It started with Aizen ripping out of his bindings with such force he lost an arm, slowing him on the way out of muken for the brief minutes it took to regenerate and turning the battle widspread and ugly before he reached, not the nearest but the most optimal senkaimon.
It started with Aizen crashing through the wall of Ichigo's home and yanking him forcefully out of his body while his family screamed in horror and alarm, then dragging him through a garganta as a senkaimon slammed open and chorus of enraged screams rose and cut off when the maw-like opening slammed shut while Ichigo looked into Aizen's calmly urgent brown eyes and did not fight him at all.
It started with Aizen explaining a man named Azashiro, a fellow criminal in muken able to hear and feel and touch everything, who'd come to him and explained a dark plot that was turning from a possibility to a plan about to be executed.
"You are worth too much to me to for me to stand by
It started with Aizen accessing the Las Noche's camera-fly network that had been dormant in Karakura and showing him conversations he wasn't meant to hear.
The Soul King's corpse wasn't holding up. They needed a living king. Ichigo was the best choice Kyoraku said. They wouldn't hurt him. They had to get him back before Aizen could enact his plan to take the throne instead.
Ichigo stood beside a calm, quiet Aizen Sousuke who only looked at him with patience and remembered a limbless, voiceless man in yellow crystal who, for the brief moment they'd been connected by a blade, had had a heart full of sorrow and weary gratitude for the end coming at last. A man whose corpse was patched together and rotting in the same place.
Ichigo watched the way Rukia testily snapped at people in his defense, the way Byakuya stood back with a narrow-eyed look and screamed disapproval and defiance with alternating silence and bringing up rules and precedence that would slow and hinder then.
He watched who gave up on him, who decided to sacrifice him, who offered help finding and binding him.
It started with the Kuchiki knocking, incongruously polite, on the doors of Las Noches in formal noble attire, not shinigami shihakushou, and offering alliance.
It started with Aizen making a snarky remark where he was seated on a pompous throne as they privately spoke about the newest wave of defectors to their side.
It started with Ichigo threading his fingers in the mans hair and yanking, forcing his neck to bend so he was looking up, eyes fluttering and surprise flashing over his face along with a flurry of a dozen other things Ichigo watched with a hot sort of greed.
"Shut up."
It started with Ichigo wrenching Aizen up and around with that grip and slamming him down onto the table and parting his thighs and driving into him until Aizen's back bowed and his eyes rolled back in ecstasy.
It ended with the Royal Realm in ruins and the two of them clutching at each other as the literal weight of the divided itself between them.
