Characters: Neliel, Nnoitra
Summary: There's a reason he keeps coming back.
Pairings: NnoiNel
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc
Timeline: pre-Hueco Mundo arc
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
You and me are fragmented and broken, pieces of a puzzle ripped to shreds. We don't understand each other as though the words coming from our mouths are of different languages.
I say 'hold back', and you say 'destroy'. This is why there will never be anything to us but destruction and death.
For you are the roaring sea that races towards land, seeking to obliterate all that lies in your path.
And I am she who seeks to stand between you and annihilation.
-0-
There is a difference to the way Nnoitra fights and the way Neliel fights, a difference to what shows through in swordplay and words and the way blood splatters and hits the floor. Nnoitra is a rampaging beast, while Neliel is all cold, slicing swishes of the blade, precision and grace personified.
This is why she always wins. Neliel remembers exactly who and what she is, what it is she fights for and what she has to maintain. She channels her energy into clean strokes, and always keeps her eyes open. Nnoitra simply gives himself over to oblivion and pours nothing but raw strength and roaring bloodlust into his zanpakuto.
With these odds, though Nnoitra is never willing to see it there's no way he can win.
-0-
There's a very simply explanation for why Neliel always comes out on top whenever Nnoitra confronts her, whether it be in violence or in words, but especially for the latter, when he just seems to be trying to provoke her with his tattooed tongue.
Nnoitra is clumsy. He knows it, she knows it and he resents Neliel for even acknowledging it, let alone underscoring it by her own grace, her own elegance. He hates the way she shows how beautiful her mind is by her eloquent words and phrases. She scores blows and strips skin from tissue with words the way Nnoitra never can with cold metal.
She is articulate. He is bumbling in his desire as he is in everything else. For this, she scorns him.
She holds him beneath her, in everything her does.
That Nnoitra will always be inferior in his eyes is something Neliel makes all the more clear with the way contempt manages to occasionally bleed out into her words. And that is what drives him on: a desire to prove himself in her eyes, and maybe, just maybe, prove to everyone else that he really is better than Neliel.
That she isn't the composed, distant woman she shows herself to be.
-0-
When they fight, Neliel is always keenly aware of the danger she finds herself in. Not just of physical injury, even death at Nnoitra's hands—because however much he desires, lusts after her, he just might kill her. But of loss of self.
She sees what Nnoitra becomes when he fights, and Neliel always vows to herself that she will never be like that.
Neliel watches Nnoitra, keeps a wary eye on him, and sees what he allows himself to devolve to. This degeneration… This, is truly worthy of her contempt.
What Nnoitra is when he fights is little more than an animal without sentient thought. He forgets himself, forgets who and what he is and becomes something that lives entirely on bloodlust and the search for oblivion. Nothing matters to him, not even that he win, except that something dies, except that some heart somewhere will stop beating when he's done.
He doesn't care if it's his own.
That's what makes Neliel feel so much contempt and disgust towards Nnoitra, even when concern for his own well-being is simultaneous. Because he doesn't behave like an Arrancar. He barely even behaves like a Hollow. He's an animal.
We're better than that, yet you insist on behaving like you do. You and I have evolved past base instinct, past the constant need to kill and devour. We don't have to behave like this anymore.
Yet you still do.
You aren't like me. Your mind is still that of a beast.
And he doesn't care if her heart stops beating any more than her own.
Because when Nnoitra fights, he doesn't care if he might kill her. Despite wanting her for himself (if he can ever have her, which Neliel doesn't see as likely), when bloodlust clouds Nnoitra's eyes he doesn't care who he cuts down.
And that's why Neliel knows she has to be careful.
Because even if she holds back, Nnoitra won't. She'll never cut twice. But he'll cut until the thing he's cutting has been ripped to shreds.
-0-
There's a reason Nnoitra keeps coming back, despite being soundly defeated by Neliel either in sword strokes or words every time. There's a reason he comes back despite the scorn she heaps on him. This, finally, is something Neliel neither knows nor is capable of fathoming. Even Nnoitra doesn't know it consciously, the knowledge is still instinctual in him, something that drives him without bothering to be at the forefront of his mind.
Nnoitra is, at his core, when everything else is stripped away, at his most basic, a death seeker. One who always seeks oblivion, without ever knowing why. He doesn't know why he wishes to die in battle, only that he does.
When he sees Neliel for the first time and every time afterwards, Nnoitra is aware that this, this is someone who might be able to kill him. That she is beautiful, desirable, unattainable is something that comes after the first revelation and eventually drowns out the first.
But what he knows is that, in Neliel, there is the capability to kill. She is capable of killing him. Finally, there is someone who can kill him.
His rage redoubles every time she says no, but Nnoitra knows that eventually, he'll be able to provoke her enough. As much as she tries to deny it, Neliel is at her core a Hollow like him, and even she can not deny the animal rage within her forever.
One day, she'll kill him, and grant Nnoitra what he has wanted more than he has ever wanted anything else. Oblivion.
And when the time comes, Neliel won't cut twice. It will be a single clean stroke, one to take his life away.
Finally.