Chapter Text
After one week of incessant cat-related puns and finding strands of cat hair all over his house, Ichigo has given up. He’s resigned to it: this is his life now.
Yoruichi is far more high-spirited than Ichigo had ever seen before, but the presumed cause for her excitement only ever looks vaguely amused or cattishly contemptuous.
“Yourichi,” Ichigo asks, on one rare occasion that Grimmjow has slunk off somewhere else, “How did you meet Grimmjow-san, exactly?”
Yoruichi, rolling all over Ichigo’s bed and getting more cat hair all over his everything, makes a small, pensive chirrup. “Saa, Grimm-chan was wandering around and looked like they needed a friend.”
That, of course, tells Ichigo next to nothing, except for the implication that Grimmjow had been in Karakura for some time before Inoue had spotted them in that alleyway near the shouten, and also that Yoruichi considers bloody back alley fights to the death to be the same thing as making friends.
The next day, Ichigo asks Grimmjow directly, “You aren’t a shinigami, are you?”
Grimmjow—who Ichigo has only ever seen in the form of a cat—is nearly twice as big as Yoruichi’s cat form. They’re both rather intimidatingly large for what are supposed to be common house cats, but Grimmjow is closer in size to a dog. Ichigo really hopes that the size of one’s cat form in no way correlates to reiatsu levels. Yoruichi is bad enough, but some other crazy cat person with nearly twice as much power as her? Ichigo shudders just to think about it.
From their place on top of Ichigo’s dresser, Grimmjow opens blue eyes that spark white with energy. “Not any more than you are.”
“Wait,” Ichigo holds one hand up. “Are you a vaizard?”
Grimmjow isn’t even bothering to look at him anymore. Instead, they stretch out across his dresser, sending everything on top of it clattering to the floor with an air of total nonchalance. Ichigo’s eyebrow twitches.
“Not any more than you are,” they say again. Ichigo’s can of body spray rolls along the ground until it thunks to a pitiful stop against the bottom of the dresser.
“Grimm-chan is more or less your opposite, Ichigo,” Yoruichi cuts in. When Ichigo glances over at her, her golden eyes are bright, and she’s planted herself right on top of his math homework. He can see the paper bunching beneath her feet.
“Don’t go making things up,” Grimmjow bites out, shooting Yoruichi a thorny look. Yoruichi only looks brighter in response, almost beaming, until Grimmjow scoffs and looks away. Whatever that’s about, Ichigo isn’t getting involved. He didn’t even know that cats could scoff.
Yoruichi and Grimmjow snipe and squabble at each other until Ichigo abruptly stands up.
“Ichigo?” Yoruichi asks. Ichigo heaves his bedroom window open so hard that the wood rattles in its frame.
“Bye,” Ichigo says, already halfway out the window.
“Whoa, whoa, where are you going?”
“I’m gonna strangle Geta-boushi with my bare hands. I don’t even care if this is his fault anymore.” By this point, all that can be seen of Ichigo is his hands as he begins the well-practiced act of scaling the side of his own house.
Grimmjow takes one long-legged bound from the dresser to the desk under the window.
“You’re so dramatic,” they chide, almost fondly, sticking their massive head out the window to peer down at Ichigo with amusement. “Fine, we’ll get out of your hair for a day or two.”
There’s a pause, and then the sound of bare feet scrabbling against siding. “… You waited until I was halfway down to decide that?”
Grimmjow raises their head imperiously, looking down their nose at Ichigo. “Not everything’s about you, y’know. I got some stuff I been meaning to take care of anyway.”
Then why have you been here torturing me, Ichigo very valiantly does not yell. Yoruichi, never one to be left out, shoves her head out the window, too.
“Oh? What are you going to do?” She presses in closer to Grimmjow until the two of them look more like one strange two-headed cat than two (still strange) separate ones.
“Don’t worry about it,” Grimmjow replies glibly, but they don’t push Yoruichi off, so they’ll probably wind up telling her anyway.
Ichigo closes his eyes and rests his forehead against the siding. His elbows are starting to twinge.
“Please just go.”
Kisuke sighs as he finally finishes closing up the shouten for the day. Tessai has wrangled the kids into bed already, and is currently in the kitchen staring grimly into a cup of tea.
It’s been another day of clandestine sales, patrolling shinigami zipping in and out for gikon dispensers or gigai or just skulking past to clap eyes on the renown Urahara Kisuke, banished former-captain. It’s bitterly amusing that since his banishment, his sales have never been higher.
He pads barefoot through the back, past Tessai and to his room. He tosses his hat onto the nearest flat surface and then, after a moment of blind fumbling, turns on the bedside lamp.
There’s a cat on his futon.
“Oh,” he chuckles, one hand dramatically pressed to his chest. “Are you finally done bothering poor Ichigo-kun?”
Yoruichi flips her tail at him, but he can read the satisfaction in the lines of her back.
“Just until he thinks he’s safe, hmm?”
Yoruichi purrs, a deep rumble of sound. Kisuke shakes his head fondly, and goes about his nighttime routine. By the time he settles into the futon, Yoruichi has stretched out across one side of it, her paws pushing insistently at his legs.
“Now, now,” Kisuke says patiently, “If you have something to say, just come out and say it.”
Yoruichi gives a little burr of amusement and then lifts her head up to meet his gaze head on.
Kisuke freezes.
“Hey,” the cat—not Yoruichi, not with those bright blue eyes—says, sharp claws digging into Kisuke’s thigh. Kisuke has already drawn his reiatsu close, mentally cursing himself for being so damn complacent. “Got a minute?”
If this cat—Grimmjow, if he remembers correctly—had managed to lie in wait in his room for who knows how long, then surely Yoruichi knows that they’re here. He likes to think that if there had been a fight, if Yoruichi was in any sort of danger, he would’ve noticed.
“Yeah,” Grimmjow continues, despite Kisuke’s silence. There’s a rising tide of corrosive energy filling the air. “You and me need to talk about that hougyouku of yours, Urahara.”
Kisuke chokes on his own spit.
When Grimmjow and Yoruichi inevitably show up again, nearly five days later, Ichigo isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He’d managed to gleefully live a cat-free life for almost two days, before the paranoia set in and he found himself constantly looking over his shoulder, expecting the two of them to turn up at the most inopportune moments. He’s honestly still a little mad about it.
But they do show up again, because of course they do, only they show up domesticated.
“Who the hell got close enough to you to put on a collar?” Is the first thing Ichigo manages to say. It’s a question for both of them, but mostly for Grimmjow, who Ichigo is pretty sure can and would kill a person with very little effort or compunction.
“It was my idea,” Grimmjow answers, looking nearly four times as smug as the last time Ichigo saw them. Both they and Yoruichi are wearing collars—Grimmjow’s blue and Yoruichi’s yellow—with some kind of shiny marble-looking thing instead of a metal tag. Ichigo guesses the two of them don’t really need to worry about vaccines or anything like that.
“I still have no idea how you talked him into this,” is Yoruichi’s vague input. She looks a little pole-axed, wide-eyed and faintly confused.
“I’m very persuasive,” Grimmjow replies, in the same mild tone of voice one would use to make detailed threats of violence.
“What exactly is ‘this’?” Ichigo asks, not really expecting a clear answer.
And, true to form, Grimmjow only bares their teeth in what might be a smile and says, “Orion’s belt.”
Ichigo honestly doesn’t even want to know.