The shinigami with the eye patch crouches next to Nnoitra-sama and stares for a while.
His shadow falls across the pale bloody shape of Nnoitra in the sand. He seems more pensive than hostile now, but all that Tesla can feel is - he doesn't know what that feeling is, but it is overwhelming and it hurts. It hurts more than his injuries, more than losing his eye, more than anything Nnoitra has ever done to him. It's crushing his chest and burning in his eye and thundering in his head.
Tesla knows he is crying. He can feel it. He didn't even know that was possible.
Finally the big shinigami grunts low in his throat. He straightens up and says, "C'mon Yachiru," in his rough voice.
By then Aizen's girl - Inoue Orihime - has finished has healing the other shinigami and they pick up Nelliel and leave. Inoue Orihime glances back. Tesla sees her. He sees her eyes linger on his own face. Her throat moves as she swallows and she turns away and scrambles after the shinigami. Of course she does. She owes them nothing.
If Tesla had the breath left for begging, he'd ask her to heal Nnoitra-sama. She'd be insane to do it, but he'd ask. She seems like the type who'd find it hard to deny a crying, bleeding enemy.
Tesla doesn't have the breath. Even if he wasn't hemorrhaging all over the sand from a sucking chest wound, this feeling is killing him.
So they leave Tesla bleeding and crying, and they leave Nnoitra dying - maybe already dead, Tesla thinks tensely.
They leave Grimmjow too. Grimmjow is there. Somewhere. Tesla can feel his reiatsu, diffuse and wounded nearby, where earlier the sheer weight of Nnoitra's drowned it out. Tesla has never cared so little about the presence of a stronger hollow nearby than he does right now. Grimmjow barely even registers as a potential threat. His whole brain is still fixed on Nnoitra-sama.
Nnoitra's reiatsu is fading.
Tesla feels like his whole skull is on fire. He cannot lay helplessly here and wait for Nnoitra's whole body to disintegrate and turn into reishi and float away on the wind. He can't. He-
It is harder to lay and let it happen than it is to heave with his whole aching body and roll over.
The sand forms clumps around Tesla's blood, gleaming red in the bright fake sunlight like grim little gemstones. His hand is more or less detached already, and dragging it hurts and makes him even more awkward, so he takes his completely numb fingers in his mouth and rips it the rest of the way off at the wrist. More blood. More clumps in the sand.
Those, Tesla thinks in a daze, are his fingers curling loosely, detached on the ground. His wrist hurts, but the sense of losing something very important is a lot worse. He's not sure it'll grow back.
On hand and knee and bloody stump Tesla crawls.
Close up he can still smell Nnoitra-sama, fill his mouth and nose and his whole burning skull with the rich smells of his blood. There's no movement. Nothing that seems like life. Just the fading ghost of his reiatsu. Still, if Tesla closes his eye-
It's wet. Tesla is still, inexplicably, crying. Maybe his injuries damaged something in his eye.
Nnoitra-sama is going away and Tesla can't fix it. There's nothing he can do to preserve him or fix him or - even if he could somehow catch up with the human girl and MAKE her, he knows it is already too late.
They would not have left otherwise. Tesla isn't important enough for them to care if he survives or not, but they wouldn't have left Nnoitra-sama behind them if they thought there was any chance he'd recover. Only Nelliel would be that stupid, or that arrogant, and look where that got her.
He breathes in again. The smell of Nnoitra's body and blood hits him once more and he begins to shake.
Tesla swallows hard and rests his face against the enormous wound in Nnoitra's chest, at the juncture of two huge slashes where x marks the spot. He inhales with his mouth and lets his eye close properly, shut against the light.
He sets his teeth against the open slash and bites down. The flesh is cold. Steadily, he begins to eat.
Tesla eats him because it is the closest he can come to keeping Nnoitra. It is selfish and he is probably unworthy, but it seems better that whatever is left of him becomes Tesla's than that it should be lost.
He is crying as he eats, but his instincts drive him eventually. Bones crack. Some places are still warm. He eats and eats. He is ravenous.
Nnoitra's reiatsu hurts. It is too strong for Tesla, even weakend like this, and he knows it. It feels corrosive. Every time he swallows it burns further into him. Good. Good.
Somewhere nearby he can hear Grimmjow laughing, all rasping and congested and dirty sounding. Tesla barely notices.
Nnoitra tastes bad. Tesla could probably have predicted that, if he'd thought about it before this very second.
He never has, though. He would not have dared.
Tesla eats and eats until he is glutted, and then he keeps eating still, until hair and scraps of clothing are all that's left. They smell good, like good and homey things, and he curls up around them and sleeps.
There's no sign of Nnoitra left when he wakes up. No sign of Grimmjow, either. Tesla staggers to his feet. He has two hands, which doesn't seem that strange until he remembers what happened to them.
He's missing one glove and his hand feels strange and sensitive, but he can't even see a scar. The wound across his torso is scarred, but it looks old already.
He feels physically okay, but -
No scent of Nnoitra lingers. No scrap of clothing. Nothing remains.
Wrong, he reminds himself, rubbing the long line from his throat to his belly with his new and reactive fingers. Wrong. Tesla clenches his jaw.
He doesn't know what to do with himself. He wonders what Nnoitra-sama would want him to do.
IDIOT, he thinks critically, flatly, FIND SOMEONE TO KILL.
Tesla doesn't question the thought. It isn't a bad plan. It seems even like something Nnoitra would want. Especially if there are still shinigami hanging around.
He tips his head back and throws wide the net of his senses, wondering. There are. Shinigami, scurrying over the sand, black and heavy like ants.
That's not right, he thinks. Hueco Mundo is for the hollows. Aizen is one thing, but shinigami as a group are not welcome here. If there are stragglers, Tesla will...
Yes.
He eats some shinigami. He can feel the enormous reiatsu of the one who killed Nnoitra hovering at the edges of his perquisa, but he doesn't try to follow the feeling. He can feel it when that same shinigami takes Yammy down, despite all Yammy's rage and the enormous thundercloud of his oppressive power.
Part of Tesla feels that shinigami and it howls - fight, kill, - and it is like a mantra in his skull, a pounding drum beat of rising violence, like a pulse for a thing without a heart. He breathes against the urge, blinking widely.
Tesla knows he cannot win against anybody who has defeated Yammy. There are things in this world that are possible, and there are things that are not.
THEN YOU SHOULD FIGHT ANYWAY, COWARD, he thinks, and he shudders at the thought's familiar tone, AND DIE FIGHTING.
Tesla does not.
The next shinigami Tesla finds is a hunched and sad eyed little thing, left behind to wander in the shifting sands just outside of Las Noches. He is small and nervous and Tesla takes a strange and unkind pleasure in playing with him.
As a rule, Tesla does not play with his food. Once his reserve falls away and he is committed to violence Tesla is consumed by it. He's too rough to draw anything out. He doesn't think clearly, usually, -
Now it is different. His thoughts are crystal clear. The shinigami tries to fight him off with a scalpel.
"Oh, I bet you feel sorry for yourself now, shinigami," he says roughly down to him when the poor bastard is curled shaking in the sand. "I bet you think this is unfair."
The shinigami looks up at him, wide-eyed and afraid. "Ah... please... that is..." he stammers.
Tesla laughs, which is not at all like him, and takes him apart very slowly.
When he's done he eats him. And because he is bitter and angry and be wants to make someone else feel half as bad as he does, be starts with his feet and works bits way up.
Nobody comes to save the shinigami this time.
WEAK, he thinks after, annoyed. He is red with fluids and glutted and he should be satisfied enough that even the hunger is diminished for a moment but...
Something is wrong.
WEAK, snarls in his thoughts, ever louder, a black crackle of disgust and anger. It's still hungry. It might never be satisfied.
Tesla closes his eye.
...Confusing.
The next shinigami he sees, he thinks CRUSH, CRUSH, CRUSH - and then, crystal fucking clear, like a silver bell struck in the cesspit of his mind: P R A Y.
And Tesla supposes he knows very well what's gone wrong, here.