Chapter Text
Ichigo returned home through his window, another hollow slain. He crouched on the sill and took a deep breath. He navigated through the open window carefully, not wanting to hit the glass with his zanpakuto or snag his loose Soul Reaper uniform on anything. The moonlight illuminated his room in a wash of blue and silver. His body lay motionless in the bed. Increasingly, he was becoming more accustomed to seeing his body lying soulless, though it was never a particularly comfortable sight. Except in this case.
The hollow sighting had come at a terrible time. They had just gotten dismissed from school, out in the crowded streets of Karakura town with the afterschool traffic buzzing about them. There was no subtle way to enter Soul Reaper form without being noticed, and so he resorted to the least disruptive way: soul candy. Rather than letting his body collapse unattended in the street, Kon could walk home and wait there until the job was done.
He hopped down into his room and observed Kon sleeping soundly. His body was contorted, legs straight, body sideways, one arm thrown over his face and his mouth wide open. Ichigo could already feel how his muscles and bones would be aching tomorrow, sprawled in this position for who knows how long. He wasn’t even aware his body was capable of contorting like that. It was never a particularly comforting sight, but still he gave a short sigh of relief.
“Well look at that,” he said to himself. “Knowing Kon, I would have expected worse.”
Rukia followed in behind him, hopping through the open window. “Nice work back there.”
Ichigo clicked on a small study light that sat on his desk. “Same to you. I’m sure it’s tough knocking the rust off when your powers have been gone for a while. I woulda thought you never missed a day.”
“And Kon is still here,” she observed. “You never know with him.”
He scoffed a laugh. “Tell me about it.”
Ichigo got back into his body. It was an odd feeling. Like sitting in a bath while it’s draining-- gravity slowly returning to each limb and joint, one-by-one. He saw his black and white clad soul reaper form settle and fade into the jeans on his legs and disappear from his bare arms, which were capped at the shoulder by a tee shirt. He placed his head on the pillow and expected the uncomfortable, immediate release of Kon’s soul candy. But there was nothing. He cleared his throat. Again, nothing, but a burning, almost itchy feeling at the back of his throat.
He sat up and focused on the itchy feeling, cupping one hand under his chin, ready to catch the soul candy.
Nothing came.
He cleared his throat, swallowed, and gave a short cough. Still, nothing budged, and no soul candy landed in his palm. His shoulder bumped into the wall as he slouched to the side, and a jolt of surprise ran through him. Shifting in and out of Soul Reaper form was also still something to get used to, but it had been getting easier each time. The recalibration, the re-synching of spirit and body and the millions of functions that had to come back online, was a dizzying experience. It never lasted more than a few seconds. To lose his balance without realising it was new. “The hell…?” he muttered. He adjusted his body to lean against the wall in a more intentional way.
He opened and closed his palms a few times. Tapped each of his fingers to his thumb. Rolled his neck. Whoa… He paused for a second as a watery saliva filled his mouth. He swallowed, and put a hand to the back of his neck. His brain seemed to swirl inside his head in a delayed, dazed way, like shaking a snowglobe with a single flick of the wrist. His head had stopped moving, but his brain was still catching up.
“Rukia” he pinched the back of his neck, trying to find a tight muscle or misalignment, “is it possible-- when you get back in your gigai. Is it possible to do it wrong?”
“‘Do it wrong?’” She iterated. Her flat affect betrayed the curious tone in her voice. “What do you mean?”
“It feels like I’m…” he tried to think of how to describe it, but the words eluded him. “It feels wrong. When you get back in your body it usually feels like this.” He placed one of his palms against the other and laced his fingers together. “Two things become one.” He swung his hands to the side back and forth, moving as one unit. “Connected, you know? Right now for me it feels more like--” he unlaced his fingers, and pressed his palm flat against the other, then tipped his hand slightly sideways, so his fingers misaligned. “Like this. Like I’m in my body but it’s wrong. It’s connected, but it’s wrong. It’s off. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Rukia flipped through the archive of information in her mind. “I remember when Renji first came to the world of the living, he had a clumsy time getting in and out of his gigai. But he never reported feeling ‘wrong’ in it. As for me, I’ve never experienced anything like what you’ve described, either.” She pondered for a moment with her thumb and forefinger pinching her chin. “Maybe it has something to do with the hollow we just fought. Let me get back in my gigai and see if it’s the same.”
She walked into the closet with her kimono nearly catching in the sliding door as she closed it. She re-emerged in the pajama set that she had “borrowed” from Yuzu. She gave herself a look over, rolled her neck, rotated her wrists, stretched one arm across her body, then the other, touched her toes. “I feel fine.” She concluded.
The whole charade made Ichigo dizzy. His eyes wobbled and his throat tightened. “Then what the hell…” He muttered.
“I’m sure it’ll settle in a few minutes. Now that we’re done for the night, you can give me your soul-candy dispenser. I’ll keep it with our other Soul Reaper tools like usual.”
“Sure, you can have it. But the dispenser is going to be empty. I don’t know what happened.”
“What, you mean you don’t have his soul candy?” She asked. “You left him in charge while we went after the hollow, right?”
“Yeah, but. Dunno. He didn’t come out.”
“He didn’t?”
A breeze came through the open window. The moonlight and the small desk lamp washed the room in a dim light and made shadow-puppets of the room’s furnishings. Rukia read Ichigo’s body language: slouched and delinquent looking, a posture she could envision Kon embodying. Ichigo looked deep in thought, spaced out and increasingly slack-jawed.
Rukia knit her brow. “Usually when a soul candy doesn’t take, the soul reaper will spit it up. When you get back into your gigai, your body should have spit his soul out. Any Soul Reaper would be able to catch it in their hand, it’s a seamless transfer. Or, at least it should be.”
Ichigo shrugged. “It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve had more than one entity messing with me. First Zangetsu. Kon. The evil version of me that keeps trying to take over.”
Rukia’s eyebrow twitched with curiosity. We all have our demons, I suppose, she thought, brushing the statement away. “Do you hear him, or feel his presence still in you?”
Ichigo tried to focus. His head swam. He leaned his head back against the wall and looked up at the ceiling. As he tried to listen to the many voices in his body, he got the sense that the room was spinning clockwise, no-- anticlockwise. The featureless ceiling did nothing to anchor him. He closed his eyes but the sensation persisted. “Kon?” He asked, though he was unsure to whom he posed the question. A rhythmic throbbing beat in his head punctuated a slight ringing in his ears.
He inventoried his body. His arms and legs felt heavy and floppy, as if held together by very loose screws. His chest felt heavy, like he could feel each pound of his heart and the breaths he drew were shallow and slow. His stomach felt like a convulsing knot of snakes. Acid stung between his ribs and burned the back of his throat.
“I don’t hear him,” he reported. “And I feel…” he swallowed a bitter film that coated his mouth. His throat felt sore and something bobbed behind his tonsils. His tongue felt thick and unwieldy in his mouth as he said, “I feel like maybe you should leave the room for a second, Rukia.”
“What are you talking about? Your family--”
“I mean it, Rukia.” He stifled a burp. “Kon is usually a stuffed lion, and the lion is usually in Yuzu’s room.”
“... So you want me to check and see if he’s-- Ichigo!”
Half-toppling off the bed, hip balanced precariously on the edge of his mattress, he made a desperate reach for the trash can by his desk. With one hand, he tipped the lip of the trashcan towards the frame of his bed, and just about rested his chin on it. The other hand clumsily grappled from the bedframe to the floor, bearing the weight of his upper half. He gave one sharp, forceful cough. Then another-- the sharpness of the sound stifled by the wet plopping splatter of vomit hitting the plastic trashcan and its liner.
Rukia watched this happen as if it had been in slow motion. And still, as he spit and let the last strings of saliva disconnect from his lip, she stood motionless.
He lifted his head, and climbed his way back up to the bed, laying on his side. His eyes watered from the effort and he smeared the wetness away with the heel of his hand. He looked at her with tear-smudged, lifeless, half-closed eyes. He cleared his throat and buried his face in his elbow. “Rukia. Do you have any idea what’s wrong with me?”
I’ve never seen someone react so badly to a gigai before. And, he’s a human. There’s no way he’d have any complications with getting in or out of his own body for Soul Reaper duty. She thought. What on earth could be the problem? She took a few steps towards him. “Let me get a closer look. Try to sit up.”
Ichigo swung one leg off the side of the bed, then the other. With some effort, he pushed himself up to the edge of the bed and swayed slightly. Both hands anchored on either side kept him stable, but his brain sloshed in his head. He closed his eyes and let his chin fall towards his chest. “I feel like crap.” He pushed his hair back from his forehead and held his palm there, as if assessing for a fever. “Not like ‘stay home from school’ sick, either. Have you ever been poisoned? I haven’t. At least not yet, knowing how it is with being a Soul Reaper. But I bet it feels something like this.”
Rukia approached him and sat next to him on the bed. “Alright, let’s see,” she said, “what’s going on?”
He turned to look at her, and she juried his face as best as she could. His eyes were open, but vacant and drooping. A hard crease underlined each of them. A spot of saliva glistened on his lower lip. His shoulders rose and fell slowly with each breath. An idea percolated in her mind.
“I want you to try something for me, okay?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“It’s easy. I’m going to hold up one of my hands and you have to hit it as quickly as you can.”
He mulled the thought over in his head. His stomach clenched but he had fought harder battles in worse condition. “Hittin’ things… alright.”
She touched his right hand with one finger. “This is ‘one.’” Then she touched his left hand. “This is ‘two’. I’ll hold up one of my hands and say a number. You have to hit my hand with the correct hand. Understand?”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “Me ‘n Tatsuki used to do stuff like that when we were kids.”
“Ready?”
He nodded once.
She held up her left hand. “Two.” His fist made contact with her palm. “Good.”
She held up her right hand. “One.” Contact. “Good.”
She held up her left hand. “One.” Contact. “Wrong hand.”
She held up her right hand. “Two.” No contact. Rukia dodged quickly before his fist made contact with her shoulder.
She held up her right hand. “Two.” Contact. “Good.”
He’s incredibly slow, she thought. I’ve seen him scrap in his gigai before and he’s usually much better than this. She held up her left hand “Two” Contact. It was starting to hurt. “Wrong hand.”
“Dammit…” he muttered.
She held up her left hand again. “One.” No contact. His knuckles grazed along her forearm.
She held up her right hand. “One.” Contact. The hits were sending shocks into her wrists and elbows now, making her wince. “Are you using your full strength?”
Ichigo looked at his hands. “I didn’t think so.”
“Hm.” A guy like him would be aware of his own strength. “You’re hitting pretty hard.”
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No, it’s okay.” She shook her wrists out and bent her fingers back for a deep stretch. “Just an observation.”
“Well.” He scratched his cheek. “Sorry if I did.”
“No, don’t worry about it. I got all the information I need anyway. There’s one more thing I want to try. I’m going to hold up one finger. You just follow it with your eyes.” She held up her index finger and moved it back and forth slightly. “Without moving your head, just follow my finger with your eyes.”
Ichigo nodded. “Sounds easy enough.”
She moved her hand in a somewhat random pattern, moving at a steady and predictable pace. To her, the concern was less about the path of her hand, but how well Ichigo was able to follow it. She observed his face carefully. He wore a serious expression, with a slight tinge of annoyance. A line next to one of his eyebrows wrote the focus into his face. His eyes were dull, but less drooped than before as he attended to the task at hand. She could see now that a cloud of lightning-shaped veins spread from the pink corner of his eye out towards his iris.
It was when she moved her hand in a slow diagonal-- a straight line going from her upper left to her lower right-- she saw something. As he followed the path of her hand, his eyes shifted just a few degrees-- less than a few millimeters, and for a fraction of a second. She brought her hand slightly closer to his face, and then pulled back towards herself again. Then she did the same motion again but in the opposite direction. And again, the same flicker. He closed one eye and continued to follow her movement.
“Both eyes open. I need to see them working together.”
A growl formed in the lower register of Ichigo’s voice. “Alright, enough with the tests.” He pressed his palms over his eyes and set his elbows on his knees. “This stupid game is making my head spin. What are you getting from this?”
“It’s something like a coordination test. I wanted to see how well you could control your movements. From bigger movements like punches to really small ones, like eye tracking.”
“And?” He rubbed his eyes, then dropped his hands into his lap. “What was that trick you did anyway? Some kind of kido?”
She blinked at him. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
His words had no boundaries with one another, smushing together and overlapping. “I was following your finger and then it looked like you had two right hands. Two pointer fingers for me to follow. I didn’t know which one was the real one.”
“So why did you close one eye?”
He shrugged non-commitally. “Iunno. It just felt right at the time. It broke the illusion for a second at least.”
Rukia gave a short huff, and then cleared her throat.
He gave her a sidelong look, narrowing his eyes. Her lips were pursed into a funny twist, which she covered badly with her fist. “What?” he asked, slowly, “why are you looking at me like that?”
“It’s just,” she stifled a laugh. “I think I know what your problem is. Think about it: poor coordination, vomiting, double-vision? I’m going to guess that your vision is also blurry and you feel like you just got sucker-punched?”
“Yeah.” He held a blank gaze with her as the pieces didn’t connect. “So?”
“Ichigo.” She raised her eyebrows, incredulous. “Don’t tell me this is your first experience with alcohol?”
The word sunk in slowly. “Alcohol.” He repeated, flatly. “What makes you so sure?”
Rukia let out a gentle laugh. “I’ve been alive a lot longer than you think. I’ve seen my share of parties and sake.”
Ichigo tried to picture it. It made sense, when he thought about it. For as serious as Rukia was about her Soul Reaper duties, she was eager to jump in on the Don Kanonji event and was quick to make friends at school. Though between the two of them it was hollows, hollows, hollows, it’s not like she hadn’t dropped the Soul Reaper side of her before. He couldn’t picture what a party would look like in the Soul Society, or what Rukia would be like after a few drinks.
“So, this has happened to you before?”
Rukia tipped her head back and forth. “To a degree. I’m part of a royal family, you know. We have to maintain our composure at gatherings. I’ve had drinks but I’ve never hit my limit, let alone surpassed it.”
Ichigo put his head in his hands. “When I find Kon I’m gonna beat the stuffing out of him.”
“Hm.” Rukia looked around the room again. “If he drank enough to get sick… I hate to tell you this, but he’s probably already out of your body. The good news is we don’t have to call Urahara for mod-soul troubleshooting. But it does mean we have to have a close look around to see where he might be.”
“Well he can’t be too far. After all, I found my body lying down in my bed. It’s not like I, or he, or whoever could have walked my body back here without a soul in it.”
Rukia grimaced. “You think he made it home by himself? Karakura town isn’t so big that a friend or relative wouldn’t find you in the street. Someone could have found you and brought you home, moved you to your room.”
He considered this, though thinking through multiple possibilities felt like wading through knee-high water. “If it was anyone in my family, or one of my friends, I’d be downstairs in the clinic right now.” He mentally waded over to the next point. “If it was anyone else on the streets, Kon would be in a storm drain and I’d be in a real hospital. Or jail,” he added, “knowing Kon.”
Rukia nodded, turning this over in her head. “You have a point.”
Ichigo glanced around his room. “He’s gotta be here somewhere.”
While Rukia had her doubts, she held back from voicing them. Searching the room was a fine place to start. Outside it was dark, and the walk to school was too vast to look for a soul candy the size of a pea. Ichigo could barely see straight looking at something one foot from his face. She hadn’t yet seen him attempt to walk. “Alright. We’ll start here.” She agreed. The most obvious spot was the one she wanted to check the least: “Ichigo, I know it was sudden. But did you happen to notice if that trashcan was empty before…?”
He gave it a slidelong glance. “S’not really where my focus was.”
Rukia gave a short sigh. “I thought you might say that.”
“You don’t happen to know how to get rid of this, do you?” He asked, pointing to the trash can.
She didn’t. “Let’s focus on finding Kon, first.”
Ichigo hesitantly picked up the trashcan and gave it a loose swirl, proclaiming with the type of bravado that comes with inebriation, “The only perfect thing about Kon is that in his soul-candy form he’s a perfect circle. Everything else about him is a pain in the ass.” He swirled it once or twice more, trying not to think too hard about it, which came surprisingly easy to him. There wasn’t much in there-- thin yellow liquid and very few shapeless solids, intermingled with white foam. “If he was in here I would have seen that bright green sphere by now.”
They simultaneously sensed a wave of relief in each other’s spiritual pressure. Then a twinge of disturbance: if not there, then where?
Rukia looked by his desk. She scanned across the surface. Pens, notebooks, homework. On the seat of the desk chair was everything Kon must have tossed out of his pockets upon getting home: wallet, keys, substitute soul reaper pass, receipts, pocket change, soul candy dispenser. Rukia glanced over her shoulder at Ichigo, who was doing his own investigation. His back faced her. She took the substitute pass and quietly pocketed it. Then she checked the soul candy dispenser, finding it empty, and walking it over to the collection of soul reaper tools they kept in the closet.
Ichigo folded back the first few inches of his bedding. He had found that Kon had just lain on top of the bed, rather than getting in it. And he was in his day clothes, too; not even pajamas, or even the school uniform Ichigo had left him in. Kon must have gone out somewhere. Ichigo could picture his nasally taunts (Do you really expect me to walk around outside in school clothes? Girls will think I’m a stupid nerd or something, not that your fashion sense is much better but at least it’s more comfortable--”) Additionally, except for a few wrinkles, the bed was still perfectly made as it had been that morning. “So it’s not like he was intentional about turning in for the night,” he muttered to himself.
Rukia looked in and along the closet. She deposited the substitute soul reaper pass in the backmost corner by her pillow. She inventoried her belongings. The soul-candy dispenser Kon had come in, her memory replacement device, her phone charger, everything was in its place. Her quilt looked untouched. Suddenly, a thought zapped across her mind. With some worry, she discreetly counted her underwear and bras. “Oh thank goodness,” she whispered to herself, finding that they were all accounted for. She had just finished putting them back when a clatter of bones suddenly made her jump. She whipped her head around to see Ichigo sticking his head under his bed.
“Are you alright?” She asked, placing a hand on her chest as if it would help to settle her pounding heart.
He didn’t even turn around. “What do you mean?”
She angled her head, trying to get a clearer view of him. “That sounded like it hurt.”
“What’re you talking about?” He crawled out from under the bed and sat on his heels, “I’m just checking under the bed.”
From across the room she could see his elbows and a bony spot on his wrist were turning red. His knees would be the same, she was sure. “Okay,” she said, “carry on, then.”
Ichigo checked under his bed. The desk lamp barely threw enough light to properly see all the way to the back. He closed one eye and squinted with the other. The lines of the hardwood trailed off into the darkness, and the wall was a solid swath of charcoal grey. He scooched a little further under. Laying on his stomach, he felt acid forcing its way up his esophagus. He gave a small burp and liquid came up with it, which he forced himself to swallow, shuddering. The wall was still grey and shadowed, but a wavy, spotted texture disrupted how solid the color originally appeared. Something that looked like moisture damage on the paint. Something running down the walls.
“Hey, I think I found something.” He slowly pushed himself out from under the bed and up to a kneeling position. “Check this out.” He grabbed the bottom leg of the bed and pulled it towards him. The bedframe scraped across the floor with a sustained honk.
“Are you stupid?” Rukia brought her fist down on top of his head. “It’s the middle of the night! You can’t be making all that noise!”
“What-- but, hey, who are you calling stupid?” Ichigo protested, rubbing the top of his head where Rukia had struck him. The rage that bubbled in him gave way to the mystification that the strike actually didn’t hurt that badly. It actually didn’t really hurt at all.
“What are you going to do if your family wakes up and wants to know what all that noise was about?” She scolded.
“I didn’t think about it, okay? And if you’re so concerned about the noise, maybe stop with the lectures!”
Besides a small mist of a splatter on the windowsill, there would otherwise be no way of telling that a streak of vomit ran between the bed and the wall down to the hardwood floor. Rukia gently slid the top half of the frame out a few inches. And together they pulled the bedding off and onto the floor.
It must have been some time since Kon began his bender, since the smear of vomit on the fabric had already dried around the edges and was losing its sheen, even in the most soaked areas. Impossible to miss, even in the dimly-lit room, amongst the mysterious globs was a bright green sphere, plastered to the bedding. They both looked at it for a while, contemplating their next move.
“At least we found him,” Rukia suggested.
“I’ll handle it,” Ichigo declared, pushing up sleeves he wasn’t wearing.
Rukia swatted his hand away. “Are you serious? In your state, you’ll drop him down the sink. We’ve had a surprise already with a mod-soul animating a stuffed animal. We don’t need another if he gets caught in a pipe junction and makes your house’s plumbing sentient.” She sighed, then mumbled under her breath “no one would be able to shower ever again.”
Ichigo looked at the soul candy, puzzling through what to do. “It’s not your problem to handle.”
“It’s not yours, either. It’s Kon’s. But in order for him to deal with these consequences we need to get him back.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad to not get him back.” He tipped his head to the side and quirked an eyebrow. “Drop him down the sink…”
“Ichigo.”
He dropped his expression and conceded the point. “Fine. Just hang on a minute. I’m not gonna let you touch vomit.” He clambered up to his feet and staggered over to his closet. He slid open the door just a bit, opened a drawer, and retrieved a handkerchief. “Get out of your gigai. Yuzu can’t sense spirits at all-- even if she’s awake, she won’t see you in Soul Reaper form. When you bring the stuffie back in here, I’ll have the soul candy wrapped in the handkerchief. If you want to wash it off, you can, but at least there will be some protection from the mess.”
Rukia parsed his garbled speech as best as she could, ran the plan through her head, then nodded. “Okay.” She went into the closet, changed back into a Soul Reaper, and silently slipped out the room.
Ichigo unfolded the handkerchief and draped it over his hand. The bedding was white with a blue stripe on it-- easy to see the contrast in the dim light of the room. He closed one eye and got a clearer picture of the soul candy. He balanced on his elbows and slowly moved in to pinch it from the tacky smear. He held the loose corners of the handkerchief back with his other hand and pulled the soul candy off the bedding in an inelegant but effective motion. “Gotcha, bastard.” He muttered, rolling the soul candy around in the handkerchief to clean it as much as he could before Rukia returned.
He placed the soul candy back onto a clean wrinkle in the bedding where it wouldn’t roll away, and folded the handkerchief into quarters, so anything that had been wiped off the soul candy was tucked inside a few layers of fabric. He placed the soul candy back into the now clean-sided handkerchief and folded it over once more. He placed it on the corner of his desk and plopped back onto the floor. He looked under the bed again.
It would be easier to see in daylight, but it looked like most of the mess had been mopped up by the bedspread. He got down a little lower and lay on his side, looking up at the window pane from beneath his bed. It probably wouldn’t be such a big deal. A damp paper towel could handle it. Maybe a few paper towels. A washcloth, at worst.
His body felt heavy. Being a Soul Reaper felt weightless-- being able to jump so high, run so fast, swing a sword with every muscle he could muster. His human body felt limited in comparison, in small but distinct ways. It was like suddenly being aware of gravity again. He couldn’t just leap up onto a rooftop, but instead could catch a rebound in a gym class basketball game. He couldn’t run so fast that the environment blended into a blur, but rather could sprint into a fight and sweep out the legs of any bully looking for trouble.
Now he felt like he was in a losing battle with gravity. As he peeked under the bed and assessed the damage that Kon had done, his arms slowly came down to earth, asking for reprieve. His core relaxed as his ribs and hip made contact with the flooring. He stretched his shoulders back and felt how loose and elastic his joints felt. He took one last glimpse at the wall and then set his cheek on the hardwood, noting how cool it felt in comparison. A fever? He thought, touching his cheeks, his temples, his forehead. His face felt hot to the touch. It didn’t matter. The flooring was cool and refreshing, calming the persistent thump that pulsed through his temples. He thought, abstractly, that he understood dogs a bit better now-- how they laid on shady stones and cool tile floors on hot days…