly outside the boundary of his own skin.
This, now, is different. For the first time, Grimmjow can see it clearly in front of his eyes— the cruel traces time has left on Kurosaki's face. Even as they talk, even as the mauve curtains swell with the slow breeze, with every breath— time is passing them by.
“What is it?” Grimmjow asks, against all his better judgement.
“Take care of them.” Kurosaki says, simply. “Take care of the girls, Grimmjow.”
The space between him and Kurosaki freezes, and then shatters, sending the shards flying everywhere. They don't talk about this. They don't talk about this, like they don't talk about many other things, because they don't need to, they're nothing to each other, they're never going to be anything to each other.
They don't have conversations where the implicit parts are too loud and too near to remain intangible.
After a long silence, Kurosaki speaks, his voice soft and scratchy. “It's going to happen, you know. Whether or not we keep pretending, it's—”
There's a flashfire of red-hot rage that grips Grimmjow by the throat and sears through him, turning every part of him as hollow as the hole in his abdomen, and he's gripping Kurosaki's collar in the next second, his claws are out and they're burning holes in Kurosaki's worn-loose shirt.
Kurosaki doesn't flinch, his reiatsu doesn't waver in the slightest.
“You want your things to be protected, you stay here and you do shit, you hear me?” Grimmjow says through his teeth. “You're a fuckin' coward, Kurosaki Ichigo, turning tail and leaving your responsibilities on others. I'm an Arrancar, are you forgetting that too? My hands were not meant to take care of things.”
Kurosaki's face turns terribly sad for a fraction of a second.
“I don't want to hear shit from someone who can't keep up their bloody end of a promise.” The viscous bubbling at the base of his throat won't stop, like the heat wants to crawl up his throat and spill over.
Kurosaki made him a promise. That's in Kurosaki's past now, a lot of time has passed for Kurosaki since then but this is what Grimmjow will never be able to say to Kurosaki in his language of pain and bloodlust and swordsongs— it's Grimmjow's past and present and future.
“A promise?” Kurosaki says. The pain on his face is resigned, as if he's intricately familiar with its weight, but Kurosaki still curls the corner of his mouth upwards.
“A promise is made both ways. You promised me too, do you remember? You promised me. You accepted an alliance with Soul Reapers so you could keep your promise, so you could kill me yourself.” Kurosaki pauses for a breath. “Talking about promises, is this what you call being true to a promise?” Then his voice softens, and he looks up till his eyes are meeting Grimmjow's, and Grimmjow knows it's over, he's done for, this is the strike with which Kurosaki will bring him down. “Why didn't you kill me, Grimmjow?” He says slowly.
Grimmjow's hand falls loose from Kurosaki's collar. Kurosaki isn't looking at him. Grimmjow leaves.
Kurosaki falls down the next autumn, and Grimmjow stands beyond a glass door holding his breath, looking at the slow rise and fall of Kurosaki's chest.
°•°•°•°
Grimmjow has seen Kurosaki fight with, and defeat death. He's seen Kurosaki lifeless and he's seen Kurosaki come back from death. But this feels like a betrayal. Kurosaki is supposed to fight this. Kurosaki's fought worse.
Kurosaki is not fighting this. He's not even trying to.
He loathes to see how Kurosaki hasn't resisted. How he's let it happen and smiled through all of it. How he's accepted. It doesn't make sense to Grimmjow, any of it. It's so jarringly out of character. This isn't the Kurosaki he's fought with and alongside all these years, this isn't the Kurosaki he knows and—
A machine is beeping. There's a sudden rush of movement, muted voices barking commands, a renewed sense of urgency in the foul air. Amidst the blur of activity, Grimmjow's apex predator senses, devastated by relief, converge into a pin-point focus over the change of Kurosaki's pulse, the slight twitching of his muscles as his eyelids flutter open.
All the air rushes out of Grimmjow's chest as if being sucked out by a vacuum, leaving such a sonorific emptiness that it pulls his ribs inwards to a near collapse.
Kurosaki is alive. Kurosaki still has a pulse and breath in his lungs and Kurosaki is trying to say something. His lips are moving but Grimmjow can't hear anything, not even when every iota of his being is concentrated into the quiver of Kurosaki's lips.
Kurosaki's head lolls on the pillow. His eyes, unfocused as they are, are looking for something, and then his eyes meet Grimmjow's across the wall of glass between them. The world is falling away, crumbling around the edges like it's being burnt. Grimmjow feels his dead heartbeats drop into the pit of his stomach in those impossible moments before Kurosaki's face lights up into a smile, slow, lopsided, uneven. Grimmjow can't bear the sight of it.
He tears open a Descorrer and then he's in Hueco Mundo.
°•°•°•°
He doesn't go back.
Nelliel calls him a coward. He doesn't reply. The raised uneven edges of his scar bleed a sluggish and angry red.
Grimmjow's skin, otherwise unmarred, bears a singular imperfection— the scar running from shoulder to hip, the scar given to him by Kurosaki. Kurosaki is the only flaw inside him, inside his perfect body, the only threat to his heartless soul. The scar will stay with him, as a reminder of the humanity that Kurosaki Ichigo, for a split second, was able to infect him with. And humanity? Humanity is fatal.
He hasn't been able to keep anything else that Kurosaki's given him.
°•°•°•°
“He asked to see you once,” Urahara says. His voice is quieter than Grimmjow remembers, unbecoming in its uncharacteristic earnesty.
“None of my fuckin' business,” Grimmjow replies from behind the rigid wall of his palace, “We weren't friends.”
He spits out the last word too quick, the taste of it caustic on his tongue. He's always hated the word, hated the people who Kurosaki meant by the word, the way he said the word with a smile glowing with all the glorious righteousness in his bleeding heart. The people Kurosaki would shield with his own back.
The people who have the right to mourn. Grimmjow isn't one of them.
Nelliel calls him a liar.
There are many people with Kurosaki, now. People who have been there, always. The Shinigami, prim and quiet and jet black hair falling till her waist. The Quincy, who must now be proud of his silver-white hair, monitoring all the machines and all the charts and all the reports. The Woman, an auburn bun low on her nape, lines of laughter etched deep in her face, holding Kurosaki's limp hand in her own and crying only when she's out of Kurosaki's room.
The Captain and his two daughters. Yuzu sits like a statue carved from stone by his bedside, everyday, as long as they'll let her stay, and Karin tries to talk to him, Karin tells him everything that's happening, Karin sings Kurosaki's favourite songs.
They flit in and out and bring flowers for his room and draw the curtains when the light is too harsh.
People who shed tears for him. People who will grieve for him. Grimmjow will not be one of them.
Grimmjow will not go back.
°•°•°•°
Most nights he can't sleep. Some nights he falls asleep and dreams of Kurosaki slicing apples on the counter, Kurosaki hanging out clothes to dry, Kurosaki turning his head to say you could stay, but Grimmjow turns and leaves anyway, because time is always running out, and Kurosaki will never take him to an altar.
He wakes up with the empty sound of the door closing behind him.
Sometimes he catches himself wondering if the Woman can cover Kurosaki with her ethereal light and turn back time. She did, once, didn't she, when Kurosaki was a dead man at their feet, staring up at them with depthless unseeing eyes and cracked lips stilled forever around a cry of pain that he must have felt as his heart was being ripped out from his chest. But this, this feels different somehow. This, the different hair, the softer skin, the falling.
Grimmjow doesn't go back. There is no point. Grimmjow will not grieve for him.
°•°•°•°
Kurosaki begins losing his words that winter.
Grimmjow tells Urahara to stop bringing him updates. Urahara stands quietly for a while behind the wall, like he wants to say something and the coarse silence itches under Grimmjow's hierro. “This is a request, Grimmjow-san,” He says, finally, “Not a contract. Not a deal. I have nothing to offer you in return, it's a request. Please.”
Grimmjow fires a cero at him. It leaves a meteor-shaped crater in the sand afterwards and it takes hours, days for the dust to settle.
Hallibel doesn't say anything, she just closes her eyes and heaves a breath behind the collar of her jacket.
°•°•°•°
Kurosaki forgets his sisters next summer.
The girls come by. It's Karin who is crying, to his surprise. Incandescent rage shakes her lithe frame, reiatsu raising a storm in a way that reminds Grimmjow too much of Kurosaki's anger, “Why the fuck won't you go see him once?! Why the fuck not—”
She sobs into Yuzu's shoulder after she's screamed herself hoarse, after she's fired kidō after kidō in futile attempts to blast down the unshakeable walls of Grimmjow's palace. She's done considerable damage too, but Grimmjow's taken precautions.
“Grimmjow-san,” Yuzu says after the sobbing fades from the audible spectrum, touching the wall with her open palm. “Please don't mind Karin-chan. Take care of yourself. Let's go back, Karin-chan,” She murmurs.
The touch of Yuzu's soft little palm sears like a shock of heat through the glacial body of stone. It reminds Grimmjow too much of Kurosaki's kindness. It hurts more. The hierro wasn't engineered to protect against a weapon that has no edge, no malice, no pain.
This wasn't supposed to happen to Kurosaki. This was always supposed to happen to Kurosaki and there's nothing Grimmjow can do.
Kurosaki had an apartment.
He'd moved out from the clinic when he was a sophomore in college and Grimmjow had visited him the first day in his new place, when all of Kurosaki's stuff was still packed in brown boxes sealed with tape and there was no furniture, no curtains on any of the windows, and they'd cooked the first meal together in the new house— pouring hot water in instant ramen cups.
There were potted plants on the windowsill and there was a rug shaped like a cat in the living room. One afternoon, Kurosaki had taught him to repot plants— how to pat the soil and how to water the growing saplings properly. “These ones,” Kurosaki had said, pointing at a collection of frail sickly stems with a few muddy green leaves, “need to be watered every day. And these ones, once every three days.”
At the heart of Grimmjow's world of horizonless sand and unending night, Kurosaki was so gloriously alive. He breathed life around him, into everything he touched— even the cold, dead skin over Grimmjow's hollow chest.
Pantera howls in Grimmjow's mind.
He summons a Descorrer. He doesn't go to that morbid building with the dizzyingly strong smell of disinfectant and the overwhelming continuum of despair where he almost can't sense the soft cinnamon and caramel scent of Kurosaki. He makes for the apartment instead, and he doesn't get in through the bedroom window with the fluttering mauve curtains.
He opens the door with a little golden key that Kurosaki had given him once. “This is yours,” He'd said, with a smile mellowed by the dying golden light of the dusk. “You can come here whenever you want, even if I'm not here.”
Grimmjow hadn't known then. Probably Kurosaki hadn't either.
The apartment is untouched by outsiders, just like Grimmjow remembers it. Just like Kurosaki left it— his favorite comforter slung over the back of the couch, the TV remote on the kitchen counter, the black rug in the shape of a cat that Grimmjow used to hate on the floor of the living room. Kurosaki's scent is still there, strong in the spaces enclosed by walls filled with framed pictures.
Kurosaki's bed is unmade. Kurosaki is still there, lying in a graceless heap on the floor, one side of his face older than the other.
Grimmjow shudders. His palms are sweating, he realizes, he's so cold that he's shaking.
He leaves. He's wrong, the apartment isn't the same anymore. Nothing is. Kurosaki isn't there inside it, laughing at something on the TV or slicing apples in the kitchen or sitting in the verandah which had the most of the winter sun. Kurosaki isn't there.
The potted plants on the windowsill are dead.
°•°•°•°
Grimmjow blindly navigates the fumigated corridors and slides the door to Kurosaki's cabin open. Kurosaki looks up with unseeing eyes.
“Grimmjow?” He asks, his voice like the lingering warmth of a sword-calloused hand against Grimmjow's wrist, pathologically hopeful. Hope is a weapon Grimmjow hasn't learned to shield himself against yet, doesn't think he'll be able to, ever.
“Did you come, Grimmjow?”
It hasn't changed, the way his voice shapes Grimmjow's name.
Grimmjow doesn't speak. Something is weighing his vocal cords down, like the heavy shackles around his throat and wrist and ankles to keep him restrained when the Hogyoku was shattering his mask open. This agony is different, it will burn him from the inside out for an eternity and it will lick behind his teeth till he's reduced to ashes but Grimmjow will never know how to scream this one out.
There are translucent tubes hooked into Kurosaki's arms, a thicker tube taped to his nose. Wires run everywhere and machines are beeping and amidst everything, Kurosaki looks so peaceful, his skin finely cobwebbed, his eyes lustreless amber. It's torture for someone like Kurosaki to be held down like this, it's a damned insult, but Kurosaki's never looked so happy.
Grimmjow walks across the room, and it feels like that time a CD had gotten stuck in the machine— all the movements stretched slow on the TV screen, all the words rattled out of sync with the characters moving their lips. Kurosaki had laughed, shook his head and sighed, “We really have to get a new one now,” before he'd gotten up to clap the machine a few times on the top and his hair was falling over his forehead in a way reminiscent of days much, much younger.
The metal rail of the bed is cold against Grimmjow's hand. It shouldn't be. He has a hierro. Kurosaki's skin is wrinkled, fragile around the bend of his elbow, below the curve of his eye, over the column of his neck. Grimmjow feels his chest ache. It shouldn't. He doesn't have a heart.
Kurosaki's hand trembles beside his, and then Kurosaki lifts his hand, slowly. The tremor in his fingers is coarse now, Grimmjow notices, but he's the only one looking away. Kurosaki is looking only at him.
Grimmjow holds his breath. Kurosaki's palm comes to rest on his cheek, and realization sparks through the dull ache inside Grimmjow's chest like a shock of brightness, and settles.
This is it, this is the answer, nothing more and nothing less— the trace of Kurosaki's thumb across his jawbone, the warmth of Kurosaki's earth-brown gaze— a love song.
“Kiss me.” Kurosaki whispers, “Grimmjow, kiss me.”
It isn't a hurried request. It isn't a reminder that time is running out, here, between them, like the last few grains of sand falling out through fingerspaces.
Grimmjow leans forward and lets his eyes fall shut when his mouth meets Kurosaki's.
The kiss is soft, slow, heartachingly sweet, and behind his closed eyes, Grimmjow is back at that altar from many years ago. The sunlight is colored bright through the stained glass windows. Kurosaki stands in front of him in a black tuxedo, hair windswept and eyes shining.
The raw smell of disinfectant turns into flowers blooming.
When the kiss breaks, Kurosaki needs to catch his breath, the air wheezing in his throat. Grimmjow doesn't know what to do with his hands anymore, so he holds Kurosaki's face gently within the cup of his palms. His hands were never meant for this. Kurosaki beams at him, he looks happy like he hasn't known sadness for even a single day in his life.
Like he's known sadness every single day of his life and that sadness, having passed through his heart, failed to diminish any of his light.
Grimmjow sits beside the bed, holding Kurosaki's hand in his and Kurosaki falls into peaceful, undisturbed slumber shortly after.
His chest rises and falls evenly, fingers lax in Grimmjow's grip and Grimmjow thinks about how painfully simple it has been all along. After all, Kurosaki was the only one who could leave a mark on his skin.
Kurosaki's the one he wanted to kill the most and the only one he didn't want to kill. Kurosaki will stay, nestled beneath his hierro, in that empty place where his heart was supposed to have been. Grimmjow will never have the words to write a vow, but he has already said them.
Kurosaki might be averse to the idea of being tied to one person for the rest of his life, but Grimmjow has already tied the rest of his deathless life to Kurosaki.
There's no longer any time. Grimmjow leaves before dawn.
°•°•°•°
It happens, Grimmjow hears, an hour and twenty seven minutes after he leaves.
It happens at the break of dawn, as the sun rises enough so that the first rays of sunlight can enter through the lifted blinds and touch the metal railing of Kurosaki's bed. It happens when nobody is there in his room, beside his bed, holding his hand. It happens in his sleep, Grimmjow hears. Urahara's eyes are strangely red but Grimmjow feels nothing. People talk but their words are out of sync with their mouths.
Kurosaki isn't there to laugh and clap the top of the machine in an attempt to fix it.
Grimmjow hears, he was smiling.
Kurosaki leaves everyone the final proof of his humanity and Grimmjow has never known what to do with confessions.
°•°•°•°
There are ceremonies, after.
It's another church, Grimmjow notes around the reinforced dullness of his hierro. There's no sunlight through the stained glass, no white veil trailing on the aisle. All the flowers are white. He wants to tell someone that Kurosaki loved sunflowers and spider lilies but everyone's grief is too heavy. Nameless, faceless people file through, in crisp black suits and and they all speak about a hero. He sees them cry and dab at the edges of their eyes with their pressed handkerchiefs.
From the altar, Kurosaki's picture smiles at them all.
Grimmjow feels sick. He walks out.
He catches Karin outside, leaning against a wall. When she looks at him, her eyes are red-rimmed. “Can't stand half of them,” She says through a watery smile, turning her face up to look at him. “All those months when he was powerless, he was alone.”
Karin kicks back and lifts her weight off the wall. There are vines growing upwards, the depths of their green morose. “Scratch that.” She laughs, “Even when he had his powers, my brother was alone. I wanna go home, Grimmjow-san.”
He holds her hand on the way to the Kurosaki clinic. The walk is quiet and her grip on his hand is too tight but Grimmjow doesn't say anything.
The sun sets.
And rises again the next day. Nothing changes.
°•°•°•°
Nothing changes. The worlds remain at peace, all three of them in perfect harmony. Hueco Mundo is quiet, the thrum of postmortem life beneath the veil of sand like a listless scratch Grimmjow can't itch. Hueco Mundo is deader than it's ever been.
There hasn't been any war since the Quincies. Hueco Mundo has been prospering steadily under Hallibel's leadership— there are upgraded plans of border security, reinforced models of energy stabilization, newer infrastructure growing in the dead heart of the desert. Urahara must still be maintaining trade between the worlds, because Grimmjow recognises his work, he has spent enough time assembling analysers and spectrometers in the dingy low-lit storage room that Urahara called his laboratory to be allowed the bliss of forgetting those already.
Grimmjow doesn't know for sure, but he thinks it's by Hallibel's order that during the renovation of this desolate, devastated wasteland, no one touches the ruins of the palaces and pillars that were destroyed during his and Kurosaki's fights.
Grimmjow hasn't been to the living world since. He doesn't keep track of time. He doesn't know if there's a picture of Kurosaki hanging in the living room of the Kurosaki household, beside the smiling face of his mother. He doesn't know what happened to Kurosaki's apartment, if people walked in and dusted off the countertops and folded the sheets on the unmade bed and lit incense for him. He doesn't know what kind of flowers are there beside Kurosaki's grave.
Grimmjow doesn't know what humans do with dead plants on the windowsill.
He's dead as well and he has an eternity left in his hands. Kurosaki is dead because he ran out of time.
°•°•°•°
Grimmjow sleeps in the Control Room, he doesn't go back to his quarters. Nelliel comes by often, appearing silently and sitting beside him for a couple hours at a stretch without saying a word. Initially, it used to be a constant prickle of irritation under his hierro, the presence of any other person in the same room as him, but now it's grown on him a little. He doesn't have to watch his breaths around her anymore.
Hallibel has entrusted the entirety of border security to Grimmjow and the patrol force that he reluctantly commands. Sometimes, he's reminded of his own Fraccion, who he lost the night he met Kurosaki. He thinks of Yuzu and Karin on rare occasions. Sometimes he falls asleep on the chair in the Control Room and wakes up thinking he's still sleeping on the spare futon in Urahara's shop.
He doesn't think of Kurosaki.
He doesn't think of Kurosaki when the new Captain Commander visits Hueco Mundo with a cadre of Soul Reapers he doesn't recognise. He doesn't think of Kurosaki during their hushed conversation with Hallibel in the main court, or when the concentrated rage of Hallibel's whispers through her clenched teeth reverberate off the granite walls, “Leave the boy alone. Let him have peace. I hope you realise this, Captain, the Central Forty-six are greater vultures than anyone else will ever be.” He doesn't think of Kurosaki when the Captain laughs in his deep voice that's equally heavy with the weight of a loss, “Your Highness, a warrant to search for him in Hueco Mundo is being issued. It's my request to you, please decline it.”
°•°•°•°
Time folds over and over itself and what just passed becomes indistinguishable from what is happening now becomes the same as what is going to come.
Grimmjow doesn't think of Kurosaki as he absently stares at the screens in front of him and evaluates the three malfunctioning spiritual energy sensors situated at the farthest end of the north-west perimeter. It's barely worthy of being taken into account and Grimmjow can send any foot soldier to have a look once.
Oh, right. They aren't soldiers anymore. That's what Hallibel says. Grimmjow disables all alarm systems before he leaves. He takes his own time to go there. He has a lot of that on his hands and nothing to think of.
He's halfway there when suddenly a paradigm shifts.
An abrupt lash of reiryoku cracks against his hamstrings like a whip. All motions become stretched out slow in its wake, the hyperawareness of his fight-or-flight response kicking in— but before Grimmjow's knees inevitably crumple under the massive atmospheric pressure, all of the energy regulators explode simultaneously in a blinding flash of light and smoke followed neigh simultaneously by a tremendous, resounding boom. Grimmjow scrambles to his feet— forsaking grace for the sake of swiftness— as the ground quakes and the sky darkens with the heaviness of a reiatsu so colossal that it is nearly blinding.
Storm-clouds gather overhead, rumbling and thunderous with electrifying power, the distant dunes reciprocating their deep hum.
Grimmjow grits his teeth against the ringing in his ears and unsheathes Pantera right as the rain begins.
It's a torrential downpour, oppressive and cleansing, washing away the grime that collects at the very bottom of miserable existences. His eyes burn, but Grimmjow can not look away as the inexplicable light turns into substance, vibration of atoms barely contained, pure energy that he's close enough to feel on his tongue.
The light is blinding. He shields his eyes with a hand and keeps the other on Pantera's hilt.
Tendrils of light spin from the consolidated mass of the energy and settle into form, taking shape— fingers extending to arm, shoulders meeting torso— distantly, with whatever capacity of cerebration Grimmjow can muster, given that most of his energy and focus is being consumed in simply staying upright and rooted to his spot, he notes that this structure is characteristic of Vasto Lorde. Then there's the dip of a waist that looks familiar, a junction of neck and shoulder and a column of throat and the pointed tip of nose, and Grimmjow feels like the ground has opened beneath his feet into a roaring bottomless vortex.
Everything in a three meter radius gets vaporized as the magnificent energy churns sand about, the very air destabilizing into an incandescent glow of plasma-condensate— but Grimmjow can't hear anything.
The dust settles.
The light solidifies around the nascent being, and then shatters, and dissipates into the atmosphere.
Kurosaki looks back at him from the eye of the devastation and smiles, brilliant.
For two and half minutes, there's complete silence.
Then the shockwave hits.
The whole world fades to white. There's no color, no sound no movement no thought no grief, there's only a ripple passing through the ether, a short sharp brightness, rare and inevitable, that pulls at the centre of Grimmjow's existence and spreads to the tips of his extremities, lighting up every dark space inside him.
Every fiber of his constitution is screaming at him. It can't be Kurosaki, it can't— Soul Reapers had scanned under every grain of sand in all of Rukongai under orders decreed by that committee of rotten old bastards, perhaps the most corrupt bunch in the entirety of Soul Society's putrid decayed framework, who wouldn't leave Kurosaki be even when their new Captain Commander ordered them to.
Death didn't bring any peace for Grimmjow. But for Kurosaki, Grimmjow is prepared to go against everything he knows.
There were reports from the missions, undisclosed to the public, rumors of alleged sightings of certain shades of orange hair in lower Rukongai— hearsay that reached all the way to Hueco Mundo. But Grimmjow had known with a numb certainty that it couldn't have been Kurosaki.
All of Grimmjow's predator senses know that this cannot be Kurosaki.
But there is an inexplicable place inside him, a place that dwells beyond logic, beyond his animal instincts, a place yet untouched by his autophagous hunger, that harbours a feeble pulse. It's the weakest part of him, but it can not be drowned out by the rest of the noise that gnaws at the inside of his mind. It's stubborn, and it tells him otherwise.
It tells him that this is the person that he's fought with and fought along and wanted to spend the rest of his afterlife with. This is how Kurosaki's face looks— there could be no replica, no imitation of this in all of the three worlds, in all directions of time— when his eyes meet Grimmjow's across any and every room.
Nobody has moved a muscle yet, but they're both breathing hard.
“Grimmjow,” Kurosaki says, and the sound of his voice crashes against Grimmjow's scorched eardrums.
The silence between them is punctuated only by the hush of sand still churning with the aftermath of Kurosaki's resurrection.
“Makes sense, doesn't it, that I'd land up in Hueco Mundo than in Soul Society,” Kurosaki says, speaking a little faster than usual, “I was kind of floating about in this colorless world for a while in between—”
“Eight months, six days and thirteen hours,” Grimmjow grits out. He's so tired all of a sudden. “Don't bullshit me, did you know?”
Kurosaki looks strangely delicate wrapped in the dewy white vestiges of the spiritual energy from before. His breath catches but he looks Grimmjow in the eye when he answers. “I didn't, I swear, Grimmjow. I really thought I— that this was it. Urahara-san tried to talk about it once but I never—”
Kurosaki didn't know. Kurosaki kissed him knowing that it would be the last thing that he would do in his life. And now Kurosaki's back.
His skin is smooth, his eyes are sharp amber, unclouded and focused. Grimmjow wants to punch that handsome face and the ferocity of his desire is such that his achilles' tendons nearly cave with its enormity. Kurosaki's still saying something but Grimmjow can't hear anything over the pounding in his ears.
Grimmjow looks up when Kurosaki stops speaking. Kurosaki looks like he wants to say something more, because his eyes flicker away.
“Grimmjow, I—” Kurosaki begins, and then falls silent. If Grimmjow would've had a heart, it would've begun to hurt a long time ago. If he would've had a heart, he could attribute the pain to something tangible.
If Grimmjow had a heart, they would've grown old together.
He sheathes Pantera in a clean arc slashing through the spirit-dense air sitting heavy around them.
Kurosaki looks explicitly bewildered, but he doesn't say anything, their easy familiarity perhaps left behind in the earlier life. Silence forms between them like the surface of a lake freezing on a cold winter night, the nascent ice fragile and weak, but ice nonetheless.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
Kurosaki's inhale is sharp, shocked. His mouth is slightly agape, and he doesn't breathe out.
Grimmjow watches him, and he doesn't breathe either. He waits and waits instead for his patience to run out, he waits for his anger to flare its ugly head inside his chest, he waits for his hunger to twist his guts into a gnarling knot— these are his own vital signs, goddammit— but it doesn't happen. Something aches instead, in a steady rhythm, pulsatile and spreading from his sternum to his extremities, from the depths of his bones to the follicles in his skin.
For well over a minute Kurosaki remains petrified, and then suddenly, all the tension bleeds out from his body like someone has cut the tendons of all his muscles. There must be an element to this that Grimmjow's missing, because Kurosaki starts laughing. It's genuine laughter, even if it ends as soon as it begins.
Grimmjow looks at the faint glow of red high on Kurosaki's cheeks, dusted over the bridge of his nose. This is the color of blood under skin, rushing inside fine capillaries.
Kurosaki opens his mouth to speak once but then ends up swallowing his words. He raises his hand to his forehead and ruffles his hair further in an attempt to move it back from his face. “I used to think that you knew, y'know.” He says finally, after a decisive deep breath, eyes falling shut and corners of his mouth curling with a small, sad smile. “I was kinda obvious about it, wasn't I? Everyone knew. I thought you did too, and I thought it was kind of you to let me down so easy. You, you were kinder than I deserved.” Grimmjow shudders.
“You didn't have to do that. At the hospital.” Kurosaki's face is strange, the light in his eyes a little diminished. The dry desert wind has tossed his bright hair about and it's a halo around his face now, ablaze against the muted shades of blue and white.
Grimmjow's fingers are still shaking with each pounding thrust of adrenaline.
Kiss me. Grimmjow, kiss me.
“I don't remember much after the— I don't remember a lot. But I remember you. I remember that I was happy. Not only then, but also every day of my life that I spent beside you, loving you.”
There are certain changes which occur only in the absence of catalysts, like a flower that can only blossom in the deep, dark secret of the night. Grimmjow's time will never run out, but Grimmjow is not immune to it.
Time will not be his vehicle but time will weather him, erode him, and build him into newer beings. Time will change him, perhaps a little like how time changed Kurosaki.
What is Kurosaki now? Is he a Hollow, taking after the one inside him? A soul? A higher being surpassing all known entities?
Grimmjow has to forcibly reign himself back from attempting to sense Kurosaki's heartbeats, compressing and rarifying the air between them in that familiar frequency. His senses aren't used to this particular vein of command. He doesn't know what Kurosaki exactly is at the moment, and fuck it, he'll leave it for later, for Urahara to figure out, but he knows this much, that Kurosaki's heart was never just a rhythmically pounding organ of flesh and blood.
And everything else? Everything else can wait for later.
He imagines Karin's face. He can hear Yuzu breaking down into tears when Kurosaki goes back to the Human World and rings the bell of the clinic; Yuzu, who never cried once when Kurosaki was slowly withering away on a hospital bed, Yuzu, who's held everyone together since, Yuzu, the bravest human Grimmjow's ever met.
“Grimmjow, will you please fucking look at—”
Grimmjow's fingers grow loose around Pantera's grip.
He lets her fall to the ground, and the sound of sand scattering with the impact is almost louder than the faint gasp of surprise Kurosaki makes.
“What did you call it?” Grimmjow can hardly recognise his own voice, coarse and rasping. Kurosaki's eyes, earth-brown and unblinking, don't stray from his face. “Kindness? Pity? I don't know how to do that. I'm a Hollow. Those are not my sins.”
Pain is as reliable an anchor as ever— Grimmjow squeezes his fingers into fists so tight that his nails dig into his palms in a welcome counterbalance to the heaving of his lungs, the agony burning in his hollow chest. “That was not what it was. How the fuck was I supposed to know? How could I know this is what it was supposed to feel like, Kurosaki?”
His vocal cords feel raw, like their rusty hinges have been wrenched open by shaping Kurosaki's name after so long. He is aching inside, his weariness bone-deep and gravitating downwards, and the place where he can rest is so near that the proximity makes it almost impossible for him to drag himself a little further, so he lets himself fall. “Being in love?”
He doesn't crash, he soars.
Kurosaki gasps, wet and choked. His eyes are brimming with shimmering light.
°•°•°•°
Grimmjow doesn't know who takes the first step. He doesn't know if Kurosaki tilts his head up first or if he leans down before that. A certain obscure part of his patchwork soul blooms with Kurosaki's touch, with the brush of Kurosaki's breath against his lips, with the ferric warmth of the ruby-red droplet of blood forming over the curve of Kurosaki's lip, the place that got caught at the edges of Grimmjow's teeth.
The sunlight around them is too harsh, and there are no bouquets of flowers, no music playing softly. Grimmjow will never know the sacred words of the vows. He will never know any other way to love Kurosaki, a way that doesn't begin and end in bloodshed. But this will be enough.
This will transcend their mortal parts. This will transcend time.
For a handful of moments, Grimmjow feels like he has shed his hierro and he has stepped into the sun, the warmth touching his cold skin directly, seeping inside and preparing to stay. He wonders what it would be like to feel this once again, more often, all the time and then he stops himself before he gets too greedy. Destruction is far from being the only one of his sins.
Kurosaki looks up at him. His hair is falling over his forehead and time warps around them in golden tendrils, pooling around their wrists and parting in front of them. “What are we going to do now?”
Grimmjow picks Pantera up and attaches her to the holster on his belt. Time will touch them, both of them, and that is how they will be eternal.
“We're going to go home.” He says. The bedroom window is still open, mauve curtains fluttering in the wind. “We're going to make it right this time.”
Kurosaki smiles, and takes his hand.