Thirteen Minutes

by AbstractError

Objects in the rear view mirror...

Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.

Courtesy of Meatloaf.

Listen to the song of the same name :)

---

Ishida's fingers lingered over the confirmation button for a long time, without daring to press it.

It was not the fact that he had invaded Szayel's bedroom to make him so apprehensive of opening the picture folder he'd casually stumbled upon in his attempt at finding out why the Arrancar's mood had taken such a sharp turn for the better. Nor was he unnerved by the possibility of being discovered at any given minute.

Even if the band of Shinigami had not practically been next door, Ishida would have felt equally safe – by now, his fear of the Octava had completely faded, being replaced by an odd and thoroughly unexplainable fascination. If Szayel had intended to harm him in any way, he would have done so already. Besides, Ishida thought, in his twisted way, the Arrancar had demonstrated a surprising amount of good will towards Nemu; he clearly expected nothing in exchange for setting her free, and he had not fussed over his generosity, as if the selflessly good act had deserved no one's attention – least of all his own.

No, Ishida thought, it was not fear of being caught that made him hesitate, but rather the eerie sensation of standing at the barrier between two worlds. His finger hanging over the confirmation button, he felt as Alice standing before the looking glass – knowing he could go through, but not really understanding what he would face on the other side.

He pressed.

Reassuringly enough, nothing cataclysmic occurred. The folder was not even password protected. A long listing of miniature pictures appeared on the screen – all neatly and coldly numbered in ascending order, with no other reference to their contents.

It was amusing, the archer thought, smiling to himself; Szayel apparently dispensed more emotion on his coding than on his links to his past. Where others might have named their pictures in an emotional manner, trying to link them to a particularly pleasant event – Me and Uryuu, fishing, summer of '97...

...two months before mother died...

He swallowed dry, and his smile faded.

Where others might have named their pictures in an emotional manner, Szayel had probably thought that numbers were sufficient. Desperately trying to chase away the memory of his five year old self standing in a boat besides his father and smiling sheepishly, Ishida realized that he really liked Szayel Aporro's filing system.

He clicked a picture at random – 00072 seemed as interesting as any of the rest. Ishida leaned forward, to get a better grasp of its contents.

The picture was a scan; the original had been overexposed and slightly titled to one side, in clear sign that the photographer had been in a rush. It showed a handsome, fair young man, with shoulder long straight blonde hair, standing in front of the unmistakeable silhouette of Notre Dame, in Paris. He looked smug and thoroughly assured of himself; his left arm was tightly and possessively entangled around the waist of a stunningly beautiful brunette, who laughed while leaning her cheek on his shoulder. And though her hair was a deep shade of black, and her half-closed eyes looked green rather than grey, Ishida had no doubt over who the young woman was.

Neliel Tu.

Her features were the same, and though her frame was slightly less voluptuous than at present, she could hardly be mistaken for anyone else – the nature of her smile, the unmistakeable air of innocence and confidence that radiated from her entire being were telling enough. She wore a pair of purple fluorescent tights, randomly matched with an equally fluorescent green T-shirt, a taste that had been characteristic to the beginning of the 80s, and had, thankfully, gone extinct since.

Yet the man could not possibly have been Szayel Aporro, Ishida concluded, leaning even further in – there was a certain resemblance, something in the bone structure of the finely chiselled features and in the porcelain perfection of the skin, yet...

Then, something caught the archer's eye.

Behind the couple that was the centre of the photograph, half hidden by passers-by and all but inconspicuous to anyone who was not pointedly searching for it, was the figure of a third character. It was a teenager a couple of years younger than the two; his hair was a shade that was neither red, nor blonde, but rather a faded, unfortunate combination of the two. His face was half hidden by an information leaflet, but he was not reading it; his attention seemed intently focused on the couple, and there was no mistaking the cutting glance and tense attention that lurked behind the rounded frames of the glasses.

Ishida frowned, and flicked to the next picture.

And this time, he got what he was searching for.

The image caught Szayel Aporro up close, though he had been clearly trying to avoid the objective – delicate long fingers stretched forward and entire frame in graceful evasive motion. A lock of dark hair obscured the lower end of the photograph, betraying the identity of the person behind the camera, and though Szayel struggled to look displeased and dignified, the glitter in his eyes showed he was anything but.

'I used to tell her that she'd steal our souls with that camera,' Szayel Aporro said, from behind. Ishida jumped and turned, blushing fiercely. 'She used to answer that she was merely storing them. Who would have guessed she was so right?'

'Szayel Aporro...' the Quincy began, in deep embarrassment. 'I did not mean to...'

'Of course you did,' the Arrancar purred, sitting on the bed with his legs crossed and sensuously leaning back. 'You meant to pry, and that is what you are doing. I am amused,' he said, swinging his right leg. 'I thought all your curiosity in my regard would cease once Nemu was free.'

The human hesitated for a moment.

'I think you have plenty of other things to tell,' he evasively answered, trying not to outright tell the Arrancar that he'd found his behaviour since he had put out the light at the side of the panel unusual.

'And?' Szayel prompted further, tilting his head to the side. 'Have you found what you were looking for?'

'I am not sure what I found,' Ishida truthfully responded.

He shrugged defensively.

'But I am curious,' he admitted. 'Your behaviour towards Neliel Tu is not...'

Ishida stopped, searching for the correct word.

'Rational?' Szayel snickered.

The human nodded.

'There are plenty of things that trigger irrational behaviour in the universe, Ishida Uryu,' Szayel shrugged. 'Even I cannot do away with all of them – and I find it is pointless to try to repress some of them. Denial is a useless expenditure of mental energy,' he smiled. 'So, in Neliel Tu's regard, I surrender and act as my first instinct dictates. Doing anything else would be too tiresome.'

'Would it not be easier if you told her that...'

You love her? Ishida thought, yet the words remained stuck in his throat. Even though he realized the phrase was true, the dissonance between Szayel Aporro's being and the concept of him actually caring for someone was too striking.

'...how you feel?' the archer concluded.

'Not really,' Szayel shrugged. 'It would demand elaboration, and an explanation I am unwilling to offer her at this point in time. Akin to the type of explanation your clansman is not eager to offer Lilinette,' the Octava viciously purred, knowing he would unmistakeably strike a nerve.

'You don't want her to remember you,' Ishida said, softly.

'No, I do not,' Szayel Aporro smiled. 'So,' he gleefully began, the pitch of his voice suddenly changing, 'did I look anything like you imagined I did?'

Willingly surrendering to the topic switch, Ishida took a closer look at the picture.

'Not really, no,' he admitted with a little snicker. 'If anything, I thought you would have been...'

'Anorexic, greasy-haired and with acne ridden skin,' Szayel smiled.

'Something along those lines, yes,' Ishida shrugged.

Indeed, there was nothing of the stereotypical image of an introverted, too intelligent teenager in the picture before him. In truth, aside for the odd colour of the hair and for the woefully unfashionable rounded frames of the glasses, the boy in the picture looked normal, somewhat too meticulously well groomed, and, in spite of the striking perfection of his effeminate features, quite handsome.

'How old were you?' Ishida asked.

'Sixteen,' Szayel answered, after a small pause. 'Do not be fooled, though. This was taken the summer that I got my first doctor's degree.'

'First?' the Quincy inquired. 'How many did you have?'

'Three, before I died.' The Arrancar dryly responded. 'Molecular biology, which was the first, electrical engineering, which was the second, and organic chemistry, which was my last. I had just started on nuclear physics, but I never completed.'

'Wow,' Ishida breathed, not bothering to hide his surprise. 'You were in a hurry! How old were you...'

He yet again stopped, realizing how ridiculously intrusive his next question would be. Szayel guessed it and offered an answer nonetheless.

'I was two months short of thirty when I died,' he said, emotionlessly. 'And it was not that I was in any hurry. It was that the rest of you,' he muttered, with unexpected spite, 'all of you are too damned slow.'

Eight feet tall in a world of dwarves, Ishida suddenly recalled, swallowing dry. Stark's description had been painfully accurate.

'I am a medical school graduate, in truth', Szayel snickered, 'but at first I was too young to take a residency – since, clearly, none of the fossils dared let a fifteen year old actually practice...Something or other about emotional maturity,' he sneered. 'And after that, when I was the right age, three hospital boards decided I was...how was this said? Too emotionally mature. What was the exact wording? Ah, indeed, listen to this: deprived of empathy, clinical...one of them even went as far as to say frightening! Can you imagine that?'

Ishida gaped, not knowing whether saying that he could, indeed, imagine it, would annoy the Arrancar even more than the memory had. Fortunately, Szayel Aporro was too angry to notice.

'As if empathy were a prerequisite for practicing medicine,' he leered.

'Isn't it?' the Quincy shot back.

'Depends on how you regard medicine,' Szayel answered, cranking his nose. 'If you think medicine is only about comfortably curing a couple of hundred people in your entire lifetime, then probably, yes, empathy is needed. But that is a remarkably narrow view of the world, Quincy – there are multiple dilemmas that coddling a few hundred sick idiots will never solve. That was what I was after; one does not need empathy to perform surgery or research viruses. As most lesser people choose to forget, it is highly questionable whether the idea of retinal transplant, for one, would have occurred to anyone had it not been for Third Reich physicians questioning if a man could see with another man's eye, and testing the hypothesis on subjects that had no possibility to refuse... But, indeed, all of them were entrenched in their little ethical dilemmas, afraid to experiment and unable to see further than at an arm's length. Hopelessly lacking,' he fiercely concluded.

Ishida swallowed his words; the gesture had been too visible, yet, unlike what he had expected, Szayel smiled seductively.

'You're thinking that they were right, and that I am quite insane,' he purred, daring the archer to contradict. 'Don't bother denying it,' Szayel chuckled, though Ishida had opened his mouth to utter a feign denial. 'Everyone I came into contact with since I was five intuited it in some form or another, though no one could really and fully place it. Most just settled on awkward, and left it at that... It was only my mother who understood it with any degree of certainty, and every time she took me to yet another doctor who helplessly had to declare I was perfectly sane, her world died a little.'

'I am sure it was not the case,' Ishida artificially said, making Szayel smirk. 'No one wants their child to be ill...'

'You are a sweet boy, Ishida Uryu,' the Arrancar purred, making Ishida unsure of whether the words had been a compliment or a well disguised insult, 'but my mother was right. And no one truly understood it; obviously, no one could have. She was the only person who had to live with the two of us, and observed what was actually wrong.'

'Two?' the Quincy echoed.

'Myself and Illfordt,' Szayel nodded. 'In the defence of the good child psychologists, though,' the Arrancar followed, lying back with his arms crossed under his head and looking at the ceiling, 'the medical term for our shared disorder was coined much later, and even when it was finally defined and accepted, it could only be diagnosed in adults. Ironically, my mother had been fighting a losing battle all the way. By the time when it could actually have been identified with us, both of us had become remarkably adept at mimicking normality, and our mother had given up.'

'...P.P....psychopathic personalities...' he dreamily uttered. 'Do you know what that is?'

Ishida shook his head.

'It is the correct medical term for an intelligent individual who is unable to develop a conscience. The emotional transmitters and receptors in the brain fire in vain. The term was only invented in 1983. I was nineteen, and very, very amused at reading the symptom description.'

The Arrancar smiled resplendently.

'There are two types of it, too – one is aggressive narcissism, the symptoms of which are superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, utter lack of remorse or guilt, complete lack of empathy and promiscuous sexual behaviour. Does any of this remind you of someone?' Szayel sweetly inquired, propping himself on an elbow.

Ishida winced.

'The other,' Szayel continued, not bothering to hide his amusement, 'is social deviancy. That was never really my thing,' he chuckled. 'though need for stimulation and proneness to boredom are the root of my endless curiosity. In turn, Illfordt had a complete lack of long-term planning abilities and a short attention span. Poor behavioural control, impulsivity, juvenile delinquency...Though a few characteristics were mixed, I and my brother were remarkable archetypes of the pathology. Oddly enough,' the Arrancar frowned, 'I think my mother always found him a lot easier to deal with.'

'How so?' the archer inquired.

'Well,' Szayel shrugged, 'it is easier to deal with a child that amuses himself by going around the neighbourhood throwing rocks to break people's windows, than with a child that works quietly for months, saving his allowance to buy rats, then cats, then dogs, to kill and dissect.'

The Quincy cringed yet again.

'How does one handle that?' Szayel smiled, arching an eyebrow. 'The child is not stealing the neighbour's cat; he is doing nothing illegal or that can be legally defined as wrong.'

'But it's still creepy as hell,' Ishida breathed.

'Of course,' Szayel agreed. 'I believe you can now see where my mother was coming from.'

'But how could the doctors not see that?' the Quincy protested. 'I think cruelty to animals is one of the clearest symptoms of the pathology...'

'A-ha!' Szayel triumphantly exclaimed. 'This is where I had them. I was not cruel. I did not set said animals on fire, or hang them or skin them alive. I used ethanol poisoning – simple, fast, efficient and painless. I had made a still, and extracted ethanol fumes from ordinary medicinal alcohol. There was not a single doctor who did not think that was bloody ingenious for a six year old, I have to say. Plus,' the Arrancar continued, 'the knowledge of zoology and mammal anatomical make-up I possessed was grandiose. They were a complete loss. You can medicate a child for being pointlessly cruel, but not for wanting to learn. And I was, by all means, learning.'

'Yes,' Ishida shrugged helplessly. 'Resistance to cuteness is not exactly a disease. Neither is curiosity, in the end,' he forced himself to say. 'After all, experimentation on animals is not at all uncommon and goes to far crueller lengths than dissection.'

'Exactly,' Szayel Aporro confirmed.

'Your mother must have been horrified, though,' Ishida whispered.

'She was,' the Arrancar nodded. 'And she was completely torn. On one hand, she had a son who did nothing right – in spite of extreme intelligence, Illfordt was not teachable and uncontrollably violent. There wasn't a week that went by without a teacher's note or a suspension, and he barely made any grade at all. Primary and secondary school were a nightmare. Thankfully, once he made it to high-school, he took up sports, and he excelled – it consumed his impulsiveness, and the fact that he was unquestionably good kept the teachers off his back while I assured most of his passing grades.'

'On the other hand' Szayel followed, 'she had me. I did nothing wrong. Ever. I was quiet, clean and meticulous. No one could measure my intelligence quotient – I have never failed a single IQ question in the hundreds of tests that were administered. I remembered everything I read or saw or heard just once, but nothing she could do, save from asking all the pet shops in the area never to sell me anything, could stop me from conducting my research. She did her best to distract me - she made me reproduce drawings, I did, with good results. She made me play an instrument. I did – I am a technically good pianist. Everything that I touched, I excelled at. I was...'

'...perfect,' Ishida sighed.

'Perfect,' Szayel agreed, with a wide, self-congratulatory grin. 'But, at the end of the day, once I had done everything that she had asked of me without protest, I returned to my room and to my dissections. I did not stop until she actively forbid it – I did not even protest against that. I just went and got myself a chemistry set, and kept on from there.'

'What I lacked was empathy, and that severe gap made Illfordt far more manageable. He could function in a group and he always managed to find a posse of misfits that utterly worshipped him – on the good side, however, he could manifest love for my mother and understand that she loved him, to the extent where he actively tried to tone down his behaviour when he could and hide it from her when he couldn't. It made it easier on her, I would assume. I, on the other hand, could neither read emotional responses from others, nor produce any of my own. For a long time, I could not even understand why they were necessary. Until Neliel Tu...Nellie Two, dubbed so because her mother was also...Nellie,' Szayel smiled, with an entirely different flavour, 'lost her cat.'

'Eh?' Ishida perked.

'Neliel Tu lived next door to us,' the Arrancar said. 'She was born on the exact same day as Illfordt, and I think it is safe to say that he was the love of her life. Ever since I can remember she tried to keep him out of trouble, and she had a knack from diverting his destructive impulses; if he felt like throwing rocks, she took him to the lake. If he felt like splattering paint over things, she made him paint a fence, or a tree. My mother treasured her for this talent, and Nellie was constantly around him, and constantly around me – there was a two foot tall fence between our yards. Nothing could have kept us separated, I guess.'

'She had a grey, old and ugly cat intelligently called Snuggles. Quite awful I must say, but, she was eight,' Szayel explained. 'It was run over by a car – I assure you, I did nothing to it – and Neliel was inconsolable for two weeks. I obviously could not feel her pain, but her constant crying in the yard was unsettling in a way that I could not quite place. Thus, I tried to console her and keep her from making noise outside my window the only way I know how.'

'Gods in heaven,' Ishida breathed.

'You're jumping to conclusions, Quincy,' Szayel scolded with a smirk. 'I went over and explained that according to the theory of relativity, this universe is not the only possible universe, and that, for every activity, there are an infinite number of parallel activities happening at the same time. Thus, it was not only possible, but quite probable that in another universe, Snuggles was alive and well.'

'That could not have gone over well,' Ishida giggled, despite himself.

'Not at all,' Szayel agreed. 'Illfordt on the other hand was a lot brighter, emotionally. Where I tried to make her reason and rationalize her pain, he just went over and got her another cat. Simple as day, but I would never have thought of it, for you see, I took everything at face value and was insensitive to emotional undertones – if she flatly stated she did not want another cat, that she wanted Snuggles, I believed her. Illfordt did not. And though it took me years to realize it, that day was the day he won, and I lost.'

'The occasion might seem menial to you,' the Arrancar continued, with sudden tension in his voice, 'but I remember it poignantly because it was the first time that I grasped that I was lacking something. When he got her the new kitten, and she began smiling and laughing again, I felt this unexplainable surge of rage, so powerful that I was almost incapacitated for two full days. How was it possible that he could make her smile again and I could not? I was the brightest, and my approach was the correct one, judging by the information I had so, why...?'

'Clearly,' Szayel sighed, resuming his scrutiny of the ceiling, 'she had said something I had not heard or had not processed correctly. To avoid future failure, and especially losing to Illfordt, I decided I would study this strange animal called girl-that-lived-next-door, and attempt to grasp the odd language she communicated in; something that sounded like my language, but meant something completely different.'

'And so,' the Arrancar sighed, 'I took notice of Nellie. I made it a point of watching her for at least two hours a day, divided in equal intervals and at varying times, for a statistically correct overview. I did so for years. During the day, it was quite easy – she was either out in her yard or out in our yard, so there were no extraordinary lengths needed. She was Illfordt's by day, but she was mine by night; some evenings were difficult, yet with the aid of my mother's opera binoculars, I think I could have drawn every inch of her and her bedroom from memory. I saw what everyone else did, and what everyone else did not. She was a pretty child; she grew into a beautiful teenager – this was visible to all, and, since most people are shallow especially when it comes to girls, no one really looked further. But I saw what books she read when no one was watching, I knew what music she listened to, and I distinctly remember that her first training bra was baby blue and that she had some trouble fastening it in front of the mirror.'

'Well, Szayel Aporro,' Ishida sighed, 'that's just what I would have expected. When you have a hobby, you have a hobby. Did she never notice?'

'At some point, she did. I must have been twelve or so.' The Arrancar shrugged. 'It was the last year I went to school with them...'

'She must have been seriously creeped out,' Ishida said.

'Not really,' Szayel Aporro answered. 'She was already insecure about her body – at that point, she should have been, I think, because her breasts were growing at a slightly uneven pace – so I think that she found it reassuring that someone, even if it was only me, took such a pointed interest. Nonetheless, she opened the window and advised me to stop being creepy and start being normal, in such a voice that the entire neighbourhood heard her and turned on the lights.'

'I would have hidden under the bed,' Ishida winced.

'Moi?' Szayel giggled in return. 'I opened my window and reminded her that I had repeatedly seen her naked between the ages of four and eight, when she and Illfordt dragged me to go swimming at the industrial waste dump they called a pond, and that, in conclusion, there was nothing to be embarrassed about now.'

Now it's different, Einstein.

'She slammed her window, I slammed my window, my mother took away my binoculars, and though she tried her best to act angry, I think she was really happy and very amused that I had finally done something...'

'Not perfect,' Ishida laughed.

'Indeed,' Szayel sighed. 'I did come about another pair of binoculars very soon, a powerful military one, which had all sorts of heat and infrared sensors, suspecting that Nellie would close her window and draw her curtains. Most times she did, sometimes she didn't. I think she did not draw her curtains on nights when she was particularly happy or particularly sad – and on one of the rare occasions that she actually came out to the window feeling chatty, I asked her about it. To me, this was a larger scale repetition of the cat episode – I had believed her when she had said she did not like my watching, but she seemed to be acting to the opposite. I pointed out this inconsistency and demanded clarification, and she explained that other girls kept diaries to record their mood swings, but that she felt very sure that I kept a far better record of her states of mind than any diary might have.'

'She was perfectly right. Her body was only a minor part of my fascination with her, beyond the opportunity of actually observing the changes impressed upon it by increasing hormonal activity. I was particularly impressed by the stubbornness and determination with which she practiced her guitar. Nellie loved classical music – her mother was a good violinist and her father played the piano when he was in a good mood. Neither of them had made it, however; they both had different and very unsatisfying careers and though they must have been proud of her talent, they must have been equally scared. That was why they never outwardly encouraged her playing guitar, I think; they must have known that in entertainment, talent is only a minor part of being successful. They did encourage the dancing, however, probably thinking that with her looks, it would be somewhat easier; she started taking lessons when she was six, and they grew in intensity and duration every year. They were as determined to distract her from the guitar as my mother was on distracting me from my dissections. She never minded, nor was she despondent – she loved them too much to argue, but she kept at it. She was not only talented; she worked with the same determination that I did, and had tremendous endurance and strength of spirit. There are plenty of people who can make noise on a guitar, but few who can play a classical seven string. Nellie could,' Szayel shrugged.

'I liked her music. I don't know whether it was because it was more quantifiable than everything else about her, but I genuinely did. I could sense how much she improved year on year, how every time she touched the guitar she did so with additional dexterity and self assurance. Then,' he snickered, 'there was the fact that she picked up random animals from the street and brought them to my house to fix. This week it was a lizard with no tail, the next a pigeon with a broken wing...Heee,' he snickered, 'roll the pictures to the beginning. That was when she got her camera; there is a record of that particular occasion.'

Ishida turned to the screen and clicked on the picture entitled 00001. It showed a thirteen year old boy, dressed in a grey t-shirt and faded jeans, and wearing rounded-frame glasses, standing on the side of an empty street on a bright and sunny summer day. Hands in his pockets, the boy hatefully glanced at an ugly and ruffled grey pigeon that stared back with an equally hateful expression.

On the corner of the picture, across the clear sky, in the indecisive, flowery handwriting of a teenage girl, there was a note which read – 'Szayel and the pigeon.' The word pigeon was crossed out, decisively, in red, and, underneath, in small, perfect and somewhat mechanical calligraphy stood the correction - 'the winged rat.'

Ishida laughed.

'You know, Szayel,' the Quincy said, 'that is exactly what my father would have said.'

'What is your father's profession?' Szayel inquired, raising an eyebrow. 'I mean his genuine profession, not his bow-shooting hobby.'

'He is a surgeon,' Ishida shrugged.

'That explains it, then,' the Arrancar said, dryly. 'Do you know just how many diseases these birds carry? Sewer rats are innocent compared to them. And this particular pest,' Szayel Aporro continued, 'overstayed its welcome, though I did accurately fix its wing. For a while I thought that I had used the wrong alloy and that I had made the wing too heavy for it to fly, but, though it did not fly on that day, it bloody flew soon enough. It still hung about my window, making a mess all over the place, and to make matters worse, Nellie even fed it.'

He shuddered in genuine horror, making Ishida laugh.

'I don't know why she kept piling these animals on me – I think part of it was because she hoped I would gain more respect for life in its random, chaotic forms...I assure you,' Szayel said, adjusting his glasses, 'it was not the case. I never grew to like animals, but I was happy for the opportunity to practice, and I did my best. After the pigeon, there was a dog with a shredded ear; after that, there was my surgical masterpiece of a kitten with a ruptured diaphragm...If she had taken all of these critters to an actual vet, she would have driven her parents out of house and home.'

'Did you manage to fix the kitten?' Ishida asked.

Szayel nodded. 'Yes, although it was the mother of all challenges – on an adult cat, I could have done it with my eyes closed, but here, everything was a problem. Quantity of anaesthetic, getting hold of anaesthetic...Because if you imagine anyone would sell halogenated ether to a thirteen year old, you'd be sadly mistaken...But it was done, in the end. The critter lived a long and happy life and became Snuggles Three. It thankfully chased the pigeon away. It could never purr, though. I still wonder what I did wrong.' He concluded, cranking his nose.

'Nel must have been really fascinated,' Ishida said, softly.

'Not really,' Szayel shrugged. 'She left me to my tasks and went downstairs to watch TV with Illfordt; it was perfectly all right, I must say – even then I hated people standing over my shoulder. I guess you could surmise she took me for granted. Not in a bad, demanding way like Illfordt did, mind you. She had grown up next to me being weird, and so to her I was not weird at all. Nellie Two did not see the actual motive behind my trying on all of these animals, which was, quite coldly, the fact that I was curious and that living creatures were more instructive than corpses. She had, and still has, these immense powers of seeing only the good in people - she somehow assumed that I tried so hard because I wanted to help them. Nellie was inherently kind, to the point of complete blindness, a thing that was as fascinating and seemingly dangerous to me as the dance of a cobra.'

'By the time that they were fourteen, though, it was quite obvious to all that Nellie and Illfordt were in love,' Szayel said, in a deep, spiteful undertone. 'And, as you've just seen, they made a beautiful couple. They dated for a few months before Illfordt's popularity surged, and during that time, my mother was finally happy – Nellie's influence on him was steady and positive. The fact that I tolerated Nellie's presence and made an active effort of getting along with her gave my mother the illusion that there was some shred of normality hidden somewhere within me as well.'

'You never had other friends?' Ishida frowned.

'Despite my mother's and Nellie Two's best efforts, I did not feel like I needed any,' the Arrancar shrugged in response. 'I ignored them all – none of my schoolmates had anything to offer that I could not do better than anyone. This, of course, did not make me overly liked,' Szayel smiled. 'Aristotle said that in order to cope with being completely alone, one must be either a beast or a saint. Though most people have never heard this phrase, they instinctively know that it is correct, and that, furthermore, saints are very few and far between. And everyone feared the beast, or, as you yourself so nicely phrased it, the monster.' he grinned.

'As is the way of idiotic young people, there were a few attempts of picking on me – I retaliated as best I could, but the thing that completely put a stop to it was the fact that Illfordt beat one of my more stubborn aggressors within an inch of his life. My dear sibling did not do it for love of me, of course,' Szayel grinned. 'We had developed a workable understanding – I did his homework and secured his passing grades, he in turn made sure that no one touched me. I think he might have done it even if I had been useless to him – his aggressive instincts were hard to repress, and he relished each opportunity of justifiably letting them loose. For a while, it was only the fear of his tremendous aggression that kept people at bay, but as we grew and groups developed, his reckless behaviour and complete lack of fear or respect for authority made him very popular. He revelled in the attention and thrived on a following – thus upsetting him in any way dubbed one an outcast immediately, and people stayed away from teasing me. He was handsome, and he was an athlete, and girls fawned over him at every step. Always the same type – dumb and pretty.'

'What about Nel?' the Quincy frowned. 'Did you not say...?'

'I did,' Szayel nodded. 'Looking back,' he sighed, 'I still cannot regard my lack of need for a tribe as anything negative. It removed the one and most pressing issue of a teenager – the need for fitting in. I never had it; Nellie, on the other hand, had it to malady proportions. She needed to be liked, she needed attention, and, most of all, she loved him so very much. He was genuinely charming, you see, most psychopaths are, because they...we,' Szayel corrected, 'tend to overcompensate for the emotions they cannot truly feel and put tremendous amounts of effort in perfecting their image. Illfordt did not even have to try too hard. He had a knack for telling people what they wanted or needed to hear. This was the key to having Nellie, I guess – she was always afraid of some imaginary shadows that needed to be kept at bay, and though he did nothing, because there was nothing to do, he was always adept at making her feel as if he was the only thing that stood between her and an abyss waiting to swallow her. She created her own, completely illusionary abyss, mind you, but he took advantage of it.'

'She felt like she needed him, but she could not have his undivided attention unless they were alone. If they were not, he was always distracted. As other girls entered and left the stage, she desperately tried to keep up. And since there was nothing she could have done to make herself even more beautiful, she tried to keep up in terms of dumb.' The Octava dryly concluded.

'She would have gone to any lengths to fit in – her skirts got shorter, her nails grew longer, the sound of her laughter changed. She stopped reading books and raising her hand in class. When she was fifteen, she willingly dropped out of advanced mathematics, because none of her friends took it. She instead went for drama, like all of the cool kids. She developed an obsession for being thin and stopped eating anything but crackers because one of Illfordt's passing interests had wickedly observed that she had a large behind. By that time, I was already in pre-med and gotten myself the questionable title of neighbourhood genius. I no longer needed Illfordt for protection; anyone who even looked at me in a strange way found that their house pets died in random horrible ways. My newly acquired interest of chemistry, as well as the fact that my mother tolerated the presence of odd substances in my bedroom – I needed them for school, of course – made me quite adept at devising poisons...In any event,' Szayel reiterated, coughing slightly, 'I attempted to point out to Neliel that the size of her behind was in direct proportion to the distance between her hip-bones. That since her bones were wide set – a good female characteristic, that would assure she would give birth with ease when the time came – her dimensions were not a question of fat, but of skeletal structure, and that she was needlessly starving herself of both food, and of her natural curiosity for anything besides dance.'

'It's a stage,' Ishida shrugged. 'I guess all girls go thought it at some point or the other.'

'Yes, but then they need to be allowed to grow out of it as well,' Szayel snarled.

'And Neliel wasn't?' the Quincy frowned.

'No, from two perspectives,' the Arrancar dryly refuted. 'The fact that Illford adored toying with her, and always went back to her for a few months now and again, just to keep her hooked, was one.'

'The more dangerous thing, however, was the fact that people actually liked her like that. She was normal – she obsessed about the things all girls obsessed about. She read beauty magazines, she neither failed nor excelled in school, she had zounds of friends who did not give a rat's ass about her, and who mocked her kindness for naiveté. I found it particularly devastating when all, including her parents, hailed the fact that she stopped 'wasting her time' on practicing guitar. She was pretty, and thin as a wisp, and she would be a dancer – there was no need for her to dull her fingers and break her nails on the accursed instrument.'

He cringed.

'So many days,' he whispered, 'so many hours of trying and practicing, so much determination over years, abandoned and wasted, in favour of a second choice that reinforced what others liked in her... It took me a very long time to understand that she was trying to close the gap between what everyone else thought she should have been, and what she actually was. She did not want to be overly deep – being a deep teenager hurts. Finding like-minded companions is hard for anyone who likes classical music or heavy literature that doesn't come between pink covers, and one always ends up eating lunch alone. I guess my social outcast ways had taught her one thing, and that was that being alone was to be avoided at any cost. She pitied me so deeply and sincerely,' Szayel smiled. 'While I, after years and years of watching, loved the very part of herself that she tried to viciously murder. The fact that she cried like a baby when she saw a dead bird, the thick books that she used to read, Concerto de Aranjuez in D minor in the night, over and over and over, until it made me want to open the window and throw 'The Complete Pathology of the Human Kidney' at her, to make her stop and go to sleep and bloody let me study.'

'And you never told her?' Ishida asked.

'I did not acknowledge it myself, to be honest,' Szayel shrugged. 'I was fourteen,' he added. 'And while I had already learned what the parts were technically for, I was woefully unsure of what I was supposed to make of my own. Though by now I did have a pointed sexual interest in her as well, I never took it seriously, because I saw her not taking sex seriously.'

'Her attempts at making Illfordt jealous had made her somewhat promiscuous. That was all right, to the world, because she was not overly so, and because all of the pretty girls who were popular were expected to put out to some extent. It was not anything meaningful, it was just one of many hormone-driven passage rites in their brainless gang where everyone paired with everyone else without even really enjoying it.'

Szayel shrugged again.

'I did not mind her promiscuity either - though it did bother me in the beginning, as I saw one after another boy walk in and out of her life, I understood that my grasp on her was stronger than any of theirs. I just hated the way in which she forced herself to like people who did not deserve to be liked. Her behaviour in Hueco Mundo, with Nnoitra and later, Stark, is an odd and painful exacerbation of her conduct then – even then, she tried very hard to fall in love with someone else and get over him, but either Illfordt returned and wrecked whatever chance at happiness and stability she found in another boy, or the boys she tried with were aware of her history and used her. She was never really aware of it, though, she had a good, kind excuse at the ready for every treason and every form of teenage cruelty, and she always found some sort of loveable quality in every person. She was always in love. She could not be happy if she was not,' he said softly; Ishida shook his head.

'I did try to tell her,' the Arrancar continued, 'once. Though I did not try to tell her what I felt, I simply tried to point her to the fact that she was harming herself for no reason. It was after one of Illfordt's many sports successes, and all of them had gathered to celebrate by having a beer burping contest. I swear, the quantity of gas that is produced by a teenage boy's digestive system is an undiscovered source of energy. I got sent out by my mother, who, while disapproving of the beer, thought that I could show a bit more support and interest in my brother. So I filled my schoolbag with sufficient reading material to keep me occupied and tagged along.'

'The star of the show spent the entire evening entangled with two or three girls that were not even as pretty as Nellie; she had dressed in a spectacularly sexy dress and she held the eye of more than one person, but she only had eyes for him. He never noticed. At some point before midnight, she gave up on catching his eye by dancing with two random idiots, and went to sit alone under a tree; I joined her. She wasn't crying – that would have been uncool, but her suffering was so obvious that I could almost touch it.'

'She was quite angry and I was a good target; she snappily asked why I never tried to go along with anyone and made it a point of showing off how much better I was than everyone else. I dryly responded that I was better, and that I would never waste any time pretending otherwise.'

Then what are you doing following me around?

'You see, I gathered that I was ruining her image and that she wanted me to go away – last thing she would have wanted was to be seen having the geeky brother of the star as a consolation prize.'

Ishida shrugged, and Szayel mirrored the gesture.

'All of my rational instincts told me that I should have kissed her, then and there, and to make a solid point, slipped my hand in her bra. To do just that – ruin her bloody image.' The Arrancar sneered. 'She would have slapped me unconscious, but she would have been free of the idiots, once and for all.'

'You should have done it,' Ishida said, dryly.

'Yes, well, indeed,' Szayel answered softly, 'I was still with the literal. I did not think my truth was absolute truth, and I did not think my grasp of Nellie's life and needs was better than her own grasp of her life and needs. She felt she wanted to be around the idiots, and I had no solid base to contradict her.'

'So instead of taking decisive action, like Illfordt might have, I chose to explain.'

'I told her that she was the only real person around, and that the rest of them were pod-people.'

You know, Nellie, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They move around and do stuff, but they're not really all there.

Ishida unwillingly laughed.

'I have a hard time imagining you at the cinema,' he said, between chuckles.

Szayel Aporro simply shrugged.

'I didn't hate the whole world,' he replied, 'just actual people. Besides, it was an interesting movie.'

'It was,' Ishida agreed.

'She looked at me, not really daring to let the geek make her laugh,' Szayel Aporro continued. 'So I decided to up it a notch, took my pen from behind my ear and asked her to give me her hand. Now she laughed and flatly refused, but I was not discouraged. I started drawing an atom on her thigh, which was the largest piece of exposed skin – she was too shocked to stop me.'

'The world is made of these things, I explained. And the world imitates the smallest particle it is made of. Thus, I told her, drawing the orbits of electrons, all of these pod people that surrounded her just went round and round, very fast, thinking they were getting somewhere. In fact, they were just moving in circles, doomed to repeat their history and being completely unaware of the fact that they would spend their lives on a set, unimaginative path that they were unable to escape and under the pull of forces they didn't even grasp.'

Do you understand? That's not what you want to be, Nellie. You don't want to run around in anyone's orbit.

'She looked at me as if the rest of them had fallen off the face of the planet, and asked where I thought she wanted to be. And then, I drew the core.'

This is where you want to be – at the centre. The centre does not move like the other particles. It is stable, indivisible and perfect in itself, the source of all balance and gravity. It is the cause of the other particles' movement, but it is indifferent to it. It simply is, dependant on nothing. That is where you should be. That is who you should be.

'Nellie leaned on the tree behind her, staring at her thigh, and, for a moment, I was afraid she would look at me with the same incomprehension as ten years before,' Szayel continued softly. 'She didn't – she simply thought it through, quietly, for a few moments.'

'You're like that, she observed – and I shrugged, finding nothing to say.'

But I can't be like you. I cannot handle being that alone. You live in another universe, you're never here...But in the here and now, I need people, Szayel. I need people to like me. I know you think all of them are pod beings to you; maybe they are, but...If I don't see myself though their eyes, I can't see myself at all. I'm just that small and afraid. I'm not a centre; I am just a little dizzy particle looking for a core. Do you understand?

'I didn't,' Szayel admitted, and for the first time, his voice had carried genuine regret. 'I, however, deduced she would have liked me to, so I nodded – she kissed me on the cheek and returned to her dancing.'

Not knowing what else to do with his hands, Ishida returned to flicking through the pictures, settling on the image of the sixteen year old Szayel.

'All three of us left home the summer when this photograph was taken,' Szayel followed. 'Our mother paid for the trip to Paris, mostly because Nellie had wanted it for the longest time, and I could say that we were quite happy for those few weeks. When we started school, we tried living on campus, but I hated it – there were too many people, in too close space...yet, with only my scholarship to fall back on, we could scarcely afford out of campus housing. Nor could I afford all the equipment that I deemed necessary... That was, of course, until Illfordt came up with the great master plan.'

'With my knowledge of chemistry and his vast social network, we could start a very profitable business – LSD was the drug of the hour, and I knew how to make it. It is remarkably simple, in fact, and if you think I had any hesitation in feeding a herd of cattle the enlightenment they craved for, you'd be dead wrong,' the Arrancar smirked. 'I had no such qualms.'

Ishida drew a deep breath and looked to the side in disgust.

'I think that despite Nellie's influence on the both of us, and of the fact that we both outwardly appeared normal, the thin layer of control that hid our shared...affliction' Szayel said, dismissively waving his fingers at the same time 'from the world was wearing thin. I challenged myself every day with my academics, but it was still not enough – not even my professors could appreciate how fast and far I thought, and though I should have been surrounded by like minds, I still felt completely unappreciated and not understood. None of them could keep up; not only in my major subjects, but in any class that I took to fill my idle time. I posed no effort and I still was three heads above... though they were at least a decade my seniors; I first despised them, and then simply stopped seeing them as human or even alive. They were pod-creatures, no more and no less than a chance of trying my hand at synthetic drugs and testing my understanding of psychogenic substances.'

'As for Illfordt,' the Arrancar followed, 'he too needed stimulation, though for him it came in a different flavour. He'd been the star in high school, and he had gotten used to the effortlessly gained status; now, it was no longer the case. There were at least another dozen others who shared his physical talents, and he desperately needed to invent something that would still set him aside from the rest. Also, he needed to test himself, he needed to push his limits – he did not feel alive without danger, just like I did not feel alive without books. The pills worked for the both of us; I got to experiment on more subjects than one could ever hope for, and he yet again got to be the centre of attention in the circles he adored: cool, careless drones, for whom school was no more than a social experience.'

'So, for once,' the Octava continued, almost enjoying Ishida's sudden paleness, 'Illfordt was right. It also turned out to be an extremely lucrative endeavour; Nellie knew nothing of it, of course, but neither of us even thought of excluding her from enjoying the benefits. Within six months we could afford a very large three bedroom flat. They broke up as soon as we moved in, you see,' Szayel sneered, 'though I could not truly remember them actually being together. In any event, Illfordt flatly declared he needed his freedom. He would not allow her to have hers though – he'd regularly visit her bedroom and for reasons I found unfathomable, she always had him. She was exuberantly happy when he gave her any attention and miserable when he did not. Her ridiculous and unproductive search for love though sex continued, yet as soon as he gave a single sign of interest, she completely settled for the crumbs he had left over. Not my favourite arrangement, but it seemed to work. She genuinely loved her dancing, and she pursued it with passion; we rented her a room in the basement of the building, that she fitted with mirrors and I fitted with cameras – I was as hooked on watching her as Illfordt's friends were hooked on my pills.'

'For a while, we all did well,' Szayel smiled. 'We had vast amounts of money, my thesis was progressing very fast and Nellie was happy with her classes. Illfordt, however, was growing quite ambitious – he started trading my pills for stronger drugs and distributing those. Whatever minor interest he had in school vanished completely. He stopped going to classes, and took longer and longer trips to some unknown destination, always bringing in small sachets of all sorts of goodies. His social circle grew to include people from far and wide, and he left the home business to me; I disliked it at first, as I found it distracting and time consuming, but since his absences grew longer and longer, it was clear that the spice had to flow from another direction.'

'It was about this time, some six months after the photograph,' Szayel said, biting his lip and gesturing casually towards the screen, 'that Nellie's true troubles began. She had gotten into dance school because of all the deprivation she'd put herself though, but once her obsessive dieting stopped, her body was developing in a wrong way – she was too athletic for classical dance, where all of the women are bloody anorexics. She was too tall, with too heavy bones, too strong a muscular structure, and no amount of dieting could hide that she was shapely and exquisitely healthy. She failed two or three auditions, and suffered immensely. I distinctly told her to switch to modern dancing and forget the ballet – no one could ever convince me that any person who weighs forty-two kilograms for a meter seventy five in height is healthy or less of a freak than I was. I told her that classic dance spelled arthritis at thirty five, ulcer at twenty; that it meant pointless suffering for a dying form of entertainment that would never pay her enough to live. Or just keep the dancing as a hobby and actually try to study something real...It had as much of an echo as the theory of the parallel universes; Nellie said that she could not possibly study anything else, that she knew and could concentrate on nothing. She begged me to make her something that would keep her small, or help her lose more weight.'

'I hope you did not,' Ishida smirked.

'Of course not,' the Arrancar snappily replied. 'I instead offered to help in other ways,' he chuckled. 'Oh, the expression on her face was priceless,' he laughed. 'She was auditioning for Giselle. It was the last audition of the school year, and because she had failed the other two, she desperately needed the lead to make her credits. I secured a tape of Beryl Goldwyn dancing the part – I thought it was the best rendition of it, to be honest, the Russians never failed to strike me as too exuberant...'

'You watched ballet?' the Quincy chuckled.

'Absolute gayness?' Szayel shot in return, without taking offense. 'I did, at times. Neliel had dragged me to a few events, and she did watch it on television.' he admitted. 'I was far more partial to theatre, however, and I had watched it for years. I thought that since I could not feel how I should behave as a proper human, and because it was clear that my unwilling lack of emotional output was damaging my career prospects – for no one gets anywhere if absolutely everyone hates or fears them - I thought I could learn how to mimic proper human behaviour by watching professionals. I think it worked, to a certain extent,' he shrugged. 'I could at least face up to interaction without radiating complete despise of everyone around me, though my guise was thin. In any event,' he reiterated, 'we set out for Neliel to learn the part from its best rendition. I projected the tape for her to dance against, and even came up with a small infrared sensor system to attach to the crucial parts of her body – ankles, knees, shoulders, elbows – that would capture the movement of each group of muscles and rate it against perfection. I think she initially went along with me not to offend me, but within a month, she actually found it useful and began using it in earnest. For the next two months, she practiced for six to eight hours, and I got to watch and record her, for the first time not through my hidden cameras or through my mother's opera binoculars, but for real, in the same room. I thought it could get no better.'

'By the day of the audition, she was perfect by any standard. I did not honestly think she could fail it; I could not fathom any possible reason why she would...'

'She failed nonetheless,' Ishida guessed, with a little sad grimace.

The Arrancar nodded bitterly.

'She came in second, with lacking marks on her posture – again, the imperfections of her body were the ruin of her perfect technique and momentous hard work...I do not think I have seen anyone more emotionally wrecked than Nellie was when she heard the results. She cried continuously for two days; she would touch no food, and I, who could not empathize with failure because I had never experienced it, could not help. In fact, my presence did more harm than good. I could feel her resentment hanging physically in the air – I could not truly process it, since my desire of helping had been genuine, and I was frustrated enough to bite into a wall.'

'It was your failure as well, of sorts,' Ishida agreed.

'Indeed,' Szayel nodded. 'That also caused me an undue amount of distress. But then,' he suddenly giggled, in the insane tone that Ishida had come to find painfully familiar, 'I found the solution from the most unlikely of sources.'

'I kept track of my pill sales in a little black book,' he smiled. 'And I remembered I had seen the name of the girl who had won the audition within its pages – not one of my customers, but one of Illfordt's. So I picked up the campus payphone, and called her in.'

'You're kidding!' Ishida exclaimed. 'Were you not afraid she would turn him in?'

'Firstly,' Szayel smirked, 'it would have been him, not me. A most welcome result, if you ask me. Secondly, if he would actually turn on me, I could dismantle my drug lab into its perfectly innocent form, and do away with all questionable substances in less than half an hour. Who would have believed him against me?' the Arrancar cruelly snickered. 'He was a drop-out athlete, I was about to become the youngest doctor that school had ever produced. And thirdly, I was assured it would never go that far – the school would not be happy about a drug scandal on its campus, so it would keep everything quiet. Which is exactly what happened. The girl in question was expelled without much comment; she did not fight back and to the best of my knowledge, she was not enrolled by any other dance programme.'

'You ruined her life,' Ishida frowned.

The Arrancar tilted his head to the side, with a sweet, questioning expression on his features.

'I?' he inquired. 'No, no, I beg to differ, she ruined her own life. Do not imagine she was buying weed from my dear older sibling, Quincy. She was buying small, regular quantities of cocaine, which, as you well know, are not only an exceptional stimulant, but also a great appetite repressor. She was not having a bit of mindless innocent fun, she was actively cheating Nellie out of her hard work, and cheating me out of the success of my method.'

'It is most interesting,' Szayel said, thoughtfully. 'You had the exact same reaction as Nellie did.'

'You told her?' the Quincy asked.

'At the end of the third day of hunger strike, when the phone still had not rung to announce that she had, indeed, gotten the part, I told her. I saw no alternative. And I told her exactly how and why, and assured her that the part would be hers. I thought the complete knowledge would immediately calm her down, but...she suddenly looked at me as she had never looked at me before, the same disbelieving glance that the entirety of the world gathered in my presence.'

'She was furious; she said she would never take the part if it meant crushing someone as she had just been crushed; the logic of the fact that this person had never deserved her success did not seem to dawn on her – no. Nellie could only think of what the poor girl must have been going through, and what tremendous harm I had done to her, as well as to all others who had touched my vile pills; so on, and so forth. You can imagine the rest of the conversation – funnily enough, she never once blamed Illfordt for coming up with the idea, or selling the fun stuff. According to her, I should have known better.'

'Then,' Szayel said softly, 'the phone rang, and I swear to God that I beat her running to it and actually wrestled her off damned machine, which was not easy, since I was younger and smaller, and I had no interest in any physical activities whatsoever. I still won,' he grinned. 'I picked up, and holding her at an arm's length, I informed the caller that Neliel was not present and that I would take a message. I thanked them and accepted the part on her behalf, even managing to manifest some concern over the sudden illness of the former protagonist. I was,' he sighed in delight, 'worthy of a performance award. When I hung up and turned around, she was standing behind me as if she was about to hit me. I genuinely thought she would, so I started talking, as fast as I could.'

He frowned at the memory.

'I told her that if she chose to pursue her entire life placing scum above herself, she was most welcome to do so. That I imagined that being resigned to the position of a victim to the unfairness of the universe must be thoroughly comfortable, and that I would never blame her for wanting to be comfortable. But that from this point on,' he continued, swallowing dry, 'she would have no more excuses in front of the mirror. No friends, no family, no Illfordt, no one to pressure her into a direction or another – she'd have to live with the knowledge that she was willingly accepting the victim's part, because now I had straightened the odds. I had made everything just again, and all she had to do was acknowledge that the cheater had been punished and that she deserved to triumph. She whimpered that two wrongs do not make a right – I picked up the phone, put it in her hands and told her to spare me the shit moral judgement and refuse the part, if she thought she did not deserve it. And I went to my room, slamming the door behind me so hard that I broke a couple of my specimen bottles.'

'She never made the call,' he breathed. 'And she made love to me that night. Just so. She opened the door and climbed into my bed and insisted, though I was terrified and trying to get away. I was so embarrassed,' Szayel said, softly. 'I thought this would be my only chance with her and that I would blow it – and, of course, I did. I was done after twenty seconds, and if I could have dematerialized and crawled inside the wall, I would have. I thought she would go. But she stayed. She stayed for the remainder of the night, on only one condition.'

Stop thinking, just for a little. Stop thinking and be nowhere else but here. Can you try? To be nowhere else but here? Just for a little...

Szayel sat up and smiled, an expression as mechanical and crooked as Nemu's.

'You can't imagine what it is like to be me,' he said, with artificial dryness. 'This,' he said, pressing his fingers to his temple, 'never stops. I never forget anything that I am exposed to for any longer than five seconds. I can read a thousand words in less than two minutes, and I never, ever forget anything – mathematics, chemistry, science, literature, art. And nothing in the world had made my thoughts stop whirring, nothing had ever made me wish they would. Except for Nellie; she asked me, and for her, I tried...to stop thinking. Just for a little.'

'Did it work?' Ishida whispered.

'Indeed so,' Szayel nodded. 'It worked. I actually did stop thinking – and it was the most wonderful sensation. For once, there was nothing nagging to be solved, there was nothing to be done. The entirety of the universe was between her hips and her breasts, and it was more beautiful, more complex and more exciting than anything else I had ever experienced. I felt no anger and no ambition and no fear, just overwhelming happiness, the silly, dumb, pink kind, the kind that I believed did not exist. I was so happy and so shocked that I was afraid to let go of her, and she even had to struggle to briefly disappear into the bathroom. I was afraid to fall asleep, because I was afraid I would wake up myself, again, and I didn't want to be myself, for the first time I wanted to be...something else, someone else, someone who could revolve be in her orbit and feel like this at least sometimes...'

'I made her coffee in the morning, and I watched her exercise her routine. Then, I wrote on my thesis for a few hours, and we made love again in the afternoon and into the night. Before dawn, she made me promise that I would never synthesize drugs again, and I agreed, because it truly did not matter. She nodded very solemnly, swore to keep me to my word, then, as she looked at me intently, she noted that I would look much better with square glasses. Then she laughed, put her arms around me and fell asleep.'

'It lasted three wondrous days,' the Arrancar smiled. 'And I spent no second of that time thinking of anything but that particular second; I was free of myself, and I felt, different, normal – I felt like all of those people that I had spent my entire life despising, and it felt odd, but good. When she cuddled with her shoulders glued to my chest on the last night, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could do it. I could try to be like the rest of the world, I could stop being myself.'

'I told her as much,' Szayel continued. 'Though I am sure I must have sounded pathetic – I was completely daft at expressing emotion, simply because before her, I never had an emotion to express – so I asked her not to turn towards me, and just let me talk to the darkness. I told the darkness that I had loved Neliel Two since I was twelve. That I loved her very much, more than myself; that I knew all too well that her heart was always changing and fleeting, that she was insecure and wanted nothing more than for someone that would save her from herself.'

He looked to the side, avoiding Ishida's glance, then pausing a little, as if gathering courage to continue. 'I told her I could not and didn't want to save her, because she did not need to be saved – she just needed to see herself as I saw her.' He said, as softly and gently as if she had been in his arms at that very moment. 'I said she possessed strength, determination and kindness, that she was beautiful, and talented, but above all, brighter than anyone gave her credit for. That she was not a victim, that she only played one because she was afraid to face competing with herself.'

The vague shadow of a smile lifted the corners of his suddenly paler lips; the words must have been as hard to speak now as they had been then.

'And I told the darkness that if Neliel Two gave me a chance, a real chance, and showed me some patience,' Szayel whispered, 'I would try very hard to start living in the real world. I would try my best to be normal and that I would force myself to feel...something, anything. I didn't ask her to answer me right away. I simply asked that she consider it, but that she does so being aware of the fact that I am offering her a part of myself that I was unaware existed. That she should only accept it if she genuinely felt inclined to give me a chance, and asked her to not let me become one of many. Then I held her very, very tightly, and, because I felt that she was crying, I asked her not to answer. I told her that I was grateful for all that she had given me already, and that I would rather savour the memory of the moment just as it was. It would be answer enough if she would still be in my bed when I woke up in the morning.'

'She left,' Ishida said, kindly.

'No, no,' Szayel replied. 'She did far worse. She stayed. When I woke up in the morning, and she was still there, I felt...I imagine I felt like a life-long colour-blind person who woke up seeing colours for the first time.'

'I was so happy that day that everyone in the lab thought I had finally fallen ill, and that I was having a bipolar manic episode. I even told my lab colleague that his concoction was bad and would blow up in his face; I don't think he appreciated it,' Szayel shrugged, 'but I think he would have liked the explosion even less. It felt like I was standing at the edge of an entirely new world, and I was, for the first time, I was looking forward to everything and anything. Those were the only few hours of my life when I did...I bought a bottle of wine..., candy and stupid things that people in love buy, then I returned home, to find Nellie, my Nellie, crying on Illford's shoulder.'

Unexplainably, he smiled.

'He looked so smug,' Szayel admiratively said, 'so perfectly in control. And he glanced at me over her shoulder just as he whispered cut off promises in her ear – that he'd stop the drugs, that he would never leave her again, that he'd always keep her safe and that she needed not worry about a thing and though his voice was soft and trembling he was smiling at me, Ishida Uryu, and I knew he was lying. But I saw how her fingers gripped his shoulders, I could still feel them on mine – I saw her holding on to him as she always had, as if she had been drowning and he had been her only stable beacon in the entire world, and I...'

The Arrancar chuckled, with bitter self irony.

'I rationalized that if she felt a fraction as happy with him as I had felt over the last three days, I had no grounds for denying her that. I didn't even throw away the wine. I simply put it in the cooler.'

'She tried to speak to me about that final night and attempted to explain – I didn't let her, though I was not brutal.' Szayel followed, looking to the side. 'I stung her a little, and told her that I acknowledged her gratitude and the single way in which she knew to express it, and that we should leave it at that. That I would be all right, and that I had not truly meant anything that I had said – she did not believe me, but she accepted it, because she understood I was trying my best to keep her from feeling guilty. She embraced me, very, very, tightly, and I let her cry in my arms because I knew she needed my forgiveness. We never spoke of it again, and things were just as before, though now she looked at me with a certain warmth in her eyes. I guess she could not believe that I had let her go so easily, though both of us knew there was not much I could and even would have done to keep her, and that if I had even tried to, she would have pulled away with all the fury of a hurricane. I didn't even hate her. It just hurt as if I had been lying on knives every time that I lay down to sleep on a bed that suddenly looked too large for one...But I didn't hate her. Until four months later, when she discovered that she was pregnant.'

'Oh gods,' Ishida mumbled.

'Not mine, mind you,' Szayel sneered. 'I had used protection; even for the first twenty seconds, when I hadn't known whether to run out the window naked or stay and accept my virginal shame. Besides, she discovered it very early on – it could not have been more than a month. Illfordt, of course, did what he knew best; vanished for three days, and, upon his triumphant return, briskly handed her the abortion fee. But she was dancing Giselle at the time, she could not afford a surgical procedure, even of the simplest kind. It would have meant missed rehearsals and dismissal, after all she had been though to get it...'

'She knocked on my door, and this time,' the Arrancar hissed, with a vicious grin, 'I made her beg.'

Abortion is murder.

'I asked her when she would stop bringing things for me to fix; when she would stop being so bloody selfish and cram me with problems that I hadn't caused...And now, I wondered out loud how she even dared looked me in the eyes after I'd let down my defenses - my thoughts, my detachment, all of what I was - before her, and she'd thought no more of my abandon than she did of her other sexual misadventures. In fact, I seemed to remember that she had dispensed more attention on people she had known for one night only than she had dispensed on me all together.'

I know, I know - I am sorry, so very sorry, Szayel. I didn't think...

'That was absolutely correct - she hadn't thought, they hadn't thought, and why would they have?They had me to fix everything, to take care of her business and of his business - and they knew that I always would, because I loved her too much to subsist without her.' Szayel fiercely argued, towards her invisible shadow.

It will be different from now on, I'll stop seeing him, I will never let him near me again. Please, I'll change, if you help me, please, just one more time...

He shook his head and pressed his index to his forehead, as if attempting to physically make the anger recede. The gesture helped; his voice fell to a kind, defeated whisper.

'We both knew he'd never let go of her, however. And I knew she would never let go of him, either. Who did she think she was fooling?'

Szayel folded his hands in his lap.

'She did me the courtesy of not lying to me any further,' he said, softly. 'And I was grateful for it. She didn't speak after that - she sat on the edge of the bed, hiding her face in her palms, and as I watched her cry, I thought...'

'Szayel Aporro...' the Quincy cringed.

'I thought – why not? She was at most five weeks along; there were plenty of substances I knew and could make that cause uterine contractions. Nellie would experience no more than period pain, and she would not be unable to dance. I let her squirm for one more day before I agreed. I had planned on a week, the full week of gathering the materials and making the two drugs, but...'

He shook his head.

'I couldn't,' Szayel shrugged. 'I could not watch her suffer for longer than she had to, especially since Illfordt was yet again gone God only knows where. I promised her that I would make her the pills, and I explained how they would work. We planned that she take the first on a Tuesday, and the second on Thursday, so she could be fit to dance at the weekend. She spent the Monday night with me; we watched an election debate and she made a salad...Later, she crawled into my bed; I didn't touch her. She just curled by my side, took my hand in hers, and we slept.'

'She took the first pill at seven minutes past eight in the morning. She was dead by twenty minutes past, of massive anaphylactic shock.'

'Turned out that she was allergic to the emulsifier I had used for the pill,' Szayel concluded, hands tightly clenched in his lap. 'I had tested her for allergies on each of the active ingredients. Not the emulsifier. I had no adrenaline at hand, it was all back at the lab, and I could not have returned in time; all I could do was watch her die, as I had watched her for all of her life. Just thirteen minutes more.'

The Arrancar looked away, and adjusted his glasses with a nervous gesture.

'And that,' he whispered, 'was that.'

'Illfordt had plenty of friends who could make a body disappear,' he followed, in a flat tone. 'They did a good job of making my mistake vanish, and, in the end, it was just me and him in a house that was absolutely empty. He beat me near comatose - it was the first and only time he ever touched me – when he was too tired to hit me anymore, he simply lay on his back by my side, staring at the ceiling. There was no sound, but tears were streaming from the corner of his eyes and over his temples.'

You weren't the only one who loved her, bro'...You're not the only one who couldn't live without her. I didn't mean to be like I was. I didn't mean to, bro', I just thought she was the only one I didn't need to pretend with. I could be like I am around her, no pretending to do...She always forgave me, she always took me back, no matter what I did...

'It struck me that I had never thought of it that way,' Szayel said. 'I had never thought that he loved and needed her too. It was just that he settled for the most selfish and comfortable way of having her - as was his vaunt. He actively fed her insecurities, knowing that they would keep her coming back, but he did love her in the only way he knew how. His cruelty towards her had never been more than the overactive defence of an insecure and terrified parasite, who had discovered the most effective way of latching on to his life preserving host. And who was I to talk about comfortable?' The Arrancar continued, in a whisper. 'I, who had never fought for her...I who had only ever thought of how much I wanted her to fight for herself...'

An' you killed her, you bastard, you killed her, because you couldn't have her...And now I'm alone. Now we're alone.

'He thought I had done it on purpose,' Szayel said, dryly. 'If I had tested everything else, why had I not tested the emulsifier?'

Ishida drew a sharp breath, and looked away.

'A Freudian slip?' the Arrancar giggled. 'I never made mistakes so...why...? I began to wonder myself, and, for as long as I lived, I didn't discover the answer.'

'We must have lain there for hours – I, too injured and he too broken hearted to move. Together, but at the same time completely alone; with Nellie gone, we had no ties to each other or to the rest of the world. In the end, he reached his hand across the floor for mine. I didn't take it,' Szayel said simply.

'For weeks after that night, I answered the phone, telling Nellie Two's mom, the first Nellie, that I had no idea where she was; she was never found.'

'How could you live with yourself,' the Quincy hissed.

'I couldn't,' Szayel smiled. 'I did not leave the house; I could not think, I could not write, I could do nothing. I could not even turn on the lights. Illfordt dragged himself up faster than I did, somehow, but things changed. He became reckless and his brutality reached its peak; he progressed to the truly criminal underworld, and stopped playing drug distributor to college kids. In the end, probably getting sick of my morbid disposition, he generously tossed me a rope. Or rather, flicked me a pill.'

There ya go, Doctor Mengele.

'I looked at it, not understanding what he meant me to do. I did not even take headache pills, though I smoked like a chimney.'

Stop being such a loser. Watcha gonna do, you gonna lay down and die now? Not gonna bring her back, so you will have to cope. What's done is done, got it?

'I did not actually get it.'

Gonna fix everything, little bro'. Promise. It fixed everything for me.

'And again, he meant what he said – it did fix...everything.'

Pretty golden eyes, behind thick lenses turned on Ishida.

'Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. MDMA – Ecstasy. Do you know where the word Ecstasy comes from?' he asked, softly.

Ishida shook his head.

'It comes from Greek. Ex – stasis. It means – standing outside oneself. The one place where I wanted to stand. The pill fixed things, and though it was not quite the same liberation I had experienced with Nellie, it was good proxy. A damned good proxy... Close enough to offer the hope that I could stand outside myself again, just for a little. It made easy to accept that life went on, as if Nellie had never been.'

'So, driven by new curiosity, I searched further,' Szayel said, briskly. 'Through sex – with women, then men, then both or either; each time came close, each time held the promise that I would yet again feel what I and felt on those three days, and, in truth, climax always held magic. It still does. But it never lasted beyond the physical sensation; I was out of myself only for that mere second, and I crashed back to my senses immediately after. This simply told me that I needed more varied experiences, or more frequent ones, and so, just like with everything else, I took a comprehensive approach and set out to try everything and anything, methodically upping the level of perversion at each step, even though I was painfully aware of the fact that the very extent of the mental control that I exerted in my choice of partners and games prevented me from getting away from myself.'

'I continued to make my pills – I just varied the recipe a little, always with something else – sometimes strychnine, sometimes additional psychotropic essences. I always made sure that I was around to watch what happened to my intended subject, and if things went awry, I could not be blamed – after all, they all thought they had taken the same pill. They could not have known about my special little extras...In truth,' the Arrancar said, dryly, 'I was watching them to see what I should give myself to enhance the feeling, to make the high, stronger, better. To bridge that tiny little gap that made the experience of drugs and sex less than the feeling that I had had on those three nights with Nellie.'

'Illfordt was shot some three years later; he'd tried to cheat too many people out of too much, I think, but I never delved into the matter. I was not disturbed. Despite my trips outside myself, and the occasional whispered rumours about my pills being deadly, my life was on-track, as a sign that my evasion from myself kept failing. Money kept coming in, and I no longer made anything but my special batches myself; I was thoroughly amused. The rumours only made the idiots more curious and more daring: getting high without knowing if you will ever come down must have been quite the thrill. And I, indifferent to it all, kept going. I achieved my first doctorate, then my second, then my third; my pills got better and better, and watching their effect on those foolish enough to try them was a prize onto itself. As for myself, I searched from ecstasy, through cocaine, to meth...It was only heroine that finally worked,' he seductively smiled. 'They call the first hit God's Kiss, Ishida Uryu, and it is true. It is really...'

Szayel Aporro laughed.

'God's Kiss. It transports you to a place where nothing else matters, where nothing else exists, and you are nothing: just where I wanted to be.'

'I finally succeeded in killing myself thirteen years later. They passed like thirteen minutes,' the Octava smiled. Softly, with his usual gestures, he reached for his fringe and removed the two hairpins, allowing the soft pink tresses to slip to his forehead and reveal the round, dark channel underneath.

'Your Hollow hole,' Ishida said. 'The thing that killed you...'

'A massive cocktail of cocaine and heroine – the ultimate rush. One excites; the other relaxes – they pull at your mind from different directions. And when you die, you do not feel as if you are dying, you feel as if you could take on the world; that's the cocaine. Yet, the opiate makes sure there is no pressure, no pain and no anxiety – you feel that you already have taken them all on, and that you have won.'

'Oddly enough,' Szayel purred, 'when I woke up in Hueco Mundo, I remembered nothing of the pathology of the human kidney. All I could remember was Nellie playing Concerto de Aranjuez. In D minor. Always,' he whispered, 'in D minor. And it was only then,' he said softly, 'that I learned the answer. I learned that I had not, consciously or unconsciously meant to kill her. That I had simply made a mistake.'

Ishida looked away, his eyes oddly locked onto the hazel gaze of the teenager that half smiled on the screen before him from a rushed photograph, where a lock of wavy dark hair obscured the objective.

That was why he was not too fond of pictures, Ishida thought. They seemed to be unenforceable copies of contractual promises that life made, without ever intending to keep.

'Do you still think I should tell her what happened, Ishida Uryu?' Szayel asked.

Ishida looked away, shaking his head.

Some things were better left unsaid.

---

Goodbye, Bleach.

./bow