Archive of Our Own ^beta

Yuzu had wondered, sometimes, if their mother had known.

Yuzu herself hadn’t worked it out until very recently, but she was working from a handicap. When no one told you anything about unique traits you might have inherited, how are you to know what they are? How to use them? How not to use them? Aside from using them however felt best to you and keeping your mouth shut about them, that was.

Their family was strange. There was so much they talked about freely and easily but so much, too, that was always unspoken. They spoke about being able to see, touch, hear spirits— but they didn’t say a word about anything else.

Even when Ichigo became a Shinigami. She and Karin didn’t find out until they both caught him in the outfit and even then he didn’t say a word about it, and there had been a note sent home about Ichigo fainting at school again.

They hadn’t known about the first time.

It annoyed them both but… Ichigo did his best to look after them both and he was a guy. Them worrying about him and pestering him would only mean he spent even more of his free hours away from the house. Or the putting on of a mask.

Either way? No good for anyone.

So Karin just quietly did more of Ichigo’s chores that were of the ‘if there’s need’ sort so there was less often need when he checked and Yuzu made his favorites and snuck into his room to make sure his desk was properly stocked with snack foods in case he missed a meal or needed more than the meal had provided at an odd hour so he didn’t go without.

Finding out their father was a Shinigami and could have been explaining so many things to them all—it was all their birthright, apparently, and he still wasn’t explaining what their mother was.

Because she, unlike him, had traceable ancestry. Their family tree units at school had been exhausting. Dad was ‘an orphan’, which was easy, but their mother’s known history went back over a thousand years well documented and some farther still, though with less focus on the full family history. Father to son, not father and mother and brothers and sisters and their spouses and children.

Thank the gods. It had taken weeks to get down everything and they’d been very sour when they’d seen classmates come in with four pages because they’d only gone as far as their great-grandparents.

Ichigo had warned them to start as soon as they had the forms their teacher wanted everything on and they’d listened but still barely had time, even using his old one to copy off of. (Stupid teacher not letting them each do half of it, wanting one from each even though that meant they each did more than five times the work of all of their classmates, even the one who boasted about being related to the emperor seven hundred years and lots of cousins ago).

Centuries of ancestry—their mother had been a living human, but she had also had the same sort of…

Yuzu didn’t even know how to describe it. Flavor was the closest but not quite right. And not quite true, either.

She had always known that some people had something different about them. Their mother, Ichigo, Karin—they were the most obvious, and not just from being around them. She remembered going to a candy shop once, when they were very young, and finding a cat with the same feeling—as well as the employees, but the cat was being playful and cute and kept them occupied so she had no memory of why they’d gone to that shop that one time and no other.

Interestingly, their ‘flavor’ had been dissimilar to all of their own but quite alike despite no family resemblance. Yuzu’s family had notes in common with their lost mother and, now that he could be sensed as he’d recovered, to their father, too. Karin took more after Isshin, Ichigo a solid mix, herself she couldn’t sense to tell. Isshin felt as those others had, and Yuzu had recently put it down to ‘Shinigami’.

That explained all of Ichigo’s Shinigami friends being very alike and his powered human friends being individually unique, when she finally got an explanation. Except, of course, for Ishida—he felt very much like their mother.

Quincy.

Having a name for her unique and inheritable traits wasn’t terribly helpful. Ishida, after she’d told him their mother was like him but she didn’t know more than that had asked her about all sorts of skills she supposedly should be able to do as a part-Quincy and had been unconvinced until she dragged out that infernal family tree and he’d recognized several generations from his own tree.

Cousins.

In the same damned town.

He’d been a bit like a hedgehog when she’d decided to claim him, all pokey and occasionally sharp but with a sweet and soft underbelly when you gave him the space he needed to relax and didn’t try for something other than honorific-free ‘Ishida’. He hadn’t wanted to claim the relationship with Ichigo, for whatever masculine pride-slash-stupidity reasoning, but had agreed to meet her most weeks for a picnic so they could talk about all sorts of things, not just the Quincy heritage she knew nothing about and he’d struggled for years to learn more of.

It was through him that she’d learned most of the things Karin hadn’t figured out for herself. Ichigo had been turned into a substitute Shinigami when a hollow almost killed them all— typical of him.

No one seemed to know anything about her, though. She was dismissed as weak, the one Kurosaki child—the one Kurosaki, these days—who couldn’t quite see. Only almost, like seeing someone through a bit of space and smoked glass.

When Ichigo had been injured, had lain in the same candy shop with the same too-smart cat watching from the side table and people she didn’t know around him, she’d finally gotten some hard facts by listening in. Lurking.

Outright sneaking and eavesdropping and she didn’t care how amused the cat was as it led her about.

That was her brother and she wanted to know why he wasn’t right any more.

Meeting the Visored was a revelation. So many things just slotted into her head as ‘that’s what that was’.

Their mother wasn’t quite the same as Ishida, not in the way that so many unrelated Shinigami were still—now that she knew— recognizable as Shinigami. That strange hint, sort of like an aftertaste of spice? That Ichigo shared while Karin barely had a trace of it at all?

The Visored did.

That, apparently, was hollow flavoring.

Of course, no one bothered to explain how their human mother had managed to contract and pass on hollow energies. She honestly wasn’t sure if anyone there knew. Wouldn’t be surprised, of course, as they seemed to be in the middle of all of the nonsense that had been going on.

Ichigo was hurt, losing his flavor at a devastating rate. Yuzu wasn’t sure he would live through it.

Oh, everyone assured her he would and they didn’t seem to be lying, but they weren’t telling her everything. Pained eyes didn’t point to a full return to robust health. The shop keeper, Urahara, he watched Ichigo like he’d never see him again. Like Ichigo sleeping, the occasional pained winces and all, were important and necessary.

Karin would stare at the man until he left, but when Yuzu was there alone she stared him into staying.

Whatever the man felt for her brother, Ichigo needed all of the good wishes and unconscious knowledge of presence that he could get.

She’d learned that long ago, sitting with some of the dying patients at the clinic or the hospital when they went to visit long-time patients. The will to live was bolstered by the wishes of others to the same end.

Besides, he was the most like Ichigo of the Shinigami she could easily sit near. They both had cinnamon and a thick dark syrupy flavor. She’d gotten some Kurosaki from Karin, which added in touches of Masaki—not enough spice, so she’d ‘accidentally fallen asleep’ on the Visored she only knew from overhearing others as Lisa.

That got her enough hollow for the mix.

Getting Quincy from Ishida had been much harder. It had taken weeks to get enough energy from him. He didn’t radiate like everyone else did. Even the Shinigami who were clearly controlling their energies had enough for her to take small sips without them noticing.

By the time she was done Ichigo was home, and she’d been right to worry, to plan ahead for this—it was a disaster. She’d overheard Isshin telling people to leave Ichigo be and pointedly drained all the energy off of him she could before belatedly realizing that without Ichigo about their dad was their best hope if another hollow came around trying to eat-slash-kill them.

He complained he was getting a cold and didn’t think any more about it.

She still took everything ‘Isshin shinigami’ she needed that Karin, being weaker, couldn’t easily provide without ill-effects.

Small absorptions wouldn’t be noticed; she’d done that for years. As far back as she could remember, actually, breathing in and drinking down their mother as she read with them. From Ichigo and Karin when they were cuddled on the couch or playing games at the table or on the floor. More recently from Isshin, too. She’d known something was up with him years ago.

The absorbed energies were like a different sort of food to Yuzu. She had tried not to do whatever it was she did while learning from Ishida, worried that it was wrong or something he’d decry and then after refuse to teach her anything. She had ended up starving in a way that didn’t have to do with physical foods—she hadn’t even tried to replace one with the other, thankfully.

She had reduced how much she took when she realized her absorptions made the people around her tired. Unless they needed to sleep, already, and were being stubborn. Then it was a glass of something warm and being a bit close for a while until they gave in.

“Ichigo?”

“What?”

She took that as the most welcome she’d get and entered his room with a plate of their mother’s special cookies.

They were rich, expensive to make, and therefore only for very certain situations.

Ichigo eyed her and them warily but accepted the plate when she held it out and shifted his feet to get out of her way so she could settle down comfortably. Out of respect for the cookies they each ate two before Ichigo set them aside, looking a bit like he regretted taking all of the second instead of splitting one as she’d suggested. “Alright, what is it?”

She took a deep breath. “Mom was a Quincy.”

“How do you—“

“Mom was a Quincy. Ishida is our cousin— well, not first cousin, but a cousin all the same about twenty times over if his face was any judge. As Dad doesn’t tell us anything I had to ask him about it.”

“What made you ask?”

“He’s mostly like she was. And he was called a ‘Quincy’ rather than something else or ‘unique’, like the rest of your friends. Their energy is all different.”

After staring for a minute he ruffled his hair in agitation. “You can sense energy types. Tell people apart by them?”

“Only if they have reiryoku,” she pronounced it carefully. “Otherwise they’re nothing. Null.” She cocked her head thoughtfully. “And only if I know them, for pure Shinigami. Otherwise I just know they’re Shinigami. How that cat is also one I don’t know, but she is.”

He nodded after a moment, the dubious light fading out of his eyes. “And you never said anything because we talk about things so often.”

She half-smiled. “Just so.”

“Alright, so… what has this to do with anything?”

“You’re… tattered. Bleeding out, almost.”

With a flinch he looked away. Clenched his fist and looked at it for a moment before forcing it to be at ease. Nodded.

“She wasn’t just Quincy any more than the Visored are just Shinigami. Maybe she couldn’t use it—or daren’t—but she had a bit of hollow energy. You inherited a good deal of it. Karin only the faintest scrap, I didn’t even notice it until I looked. I… I think maybe I got a good deal of it, too. Perhaps all that would have been present for a child split and I got most of it for that pregnancy. Because nothing I’ve heard of for Shinigami or Quincy is anything like me.”

“Reiatsu sensing isn’t that hard. Anyone can learn, eventually.”

“If it was only that, would I bother with the cookies? Took me five trains to find all the ingredients, nii-san.”

“What is it, then?”

“If you absorbed a great deal of reiatsu, would it fix you?”

“I… have no idea. I kind of doubt it, though, because if it would, why didn’t they do it?”

“They being the people who typically don’t want the living to have powers or anything to do with the other realms?” It was perhaps a bit cruel to point it out so bluntly, but… the kind of healing he’d need to restore such damage wasn’t quick or easy. Possibly not even possible, for them. Would they expend the effort on a more-or-less human?

She didn’t know.

Given how their father acted about their powers, she doubted it.

He opened his mouth to protest but closed it when she waited expectantly. When he grimaced and looked away she considered reaching for the cookie plate to offer them again. “I don’t think Urahara would think that way.”

“Oh?” She asked, quirking a brow and waiting to see his reaction.

The slight blush and way he wouldn’t meet her eye reassured her.

“Going for a much older man, are you?”

“Don’t be stupid. Dangai training or not I’m still a kid, as far as any Shinigami are concerned.”

As long as they don’t need you to win a war for them, anyway, she thought acidly. “Very well. A thought for another day. You trust him?” she added before he could react.

“Yes,” he agreed so firmly she was sure there were stories and, knowing her brother, probably fights involved in that declaration.

“With my life as well as your soul?”

“…Yes.”

She studied him before nodding when she saw he’d considered it but still wouldn’t waiver. “Then let’s ask him if it would help you.” She hopped up and grabbed the plate to cover it for later, waiting at the door when he didn’t follow her.

“Yuzu, does it matter?”

“I told you, I’m not like Quincy or Shinigami. Hollows have all sorts of different abilities, though, don’t they?” She turned to walk away as she spoke so he had no choice but to follow her to the kitchen.

“Yes, but so do Shinigami—have you not heard of shikai or bankai?”

“Not much, no.” She covered the cookies and hid them in the back of the baking cupboard inside a cake tin, putting the rack in the soapy water with the other dishes. Then she wound her arm through Ichigo’s and turned him for the door. “Tell me all about it on the way.”

Ichigo was a much better storyteller than Karin. She could easily imagine the various different blades from his descriptions and giggled a bit when he got in to the story about one of his first fights against ‘pineapple’, which she hoped wasn’t the guy’s real name. Given their own, though…

He trailed off suddenly and she looked up to see the shop, propelling him forward determinedly. “Yuzu, they made it clear I wasn’t really welcomed—“

“They said whatever they said to keep you away, probably,” she agreed.

“Why would I be welcome now?”

“I daresay you were always welcome, they were just trying to abide by Goat-Face’s wishes regarding how your time was spent, and with whom.”

A lash of his lingering reiatsu flicked out and she carefully didn’t absorb it as she was used to doing for those tendrils. “He what?”

“Kurosaki…” the man looked between them warily, belatedly catching the moment’s tension.

“Is Urahara here? I apparently owe him a kick in the ass for listening to my father about what I do and do not want without either of them bothering to ask me.”

“In his lab.”

With a guttural noise Ichigo stormed through the public spaces and into the private ones. Yuzu took a moment to appreciate seeing him in a temper—he looked almost like he used to—before following at a discrete distance.

After a few minutes a flushed Ichigo stuck his head out of the door and met her eyes, tilting his head for her to join them. “Now, explain.”

“Did you ask?” She asked politely but pointedly. If it was a no-go she’d rather no one knew.

Ichigo deflated. “Would a massive amount of reiatsu ‘fix me’?” He glanced sideways as he asked.

She watched Urahara, who looked like the idea had already occurred to him. “Probably, if we could focus it in the right place and get it all properly balanced. Though collecting that much energy for transfer at once...”

One of her eyebrows rose even as Ichigo studied him. “You’re already working on something of the sort, aren’t you?”

Urahra looked at the ceiling with a little noise in the back of his throat.

Did no one call him out normally? Ichigo must be a novelty.

“What were you thinking, Yuzu?”

“How did mother have a hollow part to her?”

Both looked at her in shock.

“Do you know?”

Shinigamis in town, Isshin a Shinigami in a gigai, gigai obtained from Urahara—hardly a large leap.

“I… yes,” he admitted, slowly. It seemed to Yuzu, at least, that he was very deliberately not looking at Ichigo.

“I was born with Shiro?” Ichigo asked before making a face that said for some reason he hadn’t wanted to believe Yuzu. “My hollow part wasn’t from the shattered shaft training?”

Yuzu made a mental note never to bet money with Urahara. She couldn’t read anything even from his reiatsu. Ichigo, though, felt like getting himself into a fight and was angled towards Urahara, who slowly but definitely moved so his back was more towards a wall than Ichigo. He honestly didn’t seem aware of doing it, but Ichigo noticed as well and bared his teeth before clenching his fists in his ‘must calm down’ pose. “Mom always had it, and so did you. I presume Karin always had it, too.”

Urahara grimaced. Just faintly.

She was impressed. “We know that. You’re not telling us that,” she added, and watched his eyes flick slightly before he bowed his head in recognition.

“True.” It sounded like ‘clever’ the way he said it. “She was… infected, for lack of a better word, by a hollow. She began to turn into a hollow—in a different manner than the Visored. It would have killed or completely consumed her. Isshin’s powers were spent in a seal that contained the hollow energy. Or was supposed to. It wasn’t as good as it should have been and Ichigo did receive a large amount of the infected energies from her. I hadn’t noticed your sister being affected.”

“And so he was stuck in a gigai until the last however long. Probably he began regaining energies when the seal was no longer required, though his levels were so low I didn’t notice for a time.”

“Most likely, yes,” Urahara agreed, eying her intently. “What makes you think you can provide the reiatsu Ichigo would require? You are barely noticeable, yourself.”

She held out her hand, concentrating.

The orb that formed didn’t look like the others, but she wasn’t surprised. The others had been nearly perfectly from Kurosaki sources. This one was much more diverse.

“Is that— can’t be,” Ichigo said.

Something in his voice made her look up to see both were looking at it with a sort of sick fascinated horror. She reabsorbed it instinctively, hiding her hands behind her back.

“It… wasn’t. Yet… very similar. How did you come by it?” Urahara asked her intently.

“I just make them,” she shrugged. “I absorb energy and when I have too much it forms into solid states, gets larger and larger unless I expel it to absorb from it rather than others.”

Seeing the two facepalm at once was something she would tease them about in years to come.

“Oh my god,” Ichigo groaned. “If fucking Goat-Face had just been honest with us…” he sighed.

“Kurosaki-chan,” Urahara said, looking at her with weary eyes and speaking into his palm with a twist in his voice that suggested if he’d been alone or able to leave the room for a few minutes there might have been a bit of a tantrum. “For the sake of your own soul and those of your siblings, do not ever tell anyone about that ability.”

She gave him such a deadpan look Karin would be proud of her. “Three people—ever—now know.”

“Good. May we see it again?”

Much more hesitantly she let it form on her fingers, feeling the faintest weight as it settled. They felt almost like they were made of too-thin blown glass, but they were rather indestructible despite their apparent fragility. The others were more of a pale blue or violet; this one was darker, almost black with streaks of crimson spinning through it.

“It isn’t homogenous,” Urahara said in some surprise.

“Were the others?”

“Fairly. They took longer to build up. I’ve kind of been rushing this one for you. That’s why Dad’s been sleeping so soundly.”

Ichigo grimaced. “From him?”

She huffed and puffed out her cheeks. “I couldn’t get enough ‘Isshin Shinigami’ from Karin alone! I had to rely on her for as much of Mom as I could get. Thankfully the Visored were nice enough to let me lean against them from time to time and Urahara didn’t contain his reiatsu as much while we were in your room waiting for you to wake up. Maybe it’s the sort of attacks or something, but of the Shinigami his was more like yours than anyone else around, so that was useful.”

“You—“ Urahara broke off, looking utterly consternated. “I never noticed.”

“I did it as slowly as possible to avoid being noticed,” she retorted dryly. “Getting Quincy from Ishida took forever.”

“You tried to… recreate my energy?”

“I could hardly do that. If I’d thought to separate out those energies absorbed I might have been able to. I’d never thought to so I don’t know if I could. But I hoped if I got them close enough… it would be more helpful than any old energies.”

“Very true. Though I wouldn’t have thought…” Urahara trailed off, then motioned them both over to a bookcase which, with a twitch of his hand, slid into the wall and disclosed a door previously hidden behind it. “I was thinking if enough people poured their energies into a blade we could put it into the soul-sleep and ‘awaken’ Ichigo’s powers.”

That sounded… painful.

Ichigo was grimacing again and rubbed at his chest.

Over his heart.

“And what’s wrong with him just swallowing this?” She held up the orb with a glare.

Urahara stopped, blinked. “I… don’t think it’ll work that way. It would remain solid.”

“Not if I release its solidity.”

“Can you do that within someone else’s body?”

“How would I know? I can unmake them from a meter or so away.” She didn’t like doing so; it had attracted a hollow both times.

A fan suddenly appeared to tap at Urahara’s lips as he eyed his scattered drawings and a small eerie blade that was hardly a paperknife. After a moment he shrugged. “Well, I can’t think of any way for it to hurt him even if you can’t release it and it has to pass through his system. Apart from quite possibly attracting every hollow for miles,” he added mildly, eying the orb in her grasp with some annoyance.

She was going to get that story someday.

When Ichigo was better.

“Then you’ll keep a closer eye on things?” She prodded.

A quicksilver smile flashed and vanished. Urahara inclined his head in a manner that betrayed not only an already formed intent but years spent around rather high class people who expected even their servants to move elegantly.

Did people really dismiss this man as an air-headed shop owner?

She gave him a nod of her own and offered the orb to Ichigo. He took it, hesitantly, and winced a bit as it touched his skin. “Nii-san?”

“Ichigo?”

“It’s… tingly.”

“Perhaps—“

Ichigo anticipated Urahara’s suggestion and swallowed the orb without any further hesitation. He grimaced as it went down and she winced in sympathy; it had been larger than she’d hoped, but complex and powerful as he was she hadn’t been able to keep it small. Once he was steady she reached out, mentally, and let it dissolve as slowly as she could.

Which wasn’t slowly enough not to have an immediate effect.

He bent, bracing himself on his thighs before Urahara gripped his arms and moved him backwards to a futon laid out along the far wall. When he lifted a hand and Yuzu felt his energies shift she reached out and gulped, making him flinch and turn to her.

“Don’t interfere. If things go badly I can absorb the excess.”

He very clearly wanted to brush her aside, to check on Ichigo, but he finally stilled, kneeling beside Ichigo with his hands on his own thighs.

It was an unnatural and trained stillness.

Yuzu filed that away for later consideration. Urahara’s energies were still flickering slightly in a way she was beginning to suspect Shinigami couldn’t help even if others wouldn’t be able to tell. She slumped into a similar pose beside him when she was finished unmaking the orb, waiting to see if Ichigo had enough of the same sort of thing she was within him to use it as she had banked on.

The energies in him sort of sloshed about, flung to the ends of his last remaining tendrils—

And then two such tattered edges met.

And stuck.

She caught her breath and leaned forward, hands over her mouth as she waited, smile beginning to grow as more and more pieces were brought in.

“Is it working?” Urahara breathed. “Is it— I can… I think I can feel his reiatsu…” he frowned, though, clearly not quite sure.

She couldn’t answer. She felt as if even breathing too loudly would break something.

As the last of the tattered tendrils wrapped around Ichigo she held her breath. Vaguely she was aware of even Urahara’s reiatsu stilling.

The energies vanished from her perception. Not slipped away and drifting off, but vanished.

Absorbed.

Her muffled squeal of delight was lost as the reiatsu exploded out in a wave, realigned and properly focused.

Properly Ichigo.

She pounced on him the moment he opened his eyes, ignoring that they were a bit yellow, oddly, and curled into the sense of him, back almost to normal.

“May I check him now?” Urahara asked.

With a nod she drew back out of the way, sitting on her heel as Urahara held his hand over Ichigo’s heart. She could vaguely sense his energies moving but compared to having Ichigo back to normalish he was rather uninteresting at the moment.

“It… seems to have worked,” he managed after spending what felt to her like an inordinate amount of time checking. “Though something is different.”

“A bit better mixed,” she shrugged. At Ichigo’s lifted brow she elaborated. “You always were cinnamon and molasses with a bit of bite. Now you’re a conglomerate whole. Ginger cookies, perhaps.”

“Don’t even,” Ichigo growled at Urahara, who whipped out the fan again to hide behind. A bit too slow to hide a grin and a mischievous expression that continued to gleam in his eyes.

Deciding she didn’t want to know if this counted as some sort of foreplay she took full advantage of Ichigo being in a good mood to properly snuggle in. He so rarely sat still for cuddles anymore she had to grab him when he wasn’t opposed and she was close to falling asleep from her efforts.

She also rather didn’t want to listen as the two verbally sparred. Whatever anyone else heard? She could feel their energies reaching out to brush and coil.

Much better to drift off and have her own dreams.