Uryuu threw himself into his studies with fervor after Ryuuken’s impromptu visit to his office, sensing that some looming deadline was approaching that he desperately needed to avoid.
(If anyone knew what he was trying to do, they would stop him, he knew they would.)
(So he couldn’t let anyone find out, couldn’t let anyone know—)
And then, as if in answer to his growing sense of urgency… Kurosaki started to call him.
The man never left anything particularly worrying in his voicemail, just stupid platitudes of wanting to know how he was doing, what was going on in his life, could they catch up sometime, and so on, but it was out of character for Kurosaki after years of near silence broken only by the occasional call around important times.
Uryuu was (briefly) tempted to pick up and tell Kurosaki to leave him the fuck alone, but he hadn’t picked up a call from any of them in years and he wasn’t particularly feeling up to dancing around his current ‘interest’, especially when Kurosaki could be like a dog with a bone at times. So he just let Kurosaki continue to go to voicemail and continued to half-heartedly listen to said voicemails before deleting them with a sigh.
(He… almost wished Kurosaki had shown this level of persistence years ago, back when—)
(No, it was over and done with.)
(Don’t think about it.)
He did make sure to apply wards to his apartment, though, both to contain any issues his experiments caused and to keep any nosy potential visitors out. As a bonus, it ended up soundproofing his little apartment, which was practically heavenly after dealing with the noise and chaos of a hospital all day long.
(Maybe he should have tried to learn some warding before this point, if he could have had this blessed silence earlier.)
When the nightly calls finally ceased, Uryuu just breathed a sigh of relief and continued on with his work, painstakingly breaking every array down into its component parts and trying to figure out what could be useful to him and what wouldn’t be. He was starting to feel… not confident, precisely, but like he was onto something. Like he could maybe, possibly see the light at the end of the tunnel. It felt… weirdly good. Like he was actually accomplishing something instead of repeating the same things over and over and over—
He shook those thoughts free whenever they showed up. Kept dedicating himself night after night to his goal. Forced himself to sleep and eat and shower, caring for himself as best he could make himself to because he couldn’t afford to draw any more attention than he already was, couldn’t afford to get anyone else sniffing around—
In retrospect, Kurosaki calling nightly and then abruptly not calling him should have been warning enough that something was going to happen.
He got exactly one warning — a very pointed, very polite, painfully kind voicemail from Inoue asking that he please pick up so they could talk because she was worried about him — which he ignored like all the rest and then—
The next night, someone knocked on his door, and then an obnoxious, half-remembered voice called out, “Mou, Ishida-kun! Knock knock! House check~”
Uryuu froze and stared down at his half-drawn array, brain scrambling to catch up to the fact that Urahara Kisuke was outside his door—
And then his wards shattered like brittle glass and his door clicked open, ignoring all common sense and the fact that he’d used the goddamn deadbolt, what the fuck Urahara.
“Huh, not a bad little place you have here,” Urahara said as the man stepped through and closed the door behind him, kicking off his geta and padding through the narrow entryway into the main apartment like he fucking belonged there.
Uryuu spun, furious and afraid and bristling with it, and—
Stopped. Stared. Blinked in shock at the heavy shadows under Urahara’s eyes and the faint hollows in his cheeks and the still dark, still pronounced scars tracing over his eyes and down his cheeks and instead of lambasting the man, what came out of his mouth was, “You look like shit.”
“Mou, that’s a little rude, isn’t it Ishida-kun?” Urahara said, doing his best to pout at Uryuu like he used to, back when Uryuu was a teen, back before— everything. Uryuu could see how it might fool many people, but there was something empty about the expression that grated against his memories like a broken fingernail across fabric, constantly snagging and tugging and twisting— “Besides!” Urahara chirped with a bare fragment of his old mischievous cheer, “It’s not like you look much better!”
“What?” Uryuu blurted out, blinking at the man before straightening up and running a hand through his — much too long, fuck, he really needed to get it cut but when did he ever have time anymore? — hair self-consciously. He knew he wasn’t getting as much sleep as he should, but it wasn’t affecting his work, so who cared? “Wait, no, forget that,” he muttered with a shake of his head and a sharp tug at the ends of his hair to refocus his mind. “Why the hell are you here?”
Urahara tipped his head to the side, ridiculous hat slipping a bit on his head as he arched an eyebrow and then gave Uryuu’s phone a pointed look. “You see, when people become worried about someone they know potentially hurting themself, and when that person refuses to pick up the phone to reassure them, sometimes they call in the big guns!” Urahara said as he spread his (thin! Too thin!) arms wide as if to indicate what he meant by ‘big guns’.
Uryuu narrowed his eyes at Urahara’s wrists, exposed by the arms-wide gesture, and tried to recall if the man had always looked a bit delicate; he didn’t think so, but it had been a while and his memories of his teen years were not precisely the most accurate. Urahara, annoying as he was, had always seemed a bit larger than life to his younger self, always arriving in the nick of time with an answer, or a way out, or something to direct him to the next task, next enemy to defeat, next way to help Kurosaki—
“Er…” Urahara started, then faltered in the face of Uryuu’s arched-eyebrow stare, letting his pose drop with a cough as he looked away and whisked a familiar fan out of nowhere to cover the lower half of his face. “Mou, Ishida-kun’s being mean.”
“Mean?” Uryuu repeated, voice strangled, then threw his hands in the air and turned back to the table, hastily swiping his papers into a stack and snapping books closed. “You’re the one who barged into my home, through my wards and locked door, and I’m being mean? For fuck’s sake, I know I haven’t done anything with reishi in years, but I’m not bad enough to injure myself with it!”
Urahara blinked at him several times, gaze sliding to the table and the stacks of books and paper scattered across it. “Ah, well then. Mystery solved!”
“Mystery… solved?” Uryuu repeated again, feeling like a broken record and not appreciating the sensation at all. “What mystery? I don’t recall agreeing to keep people appraised of my personal business.”
Urahara snorted at that, cast another look over him and the table, and then casually crossed the space and sprawled out on Uryuu’s couch like he owned the damn place, the bastard. “No, because you don’t talk with anyone,” the man pointed out with a wry twist to his mouth. “Take it from me, you really need to have at least someone you check in with, so people don’t go all weird around you if you vanish for a week or two in a research binge.”
“Are you offering, then?” Uryuu snapped back, before slapping a hand over his mouth in mortification.
(What the fuck was he thinking?!)
“Maa… I mean, if you want me to?” Urahara replied, pale eyes a touch wide and brows raised as he stared at Uryuu. “I would have expected you to, ah… ignore me, I guess? Or chose someone else to speak with?”
Uryuu scoffed and turned away, tired of being so obviously stared at, and made his way to the little kitchen. “You’re the one who barged in unannounced and uninvited,” he bit out as he started rifling through his cabinets, wondering what the fuck he could make for dinner; since he was already interrupted, he might as well eat before he chased Urahara out and got back to work. “And I don’t recall you being easily ignored, so if I want to preserve what’s left of my patience, I clearly need to just… deal with you. So you go away.”
“Ah… well, yes, I suppose?” Urahara murmured in response, at more of a loss than Uryuu had ever heard him be before. It was uncomfortably disconcerting. “I suppose I should go, then? Since you’re clearly okay and just busy with a new project and—”
“Sit the fuck down,” Uryuu snapped as he heard Urahara shift on the couch behind him, not turning his attention away from the supplies he was gathering on the counter. “You barged in here without even a by-your-leave, you’re not leaving the same damn way. Besides, you broke my goddamn wards, I want you to— wait, no, forget that, I don’t want you raising any wards here, I don’t need you having a literal key to my apartment.”
“Maa, it’s fine, it’s fine, I get it,” Urahara said a touch awkwardly, then cleared his throat and added, “Though if you’d like me to explain how I did it…?”
Uryuu considered that for a moment, then shrugged and said, “Yeah, sure. Might as well.”
Silence stretched after his agreement, broken only by the sounds Uryuu was making as he started preparing a quick meal, and for a moment Uryuu thought Urahara wouldn’t explain despite just offering, but then, slowly, almost hesitantly, Urahara started talking. He wended through a complex explanation, darting between subjects at a speed that Uryuu could barely keep up with, but… but when he interrupted, asking for more detail, more clarity, Urahara just… paused a moment and then gave it.
It was… surprisingly engaging, even if a lot of it made Uryuu feel like he was drowning all over again.
Even when he pointedly set a bowl of food down in front of Urahara, along with a pair of chopsticks and a glass of water, the man barely paused for more than a single, startled moment, before continuing the discussion, long since moved on from Uryuu’s wards and onto ward creation in general.
It was… weird.
Very weird.
But also… sort of nice…
(That was even weirder.)
(What the hell was wrong with him…?)
(…ugh…)
(Oh well, at least he was learning something.)
That first meeting paved the way for another. And then another. Again and again, until it was almost stranger to be alone in his apartment after work than to have Urahara practically haunting his couch, poking and prodding and giving weirdly insightful advice about a path of reishi manipulation that the man had (hopefully) never seen written out before.
(And giving advice on wards, since he kept breaking Uryuu’s, the bastard.)
At least Urahara’s presence meant that everyone else backed off, leaving him alone at long last to actually focus on his damn project.
Or… to mostly focus on his project; he really wasn’t certain how Urahara would react to the discovery that Uryuu was researching this mess of a field in order to discern if he could turn back time, but he wasn’t willing to risk it.
So instead, he practiced existing arrays and broke them apart to learn their components and then tried to rearrange the parts into new arrays — with mixed success, but he was getting better at it! — and left all his theoretical tinkering with time travel to the late night hours after Urahara had left or the days he knew Urahara wouldn’t be around.
He could feel the man watching him though, pale eyes thoughtful as they discussed theory after theory, bouncing between the Quincy practice that Uryuu was only just beginning to understand and the Shinigami practice that Urahara knew like the back of his hand, comparing and contrasting and figuring out all the surprising little differences and—
“You know, if you told me your goal, we could find a solution sooner,” Urahara said one day, in that casually offhand way he liked dropping bombshells on Uryuu.
Uryuu froze, a lump forming in his throat as he abruptly remembered how old-sly-cunning Urahara truly was. “My goal?” he forced out, trying for confused and knowing he was failing by a landslide. “What makes you think I have a specific goal beyond just… learning this part of my heritage?” he tried again, only to wince at how much worse that sounded.
Urahara hummed softly and idly rearranged the books on the table. “Then will you allow me to make a guess of my own?”
“S-sure?” Uryuu replied, voice strangled and hands clenching to keep their tremors from giving him away.
(From the sharp look Urahara gave him, he figured his efforts were wasted on the man, but that didn’t mean he was going to just let the man see his nerves like that!)
“You have an interest to arrays that have a time component, whether that’s delayed activation or freezing time or manipulating it in some way,” Urahara said as he sat back. When Uryuu opened his mouth to protest, Urahara just arched an eyebrow and added, “In the past three days you’ve skipped over four arrays in favor of ones with a time component, despite otherwise displaying a preference for tackling each array as they appear in the books. In the previous two weeks, you’ve done similarly another five times. You’re also more engaged and more interested any time the topic of time and its manipulation comes up.”
Uryuu clenched his teeth and stared down at the table in front of him, waiting for the ridicule, the dismissal, the inevitable accept your current life, give this foolish idea up—
Urahara just shifted in his seat, followed by the sound of papers rustling before his elbow thumped onto the table and he sighed, soft and pained and wistful. “I get it, you know,” he murmured after a moment. “You think I haven’t wondered what it would be like to undo all the terrible things that have happened because of me?”
“But there’s no way to do it,” Uryuu forced out, refusing to look up, to meet the pity he knew had to be in Urahara’s pale eyes. If someone like Urahara had never done it, then what chance did he have? “I get it, okay? It’s a stupid idea and I should leave it alone and—”
“And you might be onto something, in these books,” Urahara cut in before Uryuu could finish. “I gave up on the idea decades ago, before you were even born. There’s a point where the power requirements become infeasible, especially in Shinigami arts, since those rely entirely on your natural reiatsu output, which can only be boosted so much before a person’s soul becomes unstable. But Quincy arts—”
“Rely mostly on ambient reishi and are charged over time,” Uryuu breathed out, casting a quick, flickering glance up at Urahara before forcing his gaze back down onto the table, still unwilling to face whatever he might find in the man’s expression.
“Yes. In addition, I suspect you’re not intending on going back very far,” Urahara added, something brittle in his voice. “The first time I thought about it seriously, I realized I would need to go back almost fifty years to get anything of value done. The Vizard’s transformation and my exile wasn’t the beginning of things, it was just a beginning, and one that, in the end, wasn’t even a true linchpin. It was terrible, and I would undo it if I could, but… what would that truly change?” Urahara mused softly. “Aizen would still have had his claws deep in Seireitei by that point, and I had a grand total of a few years as a barely-respected Captain under my belt. Who would listen to me over the kind, helpful lieutenant that nearly everyone liked? Yoruichi didn’t make any friends by pushing me forward the way she did, and I didn’t make any friends with the way I handled the Division my first few years. I would have to go back further, but… how far to go? Before a certain point, I didn’t particularly have the sort of freedom that would enable me to make the grand, sweeping changes that were necessary.”
“Not even killing Aizen before he rose in the ranks?” Uryuu couldn’t help but ask, peeking over at Urahara in curiosity.
Urahara pursed his lips thoughtfully, then huffed and shook his head. “No, I don’t know where he was before he joined the Academy, and he rose to prominence too quickly for me to be certain of getting away with killing him at that point. I suppose I could have returned to my time as a Captain and simply stalked and killed him at some point during his experiments out in the Rukongai, but even that would be a risky proposition. He was expecting retaliation around then, so he was more on guard and had more allies than he did earlier in time… well. You see my issue. I just… gave up the thought of it at some point, because it was too complex and would have required too much power to do.”
Uryuu considered Urahara’s words, still watching the man thoughtfully, then asked, “You didn’t think to use the hogyoku?”
Urahara flinched and turned his head fully towards the wall. “No,” he said with finality. “The damn thing was a terrible decision on my part, and by then I wanted nothing to do with it ever again.”
“And you think I can go back?” Uryuu prodded, abruptly wanting to get Urahara’s focus away from whatever shitty place he’d accidentally sent the man by asking about the shiny rock that fucked up everything around it even when it was sealed an entire world away.
“It’s… possible,” Urahara decided, finally pulling his attention back from the wall and to Uryuu, his expression more serious than Uryuu had seen in a long, long time. “I do think you’re onto something, but I’m not entirely certain how it will work. There’s a possibility that you could simply merge with your past self, or you could just end up back in time how you are right now, as an entirely displaced person with no records of your existence. I don’t even know if you’ll even be able to affect this timeline, or if you’ll simply create a new one instead.”
“But it’s possible,” Uryuu repeated more firmly, hands clenching and back tensing as he met Urahara’s serious expression head on. “You’re not just trying to… to give me some stupid hope or something, right?”
“I’m not,” Urahara agreed.
Uryuu pursed his lips, then half-asked, half-stated, “And you’ll help me with this.”
“I will,” Urahara agreed again, sounding almost like the man Uryuu remembered from his teens.
He barely needed to consider it further; with Urahara helping him towards his actual goal and not just towards learning Quincy arts in general, of course it would be possible. However it worked out, it would still work, and Uryuu would have a chance.
He could change things, even if only for a version of himself and his former friends.
“Then please, help me,” Uryuu forced out, feeling awkward at the request but also confident at long last.
(He could do it.)
(He could.)
(And he would.)
(He swore it.)