Receiving And Bearing

Ichigo decided to take a walk.



Normally, the very idea of taking a walk was anathema to Kurosaki Ichigo. He didn’t understand to point of doing it for enjoyment, because surely you could do anything else you did while walking while doing something else more interesting. He didn’t understand the point of doing it for health and pleasure, because surely you could be playing baseball. Something with rules and a point to it. You couldn’t win at walking and it never got you anywhere if you did it on an asphalt track like the one at his high school. Ichigo had always thought the middle-aged women who jogged around the track with one another were a lot like hamsters spinning a wheel around themselves out of complete and profound boredom.



So with that in mind, Ichigo supposed he was an orange-furred hamster.



He paused in his trudging and lifted one of his feet from the sliding ground, trying to shake the sand out of his open leather sandals unsuccessfully.



Fuck walking.



On the other hand, if Ichigo wasn’t walking, he would have to be heading back in the general direction of Las Noches, which was somewhere he would never want to be, if given another chance. Of course, Ichigo notably wasn’t given another chance; however, under normal circumstances (which, given, were abnormal to begin with), Ichigo usually had no specific reasons to avoid being in a soft, warm bed as opposed to out in the lack-of-most-any-elements that was Hueco Mundo’s white dunes.



Sand. Sand. More fucking sand.



He stared off into the wavering distance, holding a hand over his brow to ward away some of the improbably bright glare of moonlight, trying not to wonder for the seventy-fifth time just exactly where all the ambient light in the godforsaken place was coming from—there wasn’t a sun! How could there be moonlight! The desert undulated off into what must surely have been eternity, laughing in Ichigo’s face and serving to elucidate precisely why everything fucking sucked seven ways to Sunday lately. Ichigo could get lost for all time and go batshit insane just to pass the time, of course. He’d never have to go back to Las Noches, to Aizen and Gin and Ulquiorra and Grimmjow.



Or Ichigo could slug his way back again with sand in his open shoes, back to the castle to deal with the hell that was Other People (loosely speaking).



He wasn’t normally one to make such decisions; normally, Ichigo knew exactly what he wanted, but truly, his circumstances as a prisoner of Aizen and the Arrancar must have been the definition of being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Oh, well. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, right Ichigo? Tired, tired clichés.



Sand in his goddamn sandals.



Images of a wolfish smile and a pair of labyrinthine snake-eyes lurked through Ichigo’s brain, lacking any outward stimuli, with irritating menace. Reluctantly, Ichigo moved to turn back, figuring that emotional hazing and fucking evil sonnuvabitches were slightly preferable to being Alone in the desert with Himself. It was a sad state of the world, when the scariest people in your life weren’t the cold-blooded mankillers but the ones inside your own head—that Hollow. It had been far, far too long since Ichigo had any contact with Hirako Shinji or Urahara Kisuke and less lengthy but more noticeable was the absence of Zangetsu. The sealed sword caught in his black belt grew heavier where it slapped against Ichigo’s thigh. Some manifestation of how it was weighing on his mind recently.



Go back to the Arrancar so that they could make you feel human again.



But first? Ichigo really had to take a piss.



He unfastened the black cummerbund over his baggy hakama, throwing it over his shoulder for safekeeping and away from the gritty crystal-sands, because the stuff got everywhere if given the chance and was impossible to get rid of even under perfect conditions, and besides which Ichigo hardly wanted to track more of it into his bedroom. Too many walks lately.



Holding the hakama up at mid-thigh—away from the ground--with one hand, Ichigo took himself in palm and leaned back, letting loose with a gentle sigh of relief. It was the simple pleasures in life that kept him going these days, when he was so low on the hierarchy of needs. Pissing, eating. It was really pathetic on many, many levels. At least nobody was around to see all of the pathetic behavior.



At least this was more interesting than dunes. Ichigo watched the stream hit the sand below him, wetting and darkening and clumping the sand and making it look for all the world like it was waiting for something to come along and make a sandcastle of it, like his sisters used to do on the beach when his father would take them on family vacations. The sort of mundane ‘smell the roses’ bullshit that people did before they knew one of their parents wasn’t strictly human, and neither were they. Ichigo knew now. Just once, they’d let the man up to visit Ichigo. That had been the mother of all doozies, that sudden big reveal. Although the circumstances had made Ichigo more relieved than anything.



His father was a Shinigami, which meant that on some level he would understand Ichigo’s absence. He could only hope his father had told his sisters, so that they wouldn’t grow up to hate him.



If he ever saw their sweet little heart-shaped faces again.



All of this, it was about that third level of the hierarchy, after physiological needs and personal safety needs were ensured. Right now, Ichigo couldn’t get past the second level. He could die tomorrow, if he stopped being useful, if Aizen won or if Aizen lost or if he went and pissed off the wrong sort of Arrancar, because some of them really didn’t care much for structure (Grimmjow, for instance—his mind always seemed to drift back to that). Although Ichigo would strongly like to think of himself as not being a coward, there came a point in one’s life when they had to buck up and admit to themselves that nobody actually wanted to be a fucking martyr, deep down in the dirty, dirty, particularly honest bits of their minds and souls. There was a worried and realistic change of heart, when one realized that their very personal and tangible actions and decisions were not really kindling a fire so much as a funeral pyre; built bright and hot and high and waiting for them to be thrown upon it.



They stopped fighting and started watching over their shoulders when it was their ass that everyone wanted to burn, because then they would be Safe.



Ichigo wondered when he would feel Safe. He fervently hoped that it would be never, because giving in meant giving up or some other bullshit platitude they told you in self-esteem seminars given by visiting celebrities or dignitaries—positive psychology.



Ichigo chiefly hoped it was never that he would feel Safe because feeling that way meant getting to the third level on the hierarchy.



Without family and friends surrounding you, in a strange place, after safety came—



A large hand clapped down on Ichigo’s shoulder and he jumped, heart fluttering into his throat as his head turned uncomfortably to see what was going on, where the touch had come from. Ichigo pinched his foreskin between fingernails in need of a clipping, surprised, thin blood trickles and hot pain-tears seeping out of the corners of his squinting eyes.



It was only Grimmjow. ‘Only’ Grimmjow.



“Fuck!”



Grimmjow cackled his supreme amusement from behind Ichigo’s ear. Ichigo’s skin broke out in nervous gooseflesh, traveling across his extremeties and working toward his core, caught in the middle of nowhere with his fucking pants around his ankles and his hand around his dick, literally and figuratively.



“Grimmjow,” Ichigo bit out, “I am trying. To take. A fucking. Piss.”



“Noticed you were trying to take a fucking piss,” Grimmjow sniggered, shoving Ichigo to the side slightly.



Ichigo shuffled slightly to the side from the force of Grimmjow’s palm against his side, using every bit of his hard-learned Shinigami footwork to avoid his own dark, wet spot in the sand. Grimmjow Jaegerjaques was a pig and a weasel and a dog. Ichigo should grab him by his obnoxiously blue head right now, shove his face into that shit and shout ‘Bad kitty!’ in his ear. It would give him immense satisfaction for at least two weeks, provided Grimmjow did not immediately eviscerate him.



“Smells like shit. Reminds me that I haven’t done that in around a year now, and I been drinking that tea of Aizen’s sometimes.... Maybe I’ll join you for a good one.”



“Done what?” Ichigo grouched, knowing immediately that he should not have done this, asked Grimmjow what in the world he could possibly join Ichigo in doing that he hadn’t in a year.



“Taken a good piss. I don’t strictly got to, since it’ll all come out as reishi eventually, but I sure as hell can if I goddamn want to.”



“Weird.” Ichigo grimaced. All this talk about Arrancar and reishi and pissing, it was a reminder that his captors were not, in the strictest sense, anywhere near human.



Grimmjow leaned a hard, hot shoulder against Ichigo’s side; surprisingly gentle pressure as their vests slid against one another with only the slightest amount of friction, high thread-counts, expensive linen—Aizen dressed his representatives well. He proceeded to follow Ichigo’s own example, fumbling with his hakama and gripping the belt and his pants in one hand, that groin that still seemed familiar to Ichigo bared to the world.



Ichigo could have reached to his side and sliced it right off then and there with a slip of his hand, along with other pieces of Grimmjow’s anatomy; he was enjoying a good leak at Ichigo’s side, not a cigarette paper could have fit between them. Not a sword slid in edge-wise. Ichigo’s eyes shifted and eventually stared down the length of Grimmjow’s hard chest, over the impossibly and unnaturally defined abs, artificially created by the magic of Urahara’s stupid stone (or perhaps by God, in a manner of speaking, if one wanted to go so far about Aizen Sousuke as Aizen Sousuke was willing to go about himself) in the epitome his own fucking image.



Ichigo’s heavy look traced the hole, watching the way the un-sunlight-moonlight played inside of it, little rolling shadows like staring into a car tire. Ichigo craned his neck, growing brave, glancing over Grimmjow’s white-clothed shoulder to stare at the way the back of his vest barely brushed the top of the empty spot.



“What’s wrong, red? Somethin’ on your mind lately about little old me?” The words flowed from Grimmjow’s mouth like sesame oil onto a wok, greasy and searing.



“Nothing,” Ichigo hissed antisocially, shaking twice and pulling up his pants with an angry jerk.



Grimmjow just shrugged, bumping Ichigo slightly off balance with his sharp elbow, and Ichigo stepped away from the other man. He glowered hotly over as he slipped his black band off of his shoulder and up over his sandaled and stockinged legs, tightly around his waist once again; mostly restoring what was left of Ichigo’s admitted stupidly and preciously human dignity (in a way, he should have been proud of that fact). The Vaizard wiped his hands off on the loose, pleated fabric over his ass, eyes flickering to Grimmjow as he also finished his business, catching a shock of blue, a hint of that trail of hair that disappeared into nothing just as it had every time Ichigo’s seen it before.



Grimmjow was almost human, except for that gaping hole.



He was completely vulnerable in front of Kurosaki Ichigo, sword once again looped through his belt, and it slowly dawned on Ichigo that Grimmjow was apologizing and propositioning at the same time, behavior coy and bastardly and yet for once in three years completely non-antagonistic. A definite apology, in its own inhuman way. Ichigo wanted to kill himself on the spot, because he was willing to accept this sort of friendly behavior from Grimmjow Jaegerjaques without arguing and shoving away. Ichigo was fairly certain that if he would except it in this desert, in this instant, he would also be willing to do so in the foreseeable future.



After safety on the hierarchy, came social intimacy.