Receiving And Bearing

Ichigo found himself walking down the empty white hallways of Las Noches, slick soles of his leather sandals scratching slightly on the surface of the marble floors. He was seeking out Grimmjow Jaegerjaques, an Arrancar, of his own accord. At one point in time the very idea would have been crazy, but for any reason other than to slice the man’s head clean off his broad shoulders. The thought made Ichigo nervous but his mind was demanding a chance to have a face-to-face talk with Grimmjow, about the other day, about Ulquiorra and the little red welts.



At least Grimmjow seemed the majority of the time to be honest and palpably real, unlike everything else in the sterile world—so much like Soul Society in makeup but different on every single level. It was true that he’d sought Grimmjow out before, once or twice a month recently, but in the past Grimmjow had only come to Ichigo’s mind when he wanted someone to blame for everything that was horrible in all of fucking existence; somebody who wouldn’t just accept it from the Very Important Prisoner like a good pawn and who would defend himself bodily if need-be, sharp fists tearing into Grimmjow’s cheek or a palm shoving roughly at his chest.



Today, Kurosaki Ichigo sought Grimmjow Jaegerjaques out for solid company and serious discussion.



“Grimm. I’m bored,” Ichigo grumbled (it was only partially a lie) and rubbed at the thin orange-brown stubble on his chin as he walked into one of the many mile-high towers that littered the round edges of Las Noches. Ichigo’s face was crankier than usual, broad lower lip turned sharply down. He’d found the subject of his search engaged in a mostly one-sided conversation with Wonderwyce Maljera (who had always given Ichigo weird feelings in his stomach, queasiness like eating too many peanuts on an empty stomach), small Arrancar’s wide blue eyes giving Ichigo a look that could almost be described as relieved.



Grimmjow cleared his throat roughly. Ichigo’s hands shuffled in the white vest over his chest. The sounds cumulatively pronounced an order to the boy that was suddenly a third wheel in the conversation. Wonderwyce, carefully picking up on the body language from both of them, bit his lip and left in a hurry with a discontented noise, scurrying past Ichigo and down the same hallway Ichigo’d come down to get there.



Yeah, he pretty much freaked Ichigo’s shit out.



“Why the fuck should I care? That you’re bored and whiney about it?” Grimmjow scowled, face falling as he obligingly walked closer to Ichigo, exaggerated facial expression partially hidden behind the mask. That familiar suggestive sneer.



“Go masturbate or something.”



“You’re a fucking pig. And you should care because you’re just as bored as I am and you know it, you giant asshole.” Ichigo looked Grimmjow in the eyes, unblinking, chin tilted up. That look of conceit and cockiness like he didn’t care who Grimmjow was and what he could do. It was the easiest and most sure-fire way to get under the Arrancar’s skin.



After a second of staring, Grimmjow looked away from their eye-lock first and appeared to be considering the situation at hand, head tilted to one side, cheek resting on the boney knuckles of his hand. It made Ichigo uneasy when Grimmjow looked like he was thinking because it usually meant that he was, that it was something no-good, and that he wanted Ichigo to be very aware of both of the above. Suddenly, the Arrancar did what was expected of him from every other time they’d played this particular game—he smiled.



“Grimm.” Ichigo was forced immediately to regret his decision to seek Grimmjow out. “I don’t know what it is, but no. Or don’t. Or I don’t want to. Just—no.”



Grimmjow simply shrugged and scratched his ear. Ichigo was suddenly finding the perfectly natural desire within himself to run the fuck away and to do it as quickly as possible (having realized the danger leaking out into the air around them), but Grimmjow’s whipcord arm shot out before Ichigo could act on his impulse. It wrapped itself in the soft linen fabric of Ichigo’s intricate white, it was always white, vest. Hauling backwards, Grimmjow lifted Ichigo easily off of theground, an inch or three from the floor, Ichigo’s toes still finding the smallest amount of purchase on the slick stone as he started to struggle. The first time they’d done this in Hueco Mundo, the first time Grimmjow had snatched him and hauled him up, Ichigo suddenly remembered that he’d kicked his legs wide and thrashed, completely off of the floor and feeling immensely vulnerable. That was years ago. This time, Ichigo was more angry than vulnerable.



“Oh shi—“



Grimmjow tossed Ichigo with as much effortless strength as was apparently necessary to be somehow classified in Grimmjow’s mind as ‘something not boring,’ sending the Vaizard on a barely controlled careen vertically through the air and, ultimately, out a goddamn window.



Ichigo hit the ground with a wet, organic sound and tumbled a few times on the white sand-substance outside of the building before catching himself, hardening the air below him into a strip of solid with a wave of reiatsu so that the grains didn’t dig apart his skin wherever it was exposed. By the time Ichigo’s vision had stopped swimming from the sudden motion, Grimmjow was perched in the frame of the tall, thin window like some sort of sick modern statuary, smoothing a hand through his bright hair. Laughing like this was all so very, very hilarious. Ichigo took off in the opposite direction across the ground, slow in the sand and even slower when the dunes started to form, feet sinking with each step, small heels digging into the shifting substance.



Grimmjow launched himself lightly from the window in the graceful and inhuman sort of way Ichigo could never even imagine mastering himself, like a cat (and Ichigo knew that descriptor to be horrifyingly accurate; memories of his own blood splattering across the desert). The Arrancar landed in front of Ichigo with a soft sound in the sand, betraying the solid weight of his body. He snatched Ichigo by the shirtfront a second time with a high-pitched noise, a bubbling giggle.



“Are we havin’ fun yet, red?”



“Chinese checkers, we could have played Chinese checkers,” Ichigo growled, still wincing and sucking for breath from the impact of his ribcage against hard ground. Grimmjow tossed him again, affording him no indecision, joints snapping audibly under Ichigo’s frame as it came down. He hit the ground hard, skin of his wrist and forehead abraded away; a tiny trickle of oxygen-rich red blood.



He smirked back at the Arrancar, smearing the blood off of his forehead. Forehead wounds, he recalled, they bled a lot. It welled up and dribbled down and stained the white cuff of his tailored sleeve.



“Jan ken pon. Charades. Hopscotch. Putting buckets of water over doors. Could have been anything. All I said was I was bored, so why are you chasing me around like a fucking maniac? You think I fucking enjoy getting kicked around in the morning? I’m not a sadist like you.”



“Hah,” barked Grimmjow, kicking the white sand up around himself with his toes, like some over-excited boy. It sparkled in the vague outdoor moonlight that always seemed to come from no source in particular, likely because this is just what occurred—Ichigo had noticed over the years that the desert was navigable even under a new moon.



“Because I am a fucking maniac,” the blue-haired man continued, marching forward through the sand. “And because you were itching to do this just as much as I was, so just fucking admit it already. Getting hoity-toity talks from the Ulqui-bitch last night too, I take it? I got one afterwards, just so’s there’s no secrets between us. You ain’t bored. You’re pissed the hell off at the world and you can’t do a damn thing about it, just like me.”



“No,” said Ichigo, lying through his clenched teeth. “That’s not it at all. I’m bored as sin. I haven’t even seen weather that’s not a sandstorm in three goddamn years. Weather! There was a time in my stupid life when I could not imagine living in a reality where there is a total absence of fucking weather! I am bored and I can’t even feel rain on my head, Grimmjow!”



Ichigo shot off into the distance again over the sand, slipping shunpo into his flight, heading into the infinite nothingness of Hueco Mundo while staring over his shoulder at Grimmjow with wide, angry eyes.



“At least it’s never shitty weather if there’s only one type of it, am I right?” Grimmjow cackled, thoroughly entertained by his own joke. Ichigo snarled as he took off in pursuit, on the chase again slowly catching up to the younger man as he exhausted himself running through the endless, pointless, stupid desert. The expression on Grimmjow’s face was worrying, eyes narrowed against the breeze and the particles of crystal in the air.



“And you’re a filthy liar, Kurosaki ichigo. So march your happy ass back here and let me fuck you the hell up!”



Ichigo stopped cold, skidding to a hault in the soft terrain, warm sands pooling over his toes beneath the thin black fabric of his socks. Grimmjow plowed into his side, not having been paying a great deal of attention to what was actually going on, caught in sonido, too amused at his own cleverness in spotting what he apparently assumed were Ichigo’s convoluted motives. Both of them tangled together and fell to the ground.



Crack, said their heads, meeting as they rolled.



“One of these days,” Grimmjow grunted, pinning Ichigo to the ground by his shoulders, splayed fingers digging into the thin skin as the split on his lip that had opened when they fell oozed black liquid, dark Arrancar blood. “I’m finally going to kill Ulquiorra. Then I’m gonna piss on his perfect little face.”



“Well,” Ichigo growled, nostrils flaring from effort as he bucking against the Arrancar’s surprising weight. “What the fuck do you want me to say, you have my blessing? Don’t get me involved in any killing-of-other-people bullshit, especially if you’re going to be gross and piss all over them afterwards. I’m not saying that guy doesn’t need taken down a peg, but it’s hardly any of my fucking business in this case.”



“Like you actually think of any of us as people.”



Grimmjow’s smile grew wider in a fashion Ichigo could only decide was vaguely dangerous, wrinkling the markings at the edges of his shining eyes. Snap, mouth open and shining like a switchknife. Ichigo yanked his shoulder loose with a jerk, punching Grimmjow across his sharp jaw with as much force as he could muster while dizzy and supine. Grimmjow shook it off, laughed. Ichigo used the momentum of his jerking shoulders to flip them over bodily, splattering the Arrancar’s face with the sweat-dilluted blood from his own forehead; dots of gore across pink skin. Grimmjow wrinkled his nose and licked at his split lip.



“Like you’d give a damn if I tore his head from his body. He tried to poke a hole through you, fucked up little--”



“And you tried to slice me in half!”



Ichigo moved one long leg to pin Grimmjow’s strong thigh to the ground, quartz sand susserating around them, bodies sinking only slightly s they struggled. Grimmjow spit at Ichigo, still smiling, saliva darkened by his bleeding lip. It dripped slowly down the planes of the Vaizard’s face, sliding down the column of his neck and around it, toward the sand they lay on.



“Careful.”



“Nng?” Ichigo grunted without words, confused by the sudden sly tone to Grimmjow’s gravelly voice. Careful. Careful. Be careful of what, aside from everything in a place like Hueco Mundo?



“You might start enjoying yourself if you’re not careful. They’re turning black and yellow again. Your eyes. That means he’s around, don’t it?”



Ichigo froze. The sand stopped whispering. Silence except for the sounds of both of their hearts.



“Ha-cha,” cackled Grimmjow, a snapping noise, a noise that would have been comical to Ichigo from the man’s wide mouth in any other situation. Having worked a hand free as Ichigo sat before him, Grimmjow pressed his heated, dry palm against the underside of Ichigo’s chin and pressed upward suddenly, snapping the other man’s orange head back with a sickly sound, snat!, sending him across the ground for a third time in so many minutes.



The presence at the back of his head when Ichigo felt least human, it was back again, rolling up to the surface like something big and nasty from an ocean trench. It would be there soon, encouraging Ichigo even while his conscience said, end this.



Grimmjow pounced upon Ichigo again without a second’s hesitation, fingers digging into muscle, roaming for an indisputable grip wherever they please, hurting. They struggled together for two or three minutes tumbling over, one on top of another, clawing at faces and punching at places where bones were near the surface, where they would feel it the most; a stalemate, until Ichigo had an idea he knew immediately he may later regret. Ichigo insinuated one gangly arm into the disturbing hole in Grimmjow’s abdomen, the one that had haunted his dreams (the little of them that he remembered) over the last ‘night.’ He ignored the impossible softness of the thickened, exposed darker skin that covered its surface, a thicker texture like some kind of protection measure, keeping things like Ichigo from getting too familiar with any organs below the surface there. He gripped the dark interior lining of the back of the Arrancar’s white vest through it, tying the two together like a metal brain-teaser from out of a vending machine.



Stuck.



Grimmjow shuffled against Ichigo’s leg, bumping against the other man’s knee which dug painfully into Grimmjow’s hard hip as Ichigo lay below him, twin white hakama slipping roughly against one another. Ichigo gave a further tug at the black fabric and Grimmjow fell against him, pressing a noticeable hard-on against Ichigo’s clad upper thigh. It had to be; there was no other possible explanation for the size, the location. It had to be an erection and not a small one. Ichigo blanched, eyes flashing back to cinnamon-tones as the blackness leaked away.



Thoughts of blue hair and a naked groin surfaced.



“What—“



Grimmjow groaned roughly and pressed against Ichigo, vibrating Ichigo’s chest over his thudding heart, leaning down and against Ichigo and sinking his teeth suddenly into the Vaizard’s tender neck, scraping the side of his confused face with the boney jaw-section of a hollow mask that hovered outlandishly, centimeters above Grimmjow’s face, texture like a cuttlefish bone.



Grimmjow pulled away before Ichigo could start struggling from beneath him, gasping, warm and wet breath nauseating against Ichigo’s lips, Ichigo still beneath him. Ichigo wanted to bolt, feeling an instinctual need to get away from the heavy breath, like something caught by a big black thing that stalked jungles. He wanted to get away from the cock pressed against his upper thigh. The younger man was shaking slightly as the adrenaline ebbed all at once from his system, replaced by confusion and revulsion, physical fight with Grimmjow having ending without warning or prompt.



Ichigo’s head slid to the side, staring blankly across the mockingly endless expanse of colorless desert. He could feel blood rising up along his face and neck, mixing with the saliva that had been slowly drying. Grimmjow’s hips moved against him and he jumped, mouth snapping open.



“This is bent! What the fuck is wrong with you?”



“Wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you, red?”



“Get the hell off of me.”



Grimmjow growled but reluctantly did what Ichigo asked of him, sliding off quickly and standing with an uncomfortable-looking stoop in his back, shaking sand out of his thick hair. Ichigo sat up immediately, head throbbing, acid burning at the back of his throat as his stomach churned violently.



“When I pulled you down. You were hard—“



“Don’t flatter yourself, bitch,” Grimmjow scowled at Ichigo, turning and walking back toward the mosque-castle. “I was excited, sue me. It was turning out to be a good fight but hey, you went and ruined it because you can’t fucking cope, you giant pussy.”



Ichigo scowled, spitting out some wet grains of sand, blood and froth, wiping his mouth with the back of a raw hand.



“Could be worse, you fucking asshole. You think this is funny? Sorry if I can’t, you know, deal but you’re an evil, messed up bastard and I’m an undead virgin.”



Grimmjow only laughed at him, turning and moving back to Las Noches.