Characters: Orihime, Ulquiorra
Summary: She knows she's not talking to a ghost. Because dead Arrancar can't become ghosts.
Pairings: UlquiHime
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc
Timeline: post-Deicide arc
Author's Note: Hmm, a Ghost-of-Ulquiorra-visits-Orihime shot. What the Heck? I'll do it.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
At first, Orihime notices nothing out of place except the cold. And even then, that's not so unexpected in itself—the landlord had warned her and the other tenants that the heating might stop working during the night.
What a time of year for the heating not to work.
She pushes the bed covers off of her to get the radiator from the other room, working in silence.
The flimsy plastic mini-blinds have been left wound up at the top of the windowpane—no jail stripes to paint the bedroom tonight, only the luminous, milky glow of the full moon to douse the silent, strangely cavernous room in an eerie silver cast. Her pale, lavender night clothes, long pants and long-sleeved shirt, are bleached to stark white in the moonlight as all that is not drowned in shadows are.
The radiator rolls over wooden planks with the heavy sort of weary creak Orihime expects out of a rusting locomotive train. Her hands fumble in the dark to join the plug with the outlet in the wall. That's when she hears it.
"Hello."
Orihime yelps and drops the limp cord, letting it hit the floor. Immediately, she hops to her feet, eyes darting wildly around the room, heart beating out of pace with time.
There's a fiery emerald flash like green stars from the flower hair pins resting on the night stand, caught in a wash of moonlight. And when Orihime's gaze is drawn irresistibly to a dark corner of her room, she is met with a darker tint of green, at once dull and piercing. Utterly penetrating, to spear her through and spill her blood.
Orihime recognizes Ulquiorra immediately.
The upper half of his body is washed and painted by the moonlight, in stark contrast with the darkness around him, and everything beneath the waist melts into the shadows, hazy and indistinct and one with the darkness. Ulquiorra stares evenly at her, unblinking and unsmiling.
For a moment, she is frozen, eyes wide open like the proverbial deer trapped in a shaft of bright light. Then, only partially shaking of the leaden weight on her bones that has made her stand stationary, Orihime forces her lips to move, throat as dry and cracked as the desert she left behind.
"…You're dead."
Slowly, he nods, and he seems to Orihime the most solid, substantial thing in the room and all else becomes flimsy cellophane figurines, ready to blow away at a slight breeze, just like her. "Yes… I am… I remember it well…"
So does Orihime, and suddenly a spectral night wind hits her face and blows back her hair in long gusts, pelting her tender skin with sand and gathering ash to lie heavy on her eyelashes. The smell of blood penetrates and permeates and cuts her to her bones—
—And then, there is nothing. All is gone, nothing is left, and Orihime is standing in her bedroom with Ulquiorra and there's no vestige of blood or ash or the desert anywhere near her. Nothing but the memories that moonlight allow to seep over her flesh.
"Strange, isn't it…" Ulquiorra is staring straight through her again. "That I should come here… And yet not so strange…" An even, toneless suggestion hangs primed to live on his tongue.
Orihime's throat tightens and like that they fall back into the pattern they inhabited as prisoner and warden. Except it's different now—as much as she stands with the desire not to offend or make things anymore difficult for herself than they already are, as it was on Hueco Mundo, she is free of him here.
Or, at least, she thought she was.
Hands itching to fidget with her sleeves but restrained, Orihime meets his gaze squarely and does not sit down, instead standing straight-backed and stiff, as if waiting for an attack and it may be that she is. "How can you be here?" She curses herself silently when the shake that she had fought to keep down rises through anyway.
"Do I frighten you, girl?"
He stands before her, a dying beast made of ash and the mockery of blood. There's nothing of him that's real, but his eyes. Real, human eyes grafted onto cold, marbled, utterly dead flesh. The only thing that to Orihime has ever been real here, when all else seems but a hazy, nightmarish dream.
It's his eternal question, what burns him and eats at him.
Ulquiorra tilts his head slightly, as if inquisitive or curious—the closest thing to emotion beside melancholy that Orihime has ever seen him exhibit. "Ghosts can travel, girl. You should know that."
Ghosts are hardly an unusual feature of Orihime's life, not at all out of the ordinary. But this… this is different. Brown eyes narrow slightly then soften, in half-willing and half-unwilling pity. "But Arrancar… can't become ghosts. You don't purify when struck with a zanpakuto. You just… die."
Like he did, fading into cold, dead ash clustering in her eyelashes and in her hair and palms.
There is another slow nod, almost cautious but really just the mockery of caution. "That's true."
Orihime closes her eyes tight. Then either there's some feature of an Arrancar's death that she is not aware of, or else she's seeing things. Hallucinations, waking dreams, chimeras… If I count to three and open my eyes, he won't be there anymore.
…One…
…Two…
…Three…
Orihime opens her eyes.
And he's still there, blinking at her with dull fascination, no doubt wondering what exactly she hopes to accomplish by attempting to banish him the way she would wounds.
Whether this is a dream or a hallucination, Orihime can't break the surface and wake up, so she ceases to worry on that particular point. If she can't wake up, then why bother trying?
The silence is overwhelming and all Orihime can hear is her own breathing, like the sounds a gas mask makes when someone breathes through it, harsh and jarring and far too loud. Unnatural, like the sounds that come in a television show, dramatized to get the pulse racing. Aberrant, like everything seems to come around Ulquiorra.
"Why are you here?" she whispers, coming to what she suspects will be the climax of all this.
There's ash hitting her face, small specks like gray snow or silver stars as they catch the moonlight that shines down waveringly upon them. Orihime stares into the depths of a world that should not belong where it is, the green of Ulquiorra's eyes.
For just a moment, she thinks. Trapped in this metal sieve, she is compressed from all sides, just as she always has been in Hueco Mundo.
A flash comes over her and Orihime takes just a step forward. A silent scream, a howl of agony so primal that it heralds to a time when she wasn't human rises deep from the depths of her own darkness. The agony that hits her when she sees him reduced to this is something she never expected, yet knows to be wholly natural.
"…No, you don't."
And he still doesn't frighten her, but he still makes her sad. Because Orihime could only begin to understand why he was so sad after Ulquiorra became naught but ash resting in the palm of her hands. Because it took her so long to understand, when the truth stood staring her in the face.
He was sad because he was alone. Even though Ulquiorra had no conception of the feeling of sadness and did not understand it when he felt it, just like he couldn't even begin to understand the nature of loneliness, he was lonely, and it made him sad. And that's the biggest part of the tragedy, to Orihime:
He was—is—sad even though he doesn't know he's lonely. Even though he doesn't know he's sad.
How can anyone experience something if they don't know what it is?
Ulquiorra pauses to form his response, sifting his words carefully as he has always done—he has no desire to expend more words than what is absolutely necessary. "I am here…" He frowns, as if this question confuses him, and after a moment Orihime realizes that it does. "…I am here… I suspect, that I am here, because you are here."
Green eyes are bleak and blank as they rake her face. "Because there is nowhere else for me."
No, there isn't. There was never anywhere for Ulquiorra, Orihime knows, and she sensed that when he was dying. He attached himself to her because she didn't know this, because the truth was unknown to her—
—And because, in a way, he needed her. She had made him feel normal, and he needed her to continue feeling normal.
Ulquiorra stares at her, long and still utterly even. But there's an emptiness to it now, a blank, absence of regret that is somehow more intense than any human regret ever could be. The shadows start to envelop him again, swallowing him back into oblivion.
"Tell me, girl. Are you still unafraid? Do I frighten you?"
The last challenge. Orihime's hair is washed to a dull unpolished bronze that rustles and glimmers in the milk-light as she moves forward, bare feet cold against the floor. Her heartbeat rises in her throat.
Her response is the same as it was before.
Her hand stretches outwards.
The expression on Ulquiorra's face is one more at peace than when he was dying, and that, Orihime suspects, says a great deal. As if questions of his have been answered by this brief sabbatical from the reality that he is dead and Arrancar can not become ghosts.
It seems to take Orihime an eternity to cross the floor. Ulquiorra is being enveloped by the shadows sliding down her wall, and there's an odd shifting at his mouth, as the black lips start to stretch.
He's almost smiling, as a single hand with long, skeletal bones of fingers reaches towards her, ghastly but beautiful like a sculpture carved in ivory in the moon's milk.
Orihime's fingers twist around his…
…And then there is nothing.
Ulquiorra is gone, and she is alone, and groping at the wall, wondering where her closure has gone.
And within a moment, she realizes that closure is now in her.
Like he is.