10Summary: Ichigo, a normal high schooler, meets Grimmjow, a man only a few years older, living a very different life. Gambling, clubs, sex. And Grimmjow's ways are catching up with him.
After weeks of a strange relationship and unexpected visits by the bluenet, the worst happens. The scene is in an alley, and Grimmjow has been shot.
Stop. Calm down, breathe, and think. Think... Not working. Okay, just breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
X X X
"You wanna live, kid? Leave. Now."
Ichigo stepped back. He risked another glance at the bluenet, now lying motionless in a slowly spreading, wet pool of blood. His eyes were closed and his features for the first time ever, completely lax. Expressionless. Lifeless.
He was too stunned to react. Ichigo's mind couldn't comprehend how they had gotten from there to here in such a short space of time. One second they were just talking and the next... the next... Grimmjow was flat out on the ground.
"G'wan. Git." The metallic clack of a trigger being cocked cut through Ichigo's near paralysis, making his heart beat wildly. The gun was lofted up to point at the centre of Ichigo's chest, and Ichigo's already thundering heart scampered in ten different directions at once. His legs and arms were shaking from adrenaline. Fight or flight. He was doing neither and his body didn't know what the fuck to do with all the extra fuel. His brain finally took it upon itself to move Ichigo's limbs, because Ichigo, for all the ever-loving world, did NOT want to leave Grimmjow like this. Could not.
Dying. Or dead already. He didn't know. And if he left, he might never know.
"Last chance kid. Ain't gonna tell ya 'gain. Beat it."
Ichigo had no choice. The man he'd spent the last and most fucked up three weeks of his life getting to know was either dead or about to die. And there wasn't a goddamn thing Ichigo could do about it. If Grimmjow was the man Ichigo had come to think he was, he would undoubtedly be yelling at Ichigo to get his stupid ass out of here right now or he'd beat it into the ground. Yeah. That's exactly what Grim would have said.
Ichigo turned away. The hardest thing he'd ever had to do in his life. He started walking, then running, feet numb inside his shoes, not registering the splash of water as his foot hit a small puddle that was left in a depressed section of rough cement. There were several shallow puddles in the alleyway. They were leftover from last night's rain, taking much longer to dry up where the sun didn't reach. This was a place where the sun couldn't reach, this world. And it was Grimmjow's world, not Ichigo's. And it was where Grimmjow's reckless, wild, savage, and ferociously lived life would finally come to an inhumane end.
Ichigo stumbled as his foot hit a sodden plastic bag and lost its traction, slipping on the wet plastic. He caught himself on the edge of falling, and instead kept going, leaving the discarded wet bag behind him, much like the man he'd just abandoned.
Ichigo hooked his fingers into the corner stone at the end of the alley and swung around the corner. He staggered to a stop, every nerve in his body pulled so tight he thought he would snap into shards under the pressure. he should have just kept going, but he was waiting for the sound. The end of it all. He knew at least how these things worked in the movies. The bad guy always makes sure that the good guy is really dead. Does the job. Professional. Impersonal. Cold. But that was the movies, and this was re...
Pop. Pop.
Ichigo jerked as two shots rang out in quick succession.
And everything stopped.
His mind. His heart. His breathing.
The muscles in his legs and stomach crumbled to dust, and he fell to his knees, vision beginning to blur, eyes peeled wide open, more open than they had ever been in his entire life. He leaned forward on his hands and felt a wash of nausea roil through his insides a split second before his stomach began in earnest to turn itself inside out. The rice, and fish and vegetables that Ichigo had eaten for lunch, the food he had shared with Grimmjow, all came back up.
Ichigo heaved until nothing was left, and he wretched painfully, huddled over sacs of garbage, adding to the wretched smell of decay and filth, the used up remnants of people's lives.
Tears streamed down his face, but not one of them was for himself.
The alley had gone quiet again, but the sound echoed in his head in a continuous loop. Ichigo pushed his rebellious body up against the brick wall, sucking in lung-fulls of air, and scrubbed the bile off of his chin with the back of his sleeve in one angry swipe.
And then he ran. He ran as fast as his legs would let him, bursting out of the maze of alleyways, out onto the street, across it, blindly, to the tune of car horns and curses. It was incredible that he didn't get hit. He ran so fast and so hard that he thought his heart would come crashing through his ribcage and his lungs would never fill with air again. Like Grimmjow's. He wanted to stop running, he needed to, but he couldn't. He hoped that he would finally trip and that when he crashed to the ground he would just wake up and find himself on his bedroom floor. Just a nightmare. Just a dream. And just who the fuck was he kidding? This was real. Not a dream. Not a joke. And not something he could take back. This had really fucking happened.
Almost as fast as that walking disaster, that path of destruction, known as Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, had come spilling into Ichigo's life, he was ripped away from it.
And the blue haired bastard had taken the largest piece of Ichigo with him.
X X X
Grimmjow had angrily lectured him on his situational awareness several times already. Grimmjow was always alert and he seemed to know exactly who was around him at all times. In a room full of thirty people, he could describe over half of them in great detail, and the rest in enough detail to render an artists sketch. Even in the moments when he carried himself with a look of lazy dis-concern, he was in tune with his environment, a natural part of it, like a big predatory cat in a dense jungle. It was an act. Plain and simple. But Grimmjow had been completely distracted this time around, all of his senses honed in on Ichigo, and the sword of Damocles which had always been dangling above his head had suddenly come crashing down. Now he was dead. And it was Ichigo's fault.
X X X
To Ichigo it had looked like a direct hit. The way Grimmjow had spun from the force of the slug. The way he had dropped like a stone and lay still as death itself. A head shot. Clean. Deadly. But the bullet had (only) skimmed it's way across the side of Grimmjow's head, slicing away a line of blue hair above his ear, and tearing away the skin against his skull. And head wounds. Well they bled like a sonofabitch.
So that was that idea. Never did anything more than that, but it was a fun writing exercise at the time.