#id tag this ir bc thats what all my fics r eventually but this snippet is not actually ir yet s o

[hashtagartistlife]

(A brief explanation of daemons, where they come from, and what they are can be found at this link.)

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Ichigo’s daemon settles early. There, in the shock of his mother’s death, her golden retriever daemon Alonso nowhere to be seen, Serafin keens, a bloodcurdling mourning sound torn from her throat as he sits numb in the rain.

He doesn’t know how long it is until her anguished shrieking attracts help, but when the paramedics arrive, take his pulse, ask his daemon to change shape (a standard procedure to check for shock in children), she flits about his head in chaotic distress and refuses to listen. The paramedics try to calm her down—one of them has got a golden warbler daemon, who keeps pace with Serafin and murmurs at her in soothing tones as she circles and circles and circles—but it’s no use, and when she attempts to shift, but can’t, it only makes the situation worse.

Ichigo—Ichigo—she thinks at him desperately, and it’s only then that Ichigo realises what the sick feeling at the bottom of his stomach is. He feels a tugging at his chest, but it’s short-lived, like running abruptly into a wall—nothing like the full-on swoop that usually accompanies a change in Serafin’s shape, and he knows this is it for them.

“I can’t—I can’t—“ he tells the paramedics who are poking and prodding him, helping him up, loading him into the back of the ambulance—“I can’t, I can’t, it’s my fault, I can’t—“

“His daemon,” one of them says shortly, and the others all stop, looking at each other with fearful, understanding eyes.

Shock, they murmur, and Ichigo hears the voices around him, muffled as if through a veil but with odd patches of lucidity: settle… early sometimes, if… trauma… nine?? I’ve never heard…. So early… too early.

Poor boy, he hears, and decides to hear no more.

Mechanically, he lets the paramedics handle him as they will: they lay him on a stretcher, wrap him up in the blankets tight. He clutches Serafin close to his chest, and he can feel her tiny heart beat over his; her small warmth does nothing to dispel the chill that has settled over them both. He’s still as the grave, but Serafin is trembling.

Settling was supposed to be a joyous event, a homecoming; it was looking at a piece of your soul and, in a moment of clarity, understanding who you were and who you were going to become and being better for it. It was not supposed to be this, this forced choice before he had ever considered what shape she might take, shocked into it by grief and guilt and frozen in a form that will always remind him of the pure agony of tonight.

Nightingale. Serafin’s a nightingale, with a high sweet voice and a small sleek body and wings feathered by plumes delicate as gossamer, the last form Kurosaki Masaki ever saw her in.

Shaking, weeping, her thoughts an incoherent jumble in his mind, Serafin presses herself closer to Ichigo’s body, and the two of them begin their long vigil.

His father is far more understanding than he has any right to be, him and his rangy lion-daemon Lyrani with their understanding eyes and understanding hugs and understanding silences, and it’s more than Ichigo can bear. He wishes they would yell at him; he wishes they would cast him out. It’s all his fault, all of it, he’s the one who pulled mom away from the centre of their house; but the most they show in front of him is a quick grim tightening of the mouth, as though they’d somehow been expecting the news and the paramedics with her bloody corpse is only a confirmation of the worst. He wants to rail at them—don’t you understand, don’t you get it, mom is gone, why are you so calm—but he knows he doesn’t even have the right to do that, not when he’s the reason she’s gone in the first place.

It almost destroys him to watch his sisters crumble at the news, barely five and with their daemons still shapeshifting like quicksilver; Karin’s Zenka shifting so fast he’s almost a blur, Yuzu’s Inari trying valiantly to hold onto Alonso’s golden retriever shape but slipping around the edges so that every so often he’d have horns or scales or wings. But none of them blame him for it, either, and when they come to him for comfort, crying into his shirt and Serafin’s feathers, he pats them awkwardly around their shoulders and doesn’t meet the eyes that are too full of the trust and love he doesn’t deserve.

I killed her, he thinks, and Serafin agrees:

We killed her.

“I’m sorry it had to be this way, son,” his dad tells him a few days afterwards, and Ichigo doesn’t ask how he knows—he just does. Lyrani looks at him with her steady gold eyes and does something Ichigo only remembers from his earliest years: she pads up to him, footfalls soft on the carpet, and nuzzles her head into his cheek, licking him from chin to forehead.

He used to giggle at this, he recalls, pretending disgust and running away so that she’d chase him throughout the house. Now, he runs away for a different reason: the sunlight on her golden fur, so much like Alonso’s, and he knows it’s his fault that he’ll never see Lyrani curl up with another warm body in a patch of sunlight on lazy afternoons.

We killed her, he thinks, in litany and in time with his feet hitting the pavement, and the rush of the bloated monsoon-season river beside him does not stop to tell him otherwise.

Three months later, in a hospital corridor, another boy’s daemon settles; early, far too early for it to approximate anything close to normal. The small green snake winds her body up the boy’s arm, and he clutches her closer to his chest. In the spillover of the stark white operation lights, what scant colour they have bleaches out to a ghostly transparency, so much so that he can no longer tell which of them is living and which of them the corpse. 

At least until the first incision is made. Then, the blood: not spurting and fresh and vital-red, but even more horrible in its viscosity; the dead colour of it, like the mudslide that had happened by the riverbank only a few days ago. The boy wets his lips and tries one last time. 

“Dad?”

The calico housecat by the foot of the operation table doesn’t stir. His father only spares him a single glance; one that pierces through boy and daemon, rooting them in place. They can’t look away now. 

The two of them watch the dissection of their mother, the entire, bloody thing, clinging to each other all the while.

#bleach #id tag this ir bc thats what all my fics r eventually but this snippet is not actually ir yet s o #kurosaki ichigo #ishida uryuu #im reading the book of dust la belle sauvage so naturally #its back to daemonverse we go #ive been writing this for so LONG folks i love daemonverse fics #hopefully i can write more bc i have a lot of ideas for bleach + daemons #writer life #also happy 2018!!!! #bleach fic #the division of a soul (and other mathematics)