Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach, or any characters therein. I do not profit from uploading this work.
"And in the end,
we were all just humans,
drunk on the idea
that love,
only love,
could heal our brokenness."
― Christopher Poindexter
You can tell a lot about a person by the state of their wings. Orihime's orange-y red wings were sleek and soft, the result of many friends and many group preening sessions that were as soothing as they were beneficial. Psychopaths, according to several reports, had obsessively groomed wings, almost unnaturally perfect and conditioned with artificial creams instead of natural oils from friends or family.
Orihime didn't have any family nearby, but she had plenty of friends.
When she was taken to Hueco Mundo, the first thing that drove her crazy was the patch of feathers at the center of Ulquiorra's back that stuck up and out at odd angles. It was evident he preened, the outer edges and long black primaries smooth and glistening. But that path towards the center, where even the most flexible couldn't perfectly groom, drove her mad.
Other Arrancar, she saw, traveled in groups or pairs. She watched them carefully on excursions with Ulquiorra. The Primera had someone, the Segunda had someone, the Tres had someone, even the Quinto had someone. Meanwhile, that patch of feathers was driving her crazy, the similar section that she just couldn't reach mirroring his.
When she stopped preening, miserable and lonely, Ulquiorra and his abominable patch of feathers that nobody would preen for him, lingered in her room. "Woman," She refused to look at him, but at the moon that had finally angled itself outside her window, "my duty is to ensure your physical and mental health. Preen yourself." And she was angry enough, and lonely enough, to turn and glare at him. "No." He didn't respond immediately, but she was sure he twitched.
"I will return in an hour," He said, spun around and exposed that ungroomed portion, "if you have not groomed by then, I will tie you down and do it myself." Orihime stuck her down out at the closed door, and halfheartedly began grooming her wings, starting at the primaries, before abandoning the effort. The likelihood that he would actually tie her down to preen her wings was low. At this point, she might not have minded mutual preening with her captor, if only to get that spot that tormented her.
When the door slid open once more, she jumped with ill-hidden surprise. The Espada came in, looked at her, and with wings spread and eyes narrowed like some vengeful fallen angel, began to move towards her. She scrambled backwards, fought and struggled against the grip on her arm and the body holding her down, but she may as well have been trying to prevent a natural disaster. One hand was pressed in between her shoulder blades, above the wings, and she froze as fingers began to run through feathers. Said fingers moved slowly, pausing frequently, as they worked over first one wing, and then the other, and finally the center patch of feathers.
Both hands lifted from her back to preen the down against her skin, and her fingers itched with the desire to get up and do the same. The weight on her back lifted and she stood on shaky legs, watched him begin to disappear and reached out for those center feathers. He stopped, if only to look at her with the sharpness she had come to recognize as his usual response for the unusual. "What are you doing, woman?"
She didn't want to feel embarrassed, because she had preened and been preened by males before. But she flushed as she worked her fingers through the messy feathers. "It's just – your feathers here are all mussed, and if I have to take care of myself, these need taking care of, too." She only stammered a little, and he stood stock still until that center of small black down was neat and clean. She stepped back, and watched him disappear from the room.
It was only natural, she supposed, that the other Espada would begin giving her looks. Especially when she got Ulquiorra to stay, sitting cross-legged on the couch preening each other. She held her breath when they preened and he had a twitch, the slightest rustling of feathers that suggested he would leave every ten seconds. But they made it work.
So well, in fact, that when she turned and stood from folding the crisp white uniforms she wore, he was sleeping. She approached slowly, bending to look more closely. His wings shifted and jerked in a way that suggested he was dreaming, his position looking almost uncomfortable and her own wings opening somewhat as she recalled a time she had slept on her back. But then he jerked upwards, making her yelp and jump backwards as his eyes opened.
He told her he was not human, with a calm assurance that only made her doubt the statement. But she smiled and dropped the friendly suffix she so often used for her friends, one that she had tacked on without thinking about it, and pointed out his ruffled feathers.
Later, she asked cautiously if it would be possible for her to fly. She received no answer, but, several days later, was taken to a point above the false sunlight of the castle, a place of the top of the towers and rolling sand. She flew and he walked and she beckoned him to join her. He was faster than her, and spent most of the time gliding, but he was there and her heart was suddenly racing.
"Woman, if you are overexerting yourself, we should land."
"Huh?"
"Your face has become red."
And then she felt her face heating, looking away to examine the starkly white sand against the black sky. There were no stars in this sky, though the moon's weak light made every particle beneath her glow clearly. They flew back when the moon began to set and Ulquiorra said something of the monsters prowling the desert that did not fear anything. Even as they descended, the bone-chilling cry of something made her blood run cold.
They groomed the next morning. She woke to his breath on her hair and fingers through her feathers. And sitting up, she returned the gesture, the marginal coverts her main focus and branching out from there. With exaggerated care, she rested her head upon his shoulder. His fingers stilled, tangled somewhere in her scapulars. And when he didn't stand, or tell her to stop, she scooted to sit small and cross-legged in his lap, drew her fingers over the length of his wings and stayed there.
Their wings had reached 'pristine' long ago, but they stayed in quiet, in the white silence of her prison.
It was sometime after that day that Ulquiorra began bringing limbs from the quartz 'trees' of Hueco Mundo's desert. He dropped them in a corner of her room and stared at them each time he came, as though puzzled, but refusing to speak about it. Bodily contact became a necessity when preening, and when Ulquiorra was absent Orihime poked at the mineral limbs, too large for her to break, even with her full weight pressed on them.
While she did her laundry, he sat nearby, and she didn't notice until she was done that his fiddling had become weaving and the weaving had turned the quartz into something vaguely resembling a large nest. She blinked at it, at him, who sat stiff and straight and frowned at it with more venom than was usual. She cleared her throat, and he blinked up at her, trance broken, and stood. "What's that?" She asked, more to the tightly woven construct than to him. "Ridiculous." He said, and that was the only curt answer he would give.
But later, when he left and she was lying on the couch and attempting to sleep, she stood and dragged her pillow and blanket to the nest. A gentle poke, and then a harder one, proved it would hold. She curled within it, wings pulled back so that one lay over her and the other hung loosely out. For the first time since her arrival, her sleep was deep and unburdened by dreams of her friends.
Romance had never been her strong suit, and she had been largely too embarrassed during Sex Ed to pay too much attention, but when she woke in the morning it occurred to her that she and Ulquiorra were courting. She opened her eyes to the sight of him dozing on the couch and wondered how long he had been there. She recognized the cart for her food, but the small hollow that usually took care of it was absent.
She ate breakfast on the floor and watched him and felt almost uneasy with her new knowledge. Had he not built a nest, one that she slept in, she would have passed it off as paranoia. But there she was, and there he was, and every instinct she had screamed the same thing. When he opened his eyes – suddenly, as apparently he wasn't a normal person who spent fifteen minutes coming out of sleep, but rather one of those people who was just awake – she met his gaze and asked a question.
"What are we?"
He blinked at her, very slowly.
"It would depend as to what you refer."
She scowled, and replaced the empty dishes onto the cart. "I mean, this." She gestured, between them and the nest and her wings, which stretched towards his without her immediate knowledge.
"Ah."
But he didn't answer.
No, he sank to the floor in front of her and preened her scapular feathers, that patch reachable only by another. And she pushed her fingers through his hair, the oil glands so often used for conditioning feathers leaving a scent that said hers.
Right then, the how and the why didn't matter. Right then, very little mattered except this moment, fragile as spun sugar in her hands.
He kissed her with the slowness of hot desert days and the slowness of the leaves falling and the slowness of the planets rotating. He kissed her, with his hands buried in her feathers and hers buried in his hair and the whole world holding its breath.
"I love you," She mumbled, against his lips.
The world released the breath it was holding, because he pulled away and looked at her with eyes that had become shadowed, unreadable. And he left. He left her sitting on a cold white floor in a stark white room wishing for halcyon days. He left, and Orihime sobbed.
When he came, the next morning, she could not summon the willpower to pretend to be thrilled that her friends had come for her. Her nest, she guarded, lest he think of taking it. And Ulquiorra maintained distance. The center patch of feathers on her back became disheveled, impossible to groom around the bulk of her wings and without another's assistance.
"Stockholm Syndrome." He said, unexpectedly, after informing her that Ichigo and the others drew near.
She frowned at him, at the cryptic pair of words.
"The weak human mind becomes incapable of handling a captive situation, so they begin to identify and sympathize with their captors on whom they depend for survival."
Her blood ran hot, and she lifted her chin to meet his level gaze.
"I'm not afraid."
It was a lie, because she feared losing him (her mate, her mate) and she feared her friends' reactions. But she had never feared him, and she had never feared this. Even knowing she was coming here through threats to her friends' lives, she had not been afraid.
Things grew tense when Ichigo and the others entered Las Noches, culminating to the point where she stood atop the canopy where she had once flown and watched him reach for her, missing a wing. And she reached back, desperately, frantically, and her fingers passed only through empty air.
She returned home different and numb and wishing at night for a smooth white nest of quartz instead of wood. She went home and back to school and wanted nothing more than for the fingers preening her scapulars to be slim and white, white like everything else in Hueco Mundo, the stark whiteness of that world only contrasted by black.
Little things reminded her of her lost mate. Pairs of robins and cardinals drove her to tears. Preening with her friends, once enjoyable, was unbearable at first, and the wing twitch she developed from startling at unexpected hands on her wings and taking off stayed, reminded her of Ulquiorra's habits and nuances. Uryuu, she overhead, suspected Aizen and the Espada had done something to her. Conversations about her time in Hueco Mundo stuttered to a stop when she appeared, but she heard.
It was almost reassuring when Tatsuki cornered her on her way home.
"You mated, didn't you?"
Orihime stopped and flushed and considered trying to outfly Tatsuki. She did try, darting up and being blocked by her much fitter friend, dashing this way and that before conceding defeat and landing. And she nodded, her eyes growing moist as she bit down on her lip to not cry, she would not cry –
But then she was sobbing and leaning on Tatsuki for support as they walked back to her apartment. Inside, she sat down, a fort of wings sheltering them, and she told her everything she had been holding in, every detail of their awkward courtship by exclusive contact and the patch of feathers that started it all because he had no one and she was so starved of touch.
In the end, when she was sniffling and curled in on herself, she blinked at Tatsuki and asked: "How did you guess?" To which Tatsuki snorted, crossing her arms. "I paid attention while the rest of you fought Hollows and rescued ghosts." Later, they ate vanilla ice-cream and Orihime added bean paste and mustard to hers.
Sometime during the middle of some awful chick flick based on a sappy romance novel, she stopped eating.
"I just want him back."
And Tatsuki was there, solid beneath her fingers when she started crying again, too spent to have tears and too emotional to stop the jerks of her shoulders.
"I know."
Author's Note: Ahhh it is done. I've been slowly trying to both improve and extend my writing by setting goals. Barista was the first in that project, and my goal for this was to make it twice as long. I am crazy obsessed with wing fics, and might continue this later, but for now, it's done and I am ridiculously happy.