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Ichigo can feel his powers dissipating. It itches, like it’s trying to cling to him as it fades into the air and it makes his skin feel like he’s got a million nettle barbs beneath his skin. Or Velcro that's being pealed back one hook at a time all over his body, between his skin and his muscles and it itches.
Getaboshi didn’t say anything about it – didn’t warn him about it and neither did Oyaji (but when has Oyaji told him anything?).
His friends think that he is crawling with cabin fever from the enforced bed rest he's on because while loosing all of one’s power is not a physical injury, it is an injury nevertheless. That’s fine with Ichigo – he has things to do before all his power drains away like water from a sieve.
Ichigo spends the few days that it takes for of his power to disappear wandering his inner world. Tensa isn’t there, nor his Hollow, nor Zangetsu – they’re gone, disappearing as soon as he became Getsuga, but he wallows in the fading trails of their presence. The pole Zangetsu always stood upon is still there the first day he goes back, and he can still vaguely sense the bubbling hostility his Hollow always directed at him lingering in the air.
But there’s no one there.
No one there to tell him not to try, so he goes searching anyways. He runs over, under, though the sea at one end of his soul, where he once found his powers in the trillions of boxes floating in the depths. He tries again, no better at locating reiatsu than he was before, but only finds a lone pinkish strand that fades further before his eyes. Ichigo tears his eyes away, a burning sensation building behind his eyes and in his throat.
(If he spends a few useless, precious seconds of his dwindling time with his power weeping in the ocean in his soul, no one can call him on it. Those that could have are gone – that’s why he’s there, trying to find them and God, what he wouldn’t give to have his Hollow making fun of him for crying right now.)
But there’s no time to waste and the nettles sting beneath his skin in the Living World, so he throws himself back into searching.
Ichigo runs along sideways buildings, breaking in and finding more memories than he knows what to do with, good and bad. He finds flashing images of his mother that he’d forgotten in the space of the last year spent on rescue missions cum invasions, protecting the town, his sisters, his friends, and fighting for his life.
He finds memories of those times, too.
Those are almost worse.
So he pushes on, there NO TIME to waste, even if he longs to spend more time on his memories of his mom – maybe he should’ve taken his Hollow to see those, just to see how he would have reacted.
Masaki probably wouldn’t have minded seeing his Hollow – she’d understood him the most, to this day, with the exception of those who’d shared his soul (but even then, did they really know everything about him?). But his Hollow was his instinct, as his doppelgänger had said, and his instinct was always to relax in the comfort and safety of his mother. Maybe that would have calmed down the other.
Maybe not.
No time, stop wasting time! And Ichigo hurries on, skimming the air in increasingly shorter bursts as he runs through the grey clouds that bring mists, gradually increasing to pounding rain and flashes of desperate lightening, while thunder rumbles with his nerves of not finding them, he can’t fail them.
His space to search is shrinking with his powers and that should make it easier to search, to find them at least one last time to say goodbye to the two people who’ve helped him the most this past year. Kept him true to himself and his sanity (even if the latter is somewhat questionable, given his Hollow, and his one time concern of him taking over and killing every single one of his friends. He’d take back those times, if only to have someone here with him, to have even one of them back.)
But there’s no one there. Except him.
Nobody. No body.
It’s that thought that causes him to break down.
He is a no body now, nothing fills his body with power and maybe someone (namely him) should have considered what it would do to be without his instincts, his fire, his solemnity, his forethought and drive.
But, the three worlds were on the line – his sisters, his friends, were on the line. There’s no time for such thoughts then.
There should have been.
Zangetsu and his Hollow – Tensa Zangetsu – were they not his friends, too? His to protect and defend as they lent him their power to do so for his friends? The friends that neither cared for, save him (because they’d never met and maybe that’s one more thing Ichigo has to carry on his already guilty conscience).
But, how was he to have defended them against himself?
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so, so sorry.
Apologizing didn’t bring his mother back. It doesn’t bring him his soul, either.
~IiI~
Ichigo blanks his face, burying his turmoil in the last speck of his mindscape and looks at the woman who formally introduced him to the full world. Who started this mess (but didn’t it start years and years before he was born and she had died with two men, one who ached with loneliness he tried to assuage with power and another whose curiosity knew no bounds beyond those he held dear?), and who taught him (some), who tried to make his transition from normal, ghost-seeing teenager to Shinigami as easy as possible while upholding the rules by which she’d been confined, who was his friend (the first one with whom he could speak about the ghosts, which he’d not been able to really help before she’d stabbed him through the chest and given him the tools on a silver platter).
He watches her, watches as her form fades, black to grey, violet to lilac, and says, “Goodbye, Rukia. Thank you,” just as her form flutters away from his sight, even if she’s still there.
Goodbye, Rukia. Goodbye, Renji. Goodbye, Shinji, Hiyori, Hachi, Kensei, Lisa, Mashiro, Rose, Love. Goodbye Nel. Goodbye times of peace and times of war. Goodbye, Hollow-with-No-Name. Goodbye Zangetsu.
Goodbye power, he’d been born with, thanked and cursed in turns, that was finally, finally gone.
Ichigo reenters the house, soul broken and an ache in his chest for the power he’d had since he was born.
~IiI~
“Leave him alone,” they thought. They said, “Let him recover. Reminders do nothing to help a bleeding wound heal.”
That’s the thing about Chad and Orihime (even Tatsuki, Mizuiro, and Keigo, who are now up to date with all the happenings of the Shinigami and Hollows). They might have been born with the potential for power, but they’d never been fully connected to it until Ichigo had inadvertently fostered those seeds of potential with his constantly leaking reiatsu. If they had lost their powers, perhaps those methods would have worked.
None of them had been seeing spirits since childhood. None of them had seen Hollows, or tried to help the Plus souls as much as he could before they’d either become corrupted into Hollows or Konso’d and left to Soul Society.
Ishida had.
It’s Ishida that looks back when they all run out to destroy the Hollows. It’s he who hovers, just on the edge, of Ichigo’s sight in school and occasionally when he wanders from the house. Occasionally, because he can’t look at his closet and not remember Rukia (and how she hasn’t even written him a note and it’s been three months), can’t look at his light and not remember Ikkaku breaking it just to sneak into his room, can’t even look out the window without the desire to jump out sometimes, as if the short fall might kick start his powers and allow him to glide, run, jump away from the pathetic thing his life has become. Can’t look at his father and not remember how that man had known about Shinigami. Was a Shinigami and had never said a thing, only to come at the Eleventh hour just to instruct Ichigo on the technique that would save all their lives and doom his own.
(Why, Oyaji? Was there not another way? Was this more punishment for his foolishness that had killed his mother? Weren’t the constant attacks enough? Hadn’t he changed enough for his father?)
Nothing is said, though. It’d be pointless for Ishida to apologize – it certainly wasn’t his fault, if anything it’s just another black mark against the so-called protectors of spirits who promote the use of genocide as a method of solving all their problems.
It’s just another reason for Ishida to hate Shinigami.
But, Ichigo is no longer a Shinigami – no more than he can’t be, being blood related to one.
Still, school picks up, clubs are getting increasingly hectic, and Ishida has enough on his plate without keeping Ichigo company. So those visits soon stop, too.
There is a reason that the exiles chose Karakura as their home base. There's been an enormous amount of reiatsu floating around the town from years and years as a focal point between the Three Worlds. Each ghost, each Hollow, each spiritually aware human leaves a mark on the town.
That’s quite the build up over the years.
A town, honestly, can’t take all that without something happening. And it does. In slow movements that could rival the formation of rocks, Karakura town (though it did not start with that name) evolves.
Or, as much as a physical place can evolve, it does.
The entity comes to understand the ideas of protection (from those humans-no-longer), and rage (from those-who-were-gone-and-stayed-too-long or who-were-not-“good”-before), and loss (from those left behind and those who stayed and searched for the others) and hurt (from those that dig too deep beneath it’s skin, those who rage at the sky and their fellow beings that they chase across its skin). Each of those, before returning to the cycle of souls in one way or another (or removed entirely) leaves a bit of itself behind. Not much, just an imprint that is quickly absorbed into the whole.
That’s the way it is for years.
Then, then come the exiles, burning of anger, and rage, and sorrow and Karakura welcomes them, as it has all souls, and learns.
These beings stay together, not leaving, and they wander its streets as the others do and did, but they stay. They do not up and disappear and return and disappear like the others.
Something warm settles in Karakura’s depth. These, these that stay and do not harm it, are its now.
There is the leader, and the violent one. The bouncy one and the one who tries to control it (it is…female? Genders are such hard things to pin on all the creatures within its boundaries). There is the quiet one whom no one wants mad, the one that makes music, and the one that listens. There is another that burrows deep, deep into its skin, uncomfortably deep, but not too much so (it hasn’t reached its core yet, and so for now that is safe enough). That one is joined by two others – becoming a splinter group from Leader and Violent and the others – as they do not stay with the others, though they meet occasionally. There is the one who is content to experiment with its (…his?) power making boxes and awakening a new concept to Karakura’s awareness.
Curiosity.
Karakura has power; it knows its origins as it slowly awakened. Can it do things too?
It is something to try.
There is no mouth for it to form those long chants of the new beings it claims as its own. It cannot immediately, on a whim, conjure translucent boxes that keep everything in or everything out (Karakura wishes it could, as it would be easier to protect those that it has claimed if they would stay inside such a space, like a safe cave. But it can see that these creatures are wary enough and already stifled by being contained in the place they sleep for long periods of time, only moving when they are sure that none might sense their power). But, Karakura has time and patience, for it is stone and soil and plants and life and death. And all of those are patient.
So it starts small, trying to manifest this new power. It has no hands, no head, and no weapon. But it does have a core, a heart, and a well of power that pulses with the rhythm of its streets and its inhabitants.
That is enough.
It begins with a small, almost clear, dome over its core, barely reaching beyond the ephemeral sphere that makes it Karakura and different from the other towns. Karakura holds that sphere, boosts it with the memories and the imprints and the power that thousands, millions of people and beings have given to create it.
The sphere grows.
More and more humans and beings come and pass (to the beyond or by travel) and that feeds its core, expands it and the dome that became a sphere gets larger and larger and begins to touch the town.
And then the new beings come, those who feel not like the ones that it has claimed but like some new power that simmers like lightening.
It has felt these people before, but they have not stayed and now they do, leaving bits and pieces of knowledge and power scattered through the streets. Karakura learns.
The sphere grows and grows, until the entire town is engulfed by it, the people and part of the sky contained within the same orb that carries the heart, the core, of Karakura. Almost as if these people, this town, could replace the core, comprise the core that differentiates Karakura from the other towns and cities and Karakura would respect that, would bleed away until it was nothing more than a regular town once again (because as much as it learns from it’s claimed, there is only so much it can learn and with no one to speak to life is…boring (lonely) and what is its purpose?)
But then the child is born.
Ah, the child…this is its child.
And it has a purpose, built in from all the imprints and powers and memories, to protect this child for it is its. The first to touch it, the first to reach out with fledgling powers and try to comprehend it. Yes, this child is Karakura’s.
But how best to protect it?
Karakura ponders that thought as the child grows, a smiling happy node of power within its expanding core and that warms the town, lightens the air and somehow things are just better under Karakura’s bubble of power.
And then comes the darkness.
Karakura feels when the one its own calls “Mom” dies and is consumed by one of the sparks of darkness that exists within the world. It feels the power of its child flash and flutter and Karakura roars.
THIS IS THE ONE IT CALLS ITS OWN AND THIS CREATURE HAS CAUSED IT PAIN.
But, the creature is gone before Karakura, so used to having time, can react.
That is something that changes.
As the little one grows stronger, grows hardier, grows less happy, and more angry, more slivers of desperation leaking through the initial shell of power, Karakura spends its days trying. Trying and trying and trying and trying.
It has power, that it knows, but it cannot use it freely, bound by the core that it holds in its center but.
But.
Oh, oh, OH it had the answer before the…tragedy (that’s the word, it thinks) happened. Perhaps it could have prevented it.
The people of the town are almost its core itself. It is pulsing in time with their hearts and their steps and their work. It, Karakura, is the people. It is the town. It is the animals and the environment within its sphere.
It can do anything, here, on its land, for it is the land.
So Karakura changes.
~IiI~
It stretches out it arms and legs and cracks its spine and blinks.
Oh, this is what its inhabitants see. Everything seems much…bigger and rectangular. Bizarre.
But that is an exploration for a different time. Now, Karakura has to find its child.
...
...
…It can’t find it’s child.
The power that once reached out to it, grew under its careful watch, is gone. Is gone, and now it permeates the air everywhere and Karakura feels bad as it can feel the power settling into its own core and making it stronger when clearly its child needs the power more.
With a frustrated shriek, Karakura grasps at its new hair and tugs, spinning in circles and chirping at increasingly higher pitches.
It had just made itself so that it could help its child and now it can’t find it where is it, Where Is It, WhErE Is It?
The earth under Karakura, the buildings that comprise the town, begins to shift as it can’t find its child as it once did.
Where? Not at the river. Where? Not the park. Where? Not the hospital. Where? Not the elementary school. Where? Not at the river. Where? Not the supermarket. Where? Not the bookstore. Where? Not the library. Where? Not the karate dojo. Where? Not the river.
It was always at the river.
Why is it not at the river!
Is something wrong at its child’s home?
Where? Where is its child’s home?
The new vessel of Karakura spins one last time before heading out to where the waves of power used to flow. It remembers the place, where the lightening one met another like the ones it claimed as its own (but different – it didn’t claim this one, it recalls, though it cannot remember why…. Oh, because it had a place – it found a place without its help).
And there is its child! Finally!
Karakura twitters and chirps in joy, bounding up the building to where it can catch a glimpse of its child’s brilliant hair, like the sunset that passes it by everyday (which it has finally seen beyond the feeling of fading and returning warmth, and what an experience that was…but it would better with its child safe. Its child is safe now – it is here, someday they will see the sunset together and it will be perfect).
It chirps a welcome at its child, who remains fast asleep in a curled ball on its bed. But, it isn’t comfortable in its sleep. There are tear tracks and frown lines and – why does its child look so worn? Like the crags that are too exposed to the rain and wash away further and further each season because someone stripped from it the protection of grass and shrubbery and trees.
This is ITS CHILD. WHO HAS WORN ITS CHILD AWAY INTO THIS ADULT?
WHO!
Karakura chitters indignantly in the open air, outraged for its child and its own blindness to time.
Its child is in a human body, it knows, and time passes differently (swifter) for those other than itself. And it has missed a great deal of its little one’ life, if what the face its child makes in its sleep is any indication.
Well, that just won’t do. It’s here now, it can make up for the time that it lost because now it can follow its child everywhere – WHAT IS THAT ONE DOING TO ITS CHILD!
Karakura shrieks a war cry and makes to intercept the one attacking its child, but its child, its beautiful, wonderful child, springs awake and throws the attacker through the window. Karakura whistles praise and wander through the now open window to preen its child.
Ah, its hair is just as soft as it thought!
Karakura purrs as it curls around its child’s shoulders, head pillowed on its head. At the same time, it notices that its child is not…whole. It lost something (apparently ages ago) when its mother was eaten, but now…now it has lost more.
That must be why it is not sleeping so well and no longer giving out power. It must be conserving its power – it needs to heal. Karakura can certainly help with that.
Satisfied, Karakura curls tighter around its child and dozes content with simply being with its child. It’s in a prime location to ensure that no further harm comes to its child and in a perfect place to start allowing its child to heal.
Something is off today. Ichigo woke up to his…father’s…usual wake up calls, which haven’t changed since his mother died (and isn’t it usually a bad idea to continue violently waking people up when they’ve been in war? How is the man a doctor again?), but he feels like something was…going to protect him, or had that intention until it realized that he’d already taken care of the problem.
Huh.
That’s a new thought – sure, he’s fought with and for Chad, and alongside Ishida, but the only one who truly protected him was his mom…who hasn’t been alive in nearly a decade.
Puzzling over the feelings of comfort and safety that have been present since he threw his father out the window that morning, Ichigo shrugs and heads off to school. There’s nothing to be done with that puzzle at the moment.
Except, the puzzle gets more complex as the day passes.
It's a usual morning – everyone avoids him, classes are comfortingly boring (even if he knows that he would rather be getting lower marks on his tests and essays – even flat out failing – to having the core ripped from his soul), and lunch is quiet. But, then some idiotic wanna-be Yakuza show up (again – it’s probably the fifth time this month for this group, but it might be more. Ichigo has stopped counting beyond day-to-day experiences).
“Oi, Strawberry! Stopped hanging out with Sado I see!” (Which, no shit Sherlock, they haven’t been hanging together in months.)
But that comment stings more than the testosterone-fuelled idiot will ever know (beyond his takedown being that much more painful), and Ichigo merely deepens his scowl.
“Oi! Strawberry! I’m talking to you!”
“No, really, Ogawa? I thought you were talking to the tree behind me. It certainly has more brain cells than you do.”
“What, you thought I was talking to the tree?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ichigo continues on, as blasé as he can keep his voice, if only because this is his only outlet for his frustration and anger and unrelenting tide of sarcasm that has no focus, not anymore. “I understand that you love kissing the ground so much, you wanted to proposition the tree. I truly feel bad for the poor thing, having to deal with your advances.”
“WHAT! Why you – !”
Thank God there’s a fight coming, because there’s really no point in speaking to them when they’re this slow on the uptake. It’s not like you could have witty banter with Kenpachi, but that was more because he was so focused on fighting that the rest of life didn’t matter instead of apparent incapability….
The fists come, and some chains because the kids are just bright enough to be annoying sometimes, and everything is clear. Ichigo may not have been the one to revel in fights the way his Hollow did, but there’s a certain calm he can always achieve in fights, now, that removes him from the constant absence in his soul.
Of course he has to be careful not to retaliate too much – he’s got enough blood on his hands as it is (and that’s just one more thing to haunt him in the grand scheme of things) – but he fought a war with a sword. He can take a few bullies with his fists and not get drawn…too deeply (now. Before it was a different story, and it’s probably a good thing for some of those thugs that Ichigo knows first aid and carries around the necessities because he’d learned karate as a child and then expanded that knowledge on the streets. Yoruichi and Getaboshi just encouraged him to take a more lethal approach to any weaponizable strength he had. Yeah…had…).
Except, there’s something off, again.
It’s something that feels not unlike his Hollow – a form of possessive protectiveness that Tensa Zangetsu shared. Like Ichigo is theirs and woe betide anyone who tries to hurt him because the only ones allowed to do that are the ones who share his soul and know that, at the end of the day, they’d only ever hurt him so he could grow stronger.
For all that it’s disconcerting to feel when he knows, he knows, that neither being is there and he’s not going to hope otherwise because he’s done that before, but the presence is comforting and makes it easy to forget that any part of him is broken…and has been for months (maybe years).
(All of which, the forgetting, is a lie, Ichigo knows that too, but sometimes…sometimes people need a lie more than they need the truth.)
But the fight is over and Ichigo is still standing and the bullies are scattered on the ground groaning and, a quick look at his phone confirms, the bell will be tolling soon to restart classes. So Ichigo sighs, punches in 1-1-9 on his phone and listens to the other end ring as he walks back to Karakura High.
Another piece to the puzzle that’s making no sense has been added and it's a better distraction from the truth that he is far more broken than he’d let any one believe than he’s come up with before. It makes it easier to resume classes and acting “normal” for the day.
Which is what he does.
(He knows that none of his now former friends are looking at him closely, but he never thought that his love of Shakespeare would be so ironic. Indeed, good sirs and madam, “all the world’s a stage,” and what are we but the players! Having met a goodly number of the so-called “gods” of the beyond, and their tendencies to push off problems or, better still, utilize the ever so popular American “kill it dead” philosophy, I think we can agree – we are the puppets in a grander scheme. Were we not soldiers dancing to the pipers tune, so hastily removing ourselves from the acts of the schoolboy?)
History passes, and Japanese, something else he couldn’t care less about, but parrots back and the teacher passes on to the next student. He isn’t on clean up duty, and he has no commitments today, selling his skills for sports (at least in this he gets paid, and it’s not like he hasn’t done something more dangerous for a year, though it still makes him feel dirty), so it’s a quiet walk back to his sisters.
It’s nearly summer.
It’s nearly summer and he lost his powers nearly five months ago, lost his friends a little less than five months ago, lost his purpose nearly five months ago. He spent the break between first and second year wandering Karakura and avoiding the people who won’t – will point blank refuse – to talk with him about the others he cares about on the other side and the goings on of a corrupt government, about wounds they might have sustained fighting Hollows.
Some days, Ichigo wishes that he could return to wandering (but then he remembers his responsibility to his sisters). Some days, Ichigo wonders if he died today, would his powers return and not leave him so empty (but then he remembers his responsibilities to his sisters)?
(And if he found out and it turns out that his powers did return, well, he’s pretty sure his Hollow would try its damnedest to kill him again, just because he would have, once again, not taken into account how much those two wanted to protect him.)
Ichigo stares blankly at the front of the house, at the wall that was caved in by this whole mess starting for him.
Empty.
The house, his soul, his will.
…He just wants the world to go away…but it won’t and if it did, it wouldn’t give him his powers back.
Then, the same protective feeling flares again (and for some reason, it’s coming from his…neck? In the fight he’d thought that it was from within his soul and he’s disappointed that it’s not (but also strangely relieved – his spirits haven’t seen him this low, this pathetic)), with a warmth that’s been missing for…too long.
He’d lost it at nine, regained a form of it at 15 and lost it the same year.
But it’s back – he doesn’t know how, that’s part of the mystery – but it’s back and maybe, somehow, his spirits have managed to manifest or something (they were a part of him, after all, and he’s never known how to give up), so he allows the hint of a smile to touch his lips and enters the empty, empty house.
(It’s the touch of a real smile on his face, not the ones he pastes there for his sisters on occasions he would have smiled at, once.)
And, he thinks, the house is empty now, my soul is empty now, but there’s nothing preventing me from getting better, getting stronger, so that I can protect them when they get back.
Unseen, Karakura purrs as it feels the tension and weight on its child’s shoulders ease. It’s not gone – it will not for quite some time, and maybe not even after its powers return – but it is happier, has started the path of healing. Good. Karakura can’t wait until its child can see it, and reach for it again with its powers (claiming it back as it once did, for years and years and years).
There is time, yet. It will not lose this one so easily.