A/N: going back to basics with the otp i used to die for.
In Hueco Mundo, no star ever shone. A single, solitary moon hung precariously in a blackened sky, illuminating the despondent desert with its soft, comforting light. Its lonely existence was of no concern to him, he who had long traversed the sands beneath its watchful eye. He was lured away by the melodies of a different moon, and the woman who gave its song her voice.
It was only when the hour grew late and the denizens of the hollow palace were wreathed in slumber that he would make his journey through the void. Stark, bone-white surroundings melted away, and the blank canvas of the world would come alive with strokes of green and blue; long strands of auburn hair settled upon beige shoulders; huge, dark eyes which brightened only for him.
They lay underneath the cobalt glow of an unfamiliar sky, and she would recite numbers in time to the lights which surfaced from its murky depths.
Orihime knew all the constellations, but no matter how hard she tried, their names always remained a mystery. So she had taken it upon herself to make up her own, to provide the broken patterns in her memory with identities. There was 'The Fisherman' awaiting his precious catch, the 'Exiled Queen' who mourned her throne, and far below the North Star, there was 'Brother'. She would spend hours watching the stars flicker in and out of existence, and he would spend hours watching her. Her eyes glittered in the pale moonlight, chestnut pools which haunted his visions, and he wondered whether the stars which swam within them also had names.
"Why aren't there any stars in Hueco Mundo?" she asked him one day. Her head rested in the crook of his neck, and he could feel her words enveloping his collar in a warm puff of air.
"I have never questioned it," Ulquiorra stated, completely nonchalant. He could not comprehend the beauty of the stars nor their power to bewitch; it was another one of those human idiosyncrasies, which he'd found, manifested in the woman, along with all the other curiosities of her character. There was the satisfied sigh that escaped her lips after a colourful meal of confused flavours (he would eat them all and smile with her, not for the joy of their taste but for the pleased blush that would spread across her cheeks); the telltale purr which rumbled from her throat when his fingers trailed through her hair (the strands parted like silk around his touch and he had never felt any material more fine); the sheer excitement she would display upon purchasing a fresh bag of leeks (it was almost as grand as that she would offer him upon each of his arrivals). "They would serve no purpose in the world of Hollows," adding inwardly, unless to taunt us with the fragments of the lives we have left behind.
"Do you think, when you were human, you spent nights just lying outside and contemplating life and all that jazz beneath the stars? Were you that sort of person?"
He blinked, once, twice, processing her words with a practiced cool, unwilling to allow her inquiry to befuddle him as they so often did. It was beyond belief just how easy it was for her to jar him completely out of his traditional perspective. She made him reexamine his entire existence; he questioned the way the planets aligned in the midnight sky of her world and just why that should fascinate him so; questioned the way food tasted and how it could rule over the emotions of humans with such unmitigated ease; questioned the sempiternal beat of his imaginary heart. And once again she had managed to bewilder the facets of thought which held rule over his brain, transporting him back to a place beyond his memories, a place where maybe he could have truly understood her.
Once he had been a creature uninterested in such musings, as all such perplexities tended to find a root in emotion, a force he had once believed pointless and insignificant. His views on the matter had long since changed since had he met her and realised that even a superior being such as himself was capable of bending to Emotion's determined will. He had become everything he had so desperately striven not to be, a monster masquerading as a human who would spend his nights not in sleep but in the arms of a warm-blooded girl, losing himself in the stars in her eyes. And he loved her for it.
"Perhaps I was," he said, placing a soft kiss upon her brow. "Who can know?"
In Hueco Mundo, no star ever shone.
But he knew the names of all the constellations.