Receiving And Bearing

The full moon glowered down on the dark, inexplicably hot desert like a heat-lamp in a fast food restaurant, turning anyone brave or stupid enough to sit out in the weather all salty and greasy and red in the face and chest. Ichigo almost enjoyed it, the salty and red in the face. It was warmer than usual outside because of the full moon (weather was strange in Hueco Mundo), but it always felt warmer than usual lately. Ichigo was beginning to think he couldn’t run anywhere to get away from his conscience, even out here where the only things that obscured your perfect view of infinite sands were the curling waves of rising air coming off the dunes and the occasional tiny ersatz animal—low-powered and identity-less Hollow beasts.



At the very least, staying out too long would allow Ichigo the entertainment of hours of sloughing off in large pieces, the dead skin that he could peel after the sunburn (moonburn?) began to heal.



Who’d have ever thought a dead man could get sunburn, anyway? Certainly not Ichigo, certainly not years ago.



He had a smallish bottle somewhere, a thermos of water he gathered from the inexplicable spring that came out of a wall in Las Noches, the one he still visited weekly despite the private western full bath in his living quarters. It seemed like a good time to use it, the water, and as Ichigo wasn’t feeling particularly thirsty despite the oppressive temperatures. The obvious use, therefore, was to upend the water over his shaggy head. Ichigo did so, yelping (a happy, boyish sort of noise, an exaltation) at the sudden cold and shaking his orange hair out. It dispersed the water in a chilly mist over his naked chest and broad shoulders; a chilly must which warmed all too quickly.



Ichigo spread out across the rock, the constant brightness of that huge full moon making him tired in that psychological sort of way, like a classroom with flourescent lighting on a warm early-summer day, a week before break.



During a lesson on English, while Ichigo’s pen hovered over his paper and not knowing where his hand should drop the comma.



Ichigo wondered, someplace in the forefront of his stream of consciousness as it tumbled from one vaguely related memory to another, how his little twin sisters were doing in school right now (they would be three years older, almost as old as Ichigo had been when he began all of this business of being dead); the ones he hoped he was still protecting from his prison-room in Las Noches, in a convoluted sort of fashion. If nothing else, Ichigo knew that he had saved Inoue Orihime. Thoughts of family were quickly washed down the stream, dislodged logs, as Ichigo’s ears picked up the whispering sound of slick leather soles crunching across the sand. He rolled over on top of the black rock rising from the ground, holding himself up with his elbows.



It was Grimmjow Jaegerjaques, as luck would have it.



“Grimmjow,” Ichigo said noncommittally, with bored irritation.



Grimmjow finished his casual little walk over to the obsidian rock, pulling his broad hands out of the gaps of his hakama and pressing his rough palm against the stone, pulling himself onto the relatively flat, cleaved-crystal surface. The expensive linen of his hakama slid easily over the smoothness, sending him to a sliding stop sitting at Ichigo's warm side, wrist bumping gently against the Vaizard’s naked, bared bicep. Ichigo jerked away as if seared, ignoring the way Grimmjow’s light touch sent a frisson through his nerves; an almost pleasurable little shiver of nervousness.



Grimmjow must have noticed; he scowled and sat up more rigidly.



“Hiding from me still?”



“No,” Ichigo muttered defensively, whatever positive mood he had been nursing suddenly flown away. “Although I’d be in the right if I was avoiding your ass, I’m actually just out here because I have nothing else to do and it’s better than being in there and with all of them.”



“Heh. You say them like I’m not included on that side of the old Us’n’Them equation. Tell me I’m not reading too far into things, because I’m pretty sure I’m not, am I?”



Ichigo grew silent for thirty or forty seconds, so quiet that he could hear the beating of his own heart in the back of his ears and the cracking of the muscles in the palms of his hands. Grimmjow’s blue eyes were staring at his own toes, curling and uncurling in the thin fabric of his black uniform socks. The leather of his sandals creaked.



Ichigo hadn’t meant it that way, as a way of including Grimmjow as a creature closer to Ichigo as opposed to the other Arrancar—there was no way he would do that intentionally. Not intentionally. This whole charade on the rock was just…Grimmjow playing semantics head games with him; Ichigo should ignore it and tell the Arrancar to get lost, go home, shoo. Ichigo should, except for that niggling notion swirling around in his mental objections that maybe, Grimmjow’s words had a few shades of the truth in them.



Ichigo was, after all, allowing Grimmjow to lounge beside him for no good reason at all.



Was it really that way, us-- Ichigo and the people he could stand to converse with --and them-- creatures like Ulquiorra Schiffer who had once dug a thick hole into Ichigo’s throat, cut off his breathing. Was it possible that Grimmjow was just inserting himself at will into Ichigo’s current life? Was it you, me and those other guys, as opposed to us and them? Pronouns, it seemed, could be things dangerous to your sense of the way the world worked.



Did stupid little pronouns really matter, in the long run?



Grimmjow’s gravelly voice from over Ichigo’s shoulder broke the young man out of his fairly pointless but bothersome internal musings.



“You got any of that water I saw you with left?“



Grimmjow leaned back into the stand of stone that Ichigo himself was curled against, hissing when the hot blackness burned against his back even through the vest for that first second, like lying on the sun-beaten patch of cement at a public swimming pool during the dog days of summer. Ichigo’s stream of consciousness tried to flow back to those thoughts of his youth.



“No, I just used it all up,” said Ichigo at length, before becoming very reasonably suspicious about the other man’s words. “How did you know about--”



“Stalkin’ you,” Grimmjow simpered.



“Heard through the grapevine you got told off for doing shit like that, Grimmjow. Aren’t you officially supposed to be staying far the fuck away from me or else?”



Ichigo’s nose wrinkled in irritation, tongue darting out from between pink lips to lick a drop of sweat gathering above them, more small drips and rivulets threatening to join the first as they made their way down his face from his bright hairline. At least the sweat wasn’t in Ichigo’s eyes yet; he didn’t know if he could make it across the glaring crystal-sands with salt-sore eyes. The full moon loomed like a pregnant white seahorse. The environment already made the Vaizard squint until his vision was obscured by his own thick eyelashes—it reminded Ichigo of a clear, snowy winter night, except for the complete lack of a chill. There was no need to aggravate this.



“What’s the grapevine’s name so I can make it not need one anymore?” groused Grimmjow, fidgeting beside Ichigo.



“It was fucking Yammy who told me about Ulquiorra’s little lecture to you about me, okay? Please do pick a damn fight with him so that one of you ends up dead at the end of it. It could only work out in my favor if it happened.”



My side. My favor. Us and them.



“Feh. Not worth it to pick a fight with someone like Yammy. No fun in it at all for me.”



“Keh.”



They lay there side-by-side, stewing in mutual and uncomfortable silence. Eventually, the hollow-lizard skittered away and buried itself in the sand with its brothers, having decided that there was nothing worth its while in the world at that time, or some other such thought that Ichigo’s imagination attributed to it. Ichigo wanted to join it, hidden away and alone. The heat was obviously boiling his brain where he sat, because Ichigo was considering things he knew he really ought not to be considering in a million billion years; things such as actually not giving Grimmjow Jaegerjaques the definitive and sometimes even effective Kurosaki Cold Shoulder.



“Grimmjow,” he said without any real intonation—a conversation starter. He sometimes wondered why he did stupid shit like that, knowing he would regret it. In the end, Ichigo decided that it was so that he didn’t rue the possibility of what would have happened otherwise.



“Yeah, red?”



Grimmjow replied to Ichigo’s prompt suspiciously but obligingly, resting the side of his head on one shoulder, wide expanse of bone-white teeth set into the remnants of the Arrancar’s Hollow mask even more disturbing from that position. Ichigo hesitated momentarily; something about the predatory look that lingered perpetually in that pointed face always made him want to run away and hide.



Run away to where, that was the issue that always kept Ichigo’s feet stilled.



“It’s really fucking hot out here.”



“You ever been out here during a good storm?”



“No,” Ichigo replied honestly.



He never had been, not since the first time they idiotically charged Hueco Mundo, those years ago when the small group of them had ended up half-dead and at a stalemate, healed by Inoue Orihime, battled, healed again (Ichigo was reminded why he had chosen to take Inoue’s place in Hueco Mundo, as without her intervention both he and the blue-haired Arrancar would have been dead right now, more dead). He hadn’t gone outside in a sandstorm since the others had left and he had stayed behind. Ichigo’s mind was sure it wouldn’t be safe, in the same way a four year old boy is sure there was a monster waiting in his closet for him if he dared get off the bed until the light of morning.



“There’s lightning in them, sometimes. It’s almost like a rainstorm if you ignore the way it tears your skin.”



Ichigo wasn’t sure where the blue-haired man was going with this. “Then why the hell would I want to be out in one? Is there a good reason for me to want to have my skin blasted away?”



“It’s fucking exciting and that’s the long and short of it. Gotta get your excitement somewhere in a place like this and the Hollows have learned to hide themselves real fucking well ever since those three Shinigami came to town. And sometimes it gets so cold out here it could freeze the nipples off a marble statue’s tits. Weather’s like canyon, you gotta be at one side or the other. No middle ground. You ever feel like it’s too hot, you just think about the poor dumb shit lizards that live out here and imagine going between one-hundred and then twenty degrees once a fucking month.”



“Wow,” Ichigo said, with less sarcasm than he’d really wished he could have mustered. “That was kind of deep, Grimmjow, in an incredibly idiotic and disgusting way.”



“Yeah,” said Grimmjow with a startling sort of seriousness which Ichigo found instantly foreboding. “So I guess that means since you can find at least one decent quality in me that you should let me fuck you into pieces.”



Ichigo flipped completely over onto his side and stared at the Arrancar. Grimmjow’s face split with a suggestive grin. He didn’t say another word and didn’t discourage the horrified expression Ichigo was shooting him.



“Fuck you, Grimmjow Jaegerjaques.”



“That’s also kind of workable, but I‘m gonna have to ask you to consider my suggestion first, ‘cause it might take some convincing the other way around and I’ll make sure you’ll owe me for life if that one comes off.”



Grimmjow snickered, voice dropping into a throaty purr. The threatening seriousness never left his expression and Ichigo wished so very, very hard that it had. He would have been almost okay with it, if it was all a sick joke on Grimmjow’s part, more of that taking the piss out of Ichigo for being a cocky bastard (although he never did understand why Grimmjow could see someone else as cocky).



Unfortunately, Grimmjow Jaegerjaques wasin fact, quite seriously propositioning Ichigo. It shouldn’t come as a surprise; Ichigo vaguely recalled instances in the distant past that were a little too close for comfort, touches more familiar than they should have been, Grimmjow’s breath on the back of his neck, wet. He recalled vividly a hard organ pressed against his clothed hip in the recent past, a struggle in the sand. But Grimmjow had just with a straight face and a plain voice asked to have sex with Ichigo—to fuck him. Grimmjow asked Ichigo to do something, without doing whatever he damn well pleased. Asked, before doing.



Ichigo’s stomach twitched inside of him, bile threatening to rise.



“I’m not fucking gay,” Ichigo rasped, throat tightening with confusionand nervousness; a twinge of resentment coloring the edges of his vision red.



Grimmjow threw his head back and laughed in Ichigo’s face in deep, individual chuckles, heavy and thick as motor oil pouring out of the thin neck of a bottle. The denial in the laughter only served to lubricate Ichigo’s slowly burning anger.



“Complete and utter horseshit. You ain’t gay? That kind of bullshit human sentiment doesn‘t exist in a situation like this. There’s rules and labels, sure, but they ain’t about gender, you fucking moron. They’re about power. How fucking rich.”



Grimmjow finally sobered up, staring right into Ichigo’s bright face with wet eyes.



“You really think a dog gives half a shit what kind of naughty parts another dog has, just so long as there’s a willing backside to hump? It’s all dirty anyway, every time you pick your nose when you think nobody’s looking, every time you scratch where it really itches and smell what’s on your hand after you come. How fucking human of you, to think you‘re a stand above everything else. What a fucking riot you are, Kurosaki Ichigo.”



“Shut the hell up. You just shut the hell up.”



Ichigo scrambled to stand up, shaking his head violently at Grimmjow, words tumbling from his mouth like oily, rotten things.



“There’s only one fucking dog in a twenty foot radius here, Grimmjow, and he‘s barking up the wrong tree.”



“Two of them.“



Grimmjow’s blue eyes narrowed, but the mocking, toothy grin never left the Arrancar’s face; like Grimmjow woke up each morning, took it out of a drawer and pinned it there for the day just to make Ichigo sick to his stomach.



“One dog and one whiny-ass simpering bitch.”



“Are you twelve, you giant asshole?”



“You get off your high-horse before you start worrying about the little names I’m calling you, red. This is fucking Hueco Mundo, you think me making fun of you is the worst shit that’s ever happened right where we’re standin’ now? It‘s just sex this is all about! Nature‘s answer to stress, anxiety, insomnia and your boredom. I scratched your back twice, remember. I‘ve got the fucking itch now, bitch, and it’s a good time to pay up on your favors.”



Ichigo was at his emotional limit, now—not an overemotional man by nature or by choice, but Grimmjow was an oppressive presence, a stronger personality than his own could ever hope to be. Ichigo was at the point where if he didn’t leave the situation and get far away from Grimmjow, he was going to do something he would strongly regret.



Ichigo didn’t want to have any more regrets to haunt him as he lay in bed clutching the scabbard of his sword, sleepless.



“Grimmjow,” he hissed, hopping down from the rock and refusing to meet Grimmjow‘s one-hundred-twenty-colors-crayon-box-blue. Knowing he actually liked the color of the fucking things, on days when Ichigo was feeling a little less bitter than usual and a little more elastic to new experiences.



“It’s not just sex when you’re in my fucking position. You actually did have about one chance in a fucking thousand of this actually working, and then you blew it by having a completely reprehensible personality and being a psychotic monster just like I knew you were all along. Go die somewhere.”



Ichigo stood quickly, turned on the heels of his sandals and stalked off.



“Woman!” Grimmjow cat-called from a distance, not moving from the rock to chase the Vaizard.



As Ichigo fled the scene, Ulquiorra Schiffer produced himself from a tall, narrow doorway on the massive white walls of Las Noches and ghosted past Ichigo (who was on his way to go lock himself into his room and punch things until his knuckles ran with blood). Ichigo turned his head momentarily, face red and knuckles white, to watch the Quatro Espada approaching the place where Grimmjow still sat, mouth open impossibly wide as he was laughing.



Ulquiorra looked even smaller to Ichigo, against the white nothingness. A curious deception.



Ichigo forcefully turned his glare away from the two and willed his stiff legs, sore joints, to move a little more quickly. He should stayed there, he thought, nearby to both of them so that he could tell Ulquiorra they were just…having a little chat, out in the desert, and look—no injuries this time. Ichigo could lie to Ulquiorra Schiffer until he left Ichigo and Grimmjow, even knowing the real situation between the two of them, because that was what Ichigo wanted Ulquiorra to do and, therefore, what would happen. It always worked that way because Ulquiorra always knew what the real situation was. Ulquiorra watched things. Ichigo should turn around and walk back across the sand to dispel the Arrancar’s snake-eyes with a single word.



Don’t.



He would leave just as quickly as Grimmjow’s excited and unstable reiatsu had summoned him.



The nasty little voice that hid in the back of Ichigo’s mind, the one that left the bad acid-taste in Ichigo’s mouth, the one that got just a little stronger every day, it spoke up just then. It told Ichigo that the Jaegerjaques Arrancar was only getting whatever he deserved. Let them be, let them fight it out amongst themselves.



You won’t be responsible for what happens.