Tesla wakes up on a metal table and Szayel's hand is buried in his chest right up to the wrist.
Distantly, that strikes him as not being very good.
He can taste blood. The room is thick with the smells of rust and meat.
Szayel's face is right there, too, angular and focused. His pink hair is sweat-dark at the roots and falling forward around his eyes. He is close.
Tesla can feel Szayel's breath on his insides. That's… uncomfortable.
Above them, a light flickers: pale, bright, inconsistent and maddening. Something, somewhere is dripping.
"Ah, you're finally awake. And just in time for the main event," says Szayel. "Don't move."
Tesla doesn't feel like he can move, actually. His limbs are heavy and his body aches. He can feel Szayel's hair tickling his neck and it scrapes like needle points.
Something's wrong.
Tesla remembers –
Bones cracking underfoot. Nnoitra. That stupid girl of Aizen-sama's, a man - shinigami – with spiked hair, bare steel, blood flying. The sky, so blue and bright and his eye aching – leaking? Nnoitra. Bleeding.
Nnoitra falling.
"Nnoitra-sama," he grates. It's an effort to use his voice. His head throbs in time with it, and something in his chest thrums like a plucked string under Szayel's deft hands. He can feel what Szayel must have meant by main event, because the swell of Szayel's reiatsu in his chest is deeply disconcerting.
"Don't talk, either."
Tesla clenches his jaw. "Nnoitra-sama," he repeats, throwing himself into the effort. If Nnoitra has fallen, Szayel's hands in his thoracic cavity don't matter. "He was–"
"Here," drawls a familiar voice, just out of sight. "Shut up and let him work."
"Both of you could shut up," says Szayel through his teeth. There's a muscle ticking slowly away in his jaw, and he doesn't look up from whatever his hand is doing inside Tesla's chest. "This isn't as straightforward as your simple minds may imagine."
"Thought you were 'perfect'," says Nnoitra leadingly. "Can't handle a little distraction?"
That's …different. Nnoitra doesn't treat Szayel like an equal. Nnoitra treats Aizen like a superior and everybody else like a victim waiting to happen. Usually Szayel is just… maybe the kind of victim who might cheat before Nnoitra does. Too clever by half.
And yet.
"I am perfect," he agrees, and Tesla feels a strand of hair spill over something vital and sensitive in his chest. He feels ill. "Your fraccion is not. Even a perfect being cannot make pure gold from base lead. … And if I personally controlled reality I wouldn't need either of you to begin with."
"Aa? Sounds like excuses to me." The voice is coming closer, along with the soft double tap of his heels. Tesla swallows. He wants to see – he wants to confirm with his own eyes that Nnoitra is well, is alive.
"If you want him to wake up tomorrow you'll shut up and let me fix him. You," he adds, slicing his golden eyes toward Tesla's, "stop moving."
Oddly, Nnoitra falls silent. Perhaps he's too tired. The fight was a hard one, and even indomitable monsters must grow weary sometimes.
Tesla tries to stay still. He doesn't know what's going on but Nnoitra clearly wants it to happen – so Tesla is quiet, is still and obedient, even when something in his chest wrenches horribly. "Ah… Whoops," mutters Szayel.
He can feel Nnoitra's attention sharpen. "'Whoops'?"
Szayel lifts one bloody hand and flutters his fingers at Nnoitra dismissively. Working.
His hand is sheathed in reiatsu as well as blood. Hollows cannot use their own corrupt energy to heal others, not directly. Whatever Szayel's doing has his looking black and sickly.
Tesla closes his eye. The light flickers still, showing up in black and red patterns beneath his eyelid. He feels so heavy…
Two more tapping steps - click-click, click-click – then the weight of something on his face, slick and silky and soft. He inhales and it smells like something homey and familiar, edged but comfortable, something that makes his shoulders drop. Even against the scents of blood and meat and metal, it's good.
He cracks his eye open again.
Nnoitra is upside down and close enough to touch. The soft thing is his hair, smooth and inky against Tesla's cheek. Above his head Tesla can see the sharp curve of Santa Teresa's blade towering.
His single eye is watching whatever Szayel's doing. That strange wrench in his chest comes again, perfectly in time with the downwards tug of Nnoitra's mouth.
Tesla is dizzy.
He shifts his head, just the tiniest bit, and Nnoitra's hair slips over his mouth and tumbles off his jaw.
He breathes in again. It smells like home.
Nnoitra leans on the edge of the table and the angle gives him a clear view of his chest. His clothes are still ripped and the scars on his chest are healed but discoloured. It cannot, Tesla thinks, have been such a long time…
The light overheard flickers.
There is a third, final jerk, and then Szayel's reiatsu floods Tesla's senses. He hears the gasp he makes, but everything else is lost to the rush of painful power burning through his chest.
"There," Szayel says, the exact second he opens his eye. Tesla blinks.
Things have moved. The light is still flickering. His chest hurts, but nobody's got their hands jammed in it.
He takes a deep, full breath.
The hurt doesn't change. At least it doesn't get worse.
"Finally." That's Nnoitra, and Tesla turns freely to see him. He's seated on a second long, metal table, one leg dangling off the edge. He's so tall his boot nearly scrapes the floor. He's changed now, dressed in older clothing – it's almost identical, but there's no enormous round collar.
…Tesla hasn't seen him dressed like this since he stopped cutting his hair.
"Ahh," says Szayel, noticing where he looks. "Yes, we can't quite return to Las Noches yet."
Las Noches is where all their things would be, Tesla supposes.
Nnoitra, too follows the line of his attention and tugs at the collar, frowning fiercely. In response, Tesla drops his gaze.
…the scar on Nnoitra's chest is dramatic. It's more framed by his clothing than covered, a huge, pinkish, lopsided X over his chest.
Tesla's eye lingers on the ugly bump in his collarbone. The bone appears fragile like that.
Nnoitra looks stringy and slight, despite his height and strength of arms. It is an absurd sort of irony: that Tesla can see most of Nnoitra-sama's bones and shifting tendons, but even his skin can break a zanpakutou.
"The hell're you looking at? My face's up here."
Obediently, Tesla raises his eye again. Scars never bother Nnoitra anyway.
Tesla cannot sense Las Noches, not even peripherally.
There's a machine in one corner, made from the cannibalised remains of several others and held together with pins and hope. Its screen wavers and fuzzes out every few minutes, but it spits out paper consistently. It scrapes, although Tesla can't see what makes the noise.
He has been content for now to know that Nnoitra is alive, that Nnoitra is well enough to fight. After their fight with the shinigami, it feels like by far the most important thing.
Nnoitra speaks, he moves. Nnoitra is here, heartless and breathing as any hollow.
His memories of the fight are unreliable, but… the shinigami never broke his mask, Tesla decides.
Anything else, Nnoitra would recover from, given time.
Shinigami are supposed to be dangerous. Don't they teach them about hollows' masks in shinigami school? Tesla wonders. He had them dead to rights; was it ignorance or carelessness or stupid sentiment that kept him from finishing it?
"Where are we now?"
Not near Las Noches, obviously. But this room, although a little dilapidated with its dripping fixtures and flickering lights, is serving a clear purpose as a research centre.
Which means Szayel must have built it after he acquired opposable thumbs.
Interesting thought.
"Hidden," he replies, which only confirms Tesla's suspicions. His machine hisses and he looks over his shoulder and toward the paper it's spewing. "Aizen-sama's forces are losing."
"Knew that."
"No, I suspected and you assumed. Now we know."
Nnoitra crosses his arms and lifts one shoulder as though the difference is splitting hairs. Szayel clicks his tongue, evidently annoyed, but doesn't bother to explain further.
Instead he turns to Tesla, and the next ten minutes are acutely uncomfortable – press this, look here, count this, stay still.
"Does this hurt?" he asks, and jams a gleaming needle beneath Tesla's thumbnail.
Tesla yanks his hand back and the needle clatters to the ground, dislodged by his sudden movement.
Szayel makes a dissatisfied noise. In a swift movement, he seizes him by the wrist again. His grip is not tight enough to hurt, but his reiatsu is suddenly thick and crushing.
"Yes," says Tesla, blinking rapidly, watching his own hand. He eyes the second pin in Szayel's grip. "It hurts. You don't need to do it again."
Szayel's eyes narrow. "Don't I? Experiments require repetition."
That may be true, but Tesla knows he only does it again to hurt him for resisting the first time.
Nnoitra laughs at them from his perch on the second table, swinging his leg beneath him. It sounds more like pathology than humour, sharp like a broken hinge. Neither looks toward him, and Szayel ignores the sound with a new tension in his shoulders.
They are both very aware of the blood on Tesla's hand and of the heaviness of Nnoitra's attention.
Somewhere, something is dripping.
Tesla ducks his head, lowers his eyes, and stays quiet and obedient.
Sometimes it's best not to draw too much attention, and any time Nnoitra sounds like that is exactly one of those occasions. Tesla doesn't need experience to know that – he knows it in his hindbrain, in his bones and skin – but he has experience to remind him, too.
The remainder of Szayel's tests are equally uncomfortable, and Tesla suspects more than half of them are made up out of some petty spite. They amuse Szayel, he guesses, and given that Tesla can move and breathe again –
Well, maybe Szayel's personality is a price he can afford to pay.
"He needs rest. But he'll live, as long as you don't break him," Szayel tells Nnoitra finally. Then, fearlessly, he goes on: "Now please leave the laboratory – do as you like, but if you leave the building others will be able to sense you."
"That's boring," Nnoitra complains, running one hand through his hair.
Szayel gives him a look. He sets his shoulders and turns away, back to the mess on the table. The blood on the table is old now, and only the few drops from Tesla's hand remain bright and fresh.
"So leave, then, if you're so eager."
They don't leave.
Well, they leave the room – they leave Szayel, oddly alone, to his implements and his bloody mess and ungainly machines.
Tesla wonders if he still has fraccion – or if not, will he make more? Lumina and Verona are… not the kinds of fraccion Tesla prefers to spend time with, but there's nobody he prefers to spend time with over Nnoitra anyway.
He thinks Szayel is best not left all on his own for too long. For everyone's sake.
It is boring, too: the building is four rooms large, and one of them is the laboratory from which Szayel has expelled them. Of the other rooms, there's a tap and some large humming machine in one and the others are empty but for a couple of bags and the rags of Nnoitra's last outfit. The trousers might be salvageable. Maybe. It's hard to tell because everything's still stiff with blood from the fight.
"If I may ask…" Tesla says, and pauses in case Nnoitra will cut him off.
He does.
"What the hell were you thinking?" he hisses, whirling on him.
Tesla flinches.
"I – sir, I'm sorry. I–" wasn't fast enough. Couldn't dodge. Did not predict the attack correctly. None of the possible excuses he could make are good ones – not to Nnoitra.
Nnoitra does not tolerate weak fraccion – which is why he only ever has Tesla.
Tesla deserves the blow that's coming and even though he can feel Nnoitra-sama's reiatsu rising, roiling, thick and dark and heavy and rooting him to the ground, he doesn't make an effort to dodge.
It doesn't come, which seems strange. Instead one of Nnoitra's long-fingered hands clenches in Tesla's hair and jerks his head back, back until his neck hurts and his spine throbs and Szayel's meticulous stitch job pulls hard at his skin.
He stares into Nnoitra's eye with his own remaining one and swallows hard. It hurts his throat.
The room is fuzzy, or perhaps Nnoitra's reiatsu is just that thick in it. The spiritual pressure from Szayel's fit of temper has nothing on the sheer weight of Nnoitra's.
The hum of mechanics in the next room seems suddenly very loud.
"Don't – don't fuck with me," hisses Nnoitra. There's some kind of incommunicability there, but Tesla knows exactly what he means, even when the words get lost. This, he thinks is somewhere between that hurt and I don't like it and how dare you hurt me?
Nothing reduces Nnoitra to blind rage quite as fast as his own helplessness.
"I really didn't mean to," Tesla murmurs. Then, with uncommon softness and a strange guilt welling somewhere in his belly: "Nnoitra-sama, I'm sorry."
That hand in his hair jerks, yanks, pulls him painfully higher. Tesla braces himself against it, rising onto his toes. He can hear the squeak of his boot, the soft strained ah of breath caught in his throat.
He clenches his jaw when Nnoitra shakes him. There's a bangle pressed into his temple, cold and metallic. He can feel Nnoitra's fingers trembling. "I'm not going to drag your sorry pelt to safety again, do you understand?"
He sounds like he really might be scared of that.
Tesla knows that, having fallen in combat, his chances of being left to bleed out while Nnoitra staggered away should have been very, very high.
Equally, he knows that Nnoitra would have been furious about it later. Off and on, off and on, stumbling through Hueco Mundo all alone and trailing broken bodies, with a litany of how dare you and you deserved it competing, howling for attention in his mind.
It's so obvious and predictable that Tesla can almost see it.
But they're here instead. He doesn't know why.
"I understand," says Tesla, which is only half true. He understands that Nnoitra won't save him twice.
He doesn't know what possessed Nnoitra to take him. He definitely cannot imagine Nnoitra approaching Szayel, injured and tired, abasing himself for a favour on Tesla's behalf.
But Szayel would never have helped him otherwise. Szayelaporro Granz is not in the habit of performing difficult tasks for altruistic reasons.
Nnoitra lets him go, abruptly enough and roughly enough that he nearly falls.
"I'm– I am sorry," Tesla says, and he means it more now, if that's even possible. He feels a bit sick just thinking about it. Nnoitra should not have to lower himself for Tesla.
"Don't fucking pity me!"
That's when the blow comes, sharp and out of nowhere, cracking against the side of his face. He staggers sideways but doesn't fall.
Nnoitra turns away, ignoring whatever mixed expression is on Tesla's face.
His injuries hurt, but not as badly as they did, and he's still on his feet – so whatever Szayel did certainly worked.
He wonders how Nnoitra even found Szayel, how he even knew to look for him. They both felt Szayel's reiatsu fold in on itself in a painful true death following his fight with three others.
They've worked together before, Tesla considers as he tries to catch his breath. Szayel and Nnoitra. They teamed up against Nelliel. Maybe they know each other better than Tesla thinks.
Tesla doesn't mind silence usually, but this one is uncomfortable with the two of them standing still and uncertain in the middle of an empty room.
It's quiet except for the dull hum of machinery and Tesla's uncomfortably laboured breathing. His body isn't recovered and doesn't appreciate being shoved around.
The side of his face hurts, too – the blind side, because Nnoitra always aims for the blind side. It probably never occurs to him not to. It doesn't matter. It is enough that Nnoitra uses the hand that isn't holding a weapon.
"If I can ask…" This time he doesn't interrupt. "What are we doing here now?"
"That moron left me alive," Nnoitra says, kicking his destroyed shirt away.
Of course that is what Nnoitra would be fixed upon. It's not really what Tesla is asking, but it, too, is a problem.
Nnoitra drops to the ground. He props his spine against the wall but his legs sprawl out. He takes up a lot of space.
Tesla kneels as well, wincing at how stiff and sore it feels.
Nnoitra taps his nails on the flat of his zanpakuto's blade. Tap-tap, tap-tap. "I'm gonna kill him," he says conversationally.
Tesla nods. Obviously.
"But not yet?" he prompts.
Nnoitra's expression contorts, and Tesla wishes he hadn't pushed. Instead of snapping, though, Nnoitra rubs the trailing edge of his new scar and glares. "That fucker–" he nods in the direction of Szayel's door, "thinks Azien- s… Aizen's going to lose. We're missing the fight," he adds, very sourly indeed, "but… everyone thinks we're dead, and he thinks he can get us into Soul Society after."
After. When they're recovering. When they think all the Espada are gone. When they think they're safe.
Yes, Tesla can see the appeal.
"Can he?" he wonders.
"How the hell should I know?" snaps Nnoitra. "If he can't, I'll kick him all the way back to Las Noches."
"I didn't mean –"
"You never fuckin' mean, do you, you mouthy piece of shit?" Nnoitra asks, but it's more dry than angry, which is a good sign. "What're you doing all the way over there, anyway?"
Tesla lets his mouth curl into a half smile and crawls forward.
Nnoitra isn't warm, which he thinks is probably the point – the polar night of hueco mundo is always cold, and mantis-shaped hollows are not strictly exothermic. Tesla, on the other hand, puts out heat like a small furnace, and his injuries burn even hotter.
"Don't look so smug about it," Nnoitra complains, even as he leans into the warmth. "I'm still pissed off at you. You're not forgiven. And we're not equals."
"Nnoitra-sama, I would never," Tesla assures him immediately. For whatever reason, Nnoitra-sama has seen fit to bring him home. Now aching, tired and uncertain, he has time to recover. He curls closer in tiny increments.
Quietly, Nnoitra scoffs.
Let me know if you liked something in particular about this if you feel like commenting. Otherwise, have a nice night.