Aizen sat, seemingly unperturbed, with deceptive ease on his square white throne. A throne all straight lines and angles to complement the looping coils he manipulated others into. The small, carefully placed smile did not waver for an instant, even as the ruthlessness in his eyes solidified and he ordered nonchalantly,
"Ulquiorra, kindly kill her please."
The Arrancar did not visibly hesitate, but turned on his heel in one slow, fluent movement to face the human girl with the long auburn hair and innocent, innocent honey eyes. He removed a hand from his pocket and pointed a single finger. That was all it would take. One finger and the pieces of her body would never be found. The finger hung like an unasked question in the air between them for a long time, for too long a time. The girl blinked. He did not.
"Aizen-sama," he said, never taking his eyes off her, the melancholy lines down the sides of his face looking more like the evidence of real sadness than the girl had ever seen before. "I find myself unable to comply with your request." And with that he was no longer there, but suddenly before Aizen, strange and terrible and graceful all at once and in mid air and doomed, because the attack, however fast, had no chance of succeeding against him. And Ulquiorra knew it.
At first, he had been slightly incensed that he had been ordered to guard the human girl, but only slightly. Not that it mattered greatly to him, but he was somewhat curious as to why Aizen-sama would go to the trouble of obtaining and maintaining such an obviously insignificant being. Of what use could she, with her quiet air of innocence and faint scent of naivety, possibly be? And so he had watched her, those first few days, with a detached interest impossible to detect.
She had done some predictable things. She had cried. She had refused to eat. She had withdrawn into a reserved shell he could see she was not used to wearing. But she had also done some unexpected things, like the day she had received the garments that marked her as an ally of the Arrancar. He had not anticipated the way the flowing white would take on and magnify her own sad serenity to fit it so beautifully with the song of the crescent moon's tragic light. It had all come together in front of him, prompting him to say, to both their surprise, "It looks better on you than I had expected." Even her firm, if not enthusiastic pledge of allegiance to Aizen-sama and his ambitions had taken him aback, not on its own merit, but because of the resolute and indecipherable something that had stirred silently behind her eyes. He had left with a vague disturbance somewhere within him that refused to take shape, but that he had put aside quickly and without doubt. She was only human, and there was no possibility that she could fight the cunning mental trap Aizen-sama had laid for her. None.
But she had surprised him again, when he went to oversee one of her regular feedings. He had not expected her to be able to sense the fading spiritual pressure of one of her allies amid the many clashes of reiatsu and her distance from the fight. But she had, and her persistence in believing in the impossibility of his survival had escaped his reasoning. It made no sense to him. It was foolish and illogical, an irritating manifestation of whimsical human frailty, and he had berated her for her persistence. He had reminded her where her allegiances now lay, and had dismissed her allies for their incomprehensible ignorance and stupidity. And then she had done the inconceivable. She had slapped him. In the split second while his eyes were still turned away from her, he weighed his allegiance to Aizen-sama with the powerful temptation to remind this frail bundle of flesh and bone exactly who it was that she had dared raise a hand against. But by the time his eyes returned to her face, he had made the necessary decision to comply with Aizen-sama's orders and keep the girl alive…and unharmed. And by the time he had looked back at her, something else had caught his attention; the fiery defiance in her tear-sheened eyes, the fearlessness. These should nothave been there. She was enmeshed in Aizen-sama's trap, was she not? She should not be able to resist, to defy, to burn like that. And for the first time, he had noticed, really noticed her eyes. Not just their warm honey brown that seemed to pull everything around her closer, but the indecipherable thing behind them, that was rapidly taking the shape of…'Trouble,' he thought to himself. More trouble than Aizen-sama knew. He quickly rejected the ridiculous thought. How could she, a mere human woman, be trouble? The intruders coming to her rescue would undoubtedly be cut down without much effort, and she herself, what threat did she represent? Nevertheless, he could not shake his unease and turned to leave.
"I will come again in one hour," he had said, giving nothing away. "If you haven't eaten by then, I'll tie you down and grind that food down your throat. Be prepared for that." In truth, he had almost wished she wouldn't eat, so he would have an excuse to explore at length the degree to which her defiance burned. The door had barely closed when he heard an echoing, lonely sound. He stood still for a second until he had placed it. Crying. The human woman was crying. A weak and useless action, indulged in only by the pitiful. Why then did it stir something within him? The sobs resonated inside him out of all proportion to their muffled volume and made him want to do something. What the something was, he found himself unwilling to contemplate and quickly, he walked away from the door.
When next he saw her, she was healing the intruder beneath the soft warmness of her power, and Grimmjaw was the one standing defiantly next to her, masking his nervousness with an aggressive challenge.
He had returned to her quarters within the hour as promised, only to find the two female Arrancar whose rhyming names he had no interest in recalling, but no trace of the woman. The story they had told him made no sense. They had trapped her and beat her mercilessly without reason or provocation, bruising, breaking the delicate flesh…only to receive no reaction. Then Grimmjaw, of all people, had appeared as her rescuer, snapping off one Arrancar's leg and obliterating the other with a cero.
When Ulquiorra had simply stared them down in stony disbelief, one of them, the one with the short blonde hair, had explained.
"She did it. She healed us. Both of us," she said and shivered. The other nodded jerkily.
"She didn't even say anything. Her face didn't even change. She just…" her voice trailed off as her eyes hit the floor. The first girl continued.
"I slapped her in the face and she didn't even flinch. She just kept going, with that look on her face. I've never…I've never been so scared of anyone."
This Ulquiorra could not fathom. Why would the woman frighten them? What about her could have caused their subdued voices and haunted eyes? And most puzzling, what could have caused her to heal her attackers? What sort of unearthly woman was this?
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