Chapter Text
Grimmjow isn’t an idiot: he knows Kurosaki holds back every time they fight.
It’s in the flicker of his eyes before the final strike that knocks him to the ground, the cliffside, the walls, whatever solid surface there is to stake him against so he can’t kill himself trying to win. Just a flicker of hesitation, the light in his infuriating brown eyes sliding away for an instant. Then, the pain comes. Never oblivion. Kurosaki never strikes a fatal blow, and after countless battles in any world they cross paths, one day Grimmjow decides the routine isn’t worth it anymore.
So on an afternoon like any other, impaled through the lung and pinned to the rock of Urahara Kisuke’s bunker, Grimmjow decides to change the story. Because maybe he’s been playing along, too.
“Just give up!” Kurosaki yells finally, bearing his entire weight down on the black blade of his zanpakutou, eyes showing white all the way around. “Grimmjow—stop, you’re gonna—”
The wet crunch of the sword pushing sideways through the space between his ribs, perfectly aimed to not break a bone, almost makes Grimmjow vomit from the pain. Teeth gritted, hand slipping on the blade, he twists until the honed edge points to his arm and begins splitting his armoured body apart.
“Give—up,” Grimmjow repeats, loosing an unexpected cough that paints Kurosaki’s face in a spray of blood. Half the sword pierces the stone behind him. He knows his smile is sharp-toothed and bloody from the flinch he sees cross his face. “Like hell. This ends today.”
“You’re doing to die if you keep going! You—” Snarling at his own stupidity for trying to reason with him, Kurosaki cuts himself off and simply slugs Grimmjow right in the jaw as hard as he can. Brute force after diplomacy: the second card in his deck, and too predictable to care about. Besides, there’s too much adrenaline blazing through Grimmjow’s veins for it to do anything. His body thinks it’s dying, after all.
Finally Kurosaki does the only thing he can and yanks the sword clear out of Grimmjow’s chest, grimacing in horror at the flood of gurgling blood and gore that it drags with it. The idiot drops Zangetsu with a hand outstretched toward him—the third card. The one Kurosaki always pulls when he sees Grimmjow in danger. There’s no reward for idiocy today.
Grimmjow laughs wetly as he grabs his wrist, body transforming back to skin and cloth and sword firmly clenched in hand. With an underhanded thrust, he shoves Pantera through Kurosaki’s stomach until the hilt presses against the torn cloth and bandages of his bankai, until he can smell his own blood mingling with the sweat and dirt on Kurosaki’s shocked face.
It’s going to be a draw, he knows it before he can even check the damage between them. But Grimmjow doesn’t care this time. He’s shocked the bastard, finally. Broken the stupid useless fucking soft cycle of holding back and dodging and understanding, like a shinigami could ever fucking get what it means to win and survive for decades on decades just to slam into the wall that is Kurosaki Ichigo, and never be able to break through. Not yet, anyway.
There’s always the next battle.
“Enough,” Grimmjow snarls between them, the world spinning in and out of focus. “I’m done with this play-fighting bullshit. The next time we meet, I’m making sure it’s the end.” He twists Pantera for emphasis; sneers at the choked cry of pain Kurosaki doesn’t even care about letting him hear. He’s too busy—
“I want to keep fighting you,” Kurosaki pants, hands pressed against the gaping ruin of Grimmjow’s exposed chest, stemming the flow of blood pouring from the wound. It seeps through his fingers. “I don’t want it to end. Why do you always want it to end?”
There’s a plea in there that Grimmjow can’t stand to hear, so he doesn’t. Knocking Kurosaki’s hands away, ripping Pantera back out of his guts, he stabs it into the ground to lean on. He’s not collapsing in front of Kurosaki Ichigo. Not ever again.
“I want to win!” Grimmjow roars, his world losing colour and shape. His arms shake with the effort of bearing down on his own sword. Too much blood pools around him, the air stinking with it. He can barely see his own blade anymore. “I’ve only ever wanted to win. Anything else is your own stupid fucking imagination.”
Kurosaki just clutches at his own stomach with hands still wet with arrancar blood and stares at him, his expression broken and raw in a way Grimmjow can’t decipher for once.
“You’re right, Grimmjow,” he says finally. “It was all in my head.” There’s no light in his eyes anymore, and they scan the distance between them like there’s something there other than their own spent sweat and blood beading above the dirt.
Grimmjow is trying to keep his knees locked and his body upright, shoulders trembling just trying to keep himself standing with one working lung and severe loss of blood. He’s beaten worse odds.
When Kurosaki looks up again, shoulders pulling straight against the pain, there’s a quick twist to his mouth before he can flatten it. The eyes Grimmjow is so used to seeing are dull and alien.
“You can’t win. You’re not strong enough.”
Shock is a roar of white noise in Grimmjow’s ears. For a moment, the ground tilts beneath his booted feet.
Not strong enough.
Not strong enough?
His upper lip lifts into a snarl. “Kuro—”
“I’ve outgrown you,” Kurosaki interrupts him, forearm pressing his stomach back against his spine. His mouth pulls into a taut smile Grimmjow has never seen before. “Do you have any idea what they—what I did to get strong enough to fight Yhwach? The visions and the horror and fucking secrets they ripped open like it was nothing? I could’ve used blut from the start of our fight but I didn’t, because it feels like an unfair advantage.” He laughs and it sounds like something else. His eyes are holes in his face. “I fight you because it’s fun. It’s the only fun I have anymore. So if you want to win, if you want to kill me so badly, get stronger. Get stronger and finish me off already.”
Rage blackens Grimmjow’s vision as Kurosaki turns his back on him and takes up his sword again, whipping it sharply to fling any remaining blood from the blade. He doesn’t look back or speak again. Doesn’t do anything except flicker out of existence using flash step, revealing a store of strength untouched by their battle. Stronger.
Stronger than him.
Fun.
“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” Grimmjow seethes, speaking to nothing, needing it to hit the air around him. “I swear it.”
Truth is, he’s no stranger to abject humiliation, to his pride being crushed in one hand, to eyes looking down on him. He just never thought Kurosaki would be the one doing the looking. Not really. Which means all he can do now is kill the bastard.
It’s his last fully-formed thought before his grip slips on Pantera and the bloody sand rushes toward him.
It’s a small mercy that he blacks out before he hits.
When Grimmjow’s eyes open again, he sees a stained plaster ceiling and two men staring down at him. Both are familiar faces. It doesn’t stop him grabbing the throat of one and smashing the glasses of the other with his fist, a small distraction to give him a chance to get off his back and towards the nearest door.
“Grimmjow,” Tessai rebukes, fingers raised and glowing with unspoken kidou. His cheek is cut open from his broken lenses but he doesn’t even seem to notice. “That’s no way to repay a debt. Release him.”
Inside his grip, Urahara Kisuke gurgles peacefully. There’s no fear in his eyes. There never fucking is. Releasing him with a shove, Grimmjow sneers and backs up to the door of the room, still half open. Belatedly he sees the bloody gauze and shredded sheets of the futon he’d emerged from. A quick pat at his own chest reveals a thick layer of bandages. Fuck.
“You healed me?”
Tessai doesn’t lower his fingers for an instant. “Yes.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Now, now, Grimmjow-san,” Urahara says hoarsely, smiling still. “You were perilously close to fatal blood loss when we came to check on you. I have some questions about that fight with Kurosaki-san—”
“Save it,” Grimmjow spits, furious all over again. Furious and—
I’ve outgrown you.
The air hurts when he pulls in a breath, short and sharp. He shakes off the feeling of the world tilting under his feet again.
“Just fuck off.” Shoving his arms back through the sleeves of his peeled-down jumpsuit, he yanks it together without zipping and looks around for his sword. “I’m leaving. Get Nelliel to run your shit between the worlds from now on. How’s that for gratitude? None of you assholes need to ever see me again.”
“Gratitude accepted.” With an angry twitch of his moustache, Tessai grabs Pantera from behind his kneeling bulk and throws it across the room to him. “Goodbye.”
“Wait,” Urahara blurts behind Grimmjow, following his bare footsteps through the house. “Grimmjow-san, what happened during that battle? What did you say to Kurosaki-san to end up so injured?”
The crack of laughter that leaves him surprises them both. “What did I say?”
“Well, then—what did you do?” He’s floundering, recalculating at such speed Grimmjow thinks that if he listens hard enough, he’ll hear his brain ticking and whirring like an old winding clock. He follows Grimmjow all the way through the genkan where he grabs his boots, dusty and sticky with old blood. There’s no point putting them on. “Grimmjow-san, please. I need to know what’s changed. He’s never looked so—”
“So what?” Grimmjow snaps, spinning around in the front yard of the shop. It’s night already, late by the look of the moon. His entire chest is screaming and there’s a spreading warmth starting below the wound that says he’s on borrowed time before he starts passing out again. “Tell me what he looked like. Tell me like you think I’ll give a shit.”
Urahara takes his hat off. He grips it by the brim and lets his hands fall to his sides. It’s practiced, open posture. He wants Grimmjow to believe whatever he says next.
“Defeated,” says Urahara, perplexed by his own answer. He has no idea why Grimmjow starts laughing.
The mouth of the garganta opens with a pluck of practiced fingers, stretching wide and dark and home. Stepping inside, he doesn’t even bother to give a response. Like he has an answer to that, anyway.
Before the clamping jaws of reality close between them, Urahara tries again. He says three words.
“He needs you.”
Three pointless words. Pulsing darkness slams around him with finality, the faint zippered blue glow of broken reality fading away. Grimmjow turns for the instinctive path back to Hueco Mundo, his arm pressed to his wounded chest. He might not be dying anymore, but he needs to find hollows to eat and somewhere to hole up when he gets back to Las Noches.
After that? He doesn’t want to even think about what comes after that. But it’ll come. He’s got no choice.
Beating Kurosaki has always been Grimmjow’s goal, his driving force, and all he’s ever been is a distraction. A joke. Fun. Shame burns in his chest, hot and thumping up against his ruined lung. All the words he wishes he’d said earlier, now fully-formed, stick pointlessly in his throat like pieces of jagged bone. Hurtling through the garganta at a dead run, following the compass every hollow is born with, Grimmjow feels supernatural wind whistle over the teeth of his broken mask.
He needs you.
What a load of shit.
Kurosaki doesn’t need anyone anymore.
Least of all Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez.
Finding a few adjuchas to eat isn’t hard. He hasn’t hunted since Nnoitra almost cut his head off years ago, so they don’t bother running when they see him coming. Harribel’s rule has blunted the teeth of the lesser hollow, made them less afraid of the food chain. He makes short work of six clustered together on the direct border of Las Noches, sinking his teeth into whatever unplated flesh he can find.
He doesn’t eat their entire carcass. Arrancar don’t need to. He just rips enough out to make their reiryoku boil up from their bodies; a clear spring in the desert. A spring of pure life and spiritual energy to help close his wounds and keep him on his feet. He dumps them where he found them when he’s finished, leaving just enough life in the last one for some bottom-feeders to get something worthwhile to eat. It’s nothing to him either way.
That’s the easy part.
Harribel herself is the first one to see him inside the dusty citadel, waiting against the corridor wall like she’d known he was coming all along. Her narrowed green eyes take in his coating of dirt and blood with a single sweep. Red blood, the same colour humans, quincy and shinigami all share. Her blonde brows are knit in a disapproving frown.
“Don’t worry,” Grimmjow says, smiling with pointed teeth he hasn’t bothered to transform back. “The blood’s all mine.”
“I can smell that,” she replies, unbothered by the bitter warning in his voice. She pushes off the wall as he passes, following with quiet interest. “Go down to the medics. You’re still bleeding.”
“You don’t order me around, remember?”
“I remember. But if you keep going in this direction, my fracciones will see you, and Nelliel just beyond them. I know you’re too proud to weather that particular storm of ridicule, and too injured to do anything about it.”
Hand trailing the wall, Grimmjow’s mouth tightens as he keeps trudging toward the reiatsu ahead. Like they even matter by comparison. Everything that can be said already has been, by the only—
“I don’t need those morons in medical poking at me. What’s a few more scars at this fucking point.”
“Suit yourself.” Behind him, her footsteps come to a stop, while his slowly scrape onwards. There’s sand and pieces of crumbled debris covering the stone floor of the widest entry still intact, and he kicks one with prejudice as he continues.
Harribel’s fraccion, Nelliel, it doesn’t matter who he comes across next. Nothing fucking matters until he’s healed, and he’s not submitting to those cowards down in medical with their syringes full of nameless drugs. Grimmjow saw all of them he ever needed to when tattoo guns full of black hollow venom came out five minutes after he broke free of the hougyoku’s chrysalis. The six, the last espada number he’ll ever wear, still burns on his back when he sleeps; the pain and its high-pitched whine writhing its way through dark dreams. Even in the early days, Aizen’s Las Noches was a brutal mentor.
By the time Grimmjow enters the main hall, nothing but the largest undamaged space they could carve out after the quincies were killed, his hasty meal begins to slowly knit his torn skin together. Whatever healing Urahara and Tessai gave him must have just been to replenish his blood and keep him alive. The boost of energy helps him straighten his back and stop using the wall for support, but there’s nothing he can do about the state of his clothes, the bandages—or the look on his face.
“Oh, shit,” Mila Rose mutters as he walks in, taking one glance at him and resolutely fixing her green eyes to the far wall. The three of them are sprawled on the ragged white furniture they’d managed to pull out of Aizen’s private rooms years back, forming a lopsided circle for meetings and being lazy useless fucks. Aizen’s two little psycho aides are nowhere in sight.
Apacci sits up, legs swinging off the couch one by one. Her mismatched eyes blaze with interest, the blue ring of her estigma standing out sharply.
“Who fucked you up? Are we at war again?”
“Fuck off,” Grimmjow spits, heading for the hallway on the other side of the room. Makes sense that the quickest way to his destination means running a gauntlet of nosy arrancar women. His night could always get a little worse.
“What? I’m showing concern here.”
“For yourself,” Sung-sun says pointedly. “After all, anything that can hurt Grimmjow is going to tear through you like wet paper.”
“Piss off, don’t act like you’re stronger than me!”
“More refined, certainly.”
Apacci’s snort is rough and loud. “You? Running around hiding your mouth like a schoolkid with new braces?”
“I have no clue what that means, but I’m offended and you should apologise.”
Mila Rose grunts in annoyance. “Forget it, it was probably just Ichigo getting sick of him turning up every week. It was bound to happen eventually. Nobody can stomach him for long.”
The bala he flings off his fingertips as he passes never connects. A burst of concentrated heat leaves his fingers, the room lights crimson and the tres bestias scream in alarm, but Harribel had said Nelliel was around there somewhere and it’s pretty clear what happens to his warning shot after that. The light dies behind him in silence, and nothing happens after that for a long few seconds.
“Not gonna spit it back at me?” Grimmjow asks without looking, the corner of his mouth hitched into a bitter tuck. His knees feel loose and unsteady and there’s too far still to walk.
“I’m not in the habit of crushing those already beneath me.”
Last month, last week, fucking yesterday that would have been enough to send him blind with rage. Today it just sounds like buzzing white noise he can’t tune out. All of them, lurking in Las Noches protecting territory that nothing ever challenges anymore, not a single decent kill during the war to prop up all the talk, and somehow Nelliel still thinks she has a bigger dick than him.
“You’re taking over the runs between that shinigami shopkeeper and Harribel from now on.”
Harribel’s fracciones make startled noises of delight, quickly stifled. Guess he’s not the only one that thinks Nelliel is a suffocating pain in the ass. It actually cheers him up for a second, til he hears her footsteps quickly cross to find him.
“When did Harribel-sama make that decision? What did you do? I recall Urahara-san asked for you personally.”
“I quit. I’m not doing that shit anymore.”
Silence follows that information, but only a few seconds of it.
“Then how are you going to visit to battle Ichigo?”
“I’m not.”
The halls and rooms of Las Noches are too fucking big, and he’s too slow. It gives her the opportunity to dog his heels further, her horned boots loud on the stone floor. He’s not going to turn and face her, mostly because he doesn’t want to lock eyes with her and be read like the world’s most pissed off book, but also because he’s not sure if he slows down now he’ll be able to get the momentum back up again. Grimmjow isn’t a stranger to being exhausted but this time feels like—like who the hell even knows. Introspection isn’t his thing. Never has been.
“Wait, did you actually win?” Sharp ears, those fracciones. Apacci never could shut her fucking mouth.
“No way,” Mila Rose snorts. “Look at him, he didn’t even look this shitty after Tousen punished him for killing his entire fraccion. He didn’t win. It’s probably one of the signs of the apocalypse if he ever does.”
“Please don’t jinx us,” Sung-sun sighs.
“Grimmjow, I can’t take over,” Nelliel says finally, a note of caution in her voice. “Not yet. I need to attend Soul Society to negotiate the release of some of our brethren.”
“Just leave ‘em there.”
“Leave them? That mad shinigami has been experimenting on our corpses—”
“We’re already corpses!” Grimmjow roars, spinning so sharply his vision swims for an instant. Nelliel’s hand is already on her sword’s hilt when it settles, but her wide hazel eyes are fixed to his with burning confusion. Fuck. “Do the fucking run between worlds. Send one of those idiots if you have to. I’m done with it.”
The room is so silent a single gust of wind would have echoed, but there’s no satisfaction in it. No satisfaction in anything.
Rest. Heal. Eat. The order of priority beats in his head like a drum. Instinct knows what he needs before he can prepare for what’s to come. Because he’s not defeated, he’s not giving up, and he’s sure as hell not letting Kurosaki walk away like he’s won something before the battle lines are even properly drawn. He just has to get stronger first.
It’s a bitter fucking pill, but Grimmjow knows in his gut it’s true, even if he doesn’t know exactly how Kurosaki managed to surge so far ahead of him. If he wants his battle—the battle—he needs to meet him on equal footing, simple as that.
It’s just going to burn through his gut like pure acid, first.
“You can’t just say you’re done,” Nelliel calls as he continues on, not game enough to follow this time. His feet are starting to drag just slightly again. He should have eaten more than a handful of adjuchas. “We all contribute in one way or another. If you don’t have a role to play here, you have no place in Las Noches.”
Teeth grit against the exertion that wants to make him start panting, it’s hard to ignore her meaning. Well, it’s not like he didn’t come from the sand, same as the rest of them. It won’t be hard to return to it.
“Huh? Who says you get to make a call like that, former Tres?” Apacci’s strident voice is even louder than before, bouncing off the stone. Pissed off at nothing, as usual. “Last I checked, Harribel-sama rules here, not you. And if you think you can start ordering us all around as an ex-espada, remember that it’s only because of some raggedy-ass shinigami that you’re not a two foot tall moron in diapers right now, weighing the rest of us down!”
Disbelieving silence rings out, clean and still. Even Grimmjow is distracted from his dark thoughts by the unexpected crack of surprised laughter he lets loose. Trouble amongst the tits brigade. About time they attacked each other for once.
And they do: once the shock wears off Nelliel turns back to start in about hierarchy and respect, in full sanctimonious swing as the tres bestias haul together in their usual screaming volume, calling her every name under the ancient white moon. Harribel has to be nearby listening to it all, but nobody comes to break them up. Guess even she has her limits for bullshit.
Grimmjow uses the chance to get the fuck out of sight so he can start panting like he needs to. There’s hardly enough air in the world to fill his fucked up lungs. He can almost imagine the bubbling red foam gathering inside it where the entire left lung was cut through. The shit he does when he loses patience. Shawlong would’ve—not that it matters. There’s nobody left to tell him what to do anymore, except Nelliel for some fucking reason.
Why she hasn’t let him get killed already is a mystery he can’t be bothered solving. Grimmjow knows he should’ve been left inside that quincy’s ball of death two years ago, but she obviously had a few more speeches to give before he can pass out of existence and be rid of her for good.
He makes it with only a couple of stumbling steps to the bottom of the old palace tower that used to belong to Zommari, a dangerously busted teetering mess none of the others dared to crawl up, and it’s for that reason that none of them know about the one intact space hidden behind a slab of crooked stone. He has official quarters, or whatever passes for them, but after what just happened back there he knows in his weary bones he’s not getting any peace there for a while. Nelliel has an inexhaustible well of sermons to give when she’s got a full head of steam.
Listening for the continued bellowing and cursing from the main hall, sucking in a long, crackling breath, Grimmjow grabs the ruined wall with his fingertips and begins his long, curving ascent.
At least this time he’ll have a roof over his head, he thinks with spare amusement. And a place to plan his next moves, whatever they’ll be. Kurosaki won’t know what hit him by the time he’s done.
I don’t want it to end. Why do you always want it to end?
Because it has to. Grimmjow has to win because if he’s not the strongest, he’ll always be watching his back. It’s not something Kurosaki will ever understand. He’d trust a knife right up until it was shoved between his shoulder blades. Falling behind isn’t an option. The quincies almost destroyed everything and Grimmjow doesn’t have ego enough to say he won against two of them on pure skill. The only thing he had on his side—has always had on his side—is the steel nerve to do what needs doing. And right now he needs to figure out how the hell he can get stronger than he already is, when everyone around him would rather bicker and argue and run the ruined household according to the queen’s wishes.
Pushing the stone aside with his shoulder just enough to slip through the gap, Grimmjow looks into the dusty remains of Zommari’s meditation room with almost desperate relief. There’s nothing inside but some geometric stone chairs and a slab that seemed to want to be a bed of some kind, but it’s dark and silent and nobody is going to come looking for him there. A safe place, about as safe as one can get. A few days sleeping while he heals sounds like heaven to his wounded body.
He only manages to bend at the waist and twist before gravity takes care of the rest. The impact is dull against his upper back, the stone cold. Grimmjow’s eyes are already slipping closed, mind whirling with thoughts he can’t hold onto. It can wait.
Everything can wait a while.
Nobody’s counting on him.
“Are you dead?”
The words pierce Grimmjow’s confused dreams like a shaft of blinding light. He lashes out with clawed fingers before they can sink in and make sense. Nothing connects, but that same voice swears in fright, quickly masked by anger.
“I just came to see if you’re okay! Don’t take my damn head off.”
Apacci sounds as sour and pissy as she always does, but never in his hidden room while he’s wide open for attack. Fuck. Eyes opening, he pushes himself upright with one hand, keeping the other one free for defence. His whole chest is agony, but it’s the sharp, itching kind that says he’s healed some while he slept.
Standing just in front of the gap in the stone that serves as a doorway, Emilou Apacci looks defiant and terrified in the moonlight, fists raised and her zanpakutou bracelets on clear display. Grimmjow snorts before he can help himself. Chickenshit. But she’s chickenshit that came all the way up into his hideout.
“How’d you find me in here?”
His voice is a jagged rasp made worse by the dust he’s been breathing for hours. He doesn’t bother muffling his groan as he swings his legs off the edge and plants his feet on the floor, hunching forward onto his knees. Cold sweat dampens his hairline and the back of his neck.
“You left blood on the stairs. Hell, you left it all the way down the hall. That’s careless of you, so I figured you were dying up here.” She fidgets, moving from foot to foot. There’s insecurity and daring in every inch of her. Why the hell isn’t she with her sisters?
“And you thought you’d come and pick my corpse clean, is that it?” He bares his teeth, more grimace than smile, and thumbs Pantera from its scabbard by an inch. “Good luck.”
“No,” Apacci replies loudly, flinching at her own volume and glancing back at the doorway. When she speaks again, her voice is low, confidential—and hugely embarrassed. “No, I just—I thought if you were alive I could help. You.”
Grimmjow stares at her in mute disgust. So there are still new depths he can sink to, huh?
“Are you fucking insane? Get out of here before I gut you.”
“Not for free,” Apacci says hastily, palms out and empty. “I need something from you. So I’ll bring you reishi concentrate and sneak you a change of clothes, whatever. I want you to owe me a favour—and keep it a secret from the others.”
The idea of a bargain struck between them does lower his hackles. She’s thought about this, and risked her neck on one hell of a gamble. Grimmjow’s personal creed not to attack the weak unless he’s provoked is the paper-thin shield that enables their co-existence in Las Noches, but none of them ever cornered him while fucking injured to hell and back and asked for a favour.
It’s kind of ballsy of her, and it piques his interest just enough that he jerks his chin towards the doorway.
“Clean up that blood I left first.”
“Did it already,” Apacci says, striking her chest proudly. “C’mon, Grimmjow. I know you have a shitty opinion of me but hiding tracks is Hollow 101.” Reaching into her chest armour, she pulls out a sealed paper envelope and tosses it at him. “There’s reishi tablets inside. That striped asshole you like sent it through last week with the other cargo.”
Scratching her arm, she waits for him to open it and look inside. Sure enough, they have the Urahara Shop stamp on them. A toothy grin breaks over her face as he tips them into his opposite palm and necks a few. They taste like chalk and metal on the way down.
Grimmjow studies her in silence as the pills start doing their work. She likes being useful, obviously. He’s under no obligation to stick to whatever deal she wants to strike, but for one of Harribel’s fracciones to come to him for any reason is borderline insanity. Curiosity isn’t something he likes indulging, but where does he have to go in a hurry?
“So what the hell does one of Harribel’s women want from me, that she can’t get from any of the others?”
The words coming out of his own mouth paint a sudden picture he hadn’t considered until that split second, changing his expression into great doubt. Realising it in the same instant, a blotchy red quickly stains Apacci’s cheeks.
“I don’t want sex, you creep! Do you even—?” She catches herself before she finishes the sentence and sets her shoulders, chin jutting out stubbornly. “No, I want you to make me stronger.”
The irony of those words coming out of her mouth after Kurosaki’s judgement on him isn’t lost, and the rage is still there, but all Grimmjow can find it in himself to do is laugh long and hard, and keep laughing until tears gather in the corners of his eyes.
Embarrassed again, insulted and whatever else boils away in that crazy head of hers, Apacci swells up with no way to release her anger, no fucking way at all if she wants to live, so she fists her hands in her hair, right up at the temples, sets her teeth under Grimmjow’s blurry vision and waits him out.
It’s that more than anything that he respects, being able to weather laughter and hold nerve like that. Grimmjow isn’t even good at it. He’d have fucked off to the other side of Las Noches by now if it had been him, which means she’s got her reasons for wanting it. Strength. But expecting Grimmjow to train some loud arrancar woman?
He asks as much, knuckling moisture from his lashes, sniffing and wheezing at the tail end of the least funny joke he’s heard in decades. Apacci crosses her arms under her armoured chest and looks to the small sliver of moonlight filtering in through the narrow window, shoulders hunching with the motion.
“Of the tres bestias, I’m the youngest. I only died about fifteen years ago, did you know that? I’m the weakest, the loudest, the—nobody takes me seriously. I reference Living World stuff that happened two hundred years after Harribel-sama died. Sung-sun doesn’t even know what braces are. And Mila Rose…” Apacci trails off unhappily, her eyes blindly scanning the stone at her feet. “How the hell am I ever going to measure up when I’m just a baby arrancar to them? What am I actually good for? To occasionally rip my arm off so we can summon Ayon, who doesn’t even listen to us? I want to be strong, and cunning, and clever, and…”
“Like me,” Grimmjow finishes. Apacci grimaces.
“Not all of you! Maybe eighty percent. You’re still completely crazy.”
“Crazy can keep you alive.”
Planting his palms on either side of him, Grimmjow steels his muscles and forces himself up into a standing position, surprised to find it’s not as hard as he was expecting. Maybe Urahara’s pills are worth trading for. Especially if it means he doesn’t need to go down to medical. A quick check of his bandages find them hard and dry with old blood. Good.
“So…will you do it?” Brushing nonexistent lint off her hakama, looking anywhere but at Grimmjow, Apacci tries not to look completely fucking desperate for his help. It’s kind of funny all over again. “Will you train me?”
Stretching gingerly, clawed hands high overhead, Grimmjow tests the scabbing that’s healed over his chest so far. Without his flexibility he’s useless. It starts to pull when he inhales deeply to reply.
“Hell no.”
Apacci gapes. “But—!”
“Not for a handful of pills, idiot. Who’d waste their time for that? Find me something better.”
Her cheeks are staining red again, but it’s not embarrassment this time. “There’s nothing here!”
“Then go somewhere else, dumbass. Who said you had to stay here and rot, huh? You’ve got all the fucking knowledge of the recent Living World in your stupid head, you think that’s not worth something?”
“All it ever did was make Sung-sun and Mila Rose laugh at me like I’m some kind of hatchling—” Her mismatched eyes, one brown and one arctic blue, light with realisation. “Oh. The world runs. Urahara Kisuke. Do you think they’d let me go back? My family are still alive.”
“I didn’t hear that shit,” Grimmjow mutters, tight-chested at the words in ways he can’t and won’t examine. “Tell Harribel you understand the world, how to bargain with him, that kind of thing. Find something useful to barter with. Talk to the bastard about how strong you want to get.”
“But—”
“He trained Kurosaki.”
Somehow that sets her off in agitation, pacing aggressively back and forth by the narrow window. “Kurosaki Ichigo is strong, he’s so strong. It’s the wrong kind.”
“Why?” Grimmjow asks, his eyes narrowing. “Tell me.”
“He’s so strong that he gets to choose. Hollows aren’t raised, or—or cultivated. It’s that kind of treatment that made me weak and sheltered, isn’t it? I want to fight dirty. I want to take eyes out, I want to strike from behind, I want to read my enemy like a book. I want to strike like—like a lioness. Like a snake. Like a shark.”
“Like a predator,” Grimmjow clarifies, wondering what she even used to be, if not that. How the hell did she survive? “You’re right, Kurosaki gets to choose.”
“Yeah, and he chooses you,” Apacci says, spreading her arms wide. “Every single time, he chooses you over winning. So I want what you have. The spark that makes you survive. Teach it to me.”
There’s so much wrong with the shit she just said that for a few moments Grimmjow can’t even organise his own thoughts into something that makes sense. He’s sure as hell not used to talking to anyone about the kind of things she’s bringing up. He doesn’t talk to anyone anymore. The last time he did, he didn’t even know the name Kurosaki Ichigo. Now this fledgeling hollow, wet behind the ears in ways he never even realised, wants him to teach her how to fight dirty?
It makes sense, distantly—her sisters will ridicule her, Nelliel doesn’t know how to fight outside of a duel, and to Apacci, Harribel is an untouchable goddess. More importantly, Harribel’s fighting style is torrential boiling water, and it’s only fun like the first three times Grimmjow tried it. Water is fine once your hierro is dense enough. Harribel’s weakness is her own brethren, which isn’t a big deal now that most of the arrancar are dead and dust. It’s also good that Grimmjow doesn’t give a shit about being king of Hueco Mundo anymore.
“Find me something worth the cost of that training, and don’t tell a single fucking soul about this place. Then we’ll see.”
Apacci just stares for a long few seconds, a disbelieving smile twitching the corners of her mouth.
“You’d be dead if you took this long to think in a fight,” Grimmjow tells her. She jolts guiltily.
“I’m not slow! I just didn’t think—okay. Okay! Deal. And don’t tell anyone about—about anything. I want to shock them straight in the pussy when the time comes.”
Grimmjow isn’t sure what his face does when those words process, but she leaves pretty quickly after that and he’s glad.
He chooses you. Every single time.
It’s the only fun I have anymore.
He’s not a moron. There’s danger in the words, and a clue, and he doesn’t want to seek out either. Strength. Victory. Dominance. Those are what he needs. If that woman and her sisters can see the same thing he can, it doesn’t matter if there’s a truth inside of them that will make Kurosaki make sense. Because he’ll still be weaker. He’ll be no better than Apacci under the wide fin of her barbarian queen—it’ll just be the flat of an enormous sword instead, and Grimmjow doesn’t want or need anyone taking it easy on him.
Especially not Kurosaki Ichigo.