I.

At the dawn of the great Roman Empire, a regional governor in Brittania, Iustus Claudius Silas, had a daughter by the name of Livia. She was considered the princess of the entire land for her beauty, her grace, and her kindness. In the parades and reviews, every member of every cohort exhorted themselves to drill harder, to shine their armor just a bit brighter, all in hopes that she would notice them and grant them her favor. The crude warriors of the Celts, who came again and again at the romans, were always driven back by the soldiers who carried the name of the princess on their lips.

And even the Celtic chieftains, when some were captured to be publicly executed or sent to Rome to be paraded as examples of the great empire's subjugation of the savage peoples who dared attack Caesar's land, would often warm to the girl. She would come to their cells and make sure they were treated as humanely as possible while they were in her father's care, for she felt love and pity even for her enemies. She could do this, for her father doted on her, since she was his treasured daughter and the only reminder he had of his long dead wife.

But it came to pass that one Chieftain, Aius, the greatest to defy the empire since Vercingetorix himself, did great harm to the Romans. One of his lieutenants, a young chieftain named Tristram, successfully captured the princess Livia. Livia found herself intrigued by her captor, for while he was fiercely loyal to his people and his chief, he showed no signs of anger or hatred as others did, but only a deadly implacability and a stony demeanor. But in his eyes, she thought she saw different, for he always made sure she was well cared for, and he made sure that the other soldiers left her alone, and that no harm came to her, not even those atrocities her father attributed to the Celts.

He died stabbed in the heart by the shining spears of the soldiers who came to rescue her, but only because he intercepted one flung by a reckless fledging, one that might have hit her unwittingly. She had known him only as a captor, and only for the space of a scant few months, but she felt a weight in her soul. She wept for him, and never would she marry, but became a vestal maiden, mourning the savage man in secret for the rest of her days.

II.

In the midst of the Crusades, a young nobleman named Aurel took the Knightly orders and, as was expected of his class and station, took up his sword and rode to Jerusalem to join the Crusades. But as they marched across the land, putting the Muslim people to the sword, his heart grew confused and his faith fled. For he saw that his sword was destruction, and his coming a curse upon the people of the land. The bloodshed and the loss of life dismayed him, until he thought himself more demon than angel, and that the world must be a dark place if the bloody work of the Crusaders was considered heroic. But rather than question or try to change the situation, he wrapped himself in a shroud of darkness, and resolved to unquestioningly serve his king and his pope, his only anchors in a world now proven profane and iniquitous to the extreme.

In Jerusalem, as the crusaders marched through the city streets, throwing open doors and dragging those inside out into the streets to be trampled over hoof or have their heads bashed in with maces or their bellies slit with the sword, Aurel stood at the head of them. Yet in one house, he found only a young woman standing in front of two children, wielding a stick of wood as a weapon and a talisman. She shook with fright, but her eyes shown with fierce defiance. Aurel meant to dismiss them as more trash to be burned away, but those eyes would not let him. Instead, he determined that these ones should be permitted to live.

This woman, he learned, was Shafiqah, and the children her younger siblings, Fadiyah and Suhaim. Their father, Asad, was known to the Crusaders as a tall, strong, silent man who had died upon the walls of Jerusalem, holding off a whole company of Knights so that his comrades might escape. Shafiqah and her brother and sister were put on corpse detail, assigned even with their small stature to lug the bodies of their dead countrymen to the outer walls so that they might be buried in unmarked mass graves. At the end of the day, they were put under guard, and Aurel found himself strangely compelled to visit the family, to make sure Shafiqah was earning the gift of life that he had given. He found she ate but little, giving most of her meager rations to her siblings. He tried to force her to eat once or twice, but she would not. He caught her weeping over her lost father and her friends, and when he told her matter-of-factly that they were dead and she would do best to accept that her heathen god had not been able to save them, she slapped him. He did not retaliate, but wondered at the fire that burned in this girl - no, this woman - even if the face of such reckless hatred.

When the gruesome work was over, Shafiqah and her siblings, along with the others who had been spared, were freed, but were told never to come back to Jerusalem.

Aurel slipped away from the barracks that night and began the trek across the desert, to the place where Shafiqah said they would settle. It is said to this day that in a certain village in the cradle of the Tigris and Euphrates, Blond haired and Blue eyed children are sometimes born to certain families, the legacy of Shafiqah and the demon that she tamed.

III.

In Venice, Italy, during the Renaissance, Shafiqah became a painter who created high art, canvases of realistic, natural, yet emotional scenes, bright and vibrant and full of light and sound so that they seemed to speak aloud. Aurel returned to life as a somber Contessa who was widely regarded to be intelligent, beautiful, and capable, yet sad, never laughing. She became his patroness, and he saw the light in her regardless, and they became lovers, and the Contessa's somberness became tranquility.

IV.

In South Carolina, Livia was a house slave at his father's plantation. Tristram did not treat her harshly, not as harsh as on other plantations where the whip and chain was a daily occurrence, but still, she was a slave. She was meant only to speak when spoken to, to serve at the whim of her masters and mistresses, to not have a life of her own or an independent thought or freedom to do anything that her owner did not wish her to do. Yet despite her low estate and the injustices heaped upon her, she would not break, she would not despair.

It was just before the outbreak of the Civil War that he freed all of his slaves and accompanied her North. In the North, the locals did not mind (as much) that she was free. But carrying on with someone not of her own kind? This they saw as an abomination and a disgrace. While he was fighting many miles away in the Civil War, the townsfolk scorned her, beat her, scourged her. When he returned after the war to find her exiled to a hovel in the woods, malnourished and bearing bruises and scars, he strode to town and began to use the sniping training that he had learned in the War, not with a raging fury, but with a slow, simmering, methodical hatred. He only rid the world of trash, he said.

V.

She was called Tzeitel and He, Aizik. They had a Son, Alexander. The people of their village always joked that Aizik had been given the wrong name, for he was known as a somber and thoughtful man. But this became a credit to him, for people consulted him on manners practical and even spiritual nearly as much as they consulted the Rabbi: He, Aizik, the young wise man who had been to the great universities but returned to his village. Tzeitel was known as an angel of mercy in the community, and everything that Tradition demanded of a pious wife, and Aizik loved her with all his heart. But when a certain man came to power, not even the wisdom of Aizik could save the people of the village. Aizik was sent to a different camp than Tzeitel and Alexander, and while the woman and her son survived to the end of the persecution, they never saw Aizik again.

Tzeitel mourned in her heart. Even with Europe safe again, It held too much fear, too many painful memories, and thus she took Alexander and came to America. There, she met a tailor, and she married him, and while she found him a strong, caring, noble man who always treated her well and with genuine love, and treated Alexander as his own son, she still carried a place in her heart for her lost Aizik.

VI.

She was born once again as a Japanese woman, but he was not born there. Alas, his soul, perhaps bitter over the injustices of his past few lifetimes or the suffering of the prison camps or sorrowful over the loss of her, or perhaps only because it had somehow become lost on the way to incarnation this time, had been trapped by forces of darkness, warped and twisted. She felt the loss of one of her soul mates deep inside her heart, til sometimes it ached with the pain of the loss, but as Inoue Orihime, she understood it not. But as Inoue Orihime, many of the others joined her. The soul that had been Asad and others, the soul that had been her tailor and Suhaim and others, the soul that had been Alexander and Iustus and others, the soul that had been Livia's Mother and Fadiyah and a childhood friend of the Contessa and others, and many more who had touched her former lives in ways great and small, for weal or for woe.

Then she saw him again, his soul cast outside of the great cycle, shrouded and dark. Aurel, Tristam, Aizik, the slave master's son and the Contessa and many more. Always he had been her friend, her protector and lover. Always she had pulled him back from the brink, been the moon to his burning sun, or perhaps the other way around, and always the one who balanced him. She understood this somewhere deep in her soul. She understood that underneath the hatred and despair, the soul was the same, the soul that must always be attracted to her soul, the one that completed her soul so that it was whole. She understood without knowing that she must once again save her soul mate

Whenever he came to her, that feeling in her subconscious compelled her to connect. Whenever he came to her, a small part of his soul that had not yet succumbed to the world of sand and darkness resonated, and for a moment, just for a moment, the heart that he had forgotten, the heart choked by the harshness of Heuco Mundo, began to beat.

On the top of the dome, her soul screamed in agony as she watched Aizik fight Alexander, as she watched Iustus Claudius Silas strive to cut off the head of Tristram, and as Suhaim, as noble and gentle in this life as in the others, tried to interject himself between the two, to protect her and protect them from what they had become. But Inoue Orihime was still a young girl, even if Ulquiorra - perhaps speaking from the unremembered lifetimes when he knew her as such - recognized her as a woman, and she could not recognize what she felt, mistaking it only for the pangs of her infatuation with Kurosaki Ichigo, the result of another misunderstood soul connection.

But it was over. Aizik saved his son, and Tristram insisted that the battle continue as he pulled out Iustus' sword and returned it, not knowing that his loyal armsman, Caolan, lay bleeding before him. But Alexander (brave, noble, silly Ichigo) would only face his father if they were on equal footing. But while the strange argument reached a conclusion, Ulquiorra felt his grip on reality weaken, and his soul began to shatter and float away.

At that moment, he saw her. She whom he loved, but not loved, but for whom his soul yearned, whom his soul required as a starving man requires food. But it was not only his past lives, but Ulquiorra himself who suddenly needed to know: In the end, could he redeem himself? In the end, had this woman's lack of fear cleansed the fear that gripped his own heart?

"Do I frighten you, woman?"

"I am not afraid."

"I see," He said. He saw. He saw for a moment, for a brief moment, the years reeling back before him, the lives and the lifetimes. There had been some as dark as this one had begun, those in which their souls had failed to intersect. But most had been full of light and love, as long as he kept her close. As long as he held her hand. He saw her hand now. He reached for it.

And then he saw nothing.

VII.

In the end, he was waiting for her, as her body died and her soul ascended. He appeared as Ulquiorra Cifer, dressed in white. Yet, he appeared with no hole in his chest, no bone-white helm on his head.

"Did you wait long for me, Ulquiorra?" She asked, smiling gently.

"Woman, I have spent countless lives waiting for you, and I would spend countless more if I needed to. Did I not tell you that the only knowledge I sought was to be found in you?"

"Yes, I think Aizik said that to Tzeitel, didn't he?" Orihime's face scrunched a bit as she tried to think back -- being only newly ascended, the knowledge of her past lives was still a bit jumbled.

"I said it to you. That is what is important." Ulquiorra answered.

"Yes, I think that's right. But... I think we're both tired of waiting, ne? Maybe we should make for one last lifetime. The one in which we won't lose each other ever again. The others will be waiting for us."

Ulquiorra nodded, and reached for her, "Then take my hand woman, and we shall go."

The two joined hands, fingers intertwining, palms touching. For a moment, their souls and visages seemed to shift and shimmer. A fine young Italian noblewoman held hands with a rakish young man wearing a painter's smock. A rugged Celtic chieftain dressed in fine furs held a roman noblewoman with ringleted hair to his side. Two Samurai, one large and somber, one lithe and smiling, stood side by side. Then the two became bright and brilliant figures. If one concentrated, they might make out the form of a dark haired main with expressive green eyes, and a woman with hair as bright red and dynamic as the very fires of creation. Then all in an instant, these two angels, these perfected spirits, joined the transcendent reality at the end of creation, and of their experiences past that point, no book ever written could properly tell such a tale.