chapter title: the body sown
summary: in the after-afterlife, Ulquiorra continues to ponder upon the meaning of a heart.
raw word count: 835
notes: the (chapter) title is taken from 1 Corinthians 15:42-44.
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it's so hazy, this alien place he finds his body in. antiseptic, almost; at once as sterile and as strange as a mortuary chapel.
he counts his fingers: one, two, three, four —
and then the clenched fist of five makes him remember.
"I died," he tells the empty space. the desolation doesn't answer back.
only the moon, too high up to even glimpse, bathes him in gentle waves of effulgence.
Ulquiorra walks.
the more he does, the fainter the horizon grows.
he allows himself to take in the scenery, and frowns when he finds that the sight doesn't quite register. this world is sandless, that much his feet know — and yet it all slips through his fingers, just the same.
in the strangest way, it makes him miss Hueco Mundo: miss its' sloping plains and their impossible geometry and the way the ever-present, coarse white sand clung to his skin. for a ghost world, it had substance. nothing felt more real than bleeding out and drowning in its' endless night.
here, nothing feels real.
And perhaps none of it is.
he touches his chest, and startles when he finds his hollow hole to be constructed of solid bone and muscle.
"How mystifying," he murmurs, genuinely caught off-guard. his skin is still the same chalk-white; so why?
What prompted such reverse to humanity?
oh, how very wondrous all of it is.
he paws at the base of his throat, tentative; pressing down with the pads of his fingers, palpating the outline of clavicle-heads and the tense breadth of sternocleidomastoidian nerve — yet all of him remains strangely whole, despite his growing insistence. as the bare world answers no inquiry, the whole of the wonder is his and his alone.
he walks on.
faintly, he catches a far-flung whiff of the sea; the salt of it fizzes out on his tongue, burning momentarily. the sense of unknown deepens, lowering over him like the folds of a shroud. he starts eastward, following his nose — inexplicably and inexorably drawn toward the unseen waves.
it dawns on him, midway: "I have acquired a heart."
and all at once that woman's face fills up his mind: its' delicate bone-structure, the contours of it gentle and hearty; the sun-kissed skin mantled across it, a rosé flush dusting the cheeks; those large, expressive brown eyes; her small, red mouth.
I think I loved her.
the world encircling him swirls, then; and in a singular moment of absolute clarity, its' features are revealed to him in vivid technicolor. it is soon almost wholly erased from memory — all but a smudge of brilliant blue, lapping serenely at the ever-distant horizon.
he closes his eyes, content to simply feel as his body is prised and disintegrated.
his last coherent thought is:
I wonder where to will the dust of me be returned. The soil of some distant star, perhaps.
he does not dare hope, despite his newfound heart yearning so achingly for a certain place; and the velvetine mouth of oblivion clamps shut around him before the warring within can declare any victor. what follows it is a period of drifting — the essence of him afloat for what feels like forever and a half, amorphous and only dimly aware of everything but being.
and then, at last, the miracle happens.
faintly, a familiar voice calls out his name: insistent yet clement, halfway between a plea and a prayer.
"Ulquiorra? Ulquiorra."
his eyelids feel so very heavy; febrile, too. it takes a while to will them open, and when at last they are, the world is slow to come into focus.
"...are you alright?"
that same voice. Where have I heard it before? his eyes dart, uncertain.
"Where am I?"
a floral scent fills his lungs, and all of a sudden he is hyper-aware of the woman hovering by his bedside.
"Las Noches," Orihime says, her upper body bowed above him. she tucks a stray strand of hair back behind her ear, half-absent. "I had you brought in." here she pauses, peering at him with her lower lip sucked back between her teeth in an expression of such clear concern that the word is all but written on her forehead. "Are you alright?"
his hands cup her face before he even has a chance to register that he wants to do it; fingers trembling, the whole of him brought to paroxysm by sheer relief. he lets his thumbs trail down the curve of her cheeks, committing their contour to the memory of that surreal thing called heart.
he feels it beat in response, pounding against the walls of his ears.
"Yes," he says. "I am quite alright, now."
her small hands lower over his; and she is so impossibly warm, the whole sun caught in a person. how had he never noticed that, before? when her lips unfurl in a smile, the radiance of it is almost enough to blind him.
"I'm glad," she whispers, giving his wrists a light squeeze. "I'm so very glad, you've no idea."
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fin.