Characters: Neliel, Nnoitra
Summary: He brings chaos. It is all he knows, so he infects her with it too.
Pairings: NnoiNel
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc
Timeline: Pre-Hueco Mundo arc
Author's Note: Another NnoiNel; I've said it before but I love this couple. That I had sudden inspiration was just a matter of convenience.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
The shockwaves that reverberate through her life, they inevitably originate from him. It's a well-known fact of the living and undead universe that Nnoitra Jiruga is the progenitor of all discord and unrest in Neliel tu Oderschvank's life.
Chaos is all he knows so chaos is what he brings to Neliel's life, more than anything else.
.
Neliel smells the blood before she sees him and this is what she registers: a tall slim figure of a man, undulating through a sea of sand outside the fortress of Las Noches. Another Arrancar, with a swinging crescent moon blade over him, reeking of blood.
It is evident what he wants, and Neliel defuses the explosion of his bloodlust with a clean swipe of her zanpakuto to leave him down on his back on the sand.
"Kill me," comes the hoarse, harsh refrain that will be Neliel's bane in the long watches of the night to come. She can not see the despair, the anguish that he hides, does not know him well enough to detect it. Instead, all she sees is the berserker's rage and unreasoning pride.
Ugliness, that she knows all too well.
His body is clumsy and cumbersome, a newborn Arrancar just now stitched together, separate parts to form a whole. If Neliel narrows her eyes as she stands over him, she thinks she can see the stitching still there, not yet engulfed in Hierro and skin.
The moonlight bleeds down to earth, dripping almost like rain around them, though there are no pock marks in the dunes except for their footprints.
Neliel stands for the longest time with her blade at his throat, looking at the lump of flesh beneath her, newborn and so new that he can not string together anything more significant than the constantly repeated "Kill me".
Finally, she sheathes her blade, and walks away.
"No."
He screams wordlessly, a song of rage to the night that she is never meant to hear, but recognizes anyway.
.
When Neliel learns his name, she accordingly now feels responsible (what an odd feeling, so strange and grating and harsh) for him, much in the way she feels responsible for her Fracción but different.
The endless daylight of Las Noches makes Neliel's eyes water at times, and she's just fighting back saline water as she extends a hand down to the Espada on the floor.
The way he ignores it is pointed and rude as he gets to his feet under his own power, a blunt way in silence of telling her he doesn't need her.
And even now, they both know that's not true.
"What are you called?"
His words are spoken in resentment like leeches crawling under his skin. "Nnoitra Jiruga." The one eye left exposed glowers sullenly at her, though Neliel sees something else that she won't recognize until far later and will always trouble and alienate her.
Neliel closes her eyes down for several seconds, gathering the breath that has somehow escaped from her. When speech returns her voice is strangely breathy. "Are you alright?"
"Fine," he snaps, looking at the wall, the ceiling, his zanpakuto, anywhere but at her. "Fine."
.
"I do not kill," Neliel reiterates and Nnoitra's mouth fills with teeth in a ghastly, lurid grin.
"You're weak!" he crows, triumphant, more so than it should be, voice unholy in its exultance.
Neliel frowns, feeling her ire rise almost unwillingly and wonders what words would make him understand. She knows what it is that makes him so jubilant that she shows any sign of what he considers "weakness".
What to say… He is a Hollow just as she is, a creature born of blood and violence and hatred to gall the saintliest of souls. But she does not feel the tug of the bloodthirsty moon in her blood—she is not wedded to a lust for battle, as Nnoitra is.
She is not ruled by her desires as he is.
"I do not kill," she repeats, perturbed—already Nnoitra has discovered his power to disturb her and he takes whatever opportunity he can to exploit it. "There is a stain, a madness in killing without end. It would—"
"You're weak!" Nnoitra repeats himself, as pleased as a child who has been presented with a new toy. Something new and shiny to manipulate and destroy as he pleases.
He will not listen. This, Neliel knows.
.
Neliel is no fool and she sees the world at large as anyone with eyes would. There is no mist on her vision, no cataracts, nothing to keep her from seeing what she should—at least so she thinks. What she doesn't know is that the real danger is in what she doesn't see, but how can she possibly know that?
So, this is what it comes to, desire and lust wedded to hatred and resentment and a sullen defiance. Something to disgust her on the outer levels and intrigue her on the levels Neliel doesn't admit she has, not to anyone.
She knows the story.
One animal desires to control another, and when that control is thwarted the animal grows to resent her, as much as he is ruled by lust for her.
Nnoitra is dangerous, for all that he is weaker than her.
Nnoitra will try anything.
Neliel can still feel hot eyes burning holes into the backs of her shoulder blades and now it's her skin crawling like leeches are making sluggish paths underneath, gorging themselves on her blood.
The game has become far more dangerous than it was before.
.
"Nnoitra!" Is the single scream that tears itself from her lips when she sees him fall, a sharp, shrieking cry more akin to the scream of a bird of prey than an anguished Arrancar-Hollow-Woman.
Her blade is out as she runs towards him, the hall seeming like an endless passage towards the advent of oblivion.
It's an instinct in her that suddenly rules her that has Neliel rising to protect him, even though he poses a greater threat to her life than she has ever known. She doesn't know what fuels it, only knows that it rears its head like a lioness and won't let her go until she acts on it.
She can not let him die.
Assailants are swatted away like flies with a fly swatter, Neliel's gorge rising as the smell of blood—Nnoitra's blood—rises in her consciousness, swamps her vision.
For a moment, she becomes him, and all Neliel sees is red. Carmine, crimson, lovely.
She tastes the reality she left behind, the reality Nnoitra still lives.
And then, she sees white again, and she's staring down at Nnoitra. Her face is a mask more impenetrable than the bone one ever was—it holds concern somehow mixed with disdain, holding him in contempt for being unable to control his bloodlust.
Nnoitra's face, as ever, is an open book of lust and desire and hatred wedded to loathing of himself and despair. And Neliel wonders how anyone can survive with these opposite seas of emotion warring against each other.
"Kill me." He's spitting through blood and his voice is hoarse like the rasping of a blade rusting against the wall.
And Neliel has never been, never will be prepared to give him what he wants.
She shakes her head, winter settling on her bones to make her eyes colder than they have ever been before. "No, never."
The familiar rage rises in him, to master the lesser Espada as it always does, never letting him go. "What? Why? Why won't you kill me, Neliel? Just do it! Do it now!"
It's an eternal mystery as to, at the moment whether he's thinking of death or sex. Maybe both.
Neliel does the only thing that can hurt him more than leaving him alive. She turns away, and does not look at him anymore.
Nnoitra's voice accosts her as she leaves, a final blow that's made to save face, recover what's left of his mauled and mangled pride. "You'll regret it," he promises in a tone of ominous clouds. "I swear, you will regret it."
And she doesn't answer.
.
Neliel finds it strange that Nnoitra won't look at her anymore. Formerly, he could not force his eyes to leave from her, hot with hatred and lust, but now, he can't seem more eager to leave her presence, to not have to look at her.
Neliel admits, to herself in dark places, that she finds it far more disturbing than anything else that has arisen from Nnoitra.
Because when he's screaming and howling at her she at least has the measure of him. He's too distraught and distracted to plan anything.
Now, there are secrets over his eyes, and Neliel knows that no good will come of this.
.
The final act is an epicenter of despair and anger and promises fulfilled and broken. It is a center of destruction of death. A red day, the last day Neliel will remember what the light looks like.
Nnoitra is finally successful in provoking her rage—he knows what hurts her, what sparks violence in her. No one should ever so much as touch Neliel's Fracción, but he has done that and more, reduced them to the level of animals, almost.
Maybe he is satisfied to see that they are not so different anymore, but Neliel doesn't care as she finally unsheathes her blade with the intent to kill him.
There is no time for regret or for feelings of personal betrayal. She'll be giving Nnoitra what he always wanted, today.
And that is when the miasma that will be her last gasp of air before the plunge douses her in luminous mists. Her zanpakuto drops and disappears, and Neliel twists and changes at her most fundamental levels. There will be no escape from this, she can already tell.
There is pain, intense, violent pain, the pains of stretching and then contracting, beyond all safe limits.
The last thing Neliel sees before all is darkness and she is different and in a way just as dead as Nnoitra expected her to be, is his single uncovered eye. The unholy anticipation is there, but it's warring with something else. With regret, not guilt. With helplessness. The slave to his desires can not break free from them, no matter how he wishes he could.
And the last thing she thinks, before she is a different person, is that she never found out why Nnoitra wanted to die so badly.