Characters: Orihime, Ulquiorra
Summary: "Never" is a monstrous word, but it's the only word capable of describing them.
Pairings: UlquiHime
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc
Timeline: Hueco Mundo arc
Author's Note: Well, that was fun. Let's hope for another year of this, people!
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
'Never'. Orihime turns the word over and over again in her mind, tasting it on her tongue and finding it heavy and bitter, overbearing with a presence so, so monstrous and wearying.
'Never' is one of those heavy words, one of those words that are full of terrible meaning, on par with the likes of 'forever' and 'hate' and 'love'. It is often murmured, muttered, stated, screamed, by people who have no idea what it means. They have no comprehension of the power resting on those two little syllables.
But Orihime knows. And it is not lightly that she uses that word to apply to herself, and one other.
All Orihime has to dream about on Hueco Mundo are of the dead things she has seen there. Of people who claim to be alive, but are dead in their own ways. In the crowd that greeted her when she first arrived, she didn't see a living soul there, not in all those glinting glass eyes. She was met instead with savage puppets being played on wires; they all think they're in control of themselves but really when they commit violence they're doing it at the behest of some shadowy puppet master.
That does nothing to relieve Orihime of the horror she feels at the violence ebbing and flowing like a scarlet sea all around her.
The one who comes to her, the only one there to remind Orihime that she isn't totally alone on this world, is dead too. She can see that; he has emerald marbles for eyes, things that seem to spark and scintillate but are only reflecting the light. All of that light is external; none of it comes from the inside.
With his marbled skin and long, bone-fingers, Orihime has never seen anything quite so corpse-like as Ulquiorra Schiffer.
But he is the only thing there that is real to her, and she clings to him like a sailor cast from a burning ship into a drowning sea, with no hope for survival but the scrap of driftwood her arms are wrapped about. Ulquiorra's all she has in this strange and dangerous world.
Never…
That's them.
Orihime knows this, as she rests on the couch and stares up at the ceiling, when darkness falls on a room that, even though it has no light fixtures, seems to bleed light from the walls. She traces illusory patterns on the ceiling, and tries not to see his face there.
Orihime is not afraid, because she knows that they, she, Inoue Orihime and Ulquiorra Schiffer, will never be anything but a scattered, fragmented heap of glass shards shunted into the corner with a giant broom.
Two creatures that are broken can not create a whole.
And as she is living and he is dead, they will never be. Never be anything.
Orihime is not afraid. But she is just a little sad. 'Never' seems to be the story with every relationship she has ever had, be it romantic or platonic. No matter how much she wants the present and the future 'never' manages to insinuate itself in until it is intertwined with 'forever' in the most insidious fashion.
Orihime knows it is so with Ulquiorra.
He is a dead thing, and her heart still beats. His eyes are made of marbles, his skin from a corpse. He is empty and hollow, his soul so diminished and shriveled as to be non-existent. There is a barrier between them, and Orihime only knows of two things that can tear it down.
Her death.
Or his.
But still, even after that, 'never' will remain supreme.
After, this was doomed from the start. As much as Orihime cares about him and as much as Ulquiorra seems to care about her (as much as he cares about anyone and as close as he can come to caring for anyone in his life at all), anyone can see that it was never meant to be.
Never, the shadows whisper back at Orihime, and they have his voice. Never.