Angina/Symphony

Chapter 14

The Backwards Girl

No one knows just what has become of her

Shattered doll, desperate

Oh, so innocent and delicate

But too damn obdurate

And obstinate to let go.

-Façade, Disturbed

Szayel no longer felt any desire towards the thing on the vivisection table.

On the outside, perhaps, before he'd cut it open, it could be mistaken for a sleeping human girl. She was not unattractive, otherwise she would never have caught his eye in the first place. Even when he had glanced at that first grainy image of her on the screen, his sensors picking up her odd cloudy reiatsu, he had seen the way she carried herself. In conjunction with that pale, almost translucent skin, she had had the unmistakeable air of absolute innocence about her. Szayel had seen it in the way she'd brushed tendrils of tangled dark hair out of her face in the windy desert of Hueco Mundo, oblivious to any danger or the fact that anyone was watching her.

God knew it had been a long time since he'd experienced sex. And naïvete was the thing that attracted Szayel the most - naïvete and inexperience and confused innocence. Those particular attributes were hard to locate in the female Arrancar of Hueco Mundo, if not impossible. And then this human girl had stumbled upon Grimmjow in the human world, and been able to follow him through the Garganta on top of that.

Szayel had thought she was free for the taking, and had thought it only a matter of time until she belonged to him. After all, she had clearly been trusting - or stupid - enough to swallow all the bullshit Aizen had fed her about being his guest of honour.

He hadn't expected her to have a mind of her own.

It had mildly surprised him that Amane Rei had a reason for not returning to her own world. Szayel had assumed she had fallen under the spell of the Lord of Hueco Mundo, as so many unsuspecting others had before her.

And that reiatsu explosion -

Did she have some sort of ability? Obviously she did. She had crossed the Garganta by herself, which was no mean feat. Szayel hated to admit that he didn't know something, but even he had no idea what Amane Rei's powers might be.

He could conclude with some certainty that they weren't anything too strong, nowhere near that of a Shinigami captain, despite the strength of the reiatsu explosion. It had stung, yes, but Szayel's reaction had been borne of annoyance and embarrassment rather than out of any real pain. He suspected the explosion of reiatsu had been more due to the girl's inability to control her spiritual energy than anything else.

Her body wasn't giving any clues away. The façade of the sleeping girl was exposed underneath the ceiling of his brightly lit laboratory. His scalpel gleamed crimson, the glistening muscle tissue of the peritoneum which normally covered the abdominal cavity peeled back. The gleaming coils of intestine, the soft tissues of liver and stomach and kidneys were all in reversed configuration, just as she had told him they would be. But she hadn't told him everything.

The scars on the right side of her ribcage, even stretched and pale and faint as they were, hadn't escaped Szayel's notice. She had undergone some sort of surgical procedure in the past.

He took up the bone saw resting on the bench to his left, and opened up the thoracic cavity. The motion of the saw in his hands surprised Szayel, as always. The movement of it, backwards and forwards, was gentle and almost loving - as loving as a saw through a sternum could be. It was the same every time he used it on a corpse.

That was what she had become, the girl on the vivisection table. She was no longer an object of sexual fantasy. She couldn't be, because she was no longer anything recognisably desirable.

This was a corpse, a cadaver with entrails laid out and exposed for anyone who walked in to see.

As if mirroring Szayel's thoughts, which were uncharacteristically morbid, the door to his laboratory opened.

'I see you've gotten to know Miss Amane a little better.'

Szayel recognised the voice of his master, and laid the bone saw aside. 'Aizen-sama. An honour as always,' he said.

Aizen ignored his subordinate's greeting, moving with measured strides towards the vivisection table.

'Ulquiorra informed me that Amane-chan gave up her physical body to you.'

'Yes, that is correct. She told me that she had no desire to return to the human world,' Szayel replied.

'I know.' Aizen leant over the specimen on the vivisection table, peering at the partially sawed sternum. 'Please don't allow me to interrupt,' he said, stepping back. 'Continue.'

Szayel complied, self-conscious now that Lord Aizen was watching. He finished opening the chest cavity and pried inside the ribcage, trying to locate the heart on the right side. The heart had to be the cause of the surgical scars on the girl's ribs.

Finally he found it. Szayel made various incisions with his scalpel, lifted it out, and saw the reason for the surgery.

'Transposition,' he murmured. 'That would explain it.'

Aizen interrupted from behind Szayel. 'Would you care to explain what you find so interesting about Miss Amane's heart?'

'Amane Rei was born with a rare genetic condition,' Szayel told him. 'Her internal organs are arranged in the mirror-image configuration of a normal human's. In other words, her heart is on the right side of her chest instead of the left.'

'And all her other organs are backwards?'

'Essentially, yes.' Szayel continued. 'The condition is sometimes accompanied by heart defects. The arteries and other blood vessels leading from Miss Amane's heart were transposed into abnormal positions at birth. She has scars on the right side of her chest from surgery, which would have attempted to correct the transposition. Unfortunately for Miss Amane, the arteries leading from her heart are unusually narrow.'

Aizen stepped forward. 'May I?' Szayel nodded, and Aizen's fingers touched his briefly as he took the heart.

His master's eyes narrowed, examining the bloody tubular arterial structure protruding from the top of the organ. 'I see.'

'The narrow arteries would have caused a lack of blood supply to the heart,' Szayel said. 'Miss Amane would have experienced irregular, intense pain. In the human world they call it angina pectoris.'

'That would explain why she was so eager to be separated from her body,' Aizen mused, holding the heart up to the light as if examining it further.

Szayel nodded. He had run out of things to say, and was filled with a sudden desire to have Aizen out of his laboratory. His master's presence in the middle of a dissection made the Arrancar scientist uneasy.

'I assume her body reveals nothing about the nature of her abilities,' Aizen said, lowering the heart.

Szayel shook his head. 'No. If it had, of course I would have told you, Aizen-sama.'

Aizen said nothing in response. His facial expression didn't change in the slightest, but Szayel saw the Shinigami's fingers curl tightly around the bloody heart, as if trying to crush it.

'It's tougher than I expected it to be.' The tone of his master's voice was casual. 'Isn't it strange that something this stubborn grew on the inside of that girl?' Almost as soon as his fingers had tightened, they released the heart. Aizen dropped it back onto the open chest cavity of Amane Rei's corpse. It missed and sat crookedly on top of her left breast, looking almost comical. Szayel didn't feel in the least like laughing.

'I will leave you now. Please accept my apologies for interrupting you while you are working, Szayel-san.' Aizen pushed the laboratory door open with the hand that had held the heart.

Even when his master was long gone, Szayel couldn't pull his eyes away from the bloody fingerprints on the white of the door. His uncharacteristic mental silence buzzed with the realisation that he could quite easily share the same fate as Amane Rei's dead heart, any time Aizen felt like delivering it.