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When they fight, they do it like animals.
It’s all teeth and fist and sword. At first, after Ywach was put down for good and Grimmjow had called in their promise, Ichigo had hesitated, contemplated the ethics of beating his not-so-enemy anymore into the ground. It hadn’t lasted long. Grimmjow made sure of that. Because in every swing and crash of blade, in every reverberation of their powers swelling and striking against each other, there’d been something else there too. A call and response of reiatsu that told Ichigo in his blood this is what they were made for. And when the days post-war had festered into a monotonous amalgam of soul-sucking nothing, these were the times Ichigo lived for.
But, like hell he’d tell Grimmjow that.
Los Noches is standing. Ichigo stares up at the black, endless sky as he pants open-mouthed and tastes blood. Grimmjow is beside him, doing much of the same. It always ends like this–in a heap of gore and heaving chests. Tilting his head to the side, sand crunches beneath the weight of his pounding skull. Grimmjow is worse for wear, eyes forced shut as he takes in breath. The flowing blue hair of his release form is tangled with crystalline weeds and dirt.
“Who won?” Ichigo asks, dazed and coughing as he tries to sit up. His ribs hurt. Everything hurts.
The only response he gets is an angry flick of Grimmjow’s tail. Idly, Ichigo grabs it, because if there’s one thing he’s learned about the ex-espada since they began fighting on the regular, it’s that the man has no boundaries or value of personal space. Ichigo had been adopting his forwardness in kind. Still, Grimmjow’s eyes fly open and he opens his mouth, a harsh sound filling the air. The tail thwaps around, slicing Ichigo in the knee once it’s free of his grip.
“ Ow –dick. Did you just hiss?”
Frown. “You can’t prove shit.”
Ichigo scoots a bit closer, winces in pain as a smirk grows on the side of a cut lip. “You so did. Fucking cat.”
Grimmjow snarls. “Quit catchin’ me off guard in this form, Kurosaki, or I’ll piss on you next.”
Ichigo hums as he looks down, eyes poring over the other. He can’t deny how badass Grimmjow looks like this. All feline slim shapes and lethality unparalleled. Even if Ichigo can outdo him in terms of pure strength, he’ll never come close in matters of speed. It’s a reason he loves these matches as much as he does. Grimmjow pushes him. In more ways than one.
“Hey,” he says, ignoring the pissing comment. His brain is elsewhere right now. Maybe it’s the fatigue, the total body exhaustion that only their caliber of fights can bring, or maybe it’s a few years worth of curiosity welling up at once. “What’s your hollow hole feel like?”
A single blue eye slits open and fixes a glare on him, growl already there in the depths of Grimmjow’s chest. He says, “Don’t touch it.”
“I didn’t ask to touch it!”
The eye closes. “You were gonna. Nosy bitch.”
“I was. Can I?”
The growl deepens, but Grimmjow makes no other motions, nor does he answer at all. Ichigo waits, not willing to lose a hand by going outside the parameters of consent. Idly, his fingers in the sand drag over a small, petrified stick. He picks it up and dares to poke Grimmjow in the side with it. For his efforts, Ichigo gets both eyes now.
“Not with the fuckin’ stick.”
“Kay,” Ichigo says, as he smiles like some kind of lovesick idiot. Grimmjow is deadly, even as he’s laying there in the blood-soaked sand. It’s a confession neither of them will call attention to, seeing a predator like that lying belly-up and wounded. A trust that exists between them without eyes on it. Unspoken. A lot of things were like that. Ichigo moves a single hand up over Grimmjow’s hip first, the beginnings of touch in a safe spot as the pads of his fingers travel closer. White plates cover most of Grimmjow’s skin like this. Whether made of bone like his mask, or some layered hierro, Ichigo doesn’t know. And it isn’t on the docket of interest today.
When the tips of his fingers meet the edge of Grimmjow’s hollow hole, the arrancar gasps. It’s subtle. Just a slight hitch to an inhale through his nose, but Ichigo clocks it. Notices the way the claws on his feet flex infinitesimally.
“This okay?” he asks, trailing his pointer finger along the rim of it. Strange, unnatural cold permeates from the void like frost. He puts a bit more pressure, feels the drag of the other’s skin and the bizarre way it dips off into nothing.
Grimmjow doesn’t respond in words, but he bares his teeth and lets out a small, non-aggressive growl. Ichigo isn’t sure whether to take it as encouragement or not, but he’s not a picky man. His heart is beating fast. This shouldn’t be some big deal, but it feels monumental somehow. He wonders how many others can say they’ve felt up the hole of any hollow, let alone one with as much raw power as Grimmjow. So, he doesn’t take it for granted. Carefully, Ichigo slides his fingers over the precipice, touching over the edge into that void of cold. It feels strange. Like a coalescence of pure reiryoku . Ichigo gulps, furrows his brow in concentration as he pushes his hand inside. It feels like sticking his hand into the yawning mouth of a predator. He licks his lips, too dry, and feels Grimmjow’s familiarly intense gaze on him. Flicking his eyes over, those crystal blues are narrowed into slits, all pupils as they watch him.
God, he’s beautiful.
“Hurts?” he asks, even though he knows Grimmjow would rather die than admit to any pain anywhere.
“S’fuckin’ weird…” he says, voice low and slow. Ichigo pushes his hand in further, splays his fingers out and strokes the essence that thickens the space there, and Grimmjow makes this inhuman noise that feels more erotic than any porn he’d ever seen. For a moment, Ichigo freezes, heartbeat in his ears as he watches Grimmjow’s back feet stretch out–reminiscent of a cat waking up. Ichigo can’t help but stare at them.
“Kinda want to touch your paws now too.”
“The hell is wrong with you, Kurosaki?” Grimmjow says, but there’s no bite.
“A lot of things, probably,” Ichigo answers as he scoots closer. The movement is jostling his injuries. He should be laying down, but this is more important. Grimmjow’s body tenses, and he knows he’s on the edge of these privileges being taken away. It was only ever after the particularly destructive fights did Grimmjow get like this. A temporarily subdued instinct to kill, courtesy of Ichigo indulging him whenever the moment striked. Which was often. He was not complaining. There was one way to draw the moment out, just a bit. But he couldn’t lay it on too thick. “Sue me for thinking you look cool.”
“Kiss ass.”
“Is it working?” He wiggles his fingers around in the void a bit more.
Grimmjow snorts, and Ichigo knows he’s got him. There’s the tiniest hint of a smirk on his lips. “Better get it outta your system now while I’m down.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ichigo taunts, smiling too. He removes his hand from Grimmjow’s hollow hole, slides it down his thigh. He wonders if they both ignore how intimate this feels. “Gonna kick my ass once you catch your breath?” He makes it to an all black, sleek paw, and trails a single finger over the fur there.
“You know I will,” Grimmjow says.
For a moment, the words between them die to a somehow comfortable silence as Ichigo maps the dips and curves of Grimmjow’s feline legs. There’s more power here than he can understand. Idly, he grips the man’s right foot in his hand, scoots himself down a bit to be able to hold it properly. It wasn’t like the paw of a large cat–at least, not like a tiger or anything like the cats who relied on size and strength to kill. If he were to equate it to anything, Ichigo muses Grimmjow would be closer to a cheetah. Long, aerodynamic things these legs and feet. Their claws flexed out just like any other cat’s. And when Ichigo presses his thumbs into the underside to watch them extend, his eyes widen.
“You have toe beans,” he says in awe.
Grimmjow tries to yank his paw back with a snarl, but Ichigo isn’t having any of it. He holds on with the beginnings of an apology just as Grimmjow says, “You’re fuckin’ pushin’ it,” and he can’t help but laugh. At Grimmjow’s temperament. At the absurdity of all of it. Ichigo Kurosaki, sitting in the sands of Hueco Mundo feeling up an Arrancar’s paws and hollow hole. This is how he spends his Friday nights.
“Sorry, sorry!” he says, smiling. Ichigo kneads the meat of the paw, in between the toes up to the base of his ankle, and Grimmjow’s demeanor starts to shift. It’s slow at first, noticeable only in the lessening glare Ichigo is receiving for his ministrations at all. With his free hand, he trails it up, over Grimmjow’s thigh and hip until it’s teetering on the edge of the void.
The deep rumble that starts up isn’t a growl.
There’s something perverse about the way Grimmjow responds. The way his back arches a fraction of an inch and his left paw hooks its claws into the sand. The reverberation of that guttural sound is white noise around them, the only sound in this plain aside from the occasional distant cry of hollows. Ichigo can feel himself falling here, his own body attentive to any small shift or change. He strokes the inside of that icy pit and a shiver goes up his spine.
When he looks over, Grimmjow is staring at him. He looks feral, the blue in his eyes nothing but a ring around pure black. Ichigo swallows, thick, and splays his fingers out against the dense black fur of the other’s paw, gliding up to his calf then back down. Grimmjow bares his teeth. His tail undulating beside them.
“You should have told me you were gonna like it this much,” he says, soft and nearly reverently. Grimmjow sits up, clawed hands digging into the sand, and scents the air near Ichigo.
“S’not just that…” Grimmjow trails off, leans closer. The fact that he’s flexible enough to invade Ichigo’s personal space with his leg still outstretched like that doesn’t go unnoticed. Again, the arrancar lifts his face, just a bit, nostrils flexing as he moves closer. In the span of a moment, Grimmjow’s nose is pressed just beneath Ichigo’s ear, inhaling. “You’re an open fuckin’ book, Shinigami.”
Ichigo doesn’t know if that should petrify him.
“Yeah?” Ichigo starts. “As open as…?” He dips his fingers into the hollow hole once more.
Grimmjow growls, and it’s directly in his ear, and oh…they hadn’t discussed this yet. Not that he wanted to change that. The way Grimmjow had a tendency to be touchy when he was hurt and tired and the way Ichigo purposely avoided mentioning it on the off chance it’d make Grimmjow stop. It felt pathetic, on some level. To find himself like this–panting at the thought of being touched by all that strength. But there’s something in it. Something in the relinquishment of power, of a predator vying for his attention, for his scent. It’s intoxicating.
The war had taken so much from him. Too much had changed. He’d changed. Grimmjow changed. And yet, still, here they both were, doing the same shit as before. Fighting. Healing. Fighting again. It didn’t seem like a bad way to pass time. In fact, more than Ichigo was willing to admit, it grounded him. Kept him sane. In the aftermath of uncovering such devastating power in himself, he’d remembered Aizen. A man who transcended god only to find himself alone. Did Grimmjow understand that? The balance between cultivating the power to protect versus the power others needed protection from?
“Tell that brain of yours to shut the fuck up.”
“That loud, huh?” Ichigo answers, tilts his head to give Grimmjow better access to his skin. Neither of them mention it. There’s a pause. “Grimmjow?”
“Mm?”
“Do you think there will ever be a time where you’re strong enough? Or too strong?”
For a second, there’s no response. Just the soft feeling of Grimmjow’s open lips ghosting over his pulse point, taking in the scent. Then, “No such thing as too strong when it comes to hollows.”
Ichigo frowns. “How do you mean?”
Grimmjow licks his throat, a clawed hand moving to his hip and it’s territorial in a way that makes Ichigo’s brain hazy. “Lay down.”
“Why?” Ichigo starts, out of breath. “So you can lick me with your barbed tongue some more? Weirdo.”
Grimmjow laughs. It sounds more like a growl. “It’s instinct.”
“Licking people?”
Ichigo is pushed back into the sand by Grimmjow’s hand on his chest. Their legs end up tangled together. “Marking my prey.” Another lick to his throat.
There’s that shiver again.
“You didn’t answer me when I asked who won,” Ichigo says, and he doesn’t fight back. His fingers reach up to twine through those long blue locks, nails dragging on scalp as his eyes slide shut. It’s domestic. Neither of them would stand for it if they had the energy to care. “So, if I did, means you’re my prey, right?”
“So, lick me, then,” Grimmjow says. “And no, fuck you.”
“Fine–answer my question.”
He rumbles for a bit in thought. “You’ve seen it out here. Eat or be eaten. The hell’re you talkin’ about too strong ? To us, that just means we ain’t dead yet.”
Ichigo mulled that over for a minute. It made sense. He’d seen for himself just what abject chaos a sea of mindless gillian were, fighting and eating and screaming for a sense of self. Then, if they made it past that, came the fear of regression. Move forward, or die. Kill, or be killed. Like Grimmjow said–eat, or be eaten. It made sense, but felt different. Sometimes, he forgot they were worlds apart. He remembered the way Inoue had looked at him in terror when he’d first mastered his hollow. Was there ever a point of too far, too much? He didn’t know. Grimmjow didn’t seem to care. And Ichigo would bet any amount of money the arrancar would never look at him, battle-ready, with anything but pure unbridled excitement. Maybe that’s good enough.
He thinks it might be.
Ichigo hummed. “So, you think you’ll ever get a second release? Like Ulquiorra?”
For a brief moment, the licking to his throat stops. Grimmjow’s claws have made their way around his waist, and his tail is swishing, content. “The hell you mean like Ulquiorra ?”
“Oh, right.” He’d forgotten that was a secret. “He had this nutty bat form thing. Kept it from Aizen, too.”
“Bastard. Knew he smelled different after a while.” Back to the licking. Ichigo felt Grimmjow’s legs flexing beside him, and knew if he looked down, those claws would be kneading the sand.
“Soo…?”
Grimmjow grunts. “Depends. If you quit bitchin out on me and push farther, bet I could come up with somethin’.”
Ichigo laughs again, moves his hands to scratch behind Grimmjow’s ears. “Oh, I’m bitching out on you, huh?”
“Like the bitch you are. Lookit you, layin’ down on your back nice and pretty for me.” And he’s purring. Ichigo is the bitch but Grimmjow is purring .
“Fight me, then,” Ichigo says, tugs on one of his ears. He makes the attempt to get up and is immediately met with a snarl and claws that hold strong–a knee-jerk reaction rather than a choice. But Grimmjow doesn’t let up, regardless.
“Fight you when you can barely stand? Had to go easy on you and everything at the end this time.”
“Oh, fuck you. I can barely stand? You’re taking a nap in my neck, you cat bastard. Probably couldn’t even punch me if you tried.”
“That right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Ichigo stops worrying about strength and fear and friends. He clashes swords with Grimmjow until they’re both nearly unconscious this time, and he does it with a smile on his face.
They both do.