The mask slipped into place, and his mind cleared in an instant. Cold clarity replaced the shock-induced haze, and adrenaline coursed through his veins. There was no room for extraneous thought, no time for dwelling in the past - and so it was all filed away for later reflection. At this moment there was nothing else that mattered, nothing else that existed. There was only himself and the hard ground rushing up to meet him.

His senses sharpened and his body reacted even faster than his mind processed, twisting with a catlike grace in the air. Tensed up muscles instantly loosened and relaxed, preparing for the inevitable landing. Back curved, knees bent, relax…

He landed on all fours and instantly let himself collapse sideways into a roll, dispersing the brunt of the impact before coming up into a crouch against a nearby wall. Tilting his head up sharply, he looked over towards the spot he'd been pushed from, but there was no sign of the other agent.

No one else knew he was here yet; none of the warehouse workers had seen his fall. The last group of people had just turned the corner, and the aisle was empty. He still had options, potential outs. The cold clarity was still present, had calmed his nerves, and he tried to measure his situation. Panic could wait until later.

A shout from behind suddenly broke his train of thought. "Oi, who are you!"

Ichigo whipped around and saw a giant of a man standing fifteen meters behind him, brandishing a rifle menacingly as he advanced towards him. Ichigo's arm twitched once as he fought the urge to go for his pistol. Instead, he slowly raised his hands into the air. The man didn't appear to see him as a threat, if the sauntering pace was any indication.

The giant continued to lumber forward, stopping a good three meters away. He kept the rifle at the ready, although Ichigo could now see his finger was off of the trigger. The man's eyes widened slightly as he took in the weapons displayed on Ichigo's person, and he gripped his own gun tighter in response. Ichigo did his best to look nonthreatening. He didn't want to start an all-out firefight with the entire warehouse, especially if there was a better alternative.

"And what d'you think you're doing here?" The large man finally asked. Ichigo fumbled for a second, trying to think of an excuse that wouldn't get him shot. A story began to fall in place in his mind, and he adopted the appropriate persona, flashing an apologetic smile before beginning to spin his tale -

There was a quiet rustle from one of the crates near the ceiling, and Ichigo's every instinct suddenly screamed at him to duck, that it would give away his lie but this was no harmless noise to be brushed off -

He flattened himself against the ground just as the quiet thwip of a sniper rifle sounded out. The giant suddenly cried in pain and rage as a bullet struck his arm. Ichigo rolled away, mind racing as he calculated the trajectory of the bullet and the probable location…but it didn't make any sense. If Kuro had been aiming at him, the giant shouldn't have been in the line of fire at all. It was impossible that the agent had misfired so badly but -

The injured man roared, lifting the rifle and aiming it despite his wounded arm. Ichigo's adrenaline spiked again and he could see the trigger finger perfectly, knew that he'd lost his chance and the man was now certain to shoot.

His pair of Colts flashed into his hands, and he fired. Two shots boomed through the air, and the assailant crumpled to the ground. The warehouse reacted instantly, bursting into activity - there were other shouts now, a frantic scrambling of guns and people no doubt headed his way.

Kuro wasn't trying to shoot me. He was trying to frame me.

Grimmjow heard Yammy's shout from several aisles over, then heard two cracks of gunfire pierce the air, so close they sounded like a single shot, but it was a strange sound, not the distinctive one that Yammy's rifle should have made, and…oh. He was running before his mind fully grasped the situation, running for his revolver with a twisted exhilaration because finally, finally something had happened and he could distract himself from all of these troublesome thoughts.

It was time.

Northern end, three people. The footsteps were indistinct, barely distinguishable above the general alarmed buzz of the warehouse. But his intuition was perfect, honed through a lifetime of missions and shoot-outs just like this one. The group was moving quickly but carelessly - they'd heard the gunshots, but hadn't realized the severity of the situation. They rounded the corner hastily, running out ahead of their cover before coming to an abrupt halt as they saw him. It was too late.

Only one of them was armed - two others were empty-handed, unprepared and unguarded. A single bullet rang out, striking the man holding the gun directly between the eyes. He fell to the ground with a soft thud, and the two behind him scattered as they dove back around the corner.

He needed to conserve his bullets. There were plenty of magazines clipped to his belt, but even the three-point-eight seconds it would take him to change one out could be costly. The AK-47 was imprecise and harder to handle; good for cover fire or taking out a designated target, but less useful against multiple forces. The sniper rifle was even less helpful, at this range; it was heavier and had to be mounted, and he couldn't take the higher ground. The Colts would provide him greatest accuracy, but at seven rounds apiece he would need to be careful. One bullet a person. Prioritize by immediate threat level.

Moving quickly along the wall, he positioned himself in the center of a three-way intersection, a relatively sheltered angle from where he suspected Kuro would be. But there was no time to worry about him; more people approached, two from the right and one from the left. He whirled, arms extended wide as he turned on his side, minimizing his exposure. He fired without a trace of hesitation, and three more people fell, bodies thudding to the floor.

The rush of footsteps was louder now, more urgent. A large group would be converging on him soon; his position was becoming more precarious, more dangerous. His heart pumped wildly, but his hands never so much as shook. The cold chill permeated him, settled deep into his bones, his blood, a cold so intense that it burned at him, a flame that blazed up bright -

And he smiled.

Grimmjow was almost there now, almost to the corner; he'd been at the opposite end of the warehouse when the alarm had been raised, had stopped to organize the people around him into some kind of plan that didn't just involve running wildly into shooting range. He split the group in two, sent one of them off towards the other end to block off the escape route and took his own towards the area Yammy had been patrolling.

It would be a good chance to test out the new layout - swathes of wide open area, occasionally broken up by a long strip of cargo, stacked up to the roof, almost like shopping aisles. Grimmjow ran at an angle approaching the corner, then came to a sudden stop.

He couldn't see straight down the aisle from this position, but he could see the bodies sprawled out on the floor just around the corner. Yammy's corpse was more easily distinguished from the rest; there was a small puddle of blood already pooling out from his chest, and a grotesque hole in the back of his head.

More gunshots now, more of his men down. The feeling of excitement was now tempered by a faint touch of concern. More shouting, there was running now, and suddenly his group was rushing out, sweeping forwards, pushing him forward with them and carrying him past the line of crates, and he could finally see the source of the uproar…

It was in moments like these that Ichigo felt truly alive. He saw the world with crystal sharpness, felt the blood rushing through his veins, could practically taste electricity in the air. The thrill was addicting, irresistible, absolutely overwhelming; a smile twisted across his face, wider and wider and positively demented, but at the moment nothing mattered but the carnage. He relished the bloodshed, reveled in the chaos.

The second group finally arrived, and he watched people begin to pour out from either side of the corridor. There were more this time, all armed and more prepared and more deadly than the strays he'd taken out earlier. But it was fine, all fine; they'd hesitate, and he could use that. They wouldn't be expecting just a single enemy, they'd pause, stop, worry about fallen comrades, worry about the potential crossfire. He could take advantage of such trivial concerns, easily take out the men in front during that time, use the others as living shields, pick off the rest one by one…he lifted the Colt.

Focus first on the threats - the ones most ready to shoot. The raised guns drew his attention like beacons, identified themselves to him and painted targets across their owners. Ichigo simply followed the tide, mirroring the movements of those around him as he fired, shooting as someone aimed at him, twisting out of the way as projectiles went wide off the mark, running forward and sideways and pushing off the crates, dashing towards the leader. He could sense who it was, could tell based off the posture of the people standing around him, the defensive stance of some, the deferential and frantic looks by others. Taking him out would create further confusion, and Ichigo was eager to leverage that. He was just a few meters away now, close enough that no one stood in between them.

The Colt glinted as he aimed it, positioned it perfectly - dead center of the forehead - finger ghosting over the trigger, eyes staring unflinchingly ahead, locking gazes with his soon-to-be victim and -

Something stayed his hand. The animal of instinct snarled, whined at the pause, but he didn't move, didn't shoot. Couldn't. There was something wrong; a strange, inexplicable sense that if he was doing something irreversible, tragic, but he didn't know what -

A vague flicker of recognition fluttered across his consciousness, and he grasped at it, tried to understand…he looked back down the barrel of his gun, traced his line of sight and for the first time realized what he'd been aiming at. Not a target, not an enemy, not just the leader.

It was Grimmjow.

He'd been a second away from pulling the trigger.

There was only one person standing in the widened space in front of him; a single figure, poised calmly in the midst of the chaos that surrounded him. He moved fluidly, gracefully, with an impossible beauty even as death and pain followed his footsteps. Grimmjow stood, mesmerized despite himself as he watched the scene unfold before him. There was a dreamlike quality to it all - an elegant nightmare come to life. He knew he was missing something, a crucial element that would explain the impossibility of the vision before him...

Grimmjow watched as the lone man suddenly pivoted, crouched, launched himself off the ground with incredible force and disappeared - no, not disappeared, he realized an instant later. He'd leapt forward and ran partially up along the wall and back down, weaving erratically back and forth at an inhuman speed, moving like quicksilver over, under, around bullets as he advanced.

He understood for the first time how the other warehouses had fallen so easily.

Then the figure turned, lifted, aimed his gun in a single fluid motion that bespoke a decade of practice - and froze.

For the first time, Grimmjow had a clear glimpse at the man in front of him, realized what had been so unsettling -

They looked at each other.

Recognized each other.

The moment stretched on, timeless. Grimmjow knew he should be doing something, saying something, reacting in some way but he simply stood there, arms useless at his sides, tongue leaden in his mouth, heart twisted in his chest.

Frozen silence. A rivulet of blood ran down a red-stained crate, formed slowly into a small pearl clinging just barely to the corner, and dropped to the ground with a tiny splash.

No one moved.

Ichigo felt the sight of a dozen guns trained on his back, felt for the first time his own mortality weighing down upon him, but it was nothing compared to what stood before him. He couldn't bring himself to look at Grimmjow's expression, couldn't reconcile the fact that he'd done this, that he was the cause of such pain, but he couldn't look away, was irresistibly drawn to the face of a man he thought he'd never see again.

The ice thawed, ebbed away and melted into the ground and he was suddenly so tired, so weary. He opened his mouth, tried to force out an apology, an explanation, anything, but his throat was dry, cracked, silent. His arm trembled, and Ichigo realized his gun hand was still lifted, had fallen off target a little but was still aimed, now pointing at Grimmjow's heart.

He wanted to drop the weapon, wanted nothing more than to close the distance between them, for Grimmjow to laugh it off, wrap his arms tightly around him and tell him that none of this mattered, that everything would be okay. He wanted Grimmjow to love him, to forgive him, to look at him with anything but that heart-wrenching devastation.

He wanted so many things, but he was afraid to take it. Afraid to lower the gun, his only defense, the only thing stopping the others from shooting, afraid to take that step forward, afraid of what would happen if he laid it all bare and Grimmjow didn't, wouldn't, couldn't forgive him after all.

The seconds ticked by. The drop of blood began to congeal.

Ichigo bit his lip, opened his mouth and tried to speak again. The words rasped out, barely even spoken but audible nonetheless, floating out hesitantly in the silence. "Hi, Grimm."