After that, Orihime saw Ulquiorra most days for so-called 'tests of desire'—though the fact that she knew they were tests didn't do much to dispel her hesitation. It was almost always some minor discomfort, or, in a few cases, a major one. Oddly enough, the minor ones were the ones she tended to fail. She had learned to ask when she was hungry, but progress in other areas—requests for privacy, for adjustments in temperature, for clean clothes, for silence while she slept—never rose above a crawl. She couldn't fight the sense that if she made a fuss, she'd be essentially begging for worse.
In the major cases, Ulquiorra would appear out of the blue, advancing impassively and without interest into her personal space like an unstoppable natural force. Each time, her throat closed up, her heart raced, her brain fogged, she cringed away—more than once, she'd blacked out. Afterwards she would wake to find him either gone without a trace or standing, apparently unmoved, since she'd dropped.
But, as she realized after some time, the longer she waited to protest—as Aizen had promised, all she had to do was voice a 'want' and the test would end—the more the event escalated. Those were the times she fainted, though no matter how close Ulquiorra came, no matter how intense his Reiatsu grew, he never touched her. She had a feeling that Aizen must have given him very specific boundaries, but the threat in her mind never diminished, and the paralysis was not quick to fade.
Eventually, perhaps after some benchmark Orihime couldn't fathom had either been passed or simply abandoned, Ulquiorra began testing her combat and defense skills. Actual training was clearly not the point of the exercises: it was rare for him to say even two words from the time he arrived and began hurling Ceroes at her to the time he simply turned around and walked away, leaving Orihime frazzled and panting for breath amid a pile of rubble. Given his strength, Orihime had no doubt he was using the lightest hand he could, but the fear that the combat would intensify beyond all hope of defense usually kept her from pushing back. And regardless of how bizarre her surroundings became, no matter how unreadable Ulquiorra remained, she couldn't stop herself from viewing him as someone who might, in some small way, become a friend to her…she was still Orihime, after all, and Orihime didn't fight friends. She doubted even Aizen was capable of changing that about her.
Even her Santen Kesshun, when she managed to call them at all, had become disorganized. They never appeared for long, as if the strain on her conscience was too great, and for the short period they were visible, they turned fractious. Shields sizzled and popped, rejection fields winked out as soon as Orihime's mind wandered, and Tsubaki didn't even bother shouting at her, if he even showed up.
Presumably Aizen was keeping a tally somewhere of how often she passed or failed, or he was just watching her through Ulquiorra's weird eyeball mechanic as it happened, because every few days she was summoned and her progress briefly evaluated.
The larger part of her feared these times with Aizen, and she caught herself falling back on her meekest instincts to present the smallest target possible, but there was another, less familiar sense that was growing like a mushroom patch in the darkest, dustiest corner of her mind. If she had to name it, it would have been resentment, but it felt even less pure. It was confused and complicated by the bizarre rush of relief she felt at the prospect of human (or humanish) contact each time she was summoned. She wondered whether she was being brainwashed, and then, with a quiver of doubt, whether that was something she could even fight without playing directly into Aizen's hands.
"I am beginning to suspect," Aizen said one day during a meeting, "that neither my presence nor Ulquiorra's is quite the right choice for what we're trying to accomplish here."
"What—how do you mean?" Orihime asked. She still wasn't sure exactly what he was trying to accomplish anyway, other than that he, for some reason, thought there was any chance in hell that she'd want to help him accomplish something with the Hogyoku and his presumably evil end goals.
"I mean that you're not an unruly child who needs to learn restraint and composure from her wisers and betters."
Orihime's gut response, which she of course did not voice, was that this was ridiculous. She felt like a child all the time—she ate weird food, she said weird things, and she tended to cry when other people got hurt. She felt like what she needed more than anything in the world, right now and ever, was deeper, more constant composure.
"No," Aizen said thoughtfully, almost to himself. "I think it might be the opposite. You need someone who can teach you to pitch a fit."