Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s honestly a little terrifying, because Ichigo isn’t sure that he would’ve ever noticed if Inoue hadn’t said, “Oh, Urahara-san, when did you get another cat!”

Geta-boushi actually stops, full-on freezes, before whipping his head around to stare in the direction that Inoue’s looking. If she hadn’t pointed it out, Ichigo would’ve just assumed that the black cat watching them from the mouth of the alleyway was Yoruichi, but now that he’s looking he can tell it’s not.

This cat, for one, is way bigger than any kind of domesticated animal should be, and the shadows from the alley only make it look bigger. For another thing, its eyes are a bright blue, clear even from this distance, and Ichigo knows for a fact that Yoruichi’s eyes are gold.

“Oh my,” Geta-boushi says faintly, and when Ichigo turns to look at him, he looks somewhere between suspicious and perplexed. “I don’t think that’s a cat at all, Inoue-chan.”

The cat—or, the thing masquerading as a cat—doesn’t react to the words, but Ichigo can feel his shoulders starting to tense up anyways. It takes him a moment to realize that he can feel… something, not-quite-reiatsu pressing down, dense enough for even him to feel.

Then Yoruichi shows up.

She does so in the most cacophonous way possible, leaping straight down from the roof of a building with a hair-raising yowl. There’s a burst of light, a kido or something, and through the starbursts clouding his vision, Ichigo catches a glimpse of two black cats tangled in a ball of teeth and claws. Then there’s a noise like a thunderclap and when Ichigo finally manages to clear the blurriness from his eyes, they’re both gone.

“Well.” Geta-boushi says, mild. Inoue has her hands over her mouth, eyes wide and looking a little terrified.

“Oh, I hope they’re okay!” She mumbles to herself.

“Geta-boushi,” Ichigo manages, still staring at the spot where the two cats disappeared from. “Please tell me all shinigami can’t just… turn into cats.”

“No, no, Yoruichi is quite unique in that aspect,” Geta-boushi replies, his voice a little distant. He’s got a look in his eyes that means he’s going through a mental catalogue of probable explanations for whatever the hell just happened.

Geta-boushi insists on going on with training, despite the fact—or in spite of it, maybe—that there’s still the ozone tang of reiatsu lingering in the air. Inoue spends the entire time biting her lip and shooting looks at the mouth of the alley, as though the cats will come back. Ichigo tries very hard not to dwell on it, because he really has enough to think about, but he can’t help but check, too.

Ichigo is more or less willing to put the whole occurrence out of mind: Yoruichi shows up two days later at the Shouten, and twines around Geta-boushi’s legs with an air of smug satisfaction.

“What was that?” Ichigo demands, as she leaves Urahara’s side and leaps up onto the counter.

“Oh, don’t worry about it.” Is all she’ll say. Ichigo leaves the Shouten without buying anything: having a cat on the counter like that cannot be sanitary.

He really shouldn’t be surprised, then, when he gets home from school the next day to find two enormous black cats in his bedroom.

“Um.” He says, pinned immobile under two unnerving stares. Freakin’ cats.

“Hello, Ichigo-kun!” Yoruichi chirps, her words at odds with the deep timbre of her cat voice. God, how has Ichigo’s life come to talking animals.

“Um.” He says again.

“Whassamatter, cat gotcha tongue?” The other cat asks, mouth curled up into a grin that bares needle-like gleaming white teeth.

“Oh, what the hell,” Ichigo blurts out. Talking cats that aren’t really cats, he can do. Jokes, on top of that? He has a limit, damnit.

“You’re a cat-astrophe,” Yoruichi sighs, raising a forepaw to lick at it primly. There’s nothing to say she isn’t referring to them both.

“Do not drag me into this,” Ichigo protests. Shinigami, and shinigami who can turn into cats, and other talking cats. He’s over it.

“Oh, Ichigo-kun, don’t tell me you can’t enjoy a good joke.” Yoruichi drawls, and she stretches across his comforter. Ichigo can tell that he’s going to be finding cat hair on everything, probably for the rest of his life.

“Please just. Explain. Or leave.” Ichigo sighs. He drops his bookbag on the ground and slumps into the chair by the desk.

“So unfun,” Yoruichi complains, and accompanies her complaint with a flex of her claws, leaving little pinpricks in Ichigo’s covers. Great.

“Oh, just explain it to the kid, he looks like he’s gonna have an aneurysm.” The other cat looks as bored as a cat can look, curled up in a neat little ball, paws tucked primly beneath its body. It hasn’t blinked once since Ichigo entered the room.

Cats.

“Fine!” Yoruichi huffs. “You’re both claw-ful.”

Ichigo closes his eyes.

“The only thing a-paw-ling about this is your sense of humor,” The other cat replies, droll.

“Oh my god,” Ichigo whispers.

“Right, right. Ichigo, this is Grimmjow-san. They’re…” Yoruichi pauses, and then rolls over to peer at the other cat—Grimmjow?—upside down. “What did you say you were again?”

Grimmjow rolls their eyes. Their tail thwaps against the bed. “I didn’t.”

“Ah, right!” Yoruichi rolls back over to shoot Ichigo a smile. Ichigo will deny until his dying day that it’s really adorable. “Grimmjow-san is some kind of… hybrid. Or something.”

Ichigo, head propped up on his palm and leaning heavily on his desk, raises his eyebrows.

“Not gonna ask. Why are you in my house.”

Yoruichi grins sunnily, eyes creased into content lines. “We’re going to be staying with you!”

“The hell you are.”

Yuzu, in the middle of setting the table, looks up at the sound of footsteps and then gasps.

“O-nii-chan, what happened to your face!”

“… I don’t wanna talk about it.”

After dinner, Ichigo skulks back up to his room. Yuzu, of course, hadn’t pushed, but she had dabbed the scratches on his face and neck (and arms and hands) with antiseptic. Goat Face had bellowed to the high heavens about Ichigo finally growing facial hair. Karin had cracked a joke about Ichigo needing to learn how to shave better.

Yoruichi looks only slightly repentant. Grimmjow has relocated themself to Ichigo’s pillow. Ichigo sighs.

“So what, you’re both going to stay here?”

“Of course!” Yoruichi’s tail flips forward like an inverted ‘s’. “It’ll be just like a sleepover!”

Ichigo drops down on the far corner of the bed and leans heavily against the wall. “How is this anything like a sleepover.”

“Well, we could play games—”

“No.”

“Tell each other secrets—”

“Pass.” Grimmjow rumbles, without bothering to open their eyes.

“Take the time to paws after such a busy day—”

“Oh my god—”

“Or even makeovers!”

Yoruichi has no right to sound so damn chipper. Grimmjow cracks one eye open, and says flatly: “I’m not trying to paw a cucumber mask out of my fur, pal.”

Ichigo escapes to the bathroom to change into his pajamas. The cat scratches look bright under the bathroom lights and Ichigo resolves then and there to make Geta-boushi fix this. Somehow.

Neither Yoruichi nor Grimmjow are on his bed when he gets back from the bathroom. Ichigo counts his blessings and goes to sleep.

He only has to spit cat hair out of his mouth twice.

“GOOOOD MEOWNING, ICHIGO!”

“WHY.”

Ichigo lasts until noon, by the skin of his teeth. He’s decided that it’s all Urahara’s fault and the man is going to be paying Ichigo back indefinitely.

Yoruichi is badgering Grimmjow, in the middle of saying: “—secret? Whisker it into my ear, purr-omise I won’t tail anyone!”

“Will you quit it with the crappy cat puns?” It doesn’t come out nearly as exasperated as he feels; in fact, it’s almost plaintive. He’s stretched across his bed—stuck between being grateful that there’s no school, because he knows the two of them would follow him to class, and desperately hoping for any excuse to escape Yoruichi and her weird cat friend-slash-enemy—with one arm thrown over his face.

“Crappy?” Yoruichi repeats, and she leaps from Ichigo’s desk and lands feet-first on his head. Ichigo startles upright with a yelp and Yoruichi hops down to his legs and immediately starts digging her claws into his thigh.

“Ow, Yoruichi—”

“I’ll have you know my jokes are meownificent! Purr-illiant!”

“They’re really not—”

“Meow, meow,” Grimmjow cuts in from the windowsill, and Ichigo groans, because he knows it’s only going to get worse. “Maybe the kid’s gotta point. You’re a little ham-fisted about it.”

“Oh?” Yoruichi replies archly. “You’re not doing any better.”

“Just cuz he hurt your feelings doesn’t mean you gotta lion me.”

Yoruichi makes a short jump back to the desk. “You’re both being furry mean. I was just having a little fun.”

She curls up into a tiny ball of fur—Ichigo didn’t realize she could make herself that small—and doesn’t look at either one of them. There’s a long silence. Grimmjow meets Ichigo’s eyes, and dips their head as if to say, Well, she’s upset. Now what?

Ichigo grimaces. Why is it up to him? Grimmjow’s eyes narrow and the weird, metallic not-reiatsu comes back, hovering pointedly over his shoulders. Grimmjow bares the slightest flash of fang. Fix it, their eyes say.

Fine, Ichigo mouths, and the not-reiatsu disappears. Ichigo closes his eyes and slowly counts backwards from ten. Then, with a deep exhale, he gives up.

“It’s alright, Yoruichi.” Ichigo says into the silence, rolling his eyes. This is what his life has come to. Everything is terrible. “It’s hard to draw feline when it comes to cat jokes.”

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.

Chapter Text

The worst part of the whole… ordeal, Ichigo decides, is that his family has taken it all in stride.

“Ichigo-nii-san, I picked up some cat food!” Yuzu can barely be seen over the enormous stack of boxes and grocery bags piled up in her arms.

“Thanks, Yuzu,” Ichigo says, taking the bags, instead of trying to explain (again) that neither Yoruichi nor Grimmjow actually eats cat food. He’s been leaving bowlfuls outside Urahara Shouten as paltry vengeance. Every time Geta-boushi comments on the odd number of strays hanging around, it’s a temporary balm on Ichigo’s frazzled and weary soul.

Only a temporary balm, of course, because—

“Ichigo!” It says a lot about how much Ichigo has… adjusted, that he doesn’t try to dodge. Yoruichi hits his chest—claws-first, because she’s habitually terrible—and pulls herself up to perch on his shoulder.

“It’s so cute that you taught her how to meow your name!” Yuzu giggles and scratches Yoruichi between the ears. Yoruichi allows it with an air of supreme satisfaction, because she finds Ichigo’s personal misfortune to be hilarious.

“Yup,” Ichigo agrees, because he loves Yuzu, and if she told him the sky was green, he'd be obligated as a loving older brother to agree with her.

“What a good cat you are, Kuro-tan,” Yuzu coos. Somehow, not only is Ichigo’s family convinced that he owns a cat, they're all also under the mistaken and frankly absurd belief that Yoruichi and Grimmjow are the same cat.

Grimmjow and Yoruichi, hellions that they are, do everything in their power to uphold that illusion.

Case in point: Yoruichi chirps and leaps down from Ichigo’s shoulder, twines around his leg (covering his uniform pants in yet another layer of cat hair) and then slinks up the stairs. Ichigo swears he can hear the faintest hint of laughter.

Scowling, Ichigo herds Yuzu into the kitchen. She tells him what goes where, and he packs everything away dutifully. There’s a ten pound bag of dry cat food, and a dozen or so cans of wet food. Ichigo is already thinking about how many cans he could place around Urahara Shouten until the place was overrun with strays.

Yuzu, having started dinner, absently asks Ichigo to grab the rice cooker from its place in the lower cabinet.

Ichigo turns from the cat food and then, very valiantly, does not swear.

The large, black cat sitting on the counter—where it definitely hadn't been a few seconds ago—radiates enough smugness to power a small country.

Ichigo pulls out the rice cooker and sets it on the counter, holding defiant eye contact with the cat. Grimmjow, the larger of the two assholes currently making his life into some kind of ridiculous paradoxical hell, radiates smugness even harder.

“Oh!” Yuzu says suddenly, garnering the attention of everyone in the kitchen, asshole cats included. “I almost forgot. Ichigo-nii-san, I got Kuro-tan some flea shampoo. The clerk said that it’s almost flea season and Kuro-tan could probably use a bath before then.”

Grimmjow, in the process of licking their own back leg, freezes.

Ichigo, for the first time in nearly five and a half months, can feel the love of some god shining down on him.

“Here you go!” Yuzu—sweet, oblivious Yuzu—chirps, shoving one of the grocery bags at Ichigo. “If you give Kuro-tan a bath now, you should be done in time for dinner.”

She turns back to the stovetop, humming. Completely unaware of the chaos she just set in motion.

Ichigo looks slowly from the bag full of not only flea shampoo but also topical treatments and a box of flea collars up to Grimmjow, who hasn’t moved. The smile that pulls at his mouth is, at best, manic.

“Kurosaki,” Grimmjow murmurs, soft enough that Yuzu doesn’t hear it, but hard-edged with warning.

“Come on, Kuro-tan,” Ichigo doesn’t even try to keep the sadistic glee out of his voice. He scoops the cat into his arms with minimal fuss, because at the very least Yoruichi and Grimmjow are reluctant to kick his ass within hearing range of his sisters.

“It’s bath time.” If his voice is a little too gleeful, well, who’s to say?

“Kurosaki—”

Ichigo has scratches climbing up his arms for the next week, but it was worth it.