Ulquiorra looked in something vaguely resembling pity at the woman before him. Her face was stained with tears and grime, flushed red from lack of oxygen. She had been screaming for the last two minutes; pleading for her hero to rise up and protect her again. Now she simply wept, any semblance of words lost. The other human, the archer, had seemingly passed out, and would likely be dead of blood loss soon. Ichigo Kurosaki's face remained blank and disbelieving, the gaping hole in his torso no less final than it had been a minute before when it was made.
'Pitiful.' He had blustered, and promised, and fought like a man possessed. His power had risen above anything Ulquiorra would have expected from a human. But here he was, dead, and no amount of love, no actions of a so-called heart would ever be able to bring him back. Orihime's cries devolved into wracking coughs, her voice finally giving out under the strain of constant use.
"Are you done yet?" She sniffed, hands curling into fists. With supreme effort, her eyes rose to meet his: red-ringed, blank. They had been so filled with resolution and empathy before. Even when those fled there had been fear. Now even that was gone from her gaze. His stare met hers, and he found the same despair he saw every time he looked in a mirror. The same hopelessness that had given him the power he had just used to murder her hero.
"You." It was spoken breathlessly, barely more than a whisper, but he easily heard it. "You… killed him." She blinked, and for a moment time seemed to be moving through liquid concrete. Something at the back of his mind was nagging him, but he couldn't quite place it.
"You killed him!" There was a flash of red, and he found himself flying through the air. His arm was missing.
'What?'
"Monster!" She was screeching, her teeth clenched with rage, her eyes wide and terrifying. The flash again, and this time he had time to see what it was before it hit: a glowing red arrow. His tail came up to bat it away, but the thing barely slowed, and for his trouble he lost his other arm from the elbow down.
He remembered in that moment what Aizen had said when he was sent to capture the girl: that the root of her abilities was in the rejection of reality. Power like that didn't care about his Hierro, or how laughably small her spiritual power was.
He had just driven a god to madness, and he continued to feel the consequences of that as he barely avoided another shot from the red blade, still managing to lose a foot in the process.
Orihime wasn't thinking anymore. Ichigo hadn't won. She hadn't been able to protect him. And now she couldn't bring him back.
And all of it was his fault. This hopeless, arrogant creature had held up the man she loved like a ragdoll and blown a hole in his chest, murdering him in cold blood all to prove a point. All to make them admit that he was right. The black tear-streaks on his pale cheeks sat in stark contrast to the apathy in his eyes, mocking her. As though a thing like that could ever understand loss. Could ever feel something human enough to cry over.
For the second time in the entirety of her brief life, Orihime Inoue wanted to kill someone. Tsubaki was more than willing to oblige.
She didn't need to tell him to act. There was no command phrase. He did it without any input from her. He was a part of her, her will to attack, to destroy, to avenge, and he finally had fuel to burn. She felt her rage, and disbelief, and horror flow into him, felt it sharpen and concentrate, and then she let it go.
She watched the monster's expression go from boredom to surprise; watched her anger send him flying. It felt good. He deserved to bleed. He deserved to feel fear.
Again and again she hurt him, taking his limbs. Her hand bumped against something and she looked down. Her fingers ran over the woven grip. Her eyes devoured the familiar shine of the steel
The black blade was still clasped in its wielder's hands. She took hold of the hilt, and it came free without any great struggle. Finally she stood, shaking but stable.
Her hairpins had split, and now swarmed around her like angry wasps, Tsubaki the angriest of all. She walked on quivering legs toward the object of her hatred. He was standing on one foot and watching her with grim seriousness. Even as she watched, his arms exploded back into being, weaving over themselves until clawed hands reappeared. His leg followed suit. His breath was heavy and labored as his tail crept back into existence, and his wings knitted themselves together.
He moved faster than she could track, but her power moved faster. A pitch-black hand connected claws-first with a glowing orange shield and snapped at the force of its own impact, kicking up a powerful wind that tore at her hair, but accomplishing little else. Again, he disappeared, and she felt more than knew where he ended up, his other hand pointing with all the finality of a divine executioner, glowing with green-tinged darkness. She couldn't die, not yet! He was still alive! He hadn't paid for Ichigo's death!
Her hand began to move, but her remaining hairpins outpaced it by factors too great for even him to follow. His hand was wrapped in an orange oval of light, and he found that he could not budge it at all. His eyes widened as his cero evaporated and disappeared. Orihime's lips parted, her eyes still wide and without guiding sanity. The strangled cry she let out demanded blood.
His tail moved faster than she could hope to, breaking his arm off at the elbow with a wet snap and allowing him to move backward, out of the reach of her overhand swing. As the black blade of his fallen adversary narrowly missed his chin, something foreign stirred in the pit of his stomach. He met her eyes once again, but saw only empty madness. No answers were there to be found. Her glowing shields had disappeared back into the swarm, but the blood-red edge of Tsubaki still glowed at her side. Ulquiorra spared a moment to look at his hand and found that past a certain point it was refusing to regenerate, like some morbid cross-section. It was quite simply not there anymore.
He knew rather abruptly what the stirring was, and that knowledge caused it to grow. It had been so long since he had felt it that he had quite forgotten the touch of fear. Not the existential despair that had ascended him to his current form, but a primal pulsing in the center of his being. He feared Orihime Inoue. Feared that she would take his life from him.
With another primal cry, she swung the fallen blade and sent Tsubaki flying. The red blade took his wing and arm once again, but instead of returning to its wielder as before, the attack circled around to took his other wing and much of his tail.
He couldn't dodge it. He wasn't fast enough. Even at the peak of his power, he was quite simply outclassed. Despite how much of his body he was losing, he had never felt so heavy, so weighed down.
A pulse of his Pesquisa ran over her and he felt her Reiatsu. It was pitiful, dwarfed by even the smallest of Menos, and yet he could not touch her. Even more perplexing was how power continued to flow from the sword she wielded despite its true owner lying dead not ten meters away. It didn't make sense. None of it made sense!
He was snapped from the grasp of his rising panic by a tug at his foot, and saw that it was caught just as his hand had been. The orange diamond grew and grew, binding him in place. He wasn't regenerating fast enough. She ran forward, yelling something incoherent.
It all happened so slowly. Her run was awkward, and her grip on her weapon was without any form. She had no high-speed technique. Her body was so utterly human: weak and slow, to the point of irrelevance. He saw the blow coming as thought from across a great valley, and yet even so, he was beaten. The pain he felt told him so. The finality of the roaring in is ears told him so. The sight of his blood staining the front of her ruined dress in a gory black arc told him so.
She had brought her black blade down in a two-handed cut from his shoulder to his hip. Its edge had cleaved him cleanly in two, and though his skin and bones knitted back together immediately after, he knew it was over. In a single rage-filled stroke, the timid, kind person he'd been set to watch had killed him, shredding his organs beyond all repair.
Felled by a god on behalf of an upstart human who had refused to give up. He almost laughed. But that was difficult with his lungs filled with blood. He tried anyway, and was rewarded with a gurgling noise and a fountain of black for his trouble.
He was released, the orange glow disappearing from existence in an instant. She fell to the ground, holding the sword against her chest like a lifeline as her hairpins returned to her temples, so small and innocuous for the mighty work they had accomplished. She was crying again, though this time over a very different dead body. Such a pitiful state she'd been brought to, this god that had felled him so easily. He thought he heard her muttering something, a prayer maybe. Or perhaps she was simply babbling. He could not bring himself to care.
For even as he was: felled by a creature so lowly, he felt a certain relief. The fear was gone. He felt light, lighter than flight had ever made him.
The sword clattered to the ground loudly and she reached forward to grab him by the shoulders, to shake him violently, but the moment her fingers closed on his skin, he began to dissolve. A soft breeze carried the dust of his body off into the deserts of Hueco Mundo, and she was left to repeat the same words, over and over again.
"Give him back.
Please.
Please.
Give him back."