Chapter Text
A baby dreams of things he’s never known. He’s too young to make sense of any of it, but emotions are powerful things that imprint onto the soul, and one does not need to understand one’s emotions to feel them. Words are yet to have meaning, but as he begins to make sense of shapes and sounds, he soon associates father with humiliation, resentment and despair and stagnation with enmity.
He cries, not for milk, or a soiled nappy, or for the ache in his gums as his baby teeth come through, but for the deaths of people he’s never met, never known, and who died long before he was even born. He grieves for a father trapped in a state worse than death, and for a self trapped in an ancient slumber. He prays for a world without death.
He is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And like so, years pass.
The baby who dreams of things he’s never known grows into a boy who dreams of things he’s never even imagined. In his waking hours, he’s almost ordinary: time is linear, space is fixed, and all the laws of science are obeyed. But when he sleeps, he sees an infinite number of futures come to pass.
He learns about timelines and flowcharts in school. He’s introduced to the concepts of ‘alternate universes’, ‘the multi-verse’ and ‘divergent timelines’ by comic books, manga and video games.
He’s eight when he grows sick of the chaotic milieu of his mind. On Saturday, after his half day at elementary school, he sits down in his bedroom, locks the door and picks up one of his leftover exercise books from the previous year. He selects his lucky pencil, with its chewed eraser end and well-worn sides, and get to work.
At first, he tries to write down and make sense of each potential timeline, but this quickly becomes exhausting in its repetition, so he starts over. Then, he begins to mentally cluster timelines together, creating nodes for important events and listing the different decisions at that point to lead to new nodes until timelines are established by going from the top node down, and following along different decision trees. He numbers the timelines in order of recall, adding new nodes whenever he remembers new important events. He soon runs out of space on the double-page spread of his book, so he cuts out some more spare pages. He tapes three pages together side-by-side, before taping the three pages under the double-page spread to expand his diagram. Soon, those three pages are filled too, and he tapes another four pages under them.
And on, and on, and on, and on he goes.
He finishes on Sunday morning, having not slept a wink all night, then conks out for the rest of the day. He wakes up on Monday morning to his mother knocking on his door, rushes to put everything away, packs his bag and goes to school as normal. He’s jittery all day, ignoring the usual drone of the teacher’s lessons in favour of mentally going over his work from the weekend, making notes on the events he’s forgotten until now. Finally, when he’s let out from school, he blitzes through his homework, and gets back to his diagram.
He can lump the majority of timelines under one group, which share a number of key events: firstly, Masaki dies trying to protect him from a Hollow called the Grand Fisher while losing her Quincy powers; secondly, he stays largely ignorant of the supernatural until he’s fifteen; and thirdly, a Shinigami called Rukia ends up lending him her powers when he’s fifteen, dragging him into a series of ancient supernatural wars. All of these timelines has him favouring his Shinigami side over his Hollow and Quincy sides, and the majority in which he survives has him marrying a pretty orange-haired girl called Inoue Orihime. In every single one of these timelines, they have a son called Kazui, who dies of some cause other than old age, and their marriage falls apart because of it.
In some timelines, Kazui chooses to live as an ordinary human. He dies, in his teens, in his twenties, in his thirties, or even his forties, from accidents, natural disasters, murder, sickness or even in human wars in the timelines he goes as a humanitarian aide worker overseas. The Ichigo of those lives waits in Soul Society for his son, only to find out that, as an ordinary human, Kazui entered the Cycle of Reincarnation as normal people do, and had his memories wiped clean upon arrival to Soul Society. He and his wife will blame each other for the rest of their lives for not pushing Kazui harder into choosing the Shinigami life, and the timelines in which they divorce are perhaps the healthiest out of a poor lot.
In other timelines, where Kazui becomes a Shinigami, he’ll be eaten by a Hollow, or dragged into another supernatural war, or, in the most tragic of turns, find himself falling in love with an ordinary human woman who dies long before his spirit’s aged, forgets him upon her reincarnation into Soul Society, and drives him into a depression so deep and dark that suicide became his only salvation. In those timelines, he and his wife will blame each other for dragging Kazui into the supernatural side of life, and they too, will never quite forgive each other for it.
Worse still, in the background of all of these timelines, lives a Soul Society that is just as corrupt, militaristic and unpleasant as it has been for the last two thousand years. Souls continue to starve in Rukongai. Central 46 continues to be detached from the sufferings of the citizens they rule over. And Gotei 13 remains a nepotistic lumbering beast where each Captain has free rein over their Division, to the point where experimenting on newbies is a rite of passage for the Twelfth.
In other timelines, he does not choose Orihime, but a woman half his height but filled with twice as much gusto. Dark-haired but bright-eyed, Kuchiki Rukia is a breath of fresh air in his youth, but time becomes an unforgiving mistress on their relationship. Bound by duty, Captain Kuchiki of the Thirteenth spends most of her time in Soul Society, while Ichigo lives out his human life in the Living World. They meet like Orihime and Hikoboshi, once a year on Tanabata. He craves more — a wife who can be by his side, and children for them to spoil — while she remains unyielding in her devotion to her job. He ages, and she does not. He moves on, with the shifting values of the Living, and she remains unchanged, stagnant, like the Dead. They do not get divorced, because they never married, but go their separate ways quietly into the night. When the Ichigos of those timelines die, they lament wasting their life pining after a phantom of a life that was never meant to be.
In other timelines still, things diverge before the defeat of Aizen, of Yhwach, of the apparent threats to Soul Society. No, instead, some Ichigos choose to join hands with his enemies. In the least divergent paths, he chooses Aizen, who inevitably betrays him to become the Soul King, crushing Yhwach underfoot. In those lives, Soul King Aizen brings prosperity to Soul Society, overcoming millennia of outdated tradition, at the simple cost of the Living World and Hueco Mundo’s wellbeing. Other times, he’s more feral, and will fall in love with a variety of Arrancars, from Grimmjow, to Ulquiorra, to Nel, to Harribel and more. In some of those lives, he will crown himself the King of Hueco Mundo, and become a greater threat to Soul Society that either Aizen or Yhwach, leading to a war with no winners as he is forced to cut down loved ones to protect other loved ones. In other lives, he’ll settle for a quiet existence in Hueco Mundo, until the bigoted views of Shinigamis drive them to hunt him down, and the three worlds continue on as if he’d never existed.
In other lives still, he chooses his Quincy heritage over his Shinigami and Hollow parts, and joins Yhwach, only to be disposed of as a pawn. It is his distant cousin Uryuu who salvages the balance between the three worlds, with varying costs. And, in a small sliver of timelines, he betrays everyone to crown himself the Soul King, only to find that the weight of the crown is a price he shouldn’t have paid. His memories and humanity will slip away like water through his fingers, and the existence known as “Kurosaki Ichigo” becomes subsumed by “the Soul King”. Injustices that his mortal mind would have been repulsed by become so routine that he eventually stops bothering to punish evildoers for them, and the three worlds fall back into the rotting routine of the present.
A smaller selection of timelines do not fit with this cluster of key events. In some, Masaki does not die. In others, Ichigo joins Yhwach earlier on, or becomes a Quincy under Ishida Souken’s tutelage, or ends up as a Hollow and rules over Hueco Mundo, bringing him into conflict with Aizen and Yhwach before they come into conflict with Soul Society.
But no matter what he chooses, how he chooses it, with whom he chooses with…
There is no happy ending in which everyone is happy.
There’s not even an ending in which Ichigo is entirely happy.
There is only bad options, and worse options.
Ichigo’s childhood clock ticks to midnight.
Masaki names her first and only son “Ichigo” (First Protector) in hopes of him growing up to be a good, strong and selfless man. Her first inkling that her boy will not live up to her dreams is before he even starts walking. Her baby is a grizzly creature who stresses easily and makes his displeasure known like a fire alarm. This is not the issue — babies are often difficult, and always loud. What is an issue is the too-old gaze with which her son looks at the world. Instead of pawing at his mobile, or mouthing at his toys, he stares at them, unimpressed. When she smiles at him, he does not smile back. When she coos over him, he does not babble back. In fact, even at a year old, he has yet to babble. He makes eye contact, but it’s more of a piercing stare than the curious gaze of a child.
She’s so worried about him missing his milestones that she brings him to a paediatrician, who raises concern for an autism spectrum disorder. Isshin is unimpressed, still influenced by the Shinigami values that dismiss learning disorders and mental illnesses “figments of the imagination”, and ignores Masaki’s increasingly obsessive lists about Ichigo’s odd behaviours.
She’s relieved, then, that as he ages, instead of his lack of communication skills becoming more apparent, they fade away to being negligible to the untrained eye. Ichigo’s interactions with his peers are still off in many ways, but at least he can sustain passing conversations, and, with the attention spans of children, this allows him to make facsimiles of friendships at the neighbourhood’s weekly housewives’ meetings. Notably however, he still doesn’t have friends. He still doesn’t play with toys like his peers, but glares at them with scorn. She’s forced to keep him occupied with books above his expected reading level, and more than once, she’s found him eyeing her Quincy Cross with speculation.
So, before he’s due to start elementary school, Masaki sends Ichigo to kindergarten, and encourages (read: nags) him to make friends. He stares at her when she sends him off and she braces herself. Already, she can see many children bawling their eyes out, clinging to their parents as they’re separated from their family for the first time, but her son remains dry-eyed and blank-faced. He doesn’t cling to her hand as she leads him to the classroom to meet his teacher, but lets go calmly when they arrive at their destination, and even introduces himself with terrifyingly clear Japanese. His teacher thinks he’s adorable, cooing over the “little grown-up” and Masaki’s internal cynic wonders how long the woman’s fondness for Ichigo will last.
The answer turns out to be three days.
The first day, the teacher is too busy with the more demanding children to even notice Ichigo, beyond making sure that he eats at lunch, naps at nap-time, and isn’t disruptive during story-time. As usual, there’s a boy who isn’t toilet-trained properly who insists on peeing into the classroom potplant, a girl who’s been treated like a princess all her life who can’t stand not being at the centre of attention, and at least three children who are fighting over the latest fad at any one time.
On the second day, the pecking order is established. The girl who’s been treated like a princess all her life inadvertently crowns herself the class diva by getting her pigtails pulled and immediately threatening the offender with her father’s wrath. The boy who keeps peeing into potplants takes up the role of class clown by sticking a pencil up each of his nostrils, with predictable results . And the three worst offenders arguing over some childish anime have somehow become best friends, and are now browbeating the rest of their peers into agreeing with them. The teacher is too busy to notice, but Ichigo has set up shop in a corner with a copy of the roll, and is copying the kanji for practice.
It’s only on the third day, when the metaphorical fur and feathers have settled from the savagery that is young children establishing a power structure, when the teacher finally notices that Ichigo’s been copying his classmates names as kanji practice, and making little notes in a mix of hiragana and kanji. On one hand, it’s impressive that he even knows kanji that include words with more than three strokes. On the other, some of his comments about his classmates are outright disturbing.
Masaki is called in to explain.
“Now, we don’t want to make a big issue of it, but Ichigo is…” begins the teacher diplomatically, “writing disturbing comments about his classmates.”
“Rude comments?” asks Masaki, dread already beginning to pool in her stomach.
“Not entirely,” replies the teacher, before bringing out Ichigo’s work.
Asano Keigo: Bad grades all through school. Loyal. Skirt-chaser (closet gay). Doesn’t realise until he’s 30. Fear of commitment (abandonment). Murdered by his husband for money when he’s 43?
Kojima Mizuiro: Good with older women. Mother is Special Forces. Other mother is yakuza. Arrested at 33? Oyabun. Done in by a rival, 54/67? 2 daughters, +/- 1 son? 3/4/6 grandchildren?
Kunieda Ryou: Track team. Rainy day, truck vs. bus, paraplegia, depression, suicide — hairdryer in bath-tub.
Nitou Yuuya: Paedophile. Rapist. Murderer. Heart attack (not soon enough). Mimiko? Haru? Sakura?
“It goes on in a similar vein,” continues the teacher.
Masaki’s heart feels like it’s going to beat out of her chest. She’s never taught Ichigo any of those words, and she’s kept Ichigo from watching television unsupervised. The only Quincy who’s prophetic is a fairytale, and she’s never heard of precognition being a Shinigami or Hollow power.
“I don’t know how he knows those words,” she manages to get out, mouth dry.
“I’m sure he just has an overactive imagination,” assures his teacher. “But maybe keep him away from the telly?”
“I will,” replies the Quincy woman.
It doesn’t help. She transfer Ichigo to a different kindergarten after giving him a stern word about keeping sensitive information to himself. He gives her a strange look, before nodding with unseeing eyes. At his next kindergarten, he’s described as a quiet, well-behaved child. He acts as a child should, but Masaki can’t get rid of the sinking feeling that that’s all it is — an act.
Four-year-old Tatsuki hates the boys in her karate class. They’re stupid and they all think they’re stronger than her because they’re boys. Well, jokes on them, because she can kick all of their butts six ways to Sunday, even if sensei’s put her in time-out for foul language.
She meets Kurosaki Ichigo on a sunny day, one Saturday afternoon. He joins her class because there’s only one children’s class in their dojo, and she expects him to be like all the rest.
Except he’s not. He stares at her for a moment that’s long enough to be weird, before turning away. Not dismissively, like he thinks she’s weak, but… something else. Something old and sour, like regret or grief, but those are feelings she’s heard of but doesn’t understand.
She challenges him to a spar, but their sensei intervenes, pointing out that Ichigo doesn’t even know the basics yet, and it wouldn’t be a fair fight. She relents, because she’s not a total brute, but vows to fight him before the month’s up. She stops paying attention to him for the next two weeks, because she’s so close to nailing a roundhouse kick, but picks a fight with him the week after that to celebrate her success. This time, her sensei relents with a beleaguered look.
Next thing she knows, she’s on the mat with aching ribs, and being forced to yield.
“Kurosaki!” scolds their sensei. “No contact!”
Ichigo apologises to their sensei and to Tatsuki. Tatsuki thinks it’s a little unfair, because Ichigo probably didn’t even know the rules. She bets their sensei just threw Ichigo at her to let her blow off some steam, except it backfired spectacularly, and she vows to repay the boy with an ass-kicking worthy of legends next week.
Except Ichigo doesn’t bother coming back. Through the grapevine, she hears him try out kyudo and kendo with an equal lack of enthusiasm and overabundance of talent, and laments the loss of a worthy rival.
A few years later, when she sees him in her elementary class, she’s delighted. She’s about to bound over to him to crow a challenge at him when her instincts scream at her to stop. To leave him alone. It shouts ‘threat, danger, run away’ at her. It gives her pause, but she pushes past her fear.
“Heya, Kurosaki!” she says by way of greeting. “You owe me a rematch.”
He looks at her blankly.
Somehow, she knows he’s pretending not to know her.
“It’s Tatsuki! From Kurogawa-sensei’s dojo!”
“I don’t know anyone like that,” he replies coolly before the bell rings.
He avoids talking to her or even making eye contact with her in class, and slips past her to lunch. She misses him in the cafeteria, and is almost late to her afternoon classes, only to see Ichigo already back in his seat. She scowls at him, biting back a growl, and spends her whole afternoon plotting to catch the slippery orange-haired boy before he can leave.
She’s reaching out to grab his arm when her arm is grabbed. Livid, she spins around to confront her attacker.
“Ryouko-chan?” she asks, rage making way for surprise.
Ryouko is a mousy-haired girl who goes to the same dojo as Tatsuki, albeit with much less enthusiasm. Tatsuki knows that she’s considering dropping out of karate and picking up something more gentle as a hobby, which means that the two of them have never had much in common, so there’s no reason for the shorter girl to grab her.
“Don’t,” warns the smaller girl. “You should leave him alone.”
“Why?” she demands.
“He’s a creep.”
“I don’t believe in things I don’t see with my own eyes.”
The other girl looks at her pityingly. “Your funeral.”
For all that she seems to brush off the other girl’s warning, it gets Tatsuki thinking, and she puts off confronting Ichigo to the next day. When she goes home, she asks her parents about what they know about her new-old classmate.
“Kurosaki Ichigo?” muses her mum. “Rings a bell…”
“Wasn’t he one of the witnesses you interviewed for the Nitou Case?” asks her dad.
“Oh, yeah.”
Her parents are detectives, and for all that they’re supposed to keep things confidential, it’s only human nature to vent after work. The Nitou Yuuya Drowning Case was one of the cases her mum was involved peripherally a year back, where the titular boy was found facedown in a river. Children are supposed to be interviewed by specialists, but Karakura is too small to bother employing one full-time. Instead, when a child’s testimony is considered not that important to a case, one of the female detectives are called up to interview them instead. The stereotyping grates on Tatsuki’s nerves, but her mother’s long used to the biases of society.
“He was the one who found the body in the river,” recalls Tatsuki’s mum. “He was… non-reactive, I guess is the best way to say it. If he was older, I’d say apathetic.”
“Not in shock?” asks her dad.
“No,” replies her mum. “You know how sometimes you can tell someone’s so surprised or traumatised they’ve gone numb? He wasn’t like that. It was as if finding a dead body was as much of a non-issue as having breakfast. Kind of creepy, actually.”
“Darling,” chides her dad. “Don’t be so judgemental. He’s just a kid. A few years back, I think Masaki was worried he was autistic, so he might just be bad at expressing his feelings.”
“That’s true,” agrees her mum, but none of them can quite shake the feeling that they’re lying to themselves.
The next day, Tatsuki goes to challenge Ichigo again.
“Fight me!” she demands.
He looks at her for a long time with an unreadable gaze.
“I’m sorry,” he says, as he turns away.
“Then fight me!”
“Not for that.”
“Then what?”
“Don’t watch the news tonight.”
“… huh? What?”
Tatsuki’s dad is late picking her up from school, but she’s a big girl, and her house is within walking distance. She marches her way home, bright red schoolbag on her back and yellow hat on her head. She looks both ways before she crosses the road, doesn’t talk to any strangers and fishes the spare key out from underneath a withered potplant.
“I’m home!” she chirps to a dark house. No one replies, and she figures both of her parents are still at work. She puts her shoes away (because her dad is a nag and the satisfaction of jumping out of her shoes is not worth the eventual scolding) and wanders over the fridge to help herself to a glass of milk and a cookie (or two, or three, or four, or more).
She’s eaten enough cookies to start feeling sick, and her parents are still not home. She swings her legs irritably, and hops down from her chair. It’s not the first time her parents are late, and she’s torn between starting her homework, a bath and watching TV. She hates running the bath for herself, and she only has a little bit of homework today, so she goes hunting for the remote. Ichigo’s words briefly flit through her mind, before she brushes them away.
Stupid Ichigo and his stupid warning.
She turns on the TV. It’s 6:15pm. Glaring at the clock and imagining a certain carrot-top’s face, she defiantly changes channel to the news.
“WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT AHEAD.”
She blinks.
“Eh?”
Gunshots. Screaming. The screeching of tires.
It takes her a moment to make sense of what she’s seeing. When she does, she runs to the toilet to throw up a mix of cookies and milk. She sobs, and throws up, and sobs some more. In the living room, the TV blares:
“At around 3:30 this afternoon, a bank robbery ended with the arrest of two of the perpetrators involved. The remaining two perpetrators were shot. Two civilians sustained minor injuries and are expected to recover. An off-duty detective was shot then run over by the fleeing perpetrators, and is currently in critical condition.”
The home phone rings.
She ignores it, panting over the toilet bowl.
It keeps ringing.
She flushes and picks up.
“Tatsu-chan?” asks the tinny voice of her mum through the phone.
“Mum?” she replies, through tears.
“I’m going to be late,” she says, dancing around the truth they both already know. “I’ve asked my sister to come round to look after you tonight. I’m going to stay at the hospital tonight.”
“Is dad going to be okay?”
A pause. A shuddering breath.
“I don’t know.”
At least her mum is honest.
She hates Ichigo.
Ichigo is nine going on nine thousand when fate comes knocking on his door. It’s raining, the sort of heavy smothering downpour that makes it hard to see in the distance. He’s indoors, not heading home from a martial arts’ class he’s long quit. Leaning against the cold window of his room, he looks outside. Lightning flashes and thunder booms. Howling winds lash branches of nearby trees.
It’s June 17th, 1994.
The light of Auswählen descends from the sky. It comes for Masaki, but not for Ichigo, who very carefully keeps the Quincy part of his soul tucked away behind a wall of Shinigami reiryoku, which in turn is behind a wall of Hollow reiryoku.
His dad is with the twins, who have picked a poor (perfect) day to go out shopping.
He strolls towards his mother as she screams in the light and reaches out with one hand.
“No!” she shouts, trying to warn him away.
He grabs the light and pulls.
Far, far away, in a castle of coldness, blood-red eyes fly wide.