The uneasiness was stifling. It stopped either of us from speaking. It wasn't a lack of words rather than the fact that we harboured too many. Somehow, as though carried by the waves of silence, we could hear them and, if only a little, understand them. Even then, as I stared into the endless depth of his eyes—pools of slate gray fading into black and green, mixed with many other indescribable hues and shades, I barely comprehended all of this—an overwhelming emotion that stilled to nothing, echoed by the false, haunting light of a synthetically conjured moon—the light of Las Noches, the unwavering lantern in this dry, barren desert landscape only found here.
"Do you love me?" he asked. Truths and lies rang bells in my head. Honestly, I didn't know. Did I? For longer than I should have, I pondered this one thought, allowing it to branch into millions of smaller ideas and smaller ones still.
The first fragmented piece was this one: What did I truly feel towards him? The second was this: What did I want from him?
For these questions, there were a multitude of answers. Only one, though, rang true to me.
"Yes," Yes, I wanted to love him. Yes, I wanted him to love me. Yes. Yes meant so many things.
Surprised flitted past his eyes and his brows arched only a fraction of what would have been considered perceptible. He was shocked speechless which, considering who I was speaking to and who I, myself, was, shocked me as well.
I dared to venture further under the guise that he most likely would not speak again.
"I do love you," I went on to say, the world around us seeming to fade into nothingness (though nothingness it may have been from the start). "I care about you," I declared, courage welling up within me as words I had longed to say poured out in a frenzy of speech and stuttering and conclusions I had not previously drawn revealed themselves.
"I see," he breathed, astonished and drained. There was a gentle caress in the tone that he had used that made me believe that I did not need to hear a profession of love or some sort of intimate motion in order for me to believe that what we held between us was past the point of animosity. It was something more.
I then noticed a ghosting hint of a smile that tugged at the corner of his lips. My heart, or at least what would have been my heart, leapt and surged with affection and smug satisfaction. I was satisfied with the fact that he had showed emotion and I felt nothing but the purest of love for him because what it was that he had shown was love. My heart hammered staggeringly heavily in my chest as it swelled with pride.
It was the greatest revelation of all time, like an epiphany.
He loved me.
I loved him.
We loved each other.
Love.
Before I knew what I was doing, I had grabbed him and kissed him. Slowly and even, if I dared to say, timidly, he began to kiss back. He was inexperienced, a bit shy, and a bit nervous. None of this deterred me though. He hadn't shot a cero at my head and ripped it clean off my body (assuming that I would have a body left) which meant that this was alright with him.
It was alright if I kissed him.
If my heart could have been pounding any harder, it would have been then.
Love.
It was useless, it was human, it was an emotion. But, damn it, I loved it. Because this was Ulquiorra, it didn't matter that it was all those things.
Author's Note: I think I'm getting really (in)famous for starting things right smack in the middle of a scene... I was actually writing this in the middle of English class. If you see the paper, it was written in two different pens and also in pencil. For something so short, you'd think that it wouldn't have taken long? It didn't, to be honest. This was something I'd written ages ago. I only recently found it sitting in one of my page protectors. I decided that I might as well finish it so this is the finished product. I hope you like it. If you couldn't tell, it's GrimmUlqui. Of course. I write far too many drabbles, don't I? Eh...hoped you liked it.