Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts after Ichigo loses his powers. It’s the first class trip outside of Karakura and all of his friends are trying to give him space. Naturally, they give him too much space and he gets lost. It’s not a taking a left turn when he should have gone right kind of thing but a whole Alice in Wonderland experience.

Ichigo finds his way back after an hour (or a year) before anyone has a chance to miss him. He brings with him a thousand debts and debtors tying him to an entirely new way of life. From then on, things begin to change.

Ichigo goes back to Karakura and sees spirits he never noticed before. They’re not ghosts, nothing to do with humans at all, but creatures that inhabit their world unseen yet present. He meets the eel-lady, who acts as something of a facilitator between this world and that one, renames her his crazy boss, and starts to work off some of those debts.

He starts carrying bits and bobs of what he thinks of as a tool-kit. A bit of salt; dried meat, candied fruits, and pressed flowers; an impossibly long cotton cord; some pretty beads; a soft brush and a hard comb; wet-start matches; a small canteen of purified water; a packet of honey from WacDonald’s; a couple of cheap chocolate bars. Innocuous things. Nothing that would alarm his father or sisters if they saw. Nothing they might ask questions about.

He keeps one short knife. It is plain yet effective modern steel. On his jobs he picks up and discards swords like pennies. Even now after everything, there’s only one weapon that feels right in his hand.

When Ichigo does fight, he deals in blood and bone and flesh with yakuza and delinquents, and things that look like yakuza but aren’t, and things that would drive yakuza back into their holes if they ever imagined them. Ichigo can keep Karakura safe in this one way, and that lessens the pain enough for him to keep going.

He spends more time learning than he ever has before. He learns how to see through illusions and perform magic that others would call sleight-of-hand. He learns how much his services are worth, how much he was screwed over that first Alice-in-Wonderland year, and how to trade both fairly and unfairly. He learns how to follow the letter of the law without following its spirit.

Slowly, Ichigo tips the balance of his debts, accruing more favors and owing less. (He’ll always owe a debt to someone or something. The spirits know the value of someone like Ichigo. They won’t let him go willingly.)

Ichigo learns from humans too. There are others in the world that are more like the him-of-now than the him-of-the-before. They avoid Karakura. Most things avoid Karakura. All of that spirit-soaked land is dangerous. But Ichigo finds them when he travels for sports tournaments and demands or requests instruction as needed. It is a human practice to share knowledge freely, and Ichigo needs all the help he can get.

Ichigo learns how to seal a name and set one free. How to cleanse himself properly. How to dedicate a shrine and bless a birth. How to perform an exorcism, a burial, and a wedding. He buys ofuda from the priests that know their stuff. Then he tracks down a less devout man who teaches him how to make them for himself. Ichigo’s faith in his own strength is more than enough to make up for his instructor’s flaws.

Some days he races around Karakura delivering packages, rescuing fox kits and nekomata kittens, finding new homes for misplaced spirits. (They’re yokai he knows. But part of him is afraid that if he names anything in this wondrous world, then it will disappear just like his old one.)

Other days, he’ll go out shopping for Yuzu and come back months later having spent time working for a witch, questing for a dragon, and facing down opponents that were ancient when Captain-General Yamamoto Genryūsai Shigekuni was a child.

Ichigo’s taste in reading shifts away from the western fables his mother told him. Though he’s had the misfortune to encounter pixies and other lesser fae in anglophilic parts of Tokyo. None of the Fair Folk have ever made it to Japan’s shore for which Ichigo is grateful.

Instead, he picks up books about the feudal era, reads through Karin’s copy of Inuyasha , adding a lightweight thermal blanket and extra flashlight to his ever growing toolkit as a result, and studies legends, literature, and poetry until he can recognize almost every spirit he encounters. He watches Spirited Away with Yuzu and wishes he had been half as resourceful as Chihiro on his first visit to the spirit world.

Ichigo isn’t truly happy and the spirits know it. But he’s content enough with the direction of his life and planning to escape into university and a degree in literature when the unthinkable happens and his power returns.

After the mess with Xcution and the bigger mess with the Quincy, it takes some time for him to resettle. When he finally can, he goes to visit Unagiya. He’s missed a lot of work. And she tosses him out on his ass.

Ichigo is too much of a warrior, too much of a threat, and he knows by now that humans have a special sort of existence that makes them weaker than spirits but more dangerous. His Hollow-Quincy-Shinigami self is too human. But he can still feel the debts chaining his soul tighter the longer they go unpaid, and Ichigo resolves himself.

For the first time since he went to rescue Rukia, Ichigo works to control his power. It’s not like fighting or learning a new skill or anything he’s done before. He’s learning himself and that’s slow going. He studies his power in more depth than he ever cared to before. He studies his soul, even the darkest parts that are more evil than his Hollow’s base instincts. He meditates for hours and days and weeks with a patience he learned from ancient mountains and rivers and trees. He goes to university still working on containing himself.

The first time Ichigo succeeds in pulling all of his power into his body, his bones start to itch, his skin starts to dissolve, and he starts bleeding from his ears, eyes, and nose. He ends that attempt and has only finished washing the blood from his face when his phone starts ringing off the hook and shinigami start invading his apartment.

Everyone he knows with the slightest bit of spiritual sensitivity is worried that he died. Ichigo explains what he’s doing in general terms, then throws out the shinigami, calls his sisters and his friends, and starts over.

Zangetsu has had time to review what he missed of Ichigo’s life. The sword-spirits agree that Ichigo doesn’t need their full strength at his beck and call every moment. For the first time since he learned Zangetsu’s name, the zanpakuto seals itself completely.

The resulting sword is a just a hair too long and breath too wide to be called a katana. The pure black blade has no sheath. White cloth covers and uncovers it at will and trails from the spiraling cross-guard. Red and blue leather cord wraps a hilt long enough to accommodate both hands and adds a foreign touch of color. The zanpakuto fits perfectly in Ichigo’s grip.

The next attempt at corralling Ichigo’s power goes better. The power is less than it was but still more than his body can handle safely. Ichigo does not start bleeding immediately, but the burning itch returns eventually, and he has to end the experiment.

Still, Zangetsu’s existence inspires Ichigo as do the tales of transforming kitsune. He has more than a few gifts from grateful spirits or those seeking to balance debts.

Ichigo selects a single, perfectly round pearl and meditates with it using as much focus as he can. Once he knows the pearl inside and out, Ichigo pushes power into it until the pearl is full to the brim, just short of cracking. He doesn’t cut his connection to the pearl but ties it off, so he can still draw on the power if he needs it, but so that the power still resides outside his body.

Then he repeats the process again and again with golden fans, flat river stones, ebony chopsticks, porcelain bowls, crystalline ovoids, painted umbrellas, strings of beads, a stone seal, a silk robe, a woven shroud, anything and everything he owns that could hold more than a thimbleful of power (and a thimble can hold a significant amount once he tries) until he can feel he’s on a threshold.

In the end, Ichigo produces dozens of artifacts. His apartment feels like spiritual time-bomb waiting to go off, but he’s not so foolish as to carelessly discard vessels containing his own power. He gives some to his sisters and his human friends. Not to the shinigami. Not to his father. He loves them, but a (human) year and a half of silence has damaged his faith. He can’t trust them the way he did before.

Ichigo travels home to Karakura. His family is surprised to see the decrease in his broadcasted power, and his shinigami friends can’t believe that he finally managed to seal his zanpakuto. But he doesn’t allow any outside interference to distract him. He goes to visit his mother, sits down in front of her grave marker, and spreads his spiritual power down and out.

It’s only a thin layer but it spreads across the entire town. He can sense every shrine, every place where the normal world touches the spiritual, every major spirit, and every spiritual ward. His power laps at the boundary of the town and Ichigo bids it to stay.

When Ichigo opens his eyes, he’s not surprised to see himself surrounded by the smaller spirits that have been avoiding him for the past year. In true youkai fashion, they throw a party to celebrate Ichigo’s return with lights and music and food and so much sake. Ichigo is still too young to drink by human standards, but he knocks back his portion and smiles at the cheers.

An hour into the celebration, a shinigami patrol composed of two seated officers, the new standard for Karakura, passes overhead. Neither one sees a thing.