Over a year now.
It has been over a year now since the pain in her side, overly aggressive, life ruining and completely sinister Nnoitra Gilga had died.
Nel had not known how to feel about it at first. What do you do, mourn the death of a man who tried to kill you? But how could she not when she had gone to such lengths to preserve that life? The questions had gone unanswered. She couldn't talk to Dondochakka or Pesshe about the man who had physically maimed them.
She could talk to no one.
Would it be better, she had wondered, if she had killed him? Seen the last satisfaction in his eye as he died by her hands instead of that shinigami? After all, he was despair. When she thought about it now all her questions seemed to fit. Why did she follow him? Why did she ask? Why did she fight?
He kept laughing at her. Yet he answered everytime, and she persisted. Why had she persisted? She was someone who cared for others. He was someone who spat on the corpses of those weaker than he. And when she had heard of Ichigo's 'friend' – and heard a shinigami comfort her that Nnoitra had not killed him, that he was out of the way and would do no harm – she stopped.
He had changed after all. Not enough for her to see, or perhaps that was the issue. He did not want her to see.
Time had passed her by. Even in her small and incomprehensible form she felt anxiety and sorrow. She could not explain it. It was as if a piece that had been wedged deep inside of her from her birth was suddenly gone. Though the piece was jagged and unwelcome, it was all she had ever known. She had come to accept the piece as a necessity; she even tried to understand it somehow. She obsessed over how to understand it.
But now that piece was gone, and Nel stopped to look in a moment of silence. Her fraccion asleep and peace around her, Nel could not stop searching for something in the emptiness. She smiled and pressed her hand against the cold hard ground.
She understood now.
"This is your despair, then?" she cooed in a voice that sounded like her suppressed self. In place of her jagged and misshapen piece was now an emptiness that was filled with what she could only describe. . . as despair.
As if it was a ghost, she thought she caught a glimpse in the sands. Yet Neliel knew better, the sands of Hueco Mundo were merely hallucinations of the dead.
And no matter how yearned for, even the dead man's hallucination did not appear to the mournful arrancar again.