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Ichigo wakes up at what's gotta be 3am, still kinda drunk, a little from the jostling of the futon and a lot from the cold hands that slip under his shirt. He's grumbling before he can get his eyes open, and then he's muffling himself in the pillow because he let his sisters have his bedroom for the night and he doesn't want to wake them up. Karin would kill him. Yuzu, probably also still drunk, would do unimaginably worse.
The pillow dips in front of him. A leg hooks over both of his own. His blanket is shoved down to his knees. He doesn't know if he did that himself, if he kicked it away in his nice boozy sleep, or if the cold hands just wanted full access. Ichigo realizes his eyes still aren't open. There's a little more squirming, some knees knocking. Then, from what feels like kissing-close, Grimmjow breathes one of his big, gusty sighs over Ichigo's face and goes totally, utterly still.
Ichigo squints an eye open. Sleep clings to him and it takes some doing, but he does it. Blinks in the mostly-dark, slow and stupid. Just enough amber light from the street through the windows to see pale colors and fuzzy shapes. Grimmjow is almost entirely pale colors, and too close for Ichigo's one tired eye to focus on. One big shape. He's huddled close, spine curled, and he could be making any face at all. Ichigo can't tell. Feels his eyes looking back at him, though. Doesn't need to see to know that.
Mostly, his hands are cold.
"Hey," Ichigo whispers, a dopiness in him that makes him feel loose in the joints, like he's not attached to himself in all the right places. It's a good feeling.
Grimmjow just kind of breathes at him again. Like: puffff. The air from his nose is always so much cooler than it is from his mouth.
"Your hands're cold."
Grimmjow turns his hands over and flattens his even colder knuckles to Ichigo's abs, icy fingertips edging beneath his waistband.
Ichigo flinches and slaps his own hand at Grimmjow's, misses once before finding them through his shirt. "Stop that," he mumbles, but he presses them flat instead of pushing them away and Grimmjow's fingers slip a little lower anyways, heat-seeking.
"There are brats in your bed."
"Yeah, shhh. Don't wake them up. Are you in your– Wait." He reaches blindly for Grimmjow's middle and hits the zipper on his jumpsuit. Feels down further until the fabric under his fingers sinks into cold empty space and Grimmjow jolts against him. He could have gone the other way, felt for his half-mask of snarly teeth, but Grimmjow can't feel anything there and Ichigo always wants him to feel everything. Grimmjow only encourages it by leaving his soft squishy bowels intact.
No gigai: Yuzu can't hear him. Explains why he's so fucking cold, too. Ichigo is also getting cold. He goes for the blanket around his legs next, grabs the edge of it and pulls, but Grimmjow's got it pinched between them and doesn't seem eager to move. Ichigo flops, even though he never really got up.
Grimmjow curls incrementally closer to him. His nails scratch at the flare of dark hair that leads to Ichigo's dick, right before it gets real thick, and Ichigo feels that usual twist of interest, but mostly it's just nice.
Today—yesterday—was Ichigo's birthday. He's twenty-four now, but, when he thinks about it, it doesn't really mean anything to him. He doesn't know how to perceive himself against a quantity of time. It's easier to count himself in units of other people. The biggest one, the one he reaches for first: Mom's been dead for fifteen years. And a little bit smaller, no less easy: his baby sisters have been of legal drinking age for almost three months already.
Eight years since he put his scar on Grimmjow's chest. Only three since he put his tongue in his mouth.
Really? Only three? Jesus. Feels longer. He might be drunker than he thought.
"Easy," he says, when Grimmjow's wandering fingers pinch at his pubes and tug.
"Turn over."
Three years is, apparently, long enough for Ichigo to know that this is not Grimmjow asking for sex. This is Grimmjow asking him to roll over and play mattress. Ichigo shakes his head against the pillow. "Can't. I'll get the spins and throw up and die. That'd be so sad."
"Pathetic."
"Yeah," Ichigo laughs, "That too. This is better." He tries for the blanket again and this time Grimmjow lifts his leg enough for him to pull it free. He tosses it over the both of them, sighs at the quick soak of warmth over his chilly bare arms. Gropes around to hook his hand under Grimmjow's knee and pull it higher over his hip. Grimmjow, who can bend himself into some of the sexiest, stupidest knots Ichigo's ever seen, lets him have it with a shimmy and a short, agreeable rumble.
Oh yeah, Ichigo thinks, very good. He feels staticky in his palms, the pads of his fingers, stroking up and down Grimmjow's thigh without thinking much of it. Tiredness skulks back over him in a wave, makes his eyes roll back in his head a little bit. He tries to fight it off. But it must send him under for a moment or two because suddenly he's blinking his eyes open again, finding Grimmjow in front of him and readjusting to the dark a second time tonight.
It's quiet. There's no reason to fight it, really. Grimmjow's not talking, not even petting him anymore, just staying still against him and breathing cool through his nose. Shit, Ichigo wonders, is this his present? It's a good one — nevermind that they do it all the time.
Three birthdays since Ichigo put his tongue in Grimmjow's mouth. Ichigo outgrew parties around the time he met Rukia, but his friends like the excuse to get together, especially now that it's harder with classes and work and distance. Life pulling in every different direction. His sisters, too. Tonight—last night—was nice and pretty calm and small. Yuzu cooking dinner in his kitchen, Orihime helping. Karin picking games and Chad beating her at all of them. Drinking a little. Then drinking a lot when Tatsuki's movie pick turned out to be the fun kind of terrible.
Used to be, most of them could walk home together, cab if they had to. Tonight—last night—Chad took the bus in one direction and Tatsuki, sober, drove off with Orihime in the other, and Ichigo won the fight with Yuzu over the sofa bed, and lost the fight over changing the sheets on his actual bed, and then it was bedtime in his own space, thinking very distantly about hangovers and weekend chores and the startling mundanity of being human.
Grimmjow wasn't there because Grimmjow is never there. Has never been there, in the last three years of tongue-sucking. He's invited, and Ichigo knows he knows he's invited, but he's never there.
He always turns up afterwards, though. Couple hours late, bringing nothing but himself. He'll never say happy birthday. He'll just stick his cold hands up Ichigo's shirt and down his pants, and it won't mean the same thing, not even close, but it'll sure as shit mean something.
The faint orange light through the windows changes, swells white as a car pulls into the lot outside. The headlights swing through the room, slow and stretching like a warped movie projection. The light falls past Ichigo, lands in a strip over the edge of Grimmjow's face — the last teeth of his mask, his estigma trailing, his pale temple, bright swatch of his hair — and as it slips over him it bounces through his retinas just right, makes him glimmer seaglass green and beryl blue in the depths of his very big pupils.
Wide awake and staring at Ichigo staring at him.
And then the light slides away and the room falls dark. Grimmjow and his eyes are only indiscernible blurs again.
"I think I'm catching up to you, big guy," Ichigo whispers. Smiling. Drunk but not that drunk.
Grimmjow, twenty-something for forever and ever and ever, leans himself into the last bit of breathing room between them. Knocks their foreheads together real gentle and stays there. Curled and folded, knuckles and knees and his nose nudging Ichigo's. That's cold, too. His hands aren't anymore.
Ichigo wonders if Grimmjow's wondering if he already passed him.
Maybe. Maybe not. All Ichigo can tell is that he's still looking, still seeing him in the dark, the way Ichigo can't see shit.
And what he whispers back is, "Go to sleep, godslayer," kissing-close with his leg heavy over Ichigo's hip and his hands snuck under his clothes under the blanket. Petting him again, scratching light and easy below his navel, above his dick, making him shiver and that's all.
Yeah, okay, Ichigo thinks. He can do that.