Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
She hides the mirrors, jerks curtains off walls to throw over her vanity in a frenzied dance where every second feels like one in which she might collapse.
"If I rip open your chest," he once asked her, "will I see your heart inside? If I split your skull, will it be there?"
He'd turned on her in something that wasn't quite disgust. "You humans speak of 'heart' like it is something you hold in the palm of your hands." She still remembered the way his fingers barely ghosted over the tip of her nose, rested on the front of her uniform. "What is 'heart'?" There was something so innocent about the way he had asked it.
The tears are bitter and her sinuses feel like they've been underwater for days. After the event she cries so hard that she starts to look like Ulquiorra, and when she finally gets out of bed and pushes herself to the bathroom she starts to laugh at the irony, laughing so hard she ends up crying again. They make twin streaks of grime and salt down her cheekbones, and when she tries to smear her face clean again, she can't stop thinking about the way his skin felt when she slapped him—cold, but pulsing with life.
She buries herself in her bedding but doesn't have the energy to match up the sheets with the comforter. The pillowcase is crooked but she doesn't want to adjust it. Was I always this way? There was once a time, she faintly recalled, when everything had a place in her life, and her life had a place in this world.
Nightmares haunt her: the flash of a sword in the distance. The glow of her santen kesshun. His cold fingers, fluttering to dust. That's the image that's imprinted on the back of her eyelids, the one she can't help seeing every time she hears any word that starts with U.
If she looks hard enough at herself, she eventually concludes, maybe she'll see him. She edges the frayed hem of the curtain off of the mirror and stares into her own eyes, reflection looking back at reflection. It takes her less than a minute to realize that he was speaking not with disgust or innocence but with longing.
"If you rip open my chest," she whispers to the reflection in her mind, "if you split open my skull, you will only find yourself." She wonders if maybe that's what they were both looking for the entire time.