Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s been five days. The Old Man is quiet. The hollow has been howling.

“Shut up,” Ichigo grits out.

The hollow doesn’t magically choose that moment to listen to him. His head’s pounding, a sharp, piercing headache that seems to writhe in the space between his skull and his skin, and the searing white of the semi-bare room doesn’t help. He’s not sure if the headache is from the hollow’s caterwauling or the lack of food. He’s past the point where his stomach seemed to be eating itself. Now it flares, dull and sharp in turns, before fading into a background ache.

Ichigo is grateful, in a distant kind of way, that spirit bodies don’t produce excrement. Being chained to a wall and left to rot for five days straight would have been a lot worse if he’d been left in his own filth.

Not that it’s not bad now. He stinks of blood and sweat. His wrists are red and raw, less because of the restraints themselves than his desperate and probably ill-advised attempts to break out of them. His arms ache all the way to the bone. The rest of him has fared better, for a very generous definition of “better.” Aizen, for some ungodly reason, was kind enough to chain him in such a way that Ichigo’s sitting on a thick, clean futon. It would be fucking cozy, if it weren’t for the reiatsu-suppressing cuffs pinning his arms above his head.

At least he assumes it was Aizen. He’s the last thing Ichigo remembers—a flash of slicked-back hair and a beaming smile. Grimmjow’s unhinged visage, even filtered through his own hollow’s considerably more unhinged perspective, was a more welcome sight than that fucking smile.

The door blasts inward.

For a wild, unthinking moment, Ichigo is blinded by hope.

They came.

His friends, Urahara, the captains, someone—

Then the dust clears, and he sees a set of boots, silver-veined black, painfully familiar from how they were grinding his face into strange-smelling sand a few days ago.

The rest of Grimmjow follows. He, unlike Ichigo, seems to have healed. Mostly. His torso bears a vicious scar, cutting from left shoulder to right hip. It was bleeding profusely the last time Ichigo saw it, not that the blood loss had slowed the bastard any.

“Come to finish the job?” Ichigo asks tiredly. He can’t summon anything more than a vague, thrumming fear. The fear is always there, half of it directed inward. The anger comes and goes. And right now, with that passing second of relief taking the last of his energy when it dissipated, there’s no room for rage.

Judging by his expression, Grimmjow has enough for the both of them.

“I wish,” he snarls, kicking shut the door much the same way he kicked it open. It’s a miracle it doesn’t break. “If I had my way, you’d be dead already, shinigami. You’ll be wishing that too, soon enough.”

If five days of mind-numbing boredom hasn’t made him pray for death, he doubts Grimmjow’s sparkling personality would. And that was the shock, really. The anger sparks and sputters. The fear lingers. But the boredom—the boredom’s been eating him alive.

Is it perverse that a part of him is glad to see Grimmjow?

Even the hollow has shut up. Ichigo can feel it peering out of his eyes.

Fuck off, he thinks, but even that’s lost its heat.

Kitten there’s acting strange.

Ichigo blinks and refocuses on Grimmjow. He’s just standing there, glaring at Ichigo, and what’s so strange—

Ah, right. Last time they were this close, Grimmjow was preparing to put Ichigo out of his misery, the wicked-sharp claws of his released form—and hadn’t that been a mindfuck and a half, that arrancar had their own unique power-ups—inches away from Ichigo’s heart.

Aizen stopped him.

Ichigo didn’t—doesn’t—understand, but then he’s not quite sure about anything that happened after he surprised Grimmjow with that Getsuga Tenshou. Grimmjow grabbed him, spat something about interfering shinigami, and hauled him into the same black void the other two arrancar had used, that day in the park.

They emerged in a world bleached of color—pale sands, dark sky, bright moon.

The hollow started howling then.

Everything after that is hazy, filtered through a crimson haze. By the time his mind was his own again, the black-edged violence still clinging to its edges, he was seconds away from death, and then Aizen showed up.

It’s…probably for the best he passed out at that point.

Snap!

Ichigo jerks. His abused arms loudly protest the motion.

“What the fuck?”

Grimmjow, fingers still in front of Ichigo’s face, sneers. “Be glad I didn’t punch you back to earth.”

“Why didn’t you?” Ichigo’s startled into asking.

“You look like a stiff breeze would make you pass out, and that would be inconvenient with what’s coming.”

“What…what’s coming?”

He can’t quite help the thread of wariness in his voice. Grimmjow’s sneer sharpens, but the mockery Ichigo’s expecting doesn’t come. Instead, Grimmjow’s expression turns blank, only his burning eyes holding any emotion. It’s strange, at least when Ichigo’s only seen that face twisted with fiery disdain or malicious glee.

He’s not sure what would be better now. Ichigo has been making a concentrated effort not to imagine what a man like Aizen could do with a captive. His imagination isn’t as…wild as Inoue’s, but he’s read and watched enough shit he shouldn’t have to get a few too many ideas. 

Grimmjow doesn’t seem like the torturer type. Ichigo has flashes of how his blade felt—unfiltered bloodlust and vicious joy. He loves the fight. He deemed Ichigo worthy of being killed by him only after that last, desperate attack.

And Ichigo—

For a moment there, Ichigo also—

Suddenly, Grimmjow grabs the hilt of his blade—

“Thought you weren’t here to kill—”

—and sets the whole thing aside.

Grimmjow must catch the relief on his face before Ichigo can shove it away. He laughs, dark and without an ounce of humor. Somehow, it’s even more disturbing than his murderous grins.

“Don’t get your hopes up, shinigami,” Grimmjow mutters. “I’m not here for a friendly fucking chat.”

And then he strips.

Ichigo doesn’t think much of the jacket, his mind slow and scattered, but he’d be hard-pressed to miss a grown man taking off his hakama and exposing a whole lot of nothing underneath.

His shout reverberates in the cavernous room.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

He looks away, screwing his eyes shut for good measure, and there’s a distant nagging at the back of his mind that it’s fuck-stupid to blind yourself to an enemy like that, especially one as crazy as Grimmjow, but that spark of sense is drowned by the searing memory of skin and more skin.

Grimmjow scoffs. His words drip disdain. “Ain’t your kind supposed to go gaga over shit like this?”

“My—my kind?” Ichigo sputters, still not daring to open his eyes.

“Alphas.”

“What’s that got—”

Warm, is his first thought.

It’s cold here despite the bright light gleaming in the tiny window set in one of the walls, and his shinigami robes offer little insulation. Ichigo’s been uncomfortably cold—not shivering but enough that he’s tried many times, in vain, to huddle in and preserve what little body heat he has.

For an instant, it’s pleasant.

Then the full situation rams into him.

He’s warm because Grimmjow’s in his lap.

Ichigo opens his eyes, as desperate as he was when he closed them, but the stark sight of his enemy naked in his fucking lap doesn’t make the situation magically make sense. Grimmjow’s expression is pinched; his eyes are blazing, not pleasantly.

“Grimmjow?” Ichigo doesn’t recognize his own voice, how faint it is. “What—what are you doing?”

“Do us both a favor,” comes the answer, “and don’t make a fuss. If I kill you—and I’m very fucking close to it, orders be damned—he will kill me, and I’m not dying for something as phenomenally stupid as this.”

Ichigo doesn’t understand any of that. He’s a lot more concerned about Grimmjow’s hands fumbling with his belt.

There’s a cold, dripping awareness in the back of his mind.

“Stop,” Ichigo croaks. “Stop that—stop.”

Something warm and wet trickles down the inside of his left arm. His wrists are burning hot. Ichigo wasn’t even aware he’d been trying to get free.

Grimmjow’s nostrils flare, and he looks up, eyes flying to the blood and then to Ichigo’s face. His face is terribly blank now, his movements almost businesslike. They offer no distraction from the icy reality of what he’s doing.

For a moment, Ichigo stares, horrified in a numb, not-all-there kind of way at Grimmjow’s fingers wrapped loosely around his soft dick. Then the sensation hits, cold air and warm skin, and he flinches away.

Except there’s nowhere to retreat to. The wall is smooth and unforgiving at his back. The shackles bite into his skin.

Grimmjow looks exceptionally disgusted by his handful. In any other situation, it would be funny. Maybe insulting. Now, Ichigo can’t do much more than think, dazed and confused and cold all the way to the bone, that someone else is touching him there for the first time, and it’s—

It’s—

“Well, you’ve got the right equipment,” Grimmjow grits out. “Fucking shinigami.”

And that, somehow, burns through Ichigo—a bright, relieving spark of anger—because how dare Grimmjow wear that expression, as if he’s the one being—

“What the fuck are you doing? Let go.”

Ichigo bucks him off for all he’s worth, which isn’t much. He has no leverage, and for all that Grimmjow’s perched gingerly on the futon, knees on either side of Ichigo’s legs, he’s all muscle and doesn’t even sway when Ichigo’s shoulder rams into him.

Grimmjow laughs, a short huff of a sound, utterly devoid of humor like before. Ichigo can smell his breath, hot and oddly metallic.

“Still a fighter,” he says. “This ain’t the sword of yours I want to tangle with, kid, but you’re more likely to survive this.”

He starts stroking.

Ichigo freezes.

His heart thunders in his ears, rabbit fast and reverberant; it drowns everything else, sight and smell and sense, for a blissful moment. And then sensation hits him like a truck. He jerks, shocked into violence, but there’s no sword in his hands, only metal bindings that cut deep into his wrists. Grimmjow doesn’t even seem to notice, eyes narrowed and lips curled into a nasty expression.

Ichigo follows his gaze helplessly.

His cock looks alien, peeking out from between Grimmjow’s fingers. He’s soft, mostly, but the touches burn, Grimmjow’s hand rough and calloused and bigger than his own, and every second pulses with a climbing sense of wrongness that crawls thick and noxious up Ichigo’s throat. There’s a burning behind his eyes, a kind of dazed horror.

He wrenches his head to the side and tries, again, to shove Grimmjow off him.

His shoulder’s slammed into the wall, pinned there by a strong hand. Nails bite into his flesh. Grimmjow’s grip tightens around his dick.

Ichigo—Ichigo’s a teenager. He’s thought of it. Fantasized. Faceless, nameless people. Soft curves and hard planes both. Scents sweet and sharp. Didn’t think much of it. He was young, he had sisters to raise and bullies to pummel, and then he had fucking hollows to kill and friends to rescue, and he never—

“I don’t want this,” he says, eyes still closed as if that’ll make it go away.

He hasn’t done that since his mother’s corpse was cooling on top of him.

Grimmjow’s hand doesn’t falter. His voice is even. “Neither do I, shinigami.”

“Then stop.”

He doesn’t stop.

King, says the hollow. It sounds too quiet. He smells like…

Ichigo does, on his next, shuddering breath. He recognizes it more by instinct than familiarity, and that’s odd on its own. His father’s an omega and so’s Chad, not to mention god knows how many of Ichigo’s schoolmates, almost every term bringing several new scents with all of them being at that age. Ichigo’s as familiar as anyone with scent signatures, and Grimmjow doesn’t smell like any omega he’s met. He doesn’t smell anything like the typical alpha or beta either. And it’s not even the telltale lack of scent of the unpresented. It’s a sicky sweet smell with a strange, biting undertone—like blood or dust.

It distracts him for a few, precious seconds.

“Are you going into heat?” he asks. “Is that…why?”

Grimmjow actually stops, snatching his hand back with a sound of disgust. His other one’s still biting into Ichigo’s shoulder.

“No, shinigami. Hollows don’t gotta deal with all that bullshit.”

That’s right. Rukia, she said—

Hollows aren’t people, she said. Not even animals. Just monsters.

Grimmjow sure looks like a person. And he’s definitely a monster. But Ichigo’s known long enough that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. 

He almost misses the rest of Grimmjow’s answer.

“Arrancar apparently do,” he says with a sneer. “But I’m still not here because I’m wet for alpha dick.”

He doesn’t wait for Ichigo to ask what the fuck he’s doing or make another desperate, useless attempt at shoving him away. He snarls down at Ichigo’s dick, still mostly limp because he’s tired and injured and sleep deprived and he doesn’t want this, and backs away.

Ichigo can’t help the relief. Like when the door opened, it doesn’t last.

Grimmjow drops to all fours and—

Ichigo shouts, violently trying to curl in on himself. His wrists flare, a wet, hot ache, just like—just like Grimmjow’s mouth, closed around his cock, and it hurts, almost, to focus on it, the heat of it too sharp and too much, and Ichigo tries to close his legs, but fingers dig into his thighs, nails piercing cloth and then skin, and keeps him open. Grimmjow’s broad-shouldered form spills over the narrow confines of Ichigo’s lap. The sight is surreal. It blurs, blue and white and black running together.

Ichigo jerks his head to the side, rubbing his face on his outstretched arm. Warm wetness smears on the skin. He bites his mouth till it bleeds, till his vision stops blurring.

There’s a harsh, pulsing heat in his gut, his—

“Please,” Ichigo gasps. “Please stop.”

Grimmjow does, he thinks. Only for a moment. The suction stops. His grip becomes less bruising.

It’s a passing mercy.

He sucks with renewed vengeance, and Ichigo feels it, every burning second of it, mind wiped clean of desperate distractions and grounded in the brutal reality of his body, the dull, throbbing pain from his injuries pushed to the background by a different kind of ache.

Grimmjow surges upright, turning his head to spit viciously on the floor.

Ichigo looks down. It’s hard—and wet, shining with spit. The base of it, the deflated knot, feels heavy and hot. 

When Grimmjow rises to his knees, pressing even closer to Ichigo’s bound form, he understands what’s coming. He understands, but it doesn’t prepare him for being tugged and guided into—

It’s hot. And it hurts, a sleeve of searing pressure. He can’t help the noise, then, a low, shuddering thing that writhes in his throat and crawls out of his lips, and he ducks his head, trying in vain to disappear into himself.

Strong, cruel fingers grip his chin and pull his head up. Furious blue eyes bore into his own.

“That’s a weak look in your eyes, shinigami,” Grimmjow says, mouth twisting into a snarl. “I should put you out of your misery.”

Ichigo can’t summon the energy to glare. He jerks his face out of Grimmjow’s grip, keenly aware Grimmjow is letting it happen, and turns away, screwing his eyes shut. The wet, scorching flesh pulsing around his cock doesn’t vanish. Grimmjow slides down and down, and Ichigo breaths grow shallow and sharp.

Fine hairs tickle the side of his face. Lips brush his ear.

“They’re watching.”

Grimmjow bottoms out, clenching hard, and Ichigo’s shock is buried in a short, ragged shout. God, he’s so warm. Burning. It eats up all the pain, till all Ichigo can think of is the knot in his gut and the ache in his cock and Grimmjow pressed against him, their chests flush and bodies joined.

Ichigo’s mind stutters on that, scrambling to make sense of it, any of it.

Who’s watching?

One look at Grimmjow, and he knows there won’t be answers. The fury’s back on his face, but it’s…thin. There’s a tremble to the sneer on his mouth. His hair’s plastered to his forehead, darkened by sweat, and his skin has that same wet sheen. Ichigo looks down, can’t help it, and isn’t surprised, really, to find Grimmjow limp as anything.

He’s not even all that wet. Just tight. It can’t be—it can’t feel good.

Neither do I, shinigami, he said.

It’s hard to imagine someone like Grimmjow doing anything he doesn’t want to. About as hard to accept as any of this.

“You don’t have to do this,” Ichigo tries. It comes out soft and dull. He doesn’t believe himself, not really.

“Shut up,” Grimmjow growls. “It’s either this or lose my number and probably my life, and I ain’t dying because I can’t pull a knot out of a filthy shinigami.” A derisive huff, and then a hand fists in Ichigo’s hair, yanking his face up for Grimmjow to sneer at. “Well, you’re not all shinigami, are you? Guess that’s something.”

Ichigo’s mind is spinning, questions and impressions a blurred kaleidoscope, but then Grimmjow’s moving, and it shatters, the colors twisting into a red-hot haze.

His body reacts.

His mind is screaming.

And Grimmjow—Grimmjow’s quiet, teeth gritted and body tense, slamming himself down on Ichigo’s lap, over and over, with none of the vicious joy he had when he was trying to gut Ichigo with his claws.

“How the fuck is this supposed to feel good?” he snarls, raising a hand to furiously shove his limp hair out of his eyes. “Humans and shinigami, the whole lot of you—what kind of fucking perverts are you?”

Ichigo doesn’t respond. Can’t. If he opens his mouth, he’ll scream—or worse. He can taste them on his tongue, shuddering in his throat, sounds smothered by sheer willpower. It feels—

It feels so—

Grimmjow does something, moves a little different; Ichigo feels it before he sees it. A clench of muscles. Wetness. Then—wide eyes and parted lips and a soft, breathy sound. The next slide is slicker, easier. The sound’s obscenely loud in the room.

Molten sensation claws at Ichigo’s gut.

He tries, he does, nails sinking into his palms, teeth into his lips, but Grimmjow’s warm and wet and writhing on his cock, and it’s nothing like his own hand or the too-soft press of a mattress, and it feels so good.

He comes gasping, hips bucking up and into Grimmjow, and there are words, harsh and hissed, but Ichigo can’t hear them past the echoes of his own breaths. Pleasure thrums in his gut and writhes in his spine. Full-bodied and consuming, like nothing he’s ever felt.

It fades, dripping out of his skin, his bones.

Horror takes its place.

Exhaustion and pain trickle back in.

It’s nothing like the rush of battle and the slow comedown afterward. This feels—cold. Like someone took the warmth licking at his veins and turned it into ice. His arms feel like a single, throbbing bruise, sharper stings on his palms and wrists. Dried blood pulls at his skin when he shifts.

“Shit,” he chokes out. He doesn’t recognize his voice, that raw, wrecked thing.

“Are you fucking kidding me, shinigami?”

Before Ichigo can react, his head’s yanked up. Grimmjow’s other hand wraps around his throat, tight enough to cut off air. The instinctive urge to claw at his throat just earns him another bone-deep throb of pain in his wrists.

“Where the fuck is your knot?” Grimmjow snaps.

Ichigo heaves for breath. Grey creeps into the edges of his vision.

A part of him welcomes it. The hollow doesn’t even call him weak for it.

The hollow—

Where is it?

Air rushes into his lungs so quickly that his vision whites out; he hacks and coughs. And slowly, the rest of the world filters in. His body aches in ways new and old, and he doesn’t linger too long on the new.

Grimmjow’s a snarling mass of electric energy in his lap, on his cock, and Ichigo shudders, pressing desperately back against the wall.

“I asked you a fucking question.”

It takes Ichigo a moment. And then he wants to laugh. He does, helpless and high-pitched, and there’s the distant thought that it sounds like something Kon might do in his body. Grimmjow shakes him by the hair, and Ichigo’s neck hurts, and he keeps laughing because—

His knot first popped a few months ago. He’s never been in rut.

He always thought—

When he bothered to think, he always, always thought—

Grimmjow lets him go with a furious growl. “Fine,” he spits. “I’ll fucking rip it out of you.”

Ichigo’s laughter is quick to die, after that.

Grimmjow moves with violence in every line of his body, and Ichigo’s half-soft cock stirs to life against the furious clench of his flesh. It’s a hot, biting sensation, clawing at his cock and his gut, and his nascent knot pulses with a strange, searing warmth.

The air is thick with Grimmjow’s sweet-and-sour scent. Ichigo thinks he’s imagining it, first, but with every breath he sucks in, the scent grows stronger, sharper, till it’s lining the inside of his throat like damp mold.

It goes straight to his cock.

He doesn’t notice he’s moving till Grimmjow’s hands clamp down on his shoulders, nails pricking skin, to still him for a moment—only for a moment—and then it’s all he can think of, the helpless, twisting jerks of his hips. It feels like someone else’s body.

It’s a mistake to look at Grimmjow’s face. His mouth’s a rictus of fury, but his eyes are dark and his cheeks flushed. Ichigo follows that faint pink down his neck and to his chest—sculpted muscles and dusky nipples and that gaping empty circle, perspective forging old sights into new horrors. Ichigo can’t help looking further down.

Grimmjow’s not soft anymore, but he’s not really hard either. He’s wetter inside though, slick and so soft around Ichigo, and for a moment, the filthy sounds of flesh slamming into flesh drown out even his own harsh breathing.

Grimmjow tightens around him, grinding down hard, and Ichigo moans, so low in his throat that it’s more tremble than breath.

Grimmjow stills anyway.

“You like that? Fine.”

His weight settles on Ichigo’s thighs, and it’s heavy, heady, all that heat and sour-sweet scent, and Ichigo’s the one who writhes into it, grinding his cock into Grimmjow. It pulls a whine out through Ichigo’s teeth and earns him nails tearing into his shoulders.

“Come on, you sorry fucking shinigami,” Grimmjow snarls—but it’s breathless, his strong voice shuddering around the syllables, and Ichigo bucks up, graceless and desperate and aching. “That’s it, give me your goddamn knot.”

Grimmjow clenches around him again, painfully deliberate.

Ichigo cries out. He’s burning.

“I can’t,” he gasps. “G-Grimmjow, I can’t.”

Grimmjow grips his chin, thumbnail digging into his pounding pulse. “You can, you will, or you’ll fucking die.”

He dips his head, features blurring into an indistinct mass of white and blue, and for an insane moment, Ichigo thinks Grimmjow’s going to kiss him, but then that sharp mouth bypasses his mouth, his entire face, and—

Ichigo shouts as sharp teeth tear into his shoulder, the pain lashing deep into muscle, and his wrists flare in tandem. Grimmjow growls around his mouthful, and Ichigo stills. He’s hyperaware of the blood trickling down his arm and the hotter, wetter gush of it down his shoulder, his chest, bright scarlet spilling out from the edges of Grimmjow’s mouth, and it’s so wrong, this combined with the damning ache down below, both throbbing blood-hot, like his worlds have collided and collapsed into some twisted, broken mess that’s now tearing him in two.

It’s not fear filling his veins and choking his throat; it’s anger, bitter and edged a familiar black, and hollow rises up in him, with him, and Ichigo’s teeth snap shut on the empty air mere centimeters from Grimmjow’s throat. Ichigo doesn’t how Grimmjow sees it coming—the twitch of Ichigo’s muscles, maybe, or just well-honed instinct. He’s got it in spades.

Wide blue eyes stare at him from above a blood-soaked jaw. Grimmjow has the fucking audacity to look surprised.

Ichigo snarls.

Grimmjow tightens around him like a vice, and Ichigo’s ragged inhale earns him an assault of pheromone-drenched sweetness. The furious heat in his blood turns syrupy, growing a different kind of teeth, and he’s dragging in deep, desperate breaths before he can stop himself, hips bucking up like he can physically case that scent. And he can, maybe, because every thrust meets Grimmjow’s wet heat, and he’s writhing on Ichigo’s cock, like he really will drag out his knot by sheer willpower, and there’s a molten pulse at the base of his cock that says he might even succeed.

Distantly, Ichigo’s aware he doesn’t want him to. It’s a little hard, with that scent in his noise, his throat, his lungs, to remember why. The acrid reek of blood seems to thread into Grimmjow’s strange, sour-sweet omega scent, and the resulting blend should be revolting, but it’s not, it’s—

It’s intoxicating.

He wants—he strains his bound arms and torn shoulder and sore neck trying to shove his face into Grimmjow’s throat, and Grimmjow leans away, cursing, the words harsh but slurred. The resulting pose puts his body on obscene display, and Ichigo stares, an ache flaring deep in the pit of his belly, at Grimmjow’s hand wrapped around his own cock, not stroking so much as squeezing it. All he can think is that there’s nothing there of the ease with which he handled a blade.

“Grimmjow,” he says, and it comes out a growl, jagged at the edges like it’s his hollow speaking, and the body in his lap tenses and trembles and spills white all over itself, the sight searing itself into Ichigo’s mind in the millisecond before the muscles around his cock squeeze and ripple.

His knot is torn out of him, the orgasm an endless wave of sensation that builds and builds and doesn’t crest, twisting in on itself until he’s shuddering and breathless, trapped inside his skin with something trying to claw its way out—

The pressure pops. Ichigo comes again, sobbing out a breath.

From above him, there’s a choked-off noise. Grimmjow contracts around him, over and over and over. Ichigo tries and fails to breathe, the air thin and cold in his nose.

For an eternity, everything’s warm and soft and empty.

And then it’s not.

Ichigo’s as familiar as any teenage boy with those cold, clammy seconds of the comedown, where you look back at the twists and turns of your lust-high mind and flinch back, horrified and fascinated in equal measure. He’s used to that. He’s okay with that.

This is different. The ice clings to the inside of his skin. The outside is warm, from sweat and sex and the body pressed to his. Locked with his.

He knotted Grimmjow.

Ichigo looks at him. A vague flicker of sense warns him against it, but he does it anyway.

Grimmjow’s eyes are closed tight. There’s nothing peaceful about his expression. The gore drying on his chin doesn’t help. He’s sweaty and flushed from neck down, and Ichigo stares down the length of his body till his eyes meet the soft sprawl of his cock against powder-blue curls.

His hair’s darker there, he thinks numbly.

Grimmjow’s leaning back, palms braced on the futon behind him. It gives Ichigo a painfully clear idea of how, precisely, their bodies are joined. His knot seems to throb like a second heartbeat.

He tears his eyes away. The ice is in his throat now, crawling down, shudderingly slow, to his gut. He screws his eyes shut, thumping his head back against the wall, but the image clings to the inside of his eyelids.

The worst part is how good it feels. Their bodies, locked tight. It feels so good. Warm. Intimate.

He’s never been this close to anyone.

Ichigo’s not a romantic. He’s never thought of being with someone in a concrete sense. Never felt any real interest, except flickers of a hot, tight pull at the creamy curve of a leg or the hard plane of a stomach. Scents, sometimes—particular notes that haunted him for a few hours, till something more distracting inevitably came along. 

He’s just always thought, assumed with a sort of distant certainty, that when it did happen, it would be…something real.

“Shinigami.”

Grimmjow’s voice startles him, but Ichigo can’t bring himself to open his eyes. Maybe Grimmjow will actually kill him now, now that he’s gotten what he came for. Ichigo still doesn’t know why. He doesn’t have the strength to ask.

“Oi, shinigami,” Grimmjow says more insistently. Oddly enough, violence doesn’t follow the impatience. “How long does this thing last?”

Ichigo exhales through his mouth.

“I don’t know,” he makes himself say. “I’ve never had sex.”

Grimmjow doesn’t speak after that.

Ichigo loses consciousness before his body gives up the knot.

-

There’s a sensation like hands on his shoulders, if the hands were smoke and the touch a dream. Insubstantial. Lingering only at the edges of perception and flitting away when Ichigo tries to focus on it.

The Old Man’s silent attempt at comfort.

The hollow, who hasn’t shut up since Grimmjow dragged Ichigo to Hueco Mundo, is quiet.

Ichigo appreciates it as much as he doesn’t. For once, he wouldn’t mind the creature taunting him into a rage. He could use rage. But he can’t seem to summon any himself. It licks at the edges of his mind, fiery temptation, but when he reaches for it, he thinks of Grimmjow, of—

He flinches away from that and is left with the eerie emptiness in his head.

His body still aches, the arms in particular. The shoulder Grimmjow ravaged has healed, but the gory mess remains on the skin, visible because his sleeve is still torn and ragged. Ichigo tries not to look at it. He doesn’t look further down either, at the loose white belt shifting with his every moment. Grimmjow tucked him back in after he—before he left. Ichigo doesn’t remember. It’s a strange kindness, some small mercy, but Ichigo’s finding it hard to think of kindness and mercy and Grimmjow in the same sentence, so he shies away from that too, retreating to the gnawing emptiness.

Where he doesn’t hurt, he’s worn thin, tired in a way he’s never felt, not even after Aizen cut him open to the spine and left him to die. 

Ichigo.

Ichigo starts a little when Old Man Zangetsu’s voice reverberates in his mind, fainter than it’s ever been. Maybe it’s because Zangetsu, the blade, is not here, strapped to Ichigo’s back or solid in his hand like he’s used to. It was gone when he woke up.

“Old Man…?” he asks. His voice comes out hoarse and raspy. “What—”

The door opening answers the question before it’s out, and Ichigo’s whole body thrums taut at the first flash of white, expecting electric blue to follow. It doesn’t. Two arrancar step in, both of them strangers. Ichigo’s heart leaps to his throat.

“Who are you?” he growls.

Neither of them answers. But one, their mask a jagged, spiky thing that covers their head like a helmet, sneers at Ichigo while stalking toward him. He bares his teeth right back, painfully aware of his bound arms and—

“Stay the fuck away.”

—and what happened the last time an arrancar came into his prison.

They don’t stay the fuck away.

But Ichigo’s learned his lesson about letting hollows close. The sneering one takes a kick to the stomach, and even as weak as Ichigo is, the force of it sends the arrancar crashing into the opposite wall. The other one, quiet and almost as expressionless as the green-eyed bastard who attacked the park, darts nimbly away from Ichigo’s foot.

His arms are screaming, wrists bleeding from taking most of his weight.

The arrancar he kicked crawls out of the rubble, now snarling, and Ichigo sneers right back.

There’s a blur of motion in his periphery.

He turns, knee coming up, but the quiet one is already in his space. A fist rams into Ichigo’s stomach, slamming him into the wall at his back; his spine rattles. He kicks out again, half blind with pain, but he connects only with air.

There’s a pinprick of pain in his neck. His vision clears just long enough to register the arrancar holding an empty syringe, and then black is crawling at the edges of his vision, too much like the hollow trying to claw its way out of his mind.

Ichigo lunges at the arrancar, spitting curses, but he blacks out before the impact.

-

The smell wakes him up.

Sweet and sour, like the hard candy Karin likes. His mouth’s watering even as he pries his eyes open. He breathes, deep and greedy, and opens his eyes to Grimmjow’s scowling face.

Ichigo flinches with his whole body. Shame curdles his blood.

“Took you long enough,” Grimmjow says, ignoring the flinch for all that his eyes are sharp. “You’re wasting too much of my time, asshole.”

“Fuck off then,” Ichigo snaps. There it is, the anger. It’s safer than fear, than shame. “I sure as fuck don’t want you here.”

“Don’t you?” Grimmjow’s got a strange smile on his face, half sneering, half…something else. “Your body agree with that?”

“Shut up.”

Ichigo doesn’t think about the heat unspooling in his stomach, strange and syrupy. He presses back against the wall, pulling his knees up and tucking them as close to his stomach as he can without his arms in the equation. Grimmjow’s crouching on the futon, too close to kick and too far to headbutt. Ichigo’s skin crawls at the proximity.

“I can smell you from here,” Grimmjow says, eyes half closing. “Szayel’s fucked-up little cocktail has got a hell of a kick. You’re panting for it, Kurosaki.”

He is literally panting, Ichigo realizes with mounting horror. He didn’t register it before, too focused on Grimmjow, but he’s dragging in deep breaths, mouth open for it, and the air, thick with that sour-sweet scent, coats his throat, his lungs, dripping heat into the pit of his belly.

Grimmjow’s scent is stronger than last time. Much stronger. And Ichigo—there’s a soft, pulsing ache in his neck and thighs, right in the uneven patches of skin that make up his scent glands. They’ve never felt like that before. Ichigo remembers, vaguely, the lessons from the sex-ed class at the end of middle school, but he mostly recalls the dead-eyed face of the teacher faced with a class full of giggling, sniggering students on the cusp of their cycles.

The arrancar with the syringe is a much clearer memory.

“What the hell did you do to me?” he grits out, trying not to breathe Grimmjow in and mostly failing because the air’s saturated with his scent.

Grimmjow’s nostrils are also flared. Ichigo’s suddenly painfully conscious of his aching glands.

“Me?” Grimmjow asks, mockery dripping from his crooked mouth. “Nothing yet. But my oh-so-benevolent overlord’s got plans for you, Kurosaki. Hey, tell me something.”

In the span of a blink, Grimmjow’s close, too close, his breath hot on Ichigo’s face, and his own sharp inhale spears him with a ripe scent so potent that he freezes, shuddering with the conflicting urges to slam his head into Grimmjow’s and push his nose into the pale curve of his throat.

“Get away,” Ichigo manages to say, but it comes out hollow, with none of the fury he spat at the other arrancar.

“Tell me,” Grimmjow repeats, sharp teeth bared, “what’s so fucking special about you that Aizen wants your freaky hybrid babies?”

Ichigo hears the words. It’s a long, static eternity before his mind makes sense of it, and the moment he does, he wants to erase it, erase Grimmjow ever speaking the idea into existence. He allows himself one second for a desperate prayer, calling on gods he doesn’t think are real to make this all go away.

And then he stops because Ichigo’s no stranger to hopeless realities.

“Why?” he asks. “Why would he…?”

Grimmjow doesn’t answer, instead rising from his crouch to strip. Ichigo turns his face away, screwing his eyes shut, but that does nothing for the memories etched into his mind or the heavy scent still clinging to his nostrils.

Something narrow and sharp prods his knee. Ichigo recognizes Pantera’s edge even before he opens his eyes.

“I don’t like trapped prey that I didn’t corner myself,” Grimmjow says matter-of-factly, “so I’ll give you the chance to make this easier for yourself. Stop huddling, Kurosaki, and we can get this over with. Or I can slice up a few muscles and then ride your cock.”

Ichigo stares at him.

The blade presses harder into his knee, pricking skin through the fabric.

“Don’t do this, Grimmjow,” he says. He can’t bring himself to beg. It didn’t help much anyway.

It never does.

Pantera scores a burning line down his leg, thin and shallow. Point made.

Ichigo’s tempted to stay as he is. Grimmjow will make good on his word, he’s sure. There’s a somber set to his mouth, so far from the unabashed glee he practically projected during their fights that it’s a little like looking at a different person.

And then what?

He’ll fuck up Ichigo’s legs and spread him out and take what he wants anyway, and in the aftermath, Ichigo will be left with useless legs, and if those arrancar or anyone like them come calling again, he wouldn’t be able to put up even a token resistance.

Grimmjow’s the devil he knows. And his scent’s branded itself into Ichigo’s lungs. It’s sharp like ice, the realization that a part of him has been resigned since he woke up and saw Grimmjow waiting for him.

Ichigo lowers his legs, stretching them out on the futon. A thin slice down his hakama shows a bit of bloodied skin. It’s nothing. Barely even hurts. Not like Grimmjow at all.

“Didn’t you corner me, technically?” Ichigo asks, staring numbly at his leg. “I know you beat me.”

Or the hollow, rather. Ichigo was just watching, a passenger in his own flesh. Not that it made a difference in the end.

“And I’d have killed you good and proper,” Grimmjow says, sheathing his blade and putting it aside. “Not this shit.”

Ichigo’s reminded of his own naïve thoughts from before, that Grimmjow didn’t seem the type for torture. Or—

It’s hard to think the word. He keeps skittering away from it, even in his own mind. Before, whenever he did that, Old Man Zangetsu would help. Well, he’d try—the sensation of hands at his shoulder or a warm, thick cloak around his huddled form. Kind illusions. He doesn’t, this time. Ichigo can’t sense him at all, and he realizes he hasn’t since the injection. The hollow’s as eerily quiet as before.

Maybe he can just…drop in, retreat into that sideways city making up his mindscape and search for his sword spirit and monochrome doppelganger while Grimmjow—

The scent’s a full-frontal assault; it feels like it floods Ichigo’s entire circulatory system with one stray breath.

He jerks, body moving without conscious input, straining forward as much as it can. A wall of flesh shoves him right back, and Ichigo opens eyes he doesn’t remember closing to find himself with a lapful of arrancar, again.

Grimmjow smells so—

He drags in deep, ragged breaths. The air has an almost physical weight as it flows into his lungs.

There’s a solid ache between his legs.

“You didn’t smell like this last time,” he gasps after a vain and very short-lived attempt at holding his breath.

“Fucking Szayel,” Grimmjow growls. His anger’s got a tired edge to it. “You’re not the only one who’s dosed up, Kurosaki. Hollows don’t breed. Aizen wants to see if arrancar can. And you, you piece of shit, are my fucking punishment.”

“What punishment?” Ichigo can’t help asking. He keeps his eyes on Grimmjow’s face and doesn’t think about the warmth seeping through his clothes.

Grimmjow scoffs. “Doesn’t matter. You wanted to know why this is happening—I’m telling you. Head asshole wants to see if one of us can make fucked-up little babies with you, whatever the fuck you really are. Maybe if another Espada pisses him off enough, I’ll get off bitch duty, but until then, you’re stuck with me. And I’ve just about had it with stupid shinigami bullshit, so don’t, for the love of fuck, make it difficult like last time.”

There’s something about that warning, about Grimmjow’s tone, that snags his attention, but Ichigo can’t focus on it, mind stuck on Maybe I’ll get off bitch duty. The disdain in the words, the disgust.

Grimmjow never made it a secret that he doesn’t want to do this. Ichigo didn’t even forget it despite drowning in shock and horror and a hollow sense of loss. But something about those words drives it deeper, makes it more real, and he can’t help the fresh burst of horror that sinks red-hot barbs into his chest.

And Grimmjow said, just earlier, that he’s dosed up too, and no amount of desperate denial can blur the picture painting itself in Ichigo’s mind.

“Grimmjow…”

Grimmjow rears back from him violently, mouth curling into a vicious snarl.

“Kurosaki,” he hisses, “wipe that fucking look off your face.”

“I—”

Ichigo doesn’t know what he’s going to say, what he can say, and he’s not allowed to, Grimmjow’s hand slapping over his mouth. The pressure grinds Ichigo’s head against the wall. Grimmjow other’s hand slams into the wall beside his head, and the whole thing trembles. 

“I hate your eyes,” Grimmjow says, seething. “Don’t you dare look at me like I’m some—”

Grimmjow’s mouth clicks shut, the ensuing silence burning hotter than his anger, and Ichigo tenses, expecting violence. It’s almost comforting, despite the helplessness of being bound and deprived of his blade.

But Grimmjow doesn’t snatch up his sword or wrap his hand around Ichigo’s throat. He claws at Ichigo’s crotch instead, pulling at the fabric till his cock is exposed, and the sinuous slide of his body would be better suited to battle but is reduced to a moment of hot, fluttering pressure and slick sensation.

Even his violence, Ichigo thinks with a strange sense of mourning, is tainted now.

Then the daze breaks, and Ichigo’s pulled violently into his flesh, into Grimmjow, burning and writhing around him. And wet, so wet, even though there’s nothing of pleasure in the harsh, twisted expression on Grimmjow’s face.

His scent ripens the air, gives it a beating pulse, and Ichigo pants open-mouthed.

Grimmjow grunts when he bottoms out, slick heat closing tight around Ichigo’s deflated knot. Ichigo shudders full-bodied at the memory of being tied with him, and then Grimmjow’s moving, dragging himself up Ichigo’s cock, and the shudder becomes fire, pooling in his gut. He breathes in and bucks up, helpless not to chase that heat with this sickly sweet scent gnawing on his insides, and Grimmjow gasps, blue eyes comically wide as Ichigo slams in to the hilt.

He’s pinned the next moment, Grimmjow’s heavy and unmovable, but he’s clamped tight around Ichigo’s cock and buffeting him with that scent, and when Ichigo leans in this time, it’s to try and sneak a taste of the glistening gland on Grimmjow’s throat.

He gets a fist to the abdomen for his trouble.

White stars burst in his vision; there’s a moment of clarity.

“Sorry,” Ichigo gasps, pressing back into the wall and turning his head away as much as he can. “You smell—I—”

He runs out of air and doesn’t dare breathe in, not even when the discomfort in his chest builds and builds until it’s a hot, prickling hurt and grey creeps into the edges of his vision.

He loses the battle, desperate instinct kicking in, and the air he gulps in tastes like pre-heat. A whine flutters in his throat, and his cock twitches inside Grimmjow—who’s quiet, too quiet.

Ichigo holds his breath again, gritting his teeth against the burning urge to breathe this man in deep, and risks a glance at Grimmjow’s face.

The expression that greets him is unreadable. Grimmjow’s strangely still, the granite lines of his body belying the soft heat inside of him. Ichigo tries not to think about it, but it’s hard when Grimmjow’s all he can feel and smell and taste, and even the stark awareness that he doesn’t want this, that neither of them wants this, is hard to cling to when there’s a hot, furious thing in the back of his mind that feels as alien and familiar as his hollow.

Ichigo’s never been in rut. But he knows the warning signs.

Aizen wants your freaky hybrid—

“Get away,” Ichigo tries because he can’t not try; Grimmjow’s stony expression flickers. “Please, I’m—whatever they did, it’s—you need to stop.”

“It’s what, working?” Grimmjow says with a half-hearted leer. “I can tell. Keep your teeth away from my throat, Kurosaki.”

“I don’t—”

Grimmjow doesn’t let him finish, leaning in, his expression all teeth, and hissing, “Or how about I return the favor, see how you like that,” and there’s a hand gripping Ichigo by the chin and forcing his head up. Sharp teeth scrape down the column of his throat, and they don’t draw blood, but every hair on Ichigo stands on end, the scent-haze and mindless arousal dominated by instinctual terror.

And anger, the fear twisting and blackening into red-hot rage—

How dare you, you’re prey—

The hollow claws up his throat and is spat through his teeth—an angry howl that deepens and darkens into a low, rumbling growl. Ichigo’s whole body vibrates with it. And there’s a gnawing awareness, a spark of clarity in the back of his mind: This is not a human sound.

Grimmjow’s muscles convulse around his cock. Hot breath falls on his pulse.

Slick gushes over his cock, around it, and drips out from where they’re joined, soaking Ichigo’s balls. The sound rumbling through his body changes, and Ichigo knows, somehow, that it’s a softer sound, low and inviting. Grimmjow squeezes him again, and his teeth press against Ichigo’s throat, clenched shut and cold against the flushed skin.

“Shut up.” Ichigo hears it, crystal clear for all that it’s muffled against his throat. “Shut up, fuck, fuck you, shinigami, shut up—”

Grimmjow’s voice rises in pitch and breaks, and Ichigo doesn’t register more than heat and motion before he’s yanked into a savage rhythm that shakes the wall behind him. Grimmjow is almost a blur in his lap, riding Ichigo like he wants to break him, and his scent’s sweet and ripe, flooding Ichigo’s veins and wiping his mind clean.

-

Ichigo’s used to routine. Most of his life has passed in one, mundane except in all the ways it wasn’t.

Wake up. Deal with Isshin. Survive school—teachers, friends, and bullies. Survive the streets—the ghosts and the thugs. Go home. Eat Yuzu’s cooking. Study. Sleep. Rinse and repeat.

Rukia crashed into his life, and things never settled the same, but despite rescue missions and hollow hunting, the base structure of his life was familiar. New variables in an old formula. Ichigo never thought of them as bad changes, really.

There’s still routine—white walls and strange arrancar and needles. The formula’s changed, and he doesn’t recognize the equation. His body’s not his own. His mind is—

Old Man Zangetsu and the hollow are both quiet. But where the Old Man’s presence fades with every passing day, the hollow’s silence is a live, breathing thing. It’s dissolving in Ichigo’s veins, mixing into his blood. The hunger gnawing on his belly crawls further up to become a throbbing ache in the center of his chest. Black flecks his vision, and his thoughts take on a glaze of red-tinted violence.

He loses time.

He knows, in rare flashes of painful clarity, that he’s delirious more often than not. The knowledge never sinks in, the horror as distant as most of his thoughts.

The injections continue; he doesn’t remember all of them. He’s not even sure he remembers most. The strange arrancar, always the quiet one and the sneering one, become familiar rage-inducing sights—but once, he opens his eyes to a pink-haired, bespectacled man with a too-wide smile and soft, slimy voice. He laughs when Ichigo snarls at him, the hollow’s fury rumbling under his own, and then his blood’s on fire and he’s screaming and unconsciousness is almost welcome.

Grimmjow pulls him out of the dark, the scent always, always hitting first.

Grimmjow, he always remembers.

Sometimes, he even remembers to regret it.

-

Something’s wrong.

Ichigo jerked to life to a needle sliding out of his skin, and the arrancar responsible was halfway across the room before he could lash out with a trembling leg.

Then the hollow started screaming.

It’s still screaming.

It’s a cold shock after days—weeks?—of lashing silence, and Ichigo forgets how he ever handled the pounding in his head, the claws scraping the bone curves of his skull. He curls into himself, torso bent as far as his shackled arms will allow, and chants, “Shut up, shut up, shut up…”

The hollow’s screams turn into laughter, wild and unhinged, and Ichigo’s next breath fills him with air sour-sweet and heady.

“Grimmjow,” he gasps. “Not today. Stay—stay away.”

It’s useless. Ichigo knows it’s useless. If anyone wants to be here even less than Ichigo, it’s Grimmjow. He’s just a lot more graceful about it, which isn’t much at all, but Ichigo’s set the bar quite low. There’s no grace in him, not even resignation—only numb horror. He’s more desperate when he’s lucid, and he’s fucking lucid now, the mad cackling in his head a lifeline to inglorious awareness.

“You’re pathetic,” Grimmjow says, taking his customary place, already naked.

Ichigo’s too busy shoving the hollow down to react.

Hands pull at the fabric at Ichigo’s crotch, well worn from too many attempts at the same. The rest of his shihakushō is shredded, torso almost entirely bare from Grimmjow’s claws and teeth. 

King, the hollow croons, and there’s a second of silence before the cackling resumes; through the laughter, it howls, let me out, let me out—

“Shut up, shut the fuck up—”

Fingers tighten in his hair and score fresh trails of blood down his chest.

“The hell are you mumbling about, Kurosaki?” Grimmjow grits out; Ichigo doesn’t know if the strain in his voice is irritation or from—

Grimmjow’s body closes in around the head of his cock, slick and hot. The hollow shuts up. Ichigo’s too busy trying not to buck up into that wet heat to appreciate it. He’s used to his body reacting to Grimmjow’s scent, his warmth, to blood rushing south at the first hint of that sour-sweet scent, to his knot pulsing in want as slick trickles down the length of him.

He’s used to it, but it’s never not overwhelming, devastating, and it takes every last ounce of his control not to fuck up into Grimmjow and seek out his throat.

Ichigo, the hollow rumbles, its voice deeper, more guttural, somehow more monstrous than usual, and Ichigo’s forced to abandon his body to biology and focus on the mind, jerking his head violently to clear the creeping black at the edges of his vision. Even the hollow can’t break these cuffs, can’t manifest as more than helpless, useless rage, and Ichigo’s sometimes too tired to care when it does, when there’s nothing for the hollow to claw and snarl at except the arrancar with the needles, but now it’s Grimmjow in his lap, on his cock, and Ichigo can’t—

Let me, King, the hollow purrs, the laughter dead and gone. Kitty wants it, can’t you smell it—

“Shut—ah!”

Grimmjow clenches again, dragging himself up Ichigo’s dick, and his knot’s a throbbing ache, ready to burst. It’s too fast, too soon, and it’s the drugs, Ichigo knows, whatever they’re shooting him up with changing him from the inside out, but it’s never come on this fast, and it’s never made the hollow react like this. There’s an alarm blaring at the back of his mind, but it’s buried under warring instincts and bone-deep exhaustion; it flits and flickers, intangible and out of his reach.

Grimmjow’s scent spikes; his muscles convulse around Ichigo’s cock.

Ichigo groans, but Grimmjow is as silent as the grave. His nails are embedded in Ichigo’s flesh.

Give him what he wants, the hollow snarls. Or I will.

“I can’t,” Ichigo snaps because what Grimmjow wants is to not do this and what he needs is Ichigo getting him pregnant, and there’s no fucking universe where the latter’s acceptable, but both that and the first are so far out of Ichigo’s control that it makes him scream, a raw, furious sound that has the hollow laughing all over again.

Grimmjow claws up his chest and drips wet around his swelling knot. He’s talking, low and angry, but Ichigo can’t hear a word.

Breed him, the hollow whispers, sweet and seductive, and Ichigo’s hips jerk up, too-sharp pleasure raking his gut as his knot pops into place and locks them together, and for a moment, all he can feel is Grimmjow, burning and ripe—

The hollow shoves, a great, heaving blow, and Ichigo plummets into the depths of his own mind.

“Grimmjow!”

The warning call doesn’t escape the lips no longer under Ichigo’s control. The hollow wears him like a fucking suit. It surges forward, and Ichigo catches a secondhand glimpse of liquid blue eyes blowing wide before the hollow sinks hungry teeth into hot flesh.

The hollow was going for Grimmjow’s throat, Ichigo knows, but even knotted full and physically tied to Ichigo, Grimmjow’s reflexes are nothing to scoff at. The teeth catch his shoulder instead. And it’s the hollow in the driver’s seat, but Ichigo can taste the warm lifeblood splashing his mouth, thick and coppery. It tastes—

“Motherfucker,” Grimmjow yowls and punches the hollow in the jaw.

Ichigo feels the bone-rattling impact, the force of it snapping the hollow’s head to the side. It dislodges its teeth—and the chunk of flesh clamped between them. Disgust crowds up Ichigo’s throat, even as the meat slides down his physical throat. It tastes—

It tastes good. Rich. The hunger gnawing on his sinews abates for a precious second before flaring, ten times as worse.

Ichigo doubles over in his mindscape, retching, but nothing comes out, not even bile.

The hollow recovers before he does. Ichigo shudders at the sensation of his tongue swiping over his lips and chin, wetly lapping up the blood.

“Can dish it out,” the hollow croons with Ichigo’s mouth, “but can’t take it, kitty cat?”

“Enough!” Ichigo yells, reaching out with blind, seeking fingers, all instinct, and yanks.

The hollow goes down easy but laughing, and Ichigo reclaims his body in time to catch an eyeful of bared teeth and unhinged electric eyes. Grimmjow’s forehead rams into his own, and the impact threatens to send Ichigo tumbling right back into the state he just escaped.

“You’re back,” Grimmjow says. It’s not the blow Ichigo was expecting. He blinks the stars out of his vision and manages to focus on Grimmjow’s sneering face. “I don’t much like your passenger, Kurosaki.”

Ichigo’s eyes drop to Grimmjow’s mangled shoulder. He doesn’t seem bothered. But there’s something inherently wrong with knowing his mouth did that to the same man clenched wet around his knot. Grimmjow does it to him all the time, the hollow wasn’t lying, but Ichigo’s not Grimmjow.

God, he doesn’t ever want to be Grimmjow or the hollow.

“Neither do I,” he answers belatedly. “Figured you would, before…this.” He nods jerkily at Grimmjow’s shoulder. “You two fought. Seemed you had fun.”

“If I wanted a half-feral hollow to kick around, there are hundreds out here, Kurosaki. Your hollow didn’t do this, did he?”

Ichigo blinks blankly at Grimmjow’s palm, fingers spread over the nasty scar on his chest. Grimmjow’s nails are digging into the scar tissue. Ichigo can almost feel the warmth of his skin against his own numb palm. His hands twitch in their bonds.

“I’m sorry,” Ichigo hears himself say.

“Huh? For what—this little thing? Don’t fucking insult—”

“No,” he cuts in, half a sigh, abruptly exhausted. “Not that. You deserved that.”

“Then what the fuck are you talking about?”

“This. All of this.”

Ichigo doesn’t nod at their bodies, joined in unholy harmony. He doesn’t need to. Grimmjow’s quiet, which is answer enough. When Ichigo pries his eyes open, he finds that the look on Grimmjow’s face is also quiet. His eyes don’t waver from Ichigo’s.

“You’re a fool,” Grimmjow says quietly.

Ichigo closes his eyes.

He doesn’t pass out like he usually does after the knotting. And he doesn’t slip into that feverish haze where everything’s bright and half real, where the sweet heat of Grimmjow’s body is more important than the horror of it all. He stays firmly rooted in reality. And reality is the scent lining his nose and throat making his eyes burn as fiercely as his scent glands; it’s their tied bodies birthing revulsion that churns as hot as the pleasure in the pit of his belly.

For the first time, he’s uncomfortably aware of the last, fluttering clench of Grimmjow’s muscles, of his knot pulsing once, twice, and then deflating, of his limp cock sliding out of Grimmjow’s loosened hole, of the soft, ragged breaths that slip out of them both.

He’s awake to see Grimmjow pull on his clothes and belt his sword and stride out the door, shoulders straight and head held high, without a single glance back.

-

He’s pelted with rain the moment he lands on a sideways skyscraper. He didn’t notice the weather before, too preoccupied by his hollow taking over while Grimmjow was—well.

The hollow’s perched on the roof of the same building. Ichigo’s not stupid enough to think it’s coincidence.

It raises its head, yellow-on-black eyes boring into him from above an unhinged smirk. Pale hair is plastered to its face.

“Yo. Finally decided to drop in, I see. You should scurry out the way you came. Weather ain’t too nice in these parts.”

Understatement of the year. For once, Ichigo doesn’t think the Old Man will berate him for the rain. The thought brings little comfort.

Speaking of— “Where’s Old Man Zangetsu?”

“Ain’t it obvious? Keeping us alive.” The hollow’s grin widens, the light in its eyes growing wilder. Ichigo takes a step back, keenly aware of Zangetsu’s absence at his back. “Don’t be like that, King. I’m doing my part too. The kitten, how’s he taste?”

Ichigo flinches. “Shut the fuck up, bastard.”

“Oh? Don’t tell me you got attached. Stockholm syndrome…is it?” The hollow cocks its head, a leer springing to its lips. That expression on a carbon copy of his face unsettles Ichigo more than the hollow’s most violent acts. “Or is it because it’s the first hole you’ve—”

“I said shut up!”

Ichigo rushes it, feet flying over the glass, but the hollow leaps away from his fist and leverages the landing to throw itself at Ichigo. They go down in a tangle of limbs, but Ichigo drives his knee into its gut, earning himself a satisfying grunt.

The expected retaliation doesn’t come.

Instead, the hollow pants heavily into his ear.

Ichigo freezes.

“Careful, King,” it whispers. “Monsters are always hungry.”

Inch by inch, it dissolves on top of him.

-

He remains lucid for days; at least he thinks it’s for days. He tries to count the seconds but never manages to keep it up for more than an hour or two, and the Old Man’s no longer present enough to pick up the slack. The light visible through the tiny window doesn’t fade or brighten in any way indicative of natural rhythms. It could be a fucking hallway with fluorescent bulbs for all he knows.

That sends him on a shallow but consuming rabbit hole of how electricity works in a spiritual realm.

His thoughts chase each other in circles. He returns, over and over, to what the others might make of him vanishing. Did anyone see Grimmjow snatch him away? His sisters must be worried. Yuzu will cry. Karin will try very hard not to. He thinks about his friends too. And Urahara and Yoruichi, the shinigami stationed in Karakura, and even that weird shinigami–hollow guy who called himself a visored, Hirako.

He wonders if they’ll come for him, like he and the others did for Rukia.

A part of him has faith; a smaller, sharper part is ashamed at even needing help. But mostly, hope is exhausting. He doesn’t have the energy for it.

The last of his wounds have healed, even the chafed skin at his wrists less raw than before. It’s evident enough, the reason for that as well as his newfound mental clarity; Ichigo tries not to think about it, but sometimes, he catches himself chewing on the inside of his cheek to the memory of Grimmjow’s flesh sliding down his throat, bloody and warm.

He tries not to think about the way his mouth waters.

It gets harder with each passing hour. The faded hunger returns with a vengeance, gnawing on the hard bone of his ribs and the soft flesh of his belly, and where Ichigo spent those first few days—before Grimmjow, before drugs and sex—tormenting himself with visions of Yuzu’s cooking, now his mind wanders uncontrollably to the feel of flesh parting under his teeth and blood sluicing over his tongue. And when he tries to wrench his thoughts away from that, they turn to the scent-memory of Grimmjow’s sour-sweet blend.

It’s not heat, Ichigo doesn’t think. He’s spent enough days sliding food and water through a flap in his dad’s bedroom door to have some idea of what an omega in heat smells like. He remembers thinking, in the beginning before the needles sunk him into a feverish haze, that maybe Grimmjow smelled so different because Isshin was family, and his scent, heat or not, just hit different parts of his brain. And he’s still sure that’s true, but he’s also sure Grimmjow’s not in heat. Just like Ichigo’s not in rut but still loses time and his mind to the strange, biting heat in his veins.

He hopes it stays that way. Because if Grimmjow goes into heat or Ichigo starts rutting, if either of them pulls the other into it—

Aizen wants your—

Ichigo swallows bile.

But he knows what the injections mean. He can guess what they’re trying to achieve.

And when the arrancar eventually, inevitably show up, Ichigo embraces the darkness dancing at the edges of his vision and the low growl rumbling in his throat, and he relishes the flash of very real fear in their eyes.

It doesn’t matter, in the end. His arms and reiatsu are bound, and there’s only so much he can do with his legs and limited leverage. But it’s still the most spirited fight he’s been able to put up since the first injection. The quiet one walks away with a bruised eye socket. Her asshole companion, lip split from Ichigo’s kick, spits blood on him before walking away. There’s a moment where she seems intent on more, fists clenched and body tense, but then she freezes and throws a wild look over her shoulder before whirling around and stalking out of the room, followed by the quiet one.

Ichigo’s too busy shoving the hollow, quiet again but in that loud, lashing way, back down to think too much about it. He manages, despite the slow, fever-sweet fire eating steadily through his system, to stay awake and aware as the seconds trickle by, until the door opens again, admitting Grimmjow’s familiar frame.

For a moment, he looks startled, eyes meeting Ichigo’s and widening. The shock’s swallowed by a sneer the next moment.

“Miss me that much, Kurosaki?” he practically purrs, the sound dripping danger.

Ichigo doesn’t answer, less because of a sudden sprout of self-preservation than the uncertainty about what will come out if he opens his mouth. His whole body’s on fire. His dick’s already half hard, and as Grimmjow comes closer, as his scent grows stronger, it fills all the way up.

I don’t want this, Ichigo tells himself, fierce and desperate.

Nothing answers. No strength from the Old Man, and no mockery from the hollow.

A moment later, Grimmjow’s body heat burns his bare skin. His flesh has knitted back together, but his shihakushō hasn’t. He doesn’t miss how Grimmjow surveys his torso—dried streaks of blood and scarred but whole skin.

Grimmjow’s left shoulder, the one the hollow bit, is also scarred.

When Ichigo drags his eyes away from it, he finds Grimmjow glaring at him; burning eyes promise retribution.

Ichigo inexplicably misses the drugged haze. The sensation only grows when Grimmjow reaches for his groin. He flattens his palm against Ichigo’s dick over the cloth, huffing out a humorless laugh at the hardness he finds there.

Ichigo tries to close his eyes and sink deep into his mind. Even the hollow would be better than—

That sideways city, drowning in rain, that he fell into so easily the other day hovers just out of his reach. And Ichigo feels every inch of the fingers that curl around his cock and lead it into a scorching body.

Grimmjow’s breath falls on his face, warm and damp.

Ichigo shudders all through the first blood-hot drag of flesh on flesh.

“Hey—hey, Grimmjow,” he manages to gasp, desperate more for distraction than answers.

“What?” snaps Grimmjow, movements not faltering, and Ichigo tries and mostly fails to drag his mind away from the wet sounds and wetter sensation, but he clings with every ounce of trembling control to the question trying to scatter into meaningless segments in his mind.

“It won’t—it won’t work, right? You won’t…”

Ichigo can’t make himself say it out loud.

Grimmjow has no such compunctions.

“What, get knocked up?” He laughs, wild and cruel, and punctuates it with a brutal clench of muscles that has Ichigo arching up with a shout. “Who knows. Szayel says he’s close to the right formula. And you can feel it, can’t you, Ku-ro-sa-ki?”

He slams his body down for each hissed syllable of Ichigo’s name, and it burns through him, pressure and hot, damning pleasure, and Ichigo tries, he does, straining against the shackles and slamming his back against the wall, but Grimmjow scrapes too-sharp nails down his chest and writhes on his cock, and Ichigo breaks with a moan, slamming up into Grimmjow, over and over and—

“That’s it, you bastard,” Grimmjow hisses, every sound vicious, and meets Ichigo thrust for thrust.

“Please, Grimmjow—”

A hand closes around Ichigo’s throat, squeezes tight. Hot breath falls on his cheek. Ichigo can’t bring himself to open his eyes.

“Begging never works, Kurosaki,” Grimmjow growls. “If you were a real hollow, you’d fucking know that.”

“I’m not,” Ichigo snarls right back, and anger’s good, yeah, he can work with anger. “I’m not a hollow at all, you sick son of a bitch.”

Grimmjow’s laugh is borderline deranged. “Oh, keep telling yourself that. That the issue, shinigami? I’m a nasty fucking hollow”—a vicious ripple of slick, searing flesh, and Ichigo bites the inside of his mouth bloody trying not to cry out—”and not one of your oh-so-holy kind. Who were you panting after, huh? That runty ice bitch? Something soft and sweet and safe—”

Grimmjow cuts off with a short, strangled sound, and it takes Ichigo a second to register it’s because he’s sunk his teeth into Grimmjow’s lip, biting through flesh.

Not the hollow. Not its sweet violent urge. Just Ichigo and a fury that’s all his own, unblack and unholy.

Blood trickles down his throat.

He unclamps his jaw and jerks his face to the side—or tries. Fingers grip his hair and twist, tight and cruel, and he’s yanked right back into Grimmjow’s space. Bloody lips part wide around a mad, toothy grin.

“You think they’d want you, Kurosaki? You’re a fucking freak of nature. No amount of tinkering would make a shinigami knock up a hollow, but you—you’re no shinigami. You’re no better than me in their eyes, you sorry piece of shit.” Grimmjow laughs, loud and mean, then gasps, pressing his hips tight to Ichigo’s. “Fuck, fuck, ah, shit, I should have killed you out in that goddamn street.”

A part of Ichigo agrees. The rest’s caught up in the telltale flutter of Grimmjow’s ass around his cock, a furious demand for his knot.

His climax catches him off-guard. He’s helplessly replaying Grimmjow’s words even as his body squirms and shudders through waves of heat, knot swelling and locking into all that soft, yielding flesh.

He pries his eyes open, and Grimmjow’s there, too close and incandescently furious. Ichigo can’t help the downward slide of his gaze or the red heat that claws up his throat at the pearly mess splattering Grimmjow’s stomach.

He averts his eyes. Grimmjow scoffs.

“What, are you shy?” He cackles. “Think I like you better drugged, Kurosaki.”

“Shut up.”

“Fucking make me.”

Grimmjow’s hand returns to his throat. Ichigo glares at him. The grip tightens and tightens, till his throat throbs bruise-hot and his lungs start to burn. Ichigo welcomes the distraction and keeps his eyes on Grimmjow’s madness-lit face.

“That’s right,” Grimmjow croons. “You can’t. You know, I owe you one for the other day.”

It’s all the warning he gets before Grimmjow strikes, snake-swift, and at first, all Ichigo can feel is the tug and twitch of their bodies, locked so tight that any moment sinks serrated teeth into his spine. And then the pain hits.

Grimmjow bites deeper into his shoulder. Only the hand still constricting his throat, with just enough slack to let him suck in air through his teeth, keeps Ichigo from crying out.

When Grimmjow pulls back, he takes a chunk of Ichigo’s shoulder with him. Hot blood spurts from the wound, a searing crimson in Ichigo’s periphery, and drips down his chest. The pain takes on a sharp, shuddering pulse. White spots dance in his vision, blood loss or lack of air or both.

He can see Grimmjow’s sweat-soaked throat swell around a generous swallow.

Ichigo’s stomach clenches. Instead of bile, his mouth fills with saliva.

Grimmjow’s grip shifts from his throat to his jaw, strong fingers pressing bruisingly into the bone.

“You’re delicious, Kurosaki. Want a taste?”

Bloody lips curved into a smirk descend, sure and cruel.

And it’s ridiculous and stupid, but Ichigo’s first thought is that it’s his first kiss. A strange, hollow grief writhes in his ribcage.

Grimmjow’s mouth is edged with violence. His lips crush Ichigo’s, and their teeth clack together painfully. Too-sharp canines sink into his mouth, and a tongue wet and hot with more than just spit pushes into his mouth. Ichigo chokes around the biting, metallic taste of blood, but his throat works greedily, hungrily.

It’s with a vague, distant horror that he finds himself sucking his own blood from Grimmjow’s tongue.

Then it’s just the taste of warm, wet flesh, curiously bland, and Ichigo snaps back to his senses with a whine. He tries to jerk his head away and break the kiss, but Grimmjow’s grip tightens, and as willing as Ichigo is to break his jaw to get away, he’s not allowed to, held in place and forced to pant around Grimmjow’s tongue.

He doesn’t notice that coppery bite dominating the kiss till a low, rumbling growl crawls out of his own throat, and then it’s all he can taste, and he knows, he knows it’s not his blood.

Ichigo opens his eyes and finds himself staring into burning blue slits.

Grimmjow’s tongue slides out of his mouth, and Ichigo’s allowed all of a second to gasp for air before it returns, red and hot with Grimmjow’s eerily rich blood. And it’s disgust that squirms in Ichigo’s gut and curdles his blood, but that’s got nothing on the hunger that claws up his belly, his chest, his throat, spilling out in the clumsy slide of his tongue and desperate clench of his teeth.

Grimmjow jerks when Ichigo bites down on his tongue. For a moment, Ichigo’s distracted by the searing flesh convulsing against his knot, and then Grimmjow growls and shoves his bleeding tongue deeper into Ichigo’s mouth, and the hunger burns him clean.

-

A hazy eternity later, Grimmjow breaks the bloody kiss and lifts himself off Ichigo’s limp cock.

Ichigo’s throat is drenched with blood and the headier notes of Grimmjow’s sour-sweet not-heat scent, and his mind and body are oddly loose and lax, but he still hears Grimmjow’s parting whisper, more breath than word.

“Be ready.”

What did he mean? Ichigo asks himself, several stunned moments later.

Neither Zangetsu nor the hollow answers.

-

Next time the arrancar duo arrives, Grimmjow’s with them. He enters the room last, sauntering in with his hands in his pockets. His eyes catch Ichigo’s, and the smile that splits his face is not nice or reassuring.

Ichigo’s too shocked to react with his customary kick when the asshole arrancar approaches with the fucking syringe. He tries to jerk his head away, but the needle follows, plunging god-knows-what into his system.

A blink, and the other arrancar is there too, expression blank as she…reaches for Ichigo’s shackles?

“Your sure this is necessary?” It’s the asshole who asks the question, standing at the edge of the futon, just out of kicking range.

Grimmjow, still haunting the doorway, answers, “‘You heard Szayel. His reiatsu needs to be unbound for it to work.” His smirk turns sharp and ugly. “I call bullshit. This runt ain’t got it in him.”

“It’s a shinigami,” the asshole spits. She turns, just enough that she can eye Grimmjow while keeping Ichigo and the woman fiddling with his shackles in her periphery. “They can’t actually think this would work. You’re wasted on him, Sexta.” Her voice drops. “If you want to be really bred, I’m always—”

She doesn’t get to finish the sentence, each half of her body falling to the floor with dull, wet thuds.

Ichigo’s arms are freed in nearly the same instant, and when he turns, the quiet one is staring with blank, uncomprehending eyes at the gruesome corpse of her companion. Ichigo sees more than feels his own arm grabbing her face and slamming her head into the wall—once, twice, thrice.

She crumples. He doesn’t know if she’s dead. He can’t bring himself to check.

The strange sense of someone else piloting his body persists as he rises—and nearly topples, knees buckling under a weight they haven’t had to hold for so long. His legs feel like matchsticks.

He doesn’t collapse back on the futon by sheer, stubborn will, but his back crashes hard into the wall behind him. His arms are shaking violently at his sides.

Grimmjow, blade bared and streaked with crimson from the arrancar’s blood, is watching him with quiet eyes.

He raises a hand that’s already sparking red. Even Ichigo, his senses drowning under the frenzied writhing of his freshly unbound power, can sense the reiatsu gathering before his closed fist—pointed right at Ichigo.

He thought, for a second there, that Grimmjow was breaking him out, which made no sense, but this—this does.

Ichigo can’t run on violently shaking legs, and there’s something else creeping through his body, a slow, spreading fire that’s gnawing on his gut and licking at the edges of his vision, and he can’t get away in time, he knows, and there’s nothing but more of this hollow world to run to, but he doesn’t want to—

He doesn’t want to die.

He wants to see his sisters again. He doesn’t—

His reiatsu rises, desperate and furious—

And Grimmjow’s cero blasts a hole through the wall beside Ichigo. The hard-packed sand at Ichigo’s back crumples before his shock does, and he topples back.

He’s caught by the collar and slung unceremoniously across a broad back. The scent hits, then, fever-sweet and heady, heavy, and the creeping fire in Ichigo’s blood roars into an inferno. His reiatsu rises with it, clawing and scraping at the vents on his wrists—

A sharp, narrow pain at the back of his neck is the last thing he feels.

-

There’s a roaring in his ears, like the hollow howling, but lower, deeper.

Ichigo opens his eyes to complete darkness.

“You wouldn’t know control if it fucked you in your tight alpha ass, would you?” asks a familiar voice, made all the more familiar by the sneering disgust in it.

“I—what? Grimmjow?”

“Keep it down,” Grimmjow hisses.

“Where are we?” Ichigo whispers, patting behind himself and finding what seems to be the same grainy material that made up the wall he spent so long chained against.

“Fucking—not your voice, idiot, your reiatsu. Stop throwing it out like a fucking beacon. Aizen and the top three are gone, but that dead-eyed bootlicker is still in Las Noches, and if he finds us, you’re as good as dead.”

Ichigo shoves himself to his feet. It takes more effort than he’d like, and his knees are wobbly.

He’s steadied by the razor edge of a blade prodding his jugular.

“Are you fucking deaf?” Grimmjow snarls. Ichigo’s eyes have adjusted enough to make out his silhouette. “Get your reiatsu under control.”

“I—I can’t,” Ichigo stammers. He is so confused. “My control, it’s not—”

Grimmjow doesn’t let him finish, Pantera’s edge pressing a hair’s breadth deeper into Ichigo’s skin before vanishing as quickly as it appeared. Ichigo just barely registers the faint trickle of blood down his skin before a strong hand wraps around his neck.

His throat already knows the shape of those fingers.

Grimmjow’s breath is hot on his face when he says, “Then I should finish our fucking business and prepare a welcome party for the damned bat.”

Ichigo’s still more confused than anything, not quite able to wrap his mind around what happened. There’s only one possible explanation, and that’s—

“Why’d you save me?” he asks.

Well, he tries to. He sucks in the air for it, not sure when he stopped breathing, and is pummeled by the sour-sweet scent that’s been haunting his waking hours, except it’s more sweet than sour now, with an unidentifiable edge that rakes red-hot claws through Ichigo’s gut. His blood rushes south.

His knees buckle, and only Grimmjow’s hand on his throat keeps him upright.

The question withers on his tongue, replaced by a soft, breathy gasp of Grimmjow’s name.

Grimmjow groans. It’s not even remotely sexual.

“Of-fucking-course,” he growls. “Snap out of it, motherfucker. You’re not getting a piece of this ass again.”

“I don’t want it,” Ichigo forces out. “I never fucking did. What’s happening? Why’d you—? Where the fuck are we?”

“Doesn’t matter, we—” Grimmjow goes very, very still. Soft and uncharacteristically somber, he says, “Ah, fuck.”

Cold, razor-edged reiatsu washes over Ichigo. The darkness opposite them explodes in a wave of pure power.

Faint moonlight frames a vaguely familiar silhouette.

It takes him only a second to place the odd shape of the newcomer’s skull. The smaller arrancar from the park. Ichigo doesn’t remember many names, but he remembers this one.

Ulquiorra.

“Ulquiorra,” Grimmjow echoes from beside him. “Tch. Found us already, bastard? That’s fast, even for you.”

“What are you doing, Grimmjow?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m finishing what I started.”

“You’re impulsive and reckless. That prisoner was entrusted to your care. You’ve failed your duty. Return to Las Noches at once, and Aizen-sama may look kindly on your impertinence once again.”

Grimmjow laughs, a short bark of a sound. “I refuse. Your precious Aizen can shove his kindness up his asshole.”

“You forget yourself, Grimmjow.”

“What the fuck,” Ichigo says repressively, “is going on here?”

“Shut up,” Grimmjow snaps.

Ulquiorra doesn’t grace him with a response.

And before Ichigo can demand one violently, Grimmjow’s moving, a blue-streaked fist heading for the other arrancar’s head. It’s stopped in its tracks by a raised hand. Ichigo stares, tuning out Grimmjow’s taunts and Ulquiorra’s curt responses, keenly feeling Zangetsu’s absence. His power is unbound, but—

Another explosion rocks the building he’s in. Ichigo shields his face from the dust and debris, and when it clears, neither arrancar is in his line of vision. He can feel them outside, a clash of titans—Grimmjow’s power ragged and electric, Ulquiorra’s ice-cold and markedly stronger.

A few staggering steps and he can see them too, pale, furious streaks against the starless sky. The sands erupt around their feet and blades.

And Ichigo, here, shaking from the waist down and hot all over, swordless and fucking useless—

Hey, Old Man? 

Nothing.

Fucking hell.

Zangetsu? Zangetsu!

…shut up.

That’s not Zangetsu. But…

Ichigo thinks of Hirako and his mask. His invitation. All the implications.

But no, no, he can’t—last time it took over, Ichigo woke up in this bleached world and then—

Oi, hollow, where the fuck is Old Man Zangetsu?

I told you to shut up.

Fuck you, I need—

Power? it purrs, soft and no less dangerous for it.

Ichigo braces for what comes after, but he finds himself not having to fend off its attempts to seize control. It doesn’t even try. If Ichigo concentrates, he can catch a glimpse of narrowed yellow-on-black eyes and rain-drenched white hair. A pale figure hunched in on itself.

Take it, says the hollow.

What?

You want my power. Take it.

You—bastard, I don’t fucking trust you. All of this is your fucking fault.

Ichigo doesn’t believe that, not really. He’s the one who couldn’t keep the hollow down, the one who—

And judging by the hollow’s laugh, it knows that too.

It says, If I take over, I’m going to end up fucking kitty cat over there on a goddamn sand dune, and then that dead-eyed bastard will have an easy time killing us both. And I ain’t dying for a bit of tail. So take it and go play hero, King.

Ichigo hesitates.

That last injection, Grimmjow’s changed scent, the throbbing between his legs, the hollow’s reaction—he doesn’t like it, any of it.

Hurry up. The hollow sounds strained. Ichigo’s reasonably sure he’s not imagining it. Before it takes us both.

Ichigo’s gut clenches as if to punctuate that ominous statement.

“I…how do I?” he mutters out loud. “I don’t have my zanpakutō.”

You pathetic—hollows are instinct, dumbass. You already know what we can do. Fucking use it.

Half a mile away, Grimmjow crashes into a sand dune. Fuck.

“But—”

Go! Or you’ll die. The hollow lets out a peal of laughter that’s a shade less deranged than usual. It stops as abruptly as it started. He’ll die.

Grimmjow.

And Ichigo doesn’t like him, and he’ll never see that shade of electric blue without going cold to his bone, but—

Grimmjow didn’t want it either. He wasn’t nice or kind, but he answered Ichigo’s questions and helped, in some deeply fucked-up ways. And he got Ichigo out of there.

Now he’s fighting one of his own people and losing, and Ichigo can’t just stand back and let him die.

He won’t.

He raises a shaky arm. Dark reiatsu swirls around his fingers.

Ichigo claws his hand down his face.

Chapter Text

Grimmjow knew he should have gotten them the hell out of Las Noches.

Easier said than done, with a half-hollow bastard slung over his shoulder like so much dead weight. Didn’t help that Kurosaki was reeking of rut and whatever chemicals Szayel had cooked up, the shit pumped into Grimmjow’s own veins reacting to that scent with extreme prejudice.

It’s there even now—a strange, biting warmth lashing everywhere inside him. Even his fucking hollow hole feels hot, and if evolution both earned and not has taught Grimmjow anything, it’s that whenever that hole aches with anything except the endless hunger of a hollow, his body’s about to get fucked seven ways to Sunday.

The fucking’s never been all that literal till now.

Be an Espada, they said.

You’ll have power, they said.

Bullshit, all of it.

At least he made it out of the dome and as far as one of the outer towers. He knows for a fact that Szayel’s surveillance is spottier here, and the fucker will take hours, if not at least a day, to break out of the caja negación. 

Now he’s just got to deal with Ulquiorra.

Just the fucking Cuatro Espada.

He breaks up the pity party and spits out a mouthful of dust before throwing himself at Ulquiorra’s reiatsu signature, as inscrutable as the bastard’s face. It’s meticulously controlled even in resurrección, and Grimmjow’s still torn between pride at forcing Ulquiorra to release his sword and spitting fury that the fucker’s not taking him seriously even now.

Spitting fury, as always, wins.

Ulquiorra flies out of the path of his claws—because of course the bastard has wings—and right into a torrent of effervescent red.

Grimmjow freezes.

Standing in the jagged hole Ulquiorra’s dramatic entrance left in the tower, Kurosaki lowers a hand still sparking with the remnants of what had to have been a cero.

And it is Kurosaki. Grimmjow’s had months to burn those torn robes and scarred torso into his brain. Even if he didn’t, that shade of eyesore orange, bright even in this wan light, is hard to miss. But that’s an honest-to-god hollow mask on the fucker’s face—not that weird, lizard-like transformation he pulled off after Grimmjow first dragged him into Hueco Mundo, which didn’t dissipate till Kurosaki was a smoking half-corpse on the ground. Just a mask.

But that lizard, surprisingly powerful despite feeling like your run-of-the-mill adjuchas, was patently not Kurosaki.

This is.

Grimmjow doesn’t know how he knows, but he’s bone-deep certain and fucking furious about it.

“Stay the fuck out of this, Kurosaki,” Grimmjow yells, even as he throws himself at Ulquiorra, who also seems to have lost a few brain cells—or at least a few seconds—processing Kurosaki’s fresh heaping of bullshit. Doesn’t stop him from batting Grimmjow aside, but at least he’s no longer gawking at Kurosaki.

A green spear of erratic energy bolts toward his chest. Grimmjow dodges. The landscape doesn’t have that luxury.

The resulting devastation sinks cold claws into his gut.

Another sphere of crimson energy heads for Ulquiorra and is promptly swatted away.

Of course Kurosaki doesn’t fucking stay out of it. Grimmjow doesn’t know what the fool thinks he’s doing. He’s leaning heavily against the tower, but even that doesn’t fully hide the way he’s shaking. And for all that his right hand’s already sparking red with another cero, his reiatsu is a hot mess, swelling and shuddering without rhyme or reason. It’s got the dark, devouring edge of hollow reiatsu, but something’s off; Grimmjow can feel it in his teeth.

The dumbfuck’s gonna get himself killed, but Grimmjow didn’t drag his sorry carcass all the way out here to let fucking Ulquiorra steal his prey.

He spares a second to judge every single one of his life choices and then slips into lightning-fast sonído to intercept the bat bastard.

-

Grimmjow’s got a heat tearing up his guts that burns worse than the deep gashes streaming blood down his torso. Kurosaki’s unstable reiatsu lashes at the edges of his own, and his belly knots up tight.

It’s a losing battle, always was, and even in his head, Grimmjow’s not sure if he’s talking about Kurosaki or Ulquiorra.

He crawls out of the sand dune that became his temporary tomb, right in time to see Kurosaki take a cero to the chest.

It’s a perfect circle, warm skin charred black at the edges.

For a second, Grimmjow can see Ulquiorra through it, cold green eyes and a pale, pointed finger, because Kurosaki was standing between Grimmjow and Ulquiorra.

Because he put himself there, when Grimmjow went down.

Then Kurosaki’s body—just a body—topples. His mask cracks with a sound that rings in Grimmjow’s ears like thunder. The reiatsu trying its damnedest to mingle with Grimmjow’s shudders into nothing. Not even a wisp.

For the span of a single heartbeat, Grimmjow stares at brown eyes gone flat and dull with death.

“Aizen-sama will not be pleased,” Ulquiorra says dispassionately. “Not that I understand what he saw in this trash. Or you, Grimmjow.”

Grimmjow meets those dead-fish eyes. “You’re dead.”

A flicker of shock crosses Ulquiorra’s face. Grimmjow gets a good, close look at it, claws tearing through the fucker’s stomach. He doesn’t get away unscathed, Ulquiorra’s fist slamming into his jaw, but he barely registers the impact, catching that deceptively delicate wrist and throwing Ulquiorra into the tower.

It crumples.

Grimmjow dives into the furious cloud of dust, and Ulquiorra meets him blow for blow. His stomach’s already almost healed. Green eyes don’t waver from Grimmjow’s face, even when their attacks tear up the sands around them.

“You’re angry,” Ulquiorra states, kicking away from Grimmjow. “How odd. Don’t tell me…? You got attached.”

“Attached? Shut the fuck up. He was mine to kill. And you—” You took that away from me sounds maudlin, like nothing he’d ever say, even though there’s a hollow howl echoing in Grimmjow’s mind that’s spilling anguished rage. The air’s thick with power, but all he can taste is the absence of Kurosaki’s reiatsu. He bares his teeth, spits out, “You’ll pay for that with your life.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Ulquiorra flashes out of the path of a kick and dissuades Grimmjow’s pursuit with a green javelin of pure power. “You truly believe you can defeat me.”

“I told you to shut the fuck up.”

“Very well,” Ulquiorra intones, patently not shutting the fuck up. “Allow me to disabuse you of your delusions. Resurrección: Segunda Etapa.”

A hurricane of power descends on him.

-

He ends up face-down only a couple of feet away from Kurosaki’s corpse. It’s fucking poetic.

Ulquiorra is talking somewhere above him. Grimmjow’s starting to suspect the real power his resurrección and that bullshit second stage unlock is the ability to talk people to death, as if all the words the bastard usually doesn’t say are stored in his sealed blade.

The most pathetic thing is that it might work. Grimmjow’s barely clinging to his resurrección. Most of his blood’s outside his body. Nothing’s broken. Ulquiorra made a point of drawing blood in as many places as possible, the gashes shallow in some places and showing bone in others. Not playing—proving a point. Bastard.

Fuck, he’s still talking, intonation rising into a question—

Grimmjow groans when his ringing ears parse the content. He doesn’t fucking want to hear a single thing about alphas and omegas, about hormones and pheromones and thrice-damned arrancar biology. He’s heard damn near nothing else the last two months—Aizen’s calm commands, Nnoitra’s and Yammy’s leering, Harribel’s quiet pity. Even the numeros were fucking irritating, at least till Grimmjow started killing the ones that so much as looked at him wrong, let alone propositioned him like the dumb bitch handling Kurosaki’s tender care. And Szayel—fucking Szayel, the worst of the lot. Grimmjow could put up with his science bullshit, the needles and the tubes and the burning in his blood, but if he had to hear the word breed out of that slimy cunt’s mouth one more time—

Well, he won’t have to, he’s pretty sure.

Ulquiorra has finally stopped talking. Guess he got tired of the sound of his own voice. Grimmjow’s a card-carrying member of that club.

He’s keenly aware of Ulquiorra’s reiatsu signature drifting closer, taking its sweet time.

For some reason, he finds himself staring at Kurosaki. The sorry fool’s head is turned toward Grimmjow. He’s wearing an expression of acute shock. Even with those empty eyes, he looks so…

“Don’t look like that,” Grimmjow hears himself say. “Better this way, Kurosaki. At least you don’t have to listen to this bastard’s yapping.”

Kurosaki’s corpse doesn’t reply, of course.

Dark, clawed feet sink into the sand in Grimmjow’s periphery.

He should get up. No need to die like a dog.

He doesn’t want to die at all. Seems fucking unfair, after all the humiliation he put up with these months to avoid precisely that.

“You’re bad for my health, Kurosaki,” Grimmjow grunts, pushing himself to his knees.

Blood stains the sand under him, black as tar in the moonlight.

Slitted yellow eyes set in damp-green sclera look down on him, black estigma bleeding out of them like cursed tears. Ulquiorra’s expression holds one hundred percent more disdain than usual. Grimmjow’s developing all sorts of theories about that second resurrección of his.

It’s a good distraction from a second resurrección being a thing that’s possible and also his impending demise.

Ulquiorra crouches down before Grimmjow can summon the energy to push himself to his feet. He slaps away the hand that reaches for his face—well, he tries. Ulquiorra’s arm doesn’t so much as waver, while Grimmjow’s fingers smart.

Wicked claws, similar at a glance to Grimmjow’s own but nothing like them on closer inspection, hover over his chest. Grimmjow snarls, wrapping both hands around Ulquiorra’s wrist and trying to pull it away. It doesn’t budge. Any moment now, a cero will—

Ulquiorra raises his hand, claws skimming Grimmjow’s cut-up skin till they come to rest against the side of his throat.

On his scent glands.

Grimmjow stills.

His chest rumbles around a growl. The hair at his nape stands on end.

“What did it change?” Ulquiorra murmurs. “That thing they call the heart—I thought that was the strangest thing about humans. Now, I wonder. You’re still hollow, heartless, and yet, here you are. Is this what made you rescue this boy—this strange scent?”

The pad of a furred finger rubs against his scent gland. Grimmjow tears bloody grooves along Ulquiorra’s forearm, throwing himself to the side in the same motion.

His arm brushes Kurosaki’s still-warm flesh. Grimmjow doesn’t look at him.

Ulquiorra hasn’t moved, staring at his finger. Grimmjow feels more violated than he did when he was riding Kurosaki’s dick on the regular with the bleak awareness that Szayel was watching and probably taking notes.

Szayel was a beta, though, spared the extra bullshit of this new evolution, not that it saved Grimmjow from his damned “scientific” curiosity.

Ulquiorra is…

Grimmjow can smell it ever so faintly—a hint of sweetness, with metallic undertones. It’s exactly what Grimmjow’s scent had been before repeated exposure to Szayel’s fuckery and Kurosaki’s sharp, overpowering scent made it bloom into something that had arrancar, alpha and omega both, eyeing him with a blend of horror and fascination.

He never counted Ulquiorra among those. 

Ulquiorra turns to him. Grimmjow hits him in the face with Desgarrón.

It’s weak, neon lines of reishi barely forming before shattering on Ulquiorra’s face. The bastard’s not even fazed. And this time, when that finger points at him, dramatically slow like Ulquiorra wants to fucking savor the moment, Grimmjow knows with utter certainty that he’s about to meet Kurosaki’s fate.

Sonído’s out. He’s too weak to get a good speed, and the disorientation will leave him an easy target for a few seconds after landing. Ulquiorra won’t need whole seconds. Desgarrón’s out too; he’d just make a fool of himself.

He gathers reiatsu in his palm, blood mixing in. Might blow up and kill him. Whatever.

Movement behind him.

A sudden, terrible avalanche of reiatsu.

Ulquiorra’s eyes are wide. The dark green energy coalescing at the tip of his finger sputters and dies.

Grimmjow glances behind himself. Stupid. Can’t help it.

Hair—a wild, writhing mass of it.

Kurosaki’s hands are moving, bone-white fingers contorted in the sand.

There’s a haze of red over his body. Reiatsu so thick that Grimmjow can taste it in the back of his throat.

The loss of concentration costs him, the budding gran rey cero exploding in his palm. He’s thrown back violently—

—and caught, held flush against blood-hot flesh that burns him even through his bone armor.

The arms around his midsection are bleached pale, with red tufts of fur at the wrists. The hands are pale too, bony with dark, curved claws at the ends. Strands of flame-orange spill down Grimmjow’s shoulder. Hot breath falls on his nape.

There’s nothing of Kurosaki in it. Even the hair’s too long. All wrong.

But—

Grimmjow could die and be devoured and still never forget the feel of that reiatsu.

It’s never felt quite like this. Even before, when it was dark and edged like a hollow’s—hell, even when Kurosaki’s passenger went and turned that body into some reptilian abomination—it was only a noticeable blight on the distinctive reiatsu signature that screamed shinigami. The reverse, maybe, of how arrancar feel like hollows with a bit of shinigami energy mixed it. But not anymore. Kurosaki feels all hollow. 

And he’s holding Grimmjow. Breathing huffs of hot air into his neck.

“Oi…Kurosaki? That you?”

There’s no answer. Just more of those hot, uneven breaths.

And then it lets him go.

Sheer shock almost makes Grimmjow topple back into the sand, but his subconscious must decide it’s had enough humiliation for the day because he catches himself with a hand, the non-ruined one, and springs back to his feet, right in time to see Kurosaki slam into Ulquiorra.

Right, Ulquiorra. Grimmjow forgot him for a second there. Kurosaki clearly hasn’t.

Grimmjow stands and stares.

It’s a blood-curdling reversal of the previous fights, except in all the ways it’s not. Ulquiorra thrashed Kurosaki with contemptuous condescension and fought Grimmjow with quiet assurance in his own superiority, only deigning to respond to Grimmjow’s fury with cool disdain.

Kurosaki isn’t returning the favor. Oh, he’s thrashing Ulquiorra easy as breathing, but he’s got none of Ulquiorra’s bloodless confidence or Grimmjow’s quicksilver rage. He just…is. A force of nature. Grimmjow feels diminished watching him. He can’t imagine how Ulquiorra feels, being the focus of such slow, systematic destruction.

Even if Grimmjow was capable of pity, he wouldn’t be feeling it.

A stray cero rams into the sand a few feet from him. Grimmjow leaps away, landing on all fours by the newly formed crater. The lashing energy manages to knock some sense into him.

He eats it.

It’s not as easy as ripping into wet, reishi-rich flesh or sinking his teeth into a cracked mask and gulping down a hollow whole, but Grimmjow’s spent a long, long time as a perpetually starved adjuchas. He’s got his tricks.

He focuses on the worst of the lacerations, directing the dregs of his reiryoku to the flesh. He swapped high-speed regeneration for destructive force; he’s good at keeping himself alive. The bleeding becomes less profuse. The torn tendons impeding his movements knit together, centimeter by painful centimeter.

Above him, monsters tear up the starless sky.

It’s hard to believe that is really Kurosaki.

It rankles to stay back and watch when he marked both those bastards for death, but for all that he’s exactly as impulsive and reckless as Ulquiorra accused him of being, Grimmjow isn’t stupid. He sure as shit isn’t suicidal, recent actions aside.

He continues to absorb what he can of the energy the clashing assholes are throwing all over the place. It’s hard not to notice that it’s much, much easier to latch onto Kurosaki’s power; it latches right back, threading itself with Grimmjow’s reiatsu, just like when—

Shitting fuck, he’s wet, how the fuck is this his life—

Kurosaki rips off Ulquiorra’s arm. His floating form is framed by the moon, a stark-edged silhouette. It’s impossible, like that, to miss the moment he raises that severed arm to his mouth and bites off a generous chunk.

Grimmjow’s mouth waters. A strange horror curls up in his ribcage.

It’s not the cannibalism. Grimmjow’s real fine with cannibalism.

But—it’s Kurosaki.

Kurosaki, who blanched when he realized he ate a tiny chunk of Grimmjow, who flinched from Grimmjow’s blood in his mouth.

Who drank it anyway because they’d been starving him.

“What…are you?”

It takes Grimmjow a second to notice he’s not the one who spoke. Ulquiorra, crouching on the other side of the crater, is staring up at Kurosaki making quick work of his arm with an expression of horrified fascination. He hasn’t regenerated his arm, though Grimmjow’s well aware he can, both from Ulquiorra’s helpful explanation and nonchalant demonstration when Grimmjow tore off half a wing.

As if on cue, Ulquiorra regrows his limb; Grimmjow can’t help thinking he’s like an endless buffet.

Finished with his feast, Kurosaki descends.

No, that’s too slow a term. One moment, he’s up there in the sky. Next, he’s down, a few feet from Grimmjow.

“Oh, fuck no, I’m not on the menu,” he spits out, leaping back—and right into the same burning chest.

The scent hits Grimmjow like a sledgehammer. His knees buckle, except he doesn’t fall. He’s caught around the waist and yanked back against—

Yep, that’s a—

Son of a fucking bitch—

Dark green energy damn near blinds him.

It takes him a second to register Ulquiorra attacked—and Kurosaki shielded him, pushing Grimmjow behind his body and crushing that javelin of insane power with his bare fucking hands.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Grimmjow gasps, pushing away from Kurosaki, who doesn’t pursue this time.

He’s staring right at Ulquiorra instead. And Ulquiorra looks—

If Grimmjow dies here, and he’s going to do everyfuckingthing he can do make sure he doesn’t, at least he’ll die savoring the memory of the sheer, screaming shock splashed across that emotionless bastard’s face.

He falls with that same expression on his face, Kurosaki’s hand tearing through his chest.

A pale, clawed foot pins Ulquiorra’s head to the ground.

“I see,” Ulquiorra says. His eyes are on Grimmjow. Despite the distance, Grimmjow can hear each word like a whisper behind his ear. “I suppose…I understand now. Very well. Show no mercy, Kurosaki Ichigo.”

Kurosaki doesn’t.

The cero doesn’t kill Ulquiorra. Kurosaki’s hungry maw does.

And there’s something, a disquiet Grimmjow doesn’t dare acknowledge, about watching a fellow Espada—a higher-ranked one—be devoured with the graceless, hollow hunger of a newborn menos.

That it’s Kurosaki doing the devouring…

Ulquiorra’s mostly bits of flesh in Kurosaki’s belly or faintly glowing reishi particles when it occurs to Grimmjow that he should’ve run while Kurosaki was distracted by the meal.

Still time.

He takes a step back. That gore-splattered head snaps to the side. Twin voids pin him in place.

“Still…not on the menu,” Grimmjow murmurs. He feels oddly dazed. It’s the blood loss, probably. Or the scent, clinging to his nostrils and crawling under his skin.

He runs.

Kurosaki doesn’t give chase so much as blur into existence in front of Grimmjow, a nightmare given flesh from those empty eyes to the blood and viscera splattering his front, and Grimmjow doesn’t hesitate, throwing his elbows out to shoot the three explosive barbs left right into Kurosaki’s bony face. Kurosaki doesn’t bother dodging, and Grimmjow doesn’t break stride, his speed born more from desperation than actual energy.

He won’t get away. He’s not stupid enough to think that.

But the way Kurosaki smells, the way he’s touching Grimmjow—he doesn’t want Kurosaki catching him out here in the open.

He really should’ve gotten the hell out of Las Noches.

Somehow, he makes it to one of the small buildings smattering the outskirts of Las Noches; it’s far enough from where the three of them had duked it out to be whole and mostly unscathed, but the sand around it is disturbed, almost burying the building. Grimmjow can’t sense anything inside.

Despite the intense gaze burning up his back, Grimmjow’s careful with the door. He opens it slowly and leaves it open.

It’s not an invitation, only inevitability. If Kurosaki barrels in through the door or, even worse, the wall, Grimmjow’s harried attempts at preserving his dignity will end up useless.

The inside is a large, rectangular room, bare and bland. No unfamiliar reiatsu clings to the walls. A small, square window bored into one wall, opposite the door and close to the ceiling, lets in a shimmering column of moonlight.

Grimmjow doesn’t have a singular fucking clue what these buildings are used for or if they’re used at all. Most arrancar he knows reside within the dome, where they can lick Aizen’s ass with more dedication than skill. He didn’t sense jackshit when he holed up in the tower with Kurosaki, and he doesn’t sense jackshit now, but that doesn’t count for much when any Espada worth their salt can travel here from the dome in less than an hour.

But Aizen has taken his terrible lieutenants and the top three Espada, plus their fracción and a handful of random cannon fodder, and fucked off to the Living World. Ulquiorra was the biggest threat left, and he’s currently digested reishi in Kurosaki’s stomach.

Nnoitra could be a problem. Szayel too, in tricks though not in power, and Grimmjow bets the bastard is pissed about being punted to that pocket prison.

He’d gladly take either of them, wash the taste of defeat from his mouth with their blood, but that’s for later, if they bother hunting him down. Grimmjow’s current concern is the creature oh-so-slowly stalking through the open door. Garra de la Pantera doesn’t seem to have so much as singed him. Even the ripped remnants of his shinigami robes are intact. Fucker.

The scent hits Grimmjow before the reiatsu does, but he’s prepared this time, braced against the wall opposite the door. He curls his tail around his leg, tightening it to the point of pain, and uses the ache to ground himself.

For several long moments, Kurosaki just lingers in the doorway. The dark holes making up his eyes seem to suck in the scant light, but Grimmjow knows, all the way down to his shattered soul, that those eyes are staring right at him.

A clawed foot slides forward.

The door grates shut behind Kurosaki.

He seems…wary. Or at least cautious about approaching. Maybe the bombs did have some effect. Explains how Grimmjow managed to make it this far, and son of a bitch, doesn’t that rankle.

Everything about this rankles.

“Vasto lorde already, bastard?” he asks. “What, were you waiting to die so you could pull it off? Show-off.”

No answer. Only deep, ragged breathing. More inhale than exhale, like he’s breathing Grimmjow in. And Grimmjow’s well aware that his body’s giving Kurosaki plenty to suck in.

A blink and—

Kurosaki roughly sandwiches him between the building’s wall and a wall of muscle, which is searing but not all that softer than the grainy surface pressing against Grimmjow’s back.

Grimmjow’s the taller of the two, resurrección giving him an extra two inches on Kurosaki. The last two months, it didn’t matter because Kurosaki was a crumpled figure in chains. Right now, it just leaves him painfully aware of how close those goring horns are to his eyes. Kurosaki wouldn’t even have to try.

And those eyes—endless black instead of warm brown. Grimmjow knew, really, the moment Kurosaki took that first bite out of Ulquiorra. The idiot kid that apologized to Grimmjow with his heart on his fucking sleeve wouldn’t have had it in him to eat anyone in cold blood, hollow or not. Kurosaki’s passenger clearly would, but that one had a smart mouth and mad, mad eyes.

The vasto lorde pinning Grimmjow is just empty instinct.

And if he was angry and hungry before, now he’s…

Sharp teeth sticky with blood press to Grimmjow’s throat, horns carefully angled away. Hard-won instincts scream at him to shove the hollow off and protect his throat, but his body’s got other plans, going still and limp at the first, flickering touch of a tongue to his pulse.

Kurosaki’s scent rises, a heavy, heady musk. It’s the same it was, just a hell of a lot more intense. Fucking Szayel.

Grimmjow’s own fault though. He shouldn’t have let those assholes inject Kurosaki to begin with, but he’d thought to wait for them to unshackle Kurosaki from those complicated reiatsu-triggered restraints Aizen had made sure not to key Grimmjow into. He should have said fuck it and blown the whole thing off. If Kurosaki lost an arm, whatever, not like he’d have needed it for long anyway.

But he didn’t, and how he’s got a baby vasto lorde running more on dick than brain.

Oh, look, he’s grinding into Grimmjow now. The bulge rutting up against his thigh feels a hell of a lot bigger than what Kurosaki’s human form packed. Wonderful.

And fuck his body too for reacting to it, that slow, creeping heat making his guts squirm and cock twitch and ass turn into a fucking swamp. The ache of it’s hot and biting, like a second hollow hole has been torn open somewhere deep inside. His legs widen of their own volition, making room for Kurosaki. He realizes he tipped his head back at some point; Kurosaki’s breath is warm and damp on his throat. Those monstrous horns are on either side of his neck, gleaming in the faint light.

Kurosaki’s grinding his crotch into Grimmjow’s thigh with enough force for it to hurt through the armor. His hierro’s shot, not enough reiatsu to maintain it. He should probably slip out of resurrección, conserve energy, but…

He doesn’t want to lose the cocoon of bone and the sharp lash of his tail. This form’s more his than the clawless, toothless shinigami-mimics Aizen likes them to be.

A low growl vibrates against his throat, and instinctive terror slithers down Grimmjow’s spine, followed a millisecond later by the hot clench of his gut. Kurosaki’s moving faster, like he’s trying to fuck right through Grimmjow and into the wall beyond. He peers, neck still carefully tilted back, at the bright mane spilling down Kurosaki’s back, the tips swaying with the force of Kurosaki’s thrusts.

“You desperate fuck,” he mutters.

Kurosaki doesn’t react. He probably didn’t even hear. Grimmjow almost envies him, like he did all those times before. Szayel’s concoctions fucked with Grimmjow’s body, filled it with aches and wants that were as unfamiliar as his fangless mouth and clawless hands and long, two-limbed stance had been at the beginning. His flesh, his very existence, twisting into alienness right under his nose.

But his mind was his own. Each time he walked into Kurosaki’s prison, he did it by choice. Desperate, despairing choice but still choice.

And he knew, from the first time Kurosaki leaned in for his neck with a fever flush and glazed eyes, that the boy didn’t have that luxury. He sparked to life, now and then, horrified and defeated in turns, but some frenetic heat seemed to swallow him whole each time; most of the time, he passed out with his knot plugging Grimmjow. And now he’s even more of a mindless thing.

“Should’ve put you out of your misery when I could have,” Grimmjow says for the thousandth time. It’s lost its bite.

Kurosaki growls, shoves him a good inch into the wall, and shudders for a long, long time.

Something in Grimmjow twists and writhes. He resolutely ignores the sticky wetness pooling uncomfortably in the scant space between his skin and the armor.

He shoves lightly at Kurosaki’s shoulder. It’s almost fascinating, how human-shaped he is.

Kurosaki doesn’t budge. Perfect.

“Oi,” Grimmjow growls. “You had your fill, now get off and go…I don’t know, eat some arrancar or something. Not me. Kurosaki.”

The name elicits something of a response.

Grimmjow has all of a second to regret it before he’s yanked away from the wall and slammed to the ground, several hundred kilos of pissed-off vasto lorde pinning him bodily. He fights, of course he fucking fights; his claws gouge wounds that don’t even bleed before they leak white goop and heal shut, and when he tries with his teeth, he gets a mouthful of skin turned to steel, as if Grimmjow’s initial attack somehow triggered the fucker’s hierro.

A clawed hand wraps around his throat and shoves him down with brain-rattling force. Grimmjow doesn’t stop struggling, even when Kurosaki’s remaining hand starts clawing at the armor covering his crotch.

Kurosaki would have fought too, if he could have. He tried anyway. Begged too, and looked like it was killing him. Like Grimmjow was—

That wasn’t how he wanted to kill Kurosaki. This isn’t how—

Kurosaki has torn the armor off his skin. He’s let go of Grimmjow’s throat and is holding him in place by the thighs, and no amount of writhing or clawing makes him budge. Grimmjow tries a cero, only for Kurosaki to grab his red-wreathed hand and crush the energy in his palm.

It does distract Kurosaki enough for Grimmjow to kick away his legs and scramble out from under him, but he’s caught and thrown back to the ground, face-first this time, and when a distinct weight presses into his now-bare ass, Grimmjow gets the sense that he played himself. He makes a spirited attempt to throw Kurosaki off, but the weight on his back is immovable. Then there’s a hard face pushing his hair aside—hot breath at his nape, the slightest graze of teeth. Grimmjow’s body goes prey-still before his mind catches up.

Kurosaki ruts against him. He’s still clad in that black shinigami hakama. The fabric does little to mask the searing heat of his flesh. He moves like an animal, graceless and grunting. He makes Grimmjow feel like an animal, trapped under those hot thrusts and hotter breaths. He’s impossibly wet.

It’s humiliating.

“Fair’s fair, is it,” Grimmjow says emptily to the ground.

Kurosaki used to be so horrified at the beginning, eyes wetter and skin redder than when Grimmjow used his face as a punching bag. Empty-eyed defeat would follow, eventually, whenever Kurosaki remained aware enough to feel much of anything.

Grimmjow wonders what his face looks like right now. Angry, probably. Nothing like Kurosaki’s, he’s sure.

Kurosaki had horror to spare for Grimmjow too. Enough to jump between him and Ulquiorra.

What a sorry fucking fool.

The bonehead behind him must have figured out exactly why he’s not getting what he wants because, between one breath and the next, it’s bare flesh that presses to Grimmjow’s ass.

Claws scrape his ass, spread it wide; his hierro is non-existent. It stings. Kurosaki’s claws slip on the slick drenching that entire area. Grimmjow now understands something of that peculiar horror Kurosaki sported whenever his dick swelled at Grimmjow’s touch, his scent.

That first time, in his mouth—the kid looked almost green. And Grimmjow didn’t understand—

It slides between his cheeks. Grimmjow can hear the wet slide of it. The head dips down, catches the rim, hard and—

Too hard. Almost bony. Ridges?

That’s not—

He’s filled in one savage thrust, Kurosaki pushing in and in and in—

Grimmjow doesn’t realize he’s keening—a low, trembling sound—until he runs out of air abruptly and the sudden absence of sound rings in his ears. Kurosaki keeps pushing in, endless, until it’s not, and Grimmjow chokes on nothing.

It shouldn’t matter; he was shoving his body down on Kurosaki’s cock well before drugs and sheer fucking exposure had him soaking his underwear at Kurosaki’s mere scent. And it’s not—it doesn’t hurt, not really, but it feels—

The dick’s thinner, not by much, but enough that Grimmjow’s left unsettled, almost disoriented, by the difference. Or maybe that’s the increased length, digging deeper than anything ever has and taking another inch for good measure.

Or the strange, ridged feel of it, harder than flesh and softer than bone.

Kurosaki bottoms out with a rumbling growl, almost a purr, and it’s then, with their hips flush and Grimmjow forced into a whole new awareness of his body, that he notices the odd, semi-familiar weight nestled against the small of his back, almost like—

Kurosaki moves, a hard, grinding thrust, and that strange weight moves with him.

And Grimmjow’s reminded all at once of why Szayel, who’s mad but brilliant, had a hell of a time finding ways to make his and Kurosaki’s bodies and reiatsu compatible enough for Aizen’s fever dream to work.

Hollows, even vasto lorde, don’t have secondary genders. Their bodies aren’t compatible the way humans’ are.

And the evidence is right there, fucking Grimmjow’s ass and flopping against his back.

Kurosaki has fucking hemipenes.

He’s also most definitely in rut. The air’s drenched in it. A hollow with a hormone cycle. Way to fucking go, Szayel. Grimmjow’s chemically induced heat must be more natural than what Kurosaki’s cooking in right now. At least he’s an arrancar; he’s as hollow as anything inside, but his shell’s half shinigami now. Those fuckers deal with this shit too, once or twice a decade. Grimmjow knows more about the whole thing than he strictly wants to.

Kurosaki, merrily pounding Grimmjow into the cold, hard floor, seems blissfully unaware that he’s a freak of nature.

“Guess—you—must,” Grimmjow grunts through brutal thrusts that reverberate all the way to his bone, each word spat with sheer, bloody-minded determination, “be u—ah—used—fuck, fuck—used to it by now.”

Kurosaki doesn’t respond, unless the damp, shuddering puffs of air at Grimmjow’s nape count. Fuck, he hates that nightmare maw at the back of his neck. It’s like ice down his spine, right till the point his gut seizes hold of the fear and turns it hot and molten, and he hates that more.

His dick hurts, pressed to the rough floor. Half the ache is too sweet for comfort. His ass is even worse, swallowing Kurosaki’s cock with loud, wet sounds. It feels—

Kurosaki’s torso presses flush to Grimmjow’s, suffocating and hot, and he growls, low and full-bodied, and it’s a useless warning because all Grimmjow can do is lie there and pant as he’s filled up. It’s hotter, for some fucking reason, and Grimmjow doesn’t know what he hates more—being pumped full of come by a baby vasto lorde or knowing the general temperature of Kurosaki’s normal semen.

He’s going to kill Aizen Sousuke. Claw up his smarmy face and pluck out those empty fucking eyes.

Kurosaki makes another sound, louder and distinctly less pleased. His limp cock’s shifting inside Grimmjow. His other cock, very much not limp, is making a spirited attempt at fucking Grimmjow’s spine. It’s long enough that, with Kurosaki pressed into him like this, the head’s almost at the edge of his hollow hole.

Then Kurosaki moves, very desperately trying to fuck Grimmjow with his spent dick, and the other one, it—

Grimmjow jolts the first time, violently enough that Kurosaki’s claws tighten on his hips, breaking skin. A warning growl follows, the two-toned warble of a pissed-off hollow.

The second time, Grimmjow bites his mouth bloody and doesn’t move a muscle. It’s nothing. Just a touch. Just scorching heat sliding over corpse-cold flesh. Not like it’s going inside. Impossible, the way they’re positioned.

He’ll kill Kurosaki if he tries. Doesn’t know how, but—he can’t. Not that. He’ll—

There’s no third time.

There’s a hot wash of air at his nape, and then Grimmjow’s cold and weightless for a single, stunning second. He’s flipped over the next, and his body reminds him brightly that it’s still bloody and broken from his bout with Ulquiorra. His back slams into the ground, and his resurrección dies with a whimper; Pantera clatters to the floor beside him, within reach and perfectly useless.

Hovering above him, Kurosaki tilts his blood-splattered nightmare of a face quizzically to the side. The tips of his fair have pooled on Grimmjow’s belly, his hips.

Grimmjow’s cock is standing at attention. He looks away—and back at Kurosaki’s bloody visage, now radiating predatory interest even past the gore and inexpressive bone.

Fuck no.

Grimmjow closes his eyes.

The world fails to cease to exist around him.

Instead, clawed hands lift his hips, pull him right onto the second cock. It spears him clean through, just as deep, just as hot. The other one flops sadly against his balls. Grimmjow wishes his had the decency to do the same.

Kurosaki sets a punishing pace. Grimmjow’s ass grows slick and desperate around him. It was a lot easier to stomach back when he had the luxury, however illusory, of being able to stand up and walk off, leave Kurosaki hard and wanting.

As if Kurosaki ever wanted any of it.

Kurosaki comes with that same trembling sound, more in his chest than his throat. Grimmjow’s keenly aware of his muscles clenching over and over, drenched in wet heat and greedy for—

For—

All this trouble, and the fucker doesn’t even have a knot.

Kurosaki’s cock slides out, his mess leaking out in its wake. It’s uncomfortably warm; Grimmjow’s hole clenches around nothing.

Labored breathing fills the room, the only sound. Most of it’s Kurosaki. A little bit’s Grimmjow. At least it’s over.

He wishes his dripping ass would get the damn memo.

“Get off,” Grimmjow snaps without much hope, slapping Kurosaki’s chest. The asshole pushes into the touch, more and more, till Grimmjow’s elbow bends back with the weight, crushed unceremoniously between his shaking, sweaty body and Kurosaki’s steely flesh.

He opens his eyes warily and does not flinch at the blank voids peering at him from an inch away. Kurosaki’s jagged teeth part, and Grimmjow jolts, mind flashing wildly to Ulquiorra being torn up and devoured, but his arms might as well be twigs for all the effect they have on Kurosaki.

But Kurosaki’s maw doesn’t descend and gobble Grimmjow up as a post-fuck snack.

Instead, he sucks in air, deep and greedy; it whistles through the gaps between his sharp, blood-stained teeth. It takes a long few moments, Grimmjow frozen in mingled confusion and terror and Kurosaki just breathing, before it hits him, and his brain helpfully pushes at him an image of Kurosaki’s shackled, wasting body shuddering with deep lungfuls of Grimmjow’s scent. His eyes flickering gold. His cock—

“Oh hell no—” is all Grimmjow manages before the renewed hardness prodding his thigh shocks him into momentary silence. “Fuck’s sake, Kurosaki.”

The name comes out incredulous, borderline scandalized, and Kurosaki’s attention sharpens. It’s frankly ridiculous how aware Grimmjow is of that despite the empty spaces forming Kurosaki’s new and unimproved eyes giving nothing away.

But nothing comes of it, except another powerful inhale. The corresponding exhale blows blood-scented air right into Grimmjow’s face.

Kurosaki withdraws, folding himself back into a pale monster crouched between obscenely open thighs. Grimmjow’s half-hearted attempt to close them doesn’t get past Kurosaki’s warm bulk. The soft insides of his thighs feel too fucking soft pressed up against Kurosaki’s hierro.

Kurosaki proves himself a quick study. He doesn’t blindly rut into Grimmjow, reaching down instead with a hand. It’s probably too much to hope the fucker will accidentally claw his dick off. Well, there’s a spare anyway. And the unfair fuck clearly has regeneration, so he might as well just grow the dicks back like some penile hydra. 

Grimmjow thumps his head lightly against the floor and returns to his staring match with the ceiling. He ignores his throbbing cock and aching ass. He tries to ignore Kurosaki’s gropy reiatsu and gropier touch.

Something hot and hard prods his hole. His whole body jolts, but Grimmjow doesn’t consciously register what the hell is wrong until Kurosaki grunts and tries to push both his cocks into him.

Grimmjow arches up with a howl. And Kurosaki’s grown careless, either because he’s too horny or because Grimmjow’s stopped actively fighting, but it gives Grimmjow a chance to fold his legs all the way to his chest and kick out with every ounce of his remaining strength and reiatsu.

His feet slam into Kurosaki’s chest.

The motherfucker doesn’t budge.

Grimmjow does, the force of the blow making his body slide violently back. His torn jacket’s back on him, released from the ether of his resurrección, but it bunches up under his arms and bares his skin to be rubbed raw by the unforgiving floor. He misses hierro desperately. Even the full-body armor of his adjuchas form would be better than this baby-soft skin.

Kurosaki’s on him before Grimmjow’s momentum comes to a halt, yanking him to a rough stop. Clawed hands shove his thighs apart and up, as if Grimmjow’s unthinking escape attempt gave him ideas, and Grimmjow, freshly out of reiatsu but never one to turn down a bad idea, punches Kurosaki in his bloody maw.

It’s like punching a brick wall. Those jagged teeth cut into his knuckles.

Kurosaki leans his weight on Grimmjow’s folded-up body—and motherfucker, that hurts, injuries Grimmjow keeps forgetting flaring up with a vengeance—and roars in his face. His tongue’s long and wet and pink.

“Fuck you,” Grimmjow rasps, turning his face away but keeping those fucking teeth in his periphery. “Shove your freakshow cock in a meat grinder, Kurosaki.”

Kurosaki, of course, promptly designates Grimmjow the meat grinder.

The first, prodding push is fine. Big. Hot. But even braced for it, Grimmjow doesn’t register more than size and temperature, and then Kurosaki grunts and shoves—

“Wait!” Grimmjow cries out, the pitch entirely out of his control, and Kurosaki doesn’t wait, doesn’t even pause— “Don’t, Kurosaki, wait, dammit, wait—”

The air’s punched out of his lungs. Kurosaki slides deep and splits Grimmjow in two.

One of those things was enough to slide deep enough for Grimmjow to feel in his hollow hole, but it was easy enough to take, his soaked flesh parting easily for it after weeks of riding Kurosaki to tying. Both together is like getting fucked with a club.

Grimmjow realizes with a soft, distant horror, buried under a flood of mind-searing sensation, that like this, Kurosaki’s thicker than his knot ever was.

He blissfully blacks out before that quite sinks in.

It doesn’t last.

He comes to all at once, eyes wet and hot, the rest of him hotter, and he blinks, vision unblurring, and stares with a curious lack of comprehension at his fingers sunk into Kurosaki’s shoulders and his legs wrapped around narrow, half-dressed hips.

Then the rest of his body comes online. Violently.

Grimmjow howls, and Kurosaki fucks that out of him too, slamming his cocks in with savage fury, and for a few, burning seconds, all Grimmjow can do is cling to Kurosaki and keen and feel; each burning thrust is a horror and miracle, and every time Kurosaki pulls out—brutal in that too, yanking those ridged cocks out until the fat heads threaten, tease, to slip out of him—Grimmjow’s flesh loses the shape of it, and he thinks, I can’t, it won’t, but he can and it does, and he’s shoved full of those monstrous fucking things all over again, and again and again, and the worst of it, the thing that slips weak and shuddering out of his mouth and trembles in his arms, his legs, it’s—

It feels good.

He’s getting wrecked on some fucking reptile dick, like Kurosaki’s knotting him from belly to throat, and he’s choking on phantom musk and brine, and Grimmjow, he—he’s half insane with how fucking good it feels.

The room’s thick with wet, squelching sounds.

He looks down, and the view’s good and nice because, while he was passed out in orgasmic horror, his body lifted itself a few inches off the ground while clinging to Kurosaki like some pathetic limpet, and he’s not surprised so much as vaguely betrayed by the still-warm white splatter on his belly. His cock’s half hard still, red and wet and bouncing shamelessly each time Kurosaki rams into him, and his ass is worse; it’s clinging to Kurosaki’s cocks, clamping down and rippling wet, and the blinding pressure of being forced open around them is slowly giving way to a sweet, easy slide. It still makes Grimmjow see stars. 

Kurosaki grunts and heaves forward, slamming Grimmjow back on the floor and pressing deep—

“Kuro—saki,” Grimmjow gasps, and then he’s spared the trouble of breathing by Kurosaki plowing into him like he wants to fuck open a path to Grimmjow’s throat.

White sunbursts swim in his vision, broken up by Kurosaki’s empty eyes and gleaming hair.

The violence of the fucking reaches a crescendo that rattles Grimmjow’s bones. His nails tear at Kurosaki’s shoulders and find no purchase. His thighs bruise themselves against the bones of those hammering hips.

Another low growl, like a purr pulled apart and put back with the notes all wrong, and Kurosaki’s slamming into him, once, twice, and then he’s still, deathly still, but it’s no reprieve because he’s balls-deep inside Grimmjow, cocks twitching and spilling hot inside him.

His muscles clench around Kurosaki’s cocks, and it used to be intense when he was milking a knot, but now it’s hell, wave after wave of endless, biting pain-pleasure.

It burns him alive.

Kurosaki softens, sweet and slow. His hips shift and—

Grimmjow doesn’t recognize the noise that leaves him. His legs have tightened around Kurosaki. His insides are clinging to those dicks because now, like this, even soft, the two together are—

He clenches around them again, those quicksilver contractions that punch the breath out of him, and Kurosaki makes a low, almost wounded noise but presses closer with his whole body—ass to crotch, belly to belly, nose to nose. His hair’s a curtain around them both. Grimmjow breathes and smells rust.

A shadow of a nudge, and they’d be fucking nuzzling.

Grimmjow will never know what fit of insanity makes him do it. He’s exhausted, his blood’s burning with a cocktail of alien hormones both natural and not, there are shallow cuts littering his whole body, and he’s been fucked to within an inch of his life; it’ll drive a sane man insane, and Grimmjow’s the first to admit he’s never been that sane to begin with.

He leans in and licks a wide stripe up the reishi-rich blood that has dried on Kurosaki’s masked maw.

Kurosaki doesn’t immediately and violently murder him for it.

He doesn’t do anything much at all. Grimmjow can feel the weight of his regard pressing down on him, boring holes into his face, but he keeps his eyes carefully away from Kurosaki’s. Dried flakes of blood slowly dissolving on his tongue isn’t much of a distraction, but he focuses on it anyway because the alternatives are the hot breath on his face and the hotter flesh he’s impaled on.

Ulquiorra doesn’t have much of a flavor left. It’s just blood, spurting weak bursts of energy as they mix with the saliva Grimmjow swallows.

He does it again. This time, Kurosaki leans into it. It’s unmistakable. The low, distinctly pleased rumble in his chest punctuates it. Grimmjow bites back an insult and lays his tongue on that hard bone. It’s a pitiful mockery of all those times he sunk his teeth into Kurosaki’s meat.

Kurosaki tasted better anyway.

He cleans the mask of blood with the methodical thoroughness of a feline hollow, and Kurosaki rumbles happily through the whole process. Grimmjow ignores that for his own sake and tries to make some use of the energy trickling into him. Even in pathetic dregs like this, the power of a former Espada is nothing to scoff at. Grimmjow won’t be resuming his resurrección or fighting off Kurosaki any time soon, but he tries to plug the shallow cuts all over him, mostly harmless but sluggishly bleeding whenever Kurosaki starts ramming into him. No need to let the bastard fuck the blood out of him too; Grimmjow’s dignity and good sense are bad enough casualties.

Grimmjow licks his lips, surveying Kurosaki’s mask. White bone and black estigma. There’s some blood splatter on the horns, carefully angled so as to not gore Grimmjow while also keeping him solidly trapped, but Grimmjow’s not slicing his tongue open on those.

His eyes catch on the teeth.

They’re the worst, for obvious reasons. Grimmjow’s fairly sure there are shredded bits of flesh stuck on them. He could—

Kurosaki might bite his tongue off. Or his whole face. Hell, a careless twitch of his head would slice Grimmjow’s throat open on the cutting edge of those horns. He examines that fear—a dull, almost cursory thing.

He’s grinning when he presses his mouth to Kurosaki’s permanent grimace.

Kurosaki only presses closer, from cock to chest. Grimmjow sucks the blood and meat out of the ridges of those sharp, tearing teeth, tasting Kurosaki’s harsh, huffed breaths on his tongue, his lips.

Then Kurosaki opens his mouth, sudden and startling, and Grimmjow only has an instant to think, he’s finally going to eat me, before Kurosaki’s tongue—that wet, long, pink thing—swipes over his lips in a grotesque parody of Grimmjow’s idle feeding.

“What,” he says.

Well, he tries. It comes out as Whmmh, muffled around Kurosaki’s opportunistic tongue. It slides deep, and not for the first time, Grimmjow’s left with a sinking awareness of how the roles have reversed; he remembers Kurosaki’s shocked mouth under his own, remembers the exact moment the hunger overrode that poor motherfucker’s revulsion.

Kurosaki 2.0, New and Exceedingly Violent Hollow Version, does not house revulsion in the twist of his tongue. Grimmjow tries to play his part, but the disgust he reaches for slips out of his reach, leaving only a strange, simmering heat. Kurosaki’s tongue really is obscenely long; it’s also apparently trying to inspect Grimmjow’s tonsils. At that, most he can feel is a mystified sort of bemusement.

It slithers out of his throat, slower than it thrust in, but lingers inside his mouth, sliding wetly over Grimmjow’s tongue. Kurosaki’s face is too close; Grimmjow can feel the heat of his open maw. And his own breaths are too loud in this eerie bubble of silence.

Kurosaki’s tongue curls up to taste the roof of his mouth and then slides back into his throat, and something in Grimmjow—

He shudders, and his insides shudder too, rippling around Kurosaki’s cocks. He feels Kurosaki’s reaction in the soft growl that trembles against his mouth and the tongue that fucks his throat with sudden violence.

Grimmjow’s eyes fly open—when the fuck did he close them?—and almost regrets it. The animal parts of him can’t look at those teeth so close to his face and think anything except predator.

He tells those parts to shut up and bites down on Kurosaki’s tongue. It’s not enough to slice it in two or even make it bleed. He doesn’t even know why he does it.

Kurosaki doesn’t make another of those angry sounds. He just huffs and wriggles his tongue in the trap of Grimmjow’s teeth, which is so patently ridiculous that Grimmjow unlocks his jaw and yanks his head to the side to escape the whole messy business.

His mouth tingles from lips to throat.

Something wet and warm slathers the side of his face, tracing the teeth of his mask, which snap shut on thin air. Kurosaki’s tongue slides down—and down. Grimmjow’s a second too slow to understand.

Ulquiorra touching his scent glands with the tip of a finger had made his whole body seize with revulsion, every fiber of his being rejecting that touch.

Kurosaki tonguing them wet and messy makes his cock twitch and ass gush slick.

He makes a pathetic little noise, low and fucking wanton. A clawed hand slides into his hair, yanking his head to the side, and Grimmjow doesn’t shake off the silver-sweet shock of that tongue in time to escape.

Teeth sink into his throat, tearing into the glands there.

Grimmjow screams and his body locks tight and his orgasm tears through him like a blade through the spine.

His vision grows black—

—and promptly sparks back to dull color. His throat feels raw as he heaves for breath. Kurosaki’s licking the wound, and each touch of his tongue to the torn—claimed, whispers a voice too soft to be real—flesh of those glands sends a fissure of lightning-sharp heat down his spine.

Kurosaki has filled back up, the hard ridges of those cocks digging into Grimmjow’s too-soft insides. He’s too done and too stunned to muster anything but resignation.

Kurosaki moves without lifting his head, those horns still angled away with so much care that Grimmjow can’t help wondering how much of the real Kurosaki is left in this hollowed-out monster, and the short, gut-deep slide of his cocks eats at Grimmjow’s body, his mind, and it’s almost a relief, almost peaceful, to just sink into his singed, searing flesh and just…let go.

-

Eons pass.

At least, it feels like it. In reality, it can’t have been more than a day. Grimmjow’s internal clock got fucked around the time Kurosaki fucked him stupid for the sixth time, and the sliver of moonlight isn’t much to go by.

Nobody comes for them.

No Espada. No Aizen.

Just him and Kurosaki.

Kurosaki’s still feral, still in rut, and Grimmjow’s— 

Well, Grimmjow’s gained a grudging sort of respect for humans if this is what their bodies put them through on the regular. Several times a year, is what Szayel said. He can’t imagine living like that.

But a day or so ago, he couldn’t imagine whining and writhing while getting double-dicked by a hormonal vasto lorde either, so clearly, Grimmjow’s imagination isn’t much to go by.

He can handle Kurosaki, is the thing. He doesn’t fuss much if he gets his piece of ass—and neck and occasionally Grimmjow’s tonsils too, the freak. No, Grimmjow’s more bothered by the way his body has molded itself to the intrusion that cleaved him in two the first time Kurosaki shoved those cocks in. It doesn’t get any intense, not really, not when Kurosaki’s jackhammering into him, but there are those in-between moments, when he’s still and soft and visibly content atop Grimmjow, pressed suffocatingly close because—

Kurosaki shifts, as if on cue, and Grimmjow’s legs are tightening without his conscious input, keeping those cocks deep in him where they—

Shitting fuck.

They’re pressed suffocatingly close because Grimmjow can’t make himself let the fucker pull away. He hates it; he wants so bad to hate it. The gentle fullness pushing up against his dully aching, occasionally shuddering muscles is almost as bad as choking on Kurosaki’s savage, gut-wrenching thrusts. But it feels—

It’s not even pleasure. Grimmjow understands that. The slick slide of bodies, that he knows. That lesson he learned, the way Kurosaki never did.

What he doesn’t get is this gentle, warm something that spreads slow and syrupy through his veins when Kurosaki’s still and full inside him. The knotting was—different. It bit into different places.

And that’s how Grimmjow’s sure, when he thinks about it, that Szayel’s drugs really did trigger a true heat, instead of those unbalanced pheromonal affairs of before. But the timing, sweet fuck. He’s got some luck.  

There’s a throbbing at the side of his neck. The glands Kurosaki tore into—thick scar tissue that pulsed hot the one time Grimmjow dared a touch. They healed too fast, and now they ache too sweet. Grimmjow’s not—yeah, he’s not thinking about that. Not touching it. Nope.

Kurosaki shifts again, more insistent. There are wet, squelching sounds. He doesn’t even know where it’s all gone; Kurosaki’s militant about keeping his come inside Grimmjow, the fucking animal, but there’s a giant, gaping hole in Grimmjow’s gut that must, logically, take up some damn space. He still feels fucking bloated.

Hollow heat better be the only thing Szayel nailed. If Grimmjow’s somehow got a working womb, he’s gonna—

Kurosaki makes a low, pained noise.

That’s—that’s new.

Grimmjow was peering with half-shut eyes at the dust particles dancing in a thin column of moonlight, ignoring Kurosaki’s occasional nuzzles and jolting to life only to keep him inside, but now he lifts his head and takes a long, hard look at Kurosaki. He’s still inside Grimmjow, still soft, still crouched over him like a pale specter. His long hair’s sticking to both their chests, plastered to skin with sweat.

One of Kurosaki’s hands is buried in the very same hair, claws wound tight around a fistful of bright orange.

“Kurosaki?” Grimmjow’s voice comes out rough and raspy; he hasn’t talked in a while. Made a lot of other sounds he’s going to forget the second this anticlimactic nightmare is over, but not talked. He swallows thickly.

Kurosaki jerks at his name, but his grip just tightens in his hair, pulling at the strands hard enough that Grimmjow almost winces.

And then he lets go, only to rake those claws down his mask with an ear-splitting scraping sound, and Grimmjow flinches with his whole body, but Kurosaki doesn’t even seem to notice, fingers twisting into tight, grotesque shapes as he claws at his mask and—

Realization strikes the moment Kurosaki grasps one of his horns.

“Kuro—you fucking idiot, don’t—”

Kurosaki snaps the horn.

The mask shatters.

Grimmjow gets a solid glimpse of dull gold eyes and deathly pale skin, Kurosaki’s features more blank and unanimated now than when he was a still, silent corpse, and then the whole world explodes.

-

He survives.

A vasto lorde rips off his mask while inside him, and Grimmjow fucking survives.

He doesn’t remember it, not really. Just an explosion of effervescent red and Kurosaki’s reiatsu tearing into him. For a second there, Grimmjow was pretty sure he was going to die the most pathetic death in the history of hollowkind. At least Ulquiorra got beat to shit and then eaten, good and proper.

But no. He’s alive. He can’t see jackshit, and his spiritual senses feel like they’ve been seared shut, but he’s very, very alive.

“Holy shit,” he breathes.

His voice echoes in his ear, and he tastes blood. Did he scream again? Fuck, he hopes not.

Slowly, so slowly that Grimmjow’s fuzzy brain almost gives up the ghost, he becomes aware of his body and its surroundings. The floor feels different at his back, the grainy but mostly level surface now cracked and uneven. Bits of stone or sand are poking at his back. There’s a particularly irritating piece stuck under the small of his back, a bit to the right. And he can’t move to shift away from the mess because—

He laughs. Resignation so acute that it loops back into amusement.

Kurosaki’s pinning him. Heavy dead weight. And he’s still—the motherfucker is somehow still inside Grimmjow, and son of a fuck, if Grimmjow opens his eyes and finds he’s locked with an actual corpse, he’ll—

Wait, is that—

He manages, somehow, to convince his sore, much-abused ass to clench up. The muscles there feel like putty, and the whole endeavor leaves him gasping for breath, but—yeah, that’s a knot, an actual knot, not Kurosaki’s lizard show.

What the fuck.

“What the fuck,” he hisses.

Kurosaki’s weight doesn’t shift.

He needs to see, why can’t he fucking—

Oh. His eyes are closed. Right.

Opening them is a pain. Literally. His lids feel glued shut with grit. How long was he out?

Hueco Mundo’s starless sky greets him. Grimmjow squints at it, bemused and not sure why, until he remembers he should be seeing a nondescript ceiling, not the sky.

The building’s gone. All that’s left is the wrecked floor Grimmjow’s pinned to. The open air crawls under his skin, and he can’t even sense anybody because Kurosaki kind of exploded on him and rendered him spiritually blind.

Speaking of the devil—

Grimmjow looks down.

“Oh,” he says. And then, “Hey, what the fuck?”

Kurosaki, blissfully napping on Grimmjow, doesn’t reply. His cheek’s pressed to Grimmjow’s shoulder, and he’s moving gently with the rise and fall of his chest. Kurosaki’s skin is smooth and human-warm where it’s resting against Grimmjow’s, but he can see all too clearly that the other side of Kurosaki’s face isn’t.

A lone horn juts out from his hairline, the wicked tip almost touching the floor. It’s a miracle it hasn’t gored Grimmjow yet.

There’s more bone on Kurosaki’s face. Grimmjow raises a hand that’s too shaky for comfort and grabs a fistful of Kurosaki’s hair, still ridiculously long and spilling in a bright mess around their tangled bodies, to raise his head.

Less than half of a mask leers at Grimmjow from Kurosaki’s face; it covers almost the entire right side of his face, leaving only lips and a bit of jaw exposed. A row of serrated teeth rests right over Kurosaki’s lips. His right eye is still that blank, light-sucking void. A wide black stripe bisects the mask but doesn’t spill down into skin that’s a ghostly shade of pale—not the bone-white of the vasto lorde but certainty not Kurosaki’s warm tone.

Grimmjow knows an arrancar’s mask fragment when he sees one.

“Well, fuck,” he says.

Kurosaki’s eyelashes flutter. The human half of his face looks obscenely peaceful juxtaposed with the wicked curve of that horn and the remnants of those nightmare teeth.

Grimmjow can’t do much more than watch as Kurosaki takes his sweet time opening his eyes.

The color strikes him first. A soft gold, like some unholy blend of Kurosaki’s human eyes and his passenger’s yellow ones. For a moment, they’re dazed and uncomprehending, staring right at Grimmjow without seeing a damn thing, and then—

One look and Grimmjow knows who he’s dealing with.

“Grimmjow,” Kurosaki rasps, voice a hoarse wreck. He blinks, once, and then— “Grimmjow…?”

“Sure is,” Grimmjow says, letting go of Kurosaki’s hair. The fucker sways like he’ll faceplant on Grimmjow again, at which point he’ll be compelled to rip off the bastard’s head and probably get himself killed in the attempt, but Kurosaki steadies himself quickly, fingernails scraping in the ground beside Grimmjow.

And then the idiot tries to sit up.

Grimmjow strangles the shout before it can leave his mouth, but a ghost of it escapes anyway, low and ragged. Kurosaki’s own cry drowns it out, and this time, he does collapse on Grimmjow. The horn comes dangerously close to piercing his throat.

“Kurosaki,” Grimmjow seethes.

“Sorry,” Kurosaki gasps. “I—fuck. Fuck.”

Grimmjow realizes with dim horror that he’s wrapped his legs around Kurosaki again in an instinctive attempt to stop him from tearing their bodies apart. He glares at the muscled lines of his calves, but they fail to detach themselves from Kurosaki’s hips.

He lets out a long, controlled breath, then says, “Oi, dickhead, get your horn away from my throat.”

For a moment, Kurosaki just stays as he is, curled into himself, the tip of his horn a few centimeters away from Grimmjow’s jugular. Grimmjow doesn’t dare push him away. But a few heartbeats later, Kurosaki raises himself up on his arms. He’s careful this time. The knot doesn’t even pull.

It still makes Grimmjow’s focus zip south, as if now that he’s alive and in no immediate danger of being un-alive, his mind’s got better priorities.

Fuck, that thing burns where it’s pressing into his flesh. The girth’s less punishing than the simultaneous press of Kurosaki’s cocks, and the length’s back to normal too, but at this point, Grimmjow’s sensitive enough that he’d feel a single finger all the way to his teeth.

He sucks in a sharp breath and refocuses on Kurosaki. Judging by his expression, he also just took stock of his body. There’s a flush to his cheeks and an old, familiar horror in his eyes.

Grimmjow returns to staring at the sky.

Kurosaki doesn’t smell like rut anymore. His scent’s still sharp and heavy, but it’s lost that strange, overpowering musk. And Grimmjow’s own ass feels like it’d be happier to lose the knot plugging it up than to suck it back in, so that’s something. Who knew it’d only take an explosion of monstrous reiatsu to burn the chemicals out of them.

“Grimmjow.”

He tenses but doesn’t tear his gaze from the sky. He doesn’t respond either, and Kurosaki’s blissfully silent in turn, but it doesn’t last; of course it doesn’t last.

“Grimmjow.” Harder, more insistent. Kurosaki’s tone is—it’s something. Grimmjow doesn’t know.

“What.”

“Did I…” Kurosaki swallows thickly. Grimmjow expects that question to end in a lot of ways, most of which will compel him to bite off Kurosaki’s face to shut him up, but then the fucker asks, “Did I eat him?”

He’s startled into looking right at Kurosaki. He can’t categorize that expression; there’s too much in it.

“You sure did. Good for you.” Somewhere from the depths of his exhaustion, he summons a smirk. “Hollow 101, Kurosaki. Waste not, want not.”

Kurosaki flinches.

Grimmjow looks back up at the sky.

They don’t speak again.

Eventually, Kurosaki’s knot deflates.

Kurosaki makes a soft, wounded noise when his cock slips out. Grimmjow doesn’t; it flutters in his throat, and he crushes it. He doesn’t even wince at the mess that gushes out of him in the wake of Kurosaki’s dick. There’s more of it inside, dried and sticking to his walls. At Las Noches, he could wash it out. Hueco Mundo at large is rather lacking in water.

Whatever.

He’s not really sure he’ll live long enough for that to be a problem.

Kurosaki seems more preoccupied with preserving his modesty, making a…kilt or something with the torn remnants of his hakama. He doesn’t look at Grimmjow when he rises, not even when he picks up Pantera.

A dark gleam catches his eye.

A sword, the blade black and the hilt threaded with crimson. A short chain, also black, extends from the pommel.

Grimmjow stares at it for a beat too long. When he raises his head, Kurosaki’s looking at him. Slowly, inexorably, his eyes slide to his blade. Grimmjow tightens his grip on Pantera.

“Mind passing that over?”

Grimmjow freezes. Kurosaki eyes are on him again, unsettlingly steady.

He doesn’t know what compels him to bend and grab Kurosaki’s sword, not once breaking that stare, and actually hand it to him. Probably the same madness that drove Kurosaki to ask.

Their fingers brush on the hilt. Grimmjow snatches his hand back.

There’s a minute shift in Kurosaki’s expression when he takes the sword, but his eyes don’t waver from Grimmjow. They do shift from his face, sliding down. With rising fury, Grimmjow watches him take in the scarred bite mark on his throat and the congealed mess on his belly and the bruises on his hips. It’s the bite Kurosaki returns to, face blanched corpse-white.

“Hey, assface, my eyes are up here.”

Kurosaki’s eyes dart up guiltily. He holds Grimmjow’s stare with a strange, composed grimness. 

Say it, Grimmjow thinks, a seething challenge. Just fucking say it.

Kurosaki doesn’t.

Instead, he asks, “Can you open a garganta to Karakura?”

No, is on the tip of his tongue, instinctive and violent, but Grimmjow pauses with the syllable in his throat.

And then what? His original plan, which began and ended with “Get Kurosaki out of Las Noches and finish their fight,” is no longer viable. He might have run, he’ll still have to run, and Hueco Mundo is vast with edges Grimmjow has yet to see, but he knows himself and knows Aizen, and he’s got no delusions about his chances. But he wasn’t thinking about any of that. If he were to do it all over again, that wouldn’t change.

But that still leaves Kurosaki. Grimmjow’s not sure he can walk without limping; if he fights Kurosaki’s newly arrancarized ass, he’ll fucking die.

Or be eaten.

“Sure,” he says. His voice sounds like someone else’s. “Anything that gets you away from me.”

“You’re coming with me.”

“Like hell I am.”

Grimmjow stares, incredulous. Kurosaki’s mouth is a thin, unhappy line. It’s strange to see his human face wearing that broken mask. Grimmjow finds his gaze lingering too long on that blank right eye.

“Come with me,” Kurosaki says. “They’ll—” He hesitates, swallows. The dull-gold eye sparks with the ghost of an old fire. “They’ll hurt you, right, if you stay? For helping me. So come with me.”

“Are you hearing yourself, Kurosaki?” Grimmjow asks, and he’s not even angry anymore—or he is, but it’s buried under a kind of horrified fascination. “How, exactly, do you see that ending, tell me.”

“I—I don’t know.” Kurosaki runs a hand through his hair, only to freeze with a fistful of hair. He lets go, eyeing the long strands slipping through his fingers with a lost expression.

“Kurosaki,” Grimmjow growls, mostly to snap him out of it. Kurosaki’s free to have whatever emotions he wants about being a hollow—or, well, more hollow than shinigami now—but not while Grimmjow’s in the blast radius.

It works. Kurosaki looks at him, blinking once.

“I don’t know. Urahara-san might—or maybe Soul Society—”

“Soul Society!” Grimmjow echoes with false cheer. “Yeah, that’ll be great, Kurosaki! I’m sure they’ll welcome me with open arms. A banner even. Bet they’re real keen on rapist hollows.”

Grimmjow smiles through every word, and this time, Kurosaki’s flinch is a violent, full-bodied thing. His eyes skitter away from Grimmjow.

“Wouldn’t be just you, would it, if we’re talking rapist hollows?”

It’s so soft that Grimmjow almost doesn’t hear it. He still has to convince himself he didn’t imagine the non-question.

Kurosaki raises a hand to his own chest and lays his palm flat over the gaping hole there. The motion seems unconscious, but the gaze he levels on Grimmjow is entirely deliberate. It takes him in from forehead to feet, lingering on his throat and hips. Kurosaki’s mouth quivers, throat working thickly.

“Oh, fuck this,” Grimmjow says very calmly. “Grind, Pantera.”

Kurosaki’s too shocked to react, and Grimmjow throws himself at him mid-transformation.

It’s still not enough.

-

Kurosaki fights like some eerie blend of the boy who almost died to Grimmjow in that human town and the monster that tore an Espada to pieces without even trying. 

Grimmjow, at full power, might have stood a chance.

Now—

Kurosaki doesn’t need his resurrección, whatever the fuck that would be like. He barely even needs his sword.

“I hate you,” Grimmjow gasps, flat on the ground. His resurrección wanes, pale blue motes of reishi drifting from his armor; Grimmjow clings to it with every dreg of his power because he refuses to do this wearing only Kurosaki’s marks. “I fucking hate you, Kurosaki. End it.”

It’s almost a relief, the simplicity of it. Nothing has been simple since he went to Karakura and lost his fracción and came back with a prize that doomed them both. Grimmjow doesn’t want to die, but he’s more than ready for the world to make sense again. Death has always made sense; sometimes, it’s the only thing that does.

Above him, Kurosaki’s a haloed silhouette. The moon burns above him.

He lifts his arms, blade pointed right at Grimmjow’s heart.

And Grimmjow allows himself the luxury of closing his eyes.

The shrill whistle of displaced air.

Numb sensation rips through him.

His dead-meat heart thunders in his throat, frantically alive.

He opens his eyes.

Stares.

The blade is buried in his hollow hole. Half of it’s sunk deep into the sand. Kurosaki is leaning over it, long hair spilling over his shoulders, gleaming almost as bright as his sole visible eye.

“We don't have time for this,” he tells Grimmjow. “Come with me to Karakura.”

“And then what?” Grimmjow laughs, and it comes out a low, furious howl. “Be your little bitch? No. Fuck you, Kurosaki.”

“I won’t—I won’t touch you, not like that. I’d never.”

There’s a strange, biting ferocity in those words. Grimmjow tries not to think about white walls and shackled arms and please stop—

“Then what the fuck do you want me for?” he asks, and he shouldn’t be asking and his voice shouldn’t be so quiet and tired, but he is and it is, and Grimmjow doesn’t—

He wants to sleep.

He wants to close his eyes and sleep, and when he wakes, there won’t be Kurosaki or Aizen or Las Noches, just Grimmjow and the sands and the memories of footsteps buried in his belly.

He indulges in that fantasy for a moment, slitted eyes fixed on the moon.

Then he shakes it off and focuses on Kurosaki, who’s still bent over Grimmjow, uncharacteristically silent. Grimmjow waits. Patience comes surprisingly easily while Kurosaki takes a slow, meandering path to the inevitable ending.

“Why did you help me?” he asks.

Grimmjow’s not even surprised. “Because fuck Aizen and fuck his twisted games,” he says tiredly.

“You didn’t want to be there either,” is the brilliant deduction Kurosaki gets from that.

“No shit. I wanted to be a sword, not a wet hole to fuck.”

That makes Kurosaki flinch again.

Grimmjow smiles, slow and showing teeth. “What, you think I did it because I was sweet on you? Don’t make me laugh. Kurosaki, I was gonna bring you out into the desert and put you out of your fucking misery. You could learn a thing or two from that.”

“I didn’t think—” Kurosaki bites off the words and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Fine. Fuck it. I don’t care. I’m not you, Grimmjow, and I’m not leaving without you. So we can either stay here, fighting each other and whoever comes looking until we can't, and die like dogs at Aizen's feet. Or you can open that goddamned garganta and get us the hell out of here.”

Grimmjow just stares at him. Kurosaki stares back.

He looks so little like the boy in the street or the boy in the room, and it’s not the hair or the hole or the blank-eyed mask.

What broke you? Grimmjow’s tempted to ask. He doesn’t because he’s not very sure that’s the right question at all.

Time trickles on. The moon doesn’t wax or wane.

Kurosaki’s stare is as unwavering as his blade, and Grimmjow’s very bones ache with exhaustion.

“Open the garganta, Grimmjow,” says Kurosaki, soft and equally exhausted.

Grimmjow raises an arm. Kurosaki has the sense to tense, and if Grimmjow had the power to spare, he absolutely would shove a cero down the fucker’s gullet. As it is, it’s all he can do to hook metaphorical fingers into one of the dimensional rifts dotting Hueco Mundo’s spiritual fabric and pull, darkness spreading out from his fingers like rot.

It’s not the most stable descorrer he’s made, but it’ll do. He’s not getting shredded by turbulent reishi after the heaps and heaps of steaming bullshit he has survived.

Kurosaki stares at it for a long moment.

And then he bends down—

“Oi!” Grimmjow snarls, but Kurosaki’s fast and surprisingly sneaky, pulling his sword out of Grimmjow’s hollow hole the same moment he seizes him by the arm, and for a disorienting moment, all Grimmjow can feel is an absence within an absence, and by the time he shakes off that bit of mindfuckery, Kurosaki has already hauled him upright. Asshole has even sheathed his sword.

“I am going to rip out your spine and fuck you in the gut with it,” Grimmjow promises.

“Sounds unpleasant,” Kurosaki mutters. His expression is pinched, the remaining eye all pupil. “Can you walk?”

“Bitch.”

“I guess that’s a yes.”

But he doesn’t let go of Grimmjow, though his grip slides down from Grimmjow’s bicep to wrist, curling almost delicately around it. The forearm blades have long been eaten by his waning resurrección, but Grimmjow makes a spirited attempt to gut the fucker with his free hand.

The claws find little purchase on Kurosaki’s bared belly.

He’s still very warm.

Grimmjow lets his arm fall to his side. Kurosaki takes a step toward the garganta, and Grimmjow stumbles after him, and it’s only the stark, biting knowledge that Kurosaki can and will fucking carry him that stops him from collapsing to his knees.

Kurosaki studiously keeps his eyes on the garganta, body carefully angled away from Grimmjow despite the forced proximity.

Is it disgust or pity, Grimmjow wonders.

“When this ends horribly,” he says, “and it will, I’m going to laugh at you. And then kill you.”

That pale gold eye turns to him, still too dark for comfort. Kurosaki’s smile is an empty thing.

“I know,” he says simply.

It’s Grimmjow’s turn to look away.

Kurosaki marches forward, and Grimmjow follows, forcing his steps to be steady.

The garganta swallows them up like a hungry maw. Karakura’s blue skies gleam like a beacon.