Hell Butterfly

A Many-Splendored Battlefield

~37~

o)0(o

"Woah," said Tatsuki eloquently after opening her front door. "It's you. I didn't recognise your chi."

"It's called reiatsu," Ichigo corrected her. He looked stressed, the frown deeper than ever, heavy bags under his eyes from hours of worrying. "You don't look pleased to see me."

Tatsuki fidgeted with the door latch. Well, no. She'd recently been informed of his new talent for flying into psychotic rages and playing schizophrenic mind games. It wasn't the most encouraging. "Well, no," she scoffed aloud. "You claim to be my best friend but you never talk to me unless you want something."

"We haven't been best friends since I started winning spars and you got pissy about it," said Ichigo incredulously. "Chad, Rukia, hell even Ishida outranks you now."

"Finished that game I lent you yet?" she asked, nonchalantly ignoring him. She waved him indoors.

"I've been busy," yawned the guy, scratching his orange hair.

"I gave it to you last year!"

"I've been busy all year!" The substitute reaper growled in annoyance, not in the mood for small talk. "Look, I'm only here to find out where Inoue went."

"Why, are you her babysitter or something? No wait," glancing up in surprise; "you two finally got together!"

"No, don't be stupi...wait, what?"

"Nothing~!" trilled Tatsuki, elbowing a specific pressure point on his back. He sat down hard, landing beside the low table in the Arisawa living room. As he complained about his new bruise, his black-belt friend simply shrugged and laughed at him.

"So," she began, passing him a snack. "What's with the stalking?"

Ichigo tried not to appear guilty and evasive, failing miserably. "What? She gets kidnapped and stuff. If I don't know she's safe then anything could be..."

"Aaawww," mocked Tatsuki, but internally frowning. Was he actually saying 'if I don't know where she is, I might have blacked out and hurt her without realising'? She'd seen more than enough split-personality films to believe it.

"You look like death warmed up," she noted tactfully.

He rolled his eyes. "Cheers." They made further light conversation for as long as she could spin it out, until at length he snapped. "I know she was here last!"

Tatsuki coughed, glancing at her watch. How long had she stalled him for? "Yeah, actually... I dropped her off at the station over two hours ago. She's long gone."

There was a moment of silence and she tensed, ready for a bad reaction. Then Ichigo seemed to deflate with relief, shoulders sagging. "Good. I didn't know what to do and it's not safe for her round here anymore. I'm not," he struggled to spit the words out; "strong enough to..."

"Huh," she said in delayed surprise. "I didn't expect you to be happy about it."

"Are you kidding?" exploded the vaizard; "I've nearly killed her three times already! It's a miracle she survived long enough to run away! Hell, Tatsuki, she found Aizen and the entirety of Hueco Mundo less scary than me! I'm fucking cursed. Every single thing I do to try and get stronger just ends up damaging more people." He fell still, staring at the familiar carpet and decorations in memory of easier days. One hand drifted up to hide his face. "I actually came here to ask you for advice, I just couldn't think how to say it. You know her best, right? She doesn't make sense to anyone else."

"Orihime's not meant to make sense to anyone," murmured Tatsuki. Ichigo looked tormented. It left her feeling uneasy: she hadn't known how to help him when Masaki died, and years later still wasn't sure what to do. "But she can come back once you win the war, right?"

"...Even if the war ends, it won't magically make me normal again;" he corrected her; sombre, grim. "But maybe we'll be lucky and Aizen will kill me."

She hissed. "Don't spout crap like that. Just find a way to kill the damn Hollow."

He didn't respond. The atmosphere seemed to warp; a shiver crawling down her spine.

Yellow eyes flashed at her and she leapt backwards into a combat stance out of pure reflex. "Hey! What are you doing?"

Ichigo's fist punctured her table with a loud CRACK! "Tell me where the queenie is hiding!" roared the Hollow in its nightmarish voice. It leered at her hungrily, all the more disturbing for doing so with Ichigo's face; unnatural eyes shining. "Or I'll eat you, Tat-chan," it gloated, using an old, old nickname to unnerve her further.

"Tokyo!" shrieked Tatsuki before she could stop herself, her skin was tingling and her body heavy as his reiatsu invaded the room. "She went towards Tokyo! Don't come near me!"

Kurosaki Ichigo cackled at her, his frown gone but his smile jeering. "Amazing, Tat-chan, you're nothing but a weakling after all. I'll let you live till I get back to show my gratitude, naa?" The possessing demon turned to leave, mocking her with a friendly little wave goodbye.

She stepped up onto the ruined table and roundhouse-kicked him in the back of the head, letting rip a fierce shout. Her foot connected with a solid thud. He toppled like a stone, completely poleaxed.

"Eat that!" whooshed Tatsuki, hopping back and forth like a hyped-up boxer, and not dropping her guard in case he got up again Terminator-style. "If you wanna chase my real best friend out of town, don't you dare pick a fight with me afterwards!"

She prodded him with a foot to no response. It seemed safe. After a moment's thought she dragged him, huffing and cursing, out of the flat and to the apartment block's elevator. "Did you...forget you were in... your stupidly heavy...real body?" she asked his prone form, out of breath. "...Idiot. If you're a danger to someone, don't keep following them around!" She hit the down button and waited, praying none of her neighbours would pass by. "I'm sorry, Ichigo, but your evil inner whatsit is bat-shit insane." The doors pinged open and she heaved him inside. "Seriously, if I can let her do a runner, so should you. You don't even realise she fancies you, for god's sake!" Pressing the ground floor icon, she jumped over her unconscious friend and darted out of the lift before the doors slid shut.

There, now he was trapped in a giant steel box. That should slow him down some, right?

Dusting her hands off with satisfaction at a job well done, Tatsuki strolled back into her home and rang the Kurosaki Clinic.

"Yo, Isshin?"

"TATSUKI! MY THIRD DAUGHTER! It's been so long; why don't you visit your beloved Isshin-papa anymore?"

"Focus!" she prompted him, shaking her head wearily as he fake-sniffled down the phone. "Oi, I've got Ichigo out cold in the elevator of my building. Can you come get him ASAP? Break out the flashy lights and sirens. He went a bit...evil undead."

There was silence filled only by the fizz of the telephone.

"...Clearly we have more to fear from the Arisawas than from Aizen. Well done, Tatsuki-chan, I shall add your name to the 'Small Girls Who Have Defeated Hichigo' Hall of Fame. And... and…"

"Mm-hm?"

His voice cracked with emotion. "I'm so proud of you!"

o)0(o

Following a brief, refreshing interlude listening to some pleasant muzak; the Hollow finally managed to extricate itself from Ichigo's physical body. The clunky old lift juddered to a halt and the doors pinged open. "Ground floor," announced a husky disembodied voice.

Shirosaki Hichigo prowled out of the elevator, leaving the body behind in an untidy heap. He had a train to catch.

And although Inoue's spirit thread was hard to follow, one of tens of thousands weaving a dense white tapestry at the station; the Shun Shun Rikka's unique golden streamers stood out like homing beacons.

Sly Tatsuki. The gilded threads were going in the exact opposite direction to Tokyo.

Hichigo leapt into the air above the correct set of tracks, and accelerated into a run that broke the speed barrier. The air boomed, and he gave chase.

o)0(o

Ichigo had regained himself for a moment, though the concept of king and horse had long ago been discarded. He and the Hollow now switched so often that they both might as well be kings wearing saddles, or horses wearing crowns. He had come to on a deserted pathway with no memory of his journey there. Perhaps Inoue had sensed his pursuit and lured the Hollow somewhere uninhabited. Perhaps she just hadn't been able to flee fast enough.

There were only metres between them now.

"Listen, Orihime, you…" You have to run away!

He looked really upset, and she hated herself for putting that expression on his face. For the hundredth time she reconsidered leaving. But before he could speak any further there was an inhuman creel and the crackle of appearing bone. Ichigo began to shake as the inner Hollow took over, its mask obscuring the face she loved; warping it into an idol of fear.

That moment of absolute stillness as Ichigo fought for control and lost…

The reiatsu poured out in thick black waves, denser and more polluted than ever before. The markings upon its flat white face had changed, evolved; now a wide crimson stripe slashed either side from crown to jaw. Two blades projected out and forwards from its head at temple height. The razor-edged horns of a devil.

The Hollow was no basilisk anymore. An outpouring of this magnitude was on the level of a Vasto Lorde. Inoue had learned to recognise that if nothing else during her sojourn in Las Noches.

She might once have compared her feelings for Ichigo as an ocean hovering over her head, waiting to crash down and engulf her the moment he reciprocated – but now she truly understood the horror of being trapped beneath a sea of turbulent emotions. The spiritual pressure that flared and cascaded from the Hollow was already filling the sky. All that kept her from drowning was the thinnest pane of buttercup light.

"Shiten Kesshun, I reject;" whispered the girl, checking her shield's strength. She took no step backwards, for she was already trapped in the eye of the storm. A hurricane of power howled all around. Those bright yellow eyes were pinning her down again. Inoue was still unable to face them fully.

"You brought me back from the dead." A strangled raven's caw. Hunting, and blaming.

Orihime squeezed her eyes shut tightly, covering her ears with her hands; yet that voice still drilled through.

"Why won't you save me from isolation as well?" The Hollow scratched its ice-white talons across her shield and it began to shatter, every shard that fell chiming sweetly against the ground. Clinging closer to its elusive prey.

"The memories alone, they're not enough alone; it's burning me inside out. I'm the embodiment of his loss, and I hate it. But when I found out about these past lives, and knew things about the both of you that even you didn't, it made me more than just his shadow. It gave me a life of my own, almost. Have you any idea how badly I want to be more than despair?

I was born a side-effect, not even a real Hollow, with nothing – feeling like everything was stolen from me. I'm tired of starving and the torture of knowing every single thing I have ever lost and never had... I am so sick to death of being Ichigo."

Can't you save me from isolation as well? Well, perhaps she could, mused Inoue distantly as the funnel of vicious black rage contracted, spinning tighter and faster and with every heartbeat reeling her into the apparition's reach. No one ever tried to give the Hollows what they wanted, did they? Well, she had, just that once. That first time, the echoes of which still resonated through her every subsequent action. Sora hadn't killed her, not on purpose. No, and she had offered the same love as before, once she realised how deeply her betrayal was cutting him – to tremble at a curse he had not asked for and disown him. Ah, murmured her mind, dancing away from the reality of her imminent death and into the past; no, she had lent him her heart and he had accepted it until his own returned. Support. That was all they asked for. Devouring their most loved ones first, in search of the care and healing they craved. Arrancars Anonymous, she told herself with surety, was the way forward. Hello, my name is Ulquiorra Schiffer, and I am a recovering Hollow-oholic.

Her eyes glazed over in an effort to block out the mask leering at her. The term was tossed around so casually it became desensitised, but what horrible things masks were. Thin, expressionless shells: the lie of another life. The heart of a soul extracted and dissected, blanched to marble white and boiled to stone stiffness, like any sheet of muscle could be. And, still patterned with old broken veins that had not completely lost their colour, they were then moulded into strange designs and cauterised onto the faces of the spirits trapped in limbo. Stifling their voices, veiling their identities, burning out their eyes. Had Ichigo-kun ever noticed that Hollows had two sets of teeth when they screamed? The fangs of the mask and the jaws of the skull still trapped beneath it. She wondered if Hichigo would have two smiles.

She seemed a million miles away. She could barely be closer yet was ignoring him completely. Even though she had been warned.

It left a bitter charred taste in the Hollow's maw.

"I thought you had empathy," it creaked, hating the human intensely, blaming her. "The older you had empathy." And why it wanted empathy was anyone's guess, it barely knew its own desires; the attempt to change its instincts had only warped what was already broken. She was only alive, it vowed to itself, until a different version of her could be dragged out, and the resulting death of the pointless little queenie would satisfy it at last. It would plug the gap in its chest with her absence. Fill a hole with a void. Victory over the girl, obliteration of the enemy.

"Don't you care?" it stabbed her with accusations; "Don't you know how it feels to be nothing?"

Empathy. She flickered awake as if her name had been called. Yes, that was all the members of the AA wanted, someone to listen, a shoulder to cry on. Chew on, she amended, spying his gleaming row of canines. Oh what big teeth you have.

Her posture tightened slightly, she put her mature facade on, the one that was necessary once all her friends had gone home each night. Ignore the fiery black inferno backdrop, don't judge by appearances. Be brave. This is Ichigo. Try your best, for him.

For a fractured second their pupils locked together. The danger she was in finally hammered home, and her body automatically tried to run; spinning, stalling. There was no way out. Murder was the natural reaction to any action she performed in the territory of Shirosaki Hichigo. He had clawed her barriers to dust and left her trembling and defenceless in the tiny ring of safety. The violent tempest billowed on all sides. It would rip her apart if she even brushed against it.

…But it did not touch her.

Orihime felt a trace of curiosity.

She inched closer, still averting her eyes, and the circumference of the tornado tightened as she drew hesitantly nearer to its source. She told herself there was nowhere else to go now.

If touching him tore her hands apart, she could probably heal that.

If he killed her, perhaps she could go to Soul Society and learn to be better.

But if he embraced her, she had no idea what to do.

"I am Ichigo and this is all I am. Reject me, I dare you, I'll feed upon my own despair. Make me powerful."

It was laughing madly.

"Reject me!"

o)0(o

She had made it. Pinned right against the demon's chest, so close to human shape. Its cool salt-coloured skin rattled her with every psychotic cackle; the blunt edge of a gaping Hollow wound scuffing her cheek and a wild ginger mane whipped around them both in the gale, tangling with her own.

Shirosaki was pure sinew and thin, long limbs. His wrists bound by flaming red tassels, shoulders striped with bloody war paint. The mask swallowed his entire head in a helmet, wickedly sharp and curved scythe blades jutting out like bull horns. When he tipped his neck down to view the captive she was almost gored upon them.

It no longer spoke. Only cradled her delicate skull in those needle claws, forcing their eyes, the windows of the soul, to meet and –

The glass in those windows shattered, the desolation poured out, swamping her in toxic emotions and drowning her in unbearable pain, Orihime flinched away and by reflex –

what is faster and harder to resist than a reflex?-

- its fingers twitched and punctured her head as easily as soft butter. One straight through her cheek. Another cracking her spine. Talons slicing into her brain.

Her grey eyes rolled backwards, mouth hung slack, body convulsing oh-so-very humanly.

The Hollow flicked its hand distastefully, the carrion slid off. It looked at the crimson smearing its palm and hissed. Staggering power, and as always for a Hollow, for Ichigo: no control at all.

Slowly it crouched by the corpse, rocking on its heels ever so slightly like Ichigo guarding the riverbank of his past nightmares. Shadow emotions swelled from all the memories it had eaten: vague concepts of guilt, sorrow, regret.

An eerie keening noise shivered in the air.

It waited,

…but she never returned.

o)0(o

Ichigo awoke in a thin pool of blood with Orihime's eyes staring blankly past him.

He accepted the situation with preternatural ease, as if he had always expected to end up here again, or had never left. The ground around them was scarred in strange patterns. He felt like he'd been laid face down on an anvil and pummelled into submission by some ungodly blacksmith, which was close enough to the truth.

He stayed there, saw no pointing in moving when he was already soaked, knew from past experience that the blood would not come off no matter what he did, that the dead body would not revive no matter how frantically he shook it, and – how long had it taken to learn this? – that the ghost would not appear no matter how long he waited.

Hichigo had devoured her. What else would a Hollow do? Cannibalising the kindest person he knew… Murderer, murderer, murderer.

Slowly his eyes ceased to see what was around him. He sought refuge in his internal world, where no matter how bad the weather became, he would not have to look at the second woman he had murdered.

o)0(o

"Go on, get out there! It's your body! It's all yours your majesty!"

"No! No! This is your problem, you can fucking deal with it, I abdicate! I'm not going out there!"

"Do it," taunted the Hollow, but the rain streamed down its chalk face like tears. "I wanna see you break!"

"You can have it! You can have the body, you can have my life, just take it! I don't want it anymore!" They were pushing and shoving each other, trying to force the guilt and responsibility onto the other, struggling and wrestling wildly like twin siblings locked in war.

"Stop!" roared Zangetsu, leaping in between them and forcing them apart. "You, out!"

The Hollow danced back and forth nervously, a jester with stage fright, suddenly grinning with mad elation. "Ha! Yeah Zan-jiji, you're right! He's got no choice if I leave!" The white Ichigo span and gravity lurched around it, it leapt into the ocean of rain behind or below them, drowning itself in black foam and boiling waves.

The zanpakuto ignored it, tried to, but it should never have been so eager to give up the fight. He tried to get through to his host to no avail.

"Ichigo. Ichigo, listen to me. Go back outside, you can't stay inside forever. You'll wither away. You can't survive inside out."

"No," choked the boy, stumbling away, bright orange hair darkened to a weak brown in the downpour, as deformed as his emotions. "No. You – you can go out for me, Zangetsu-jii." He grabbed the sword by its shoulders, shunting it higher up the skyscraper as if that would automatically force it into the real world.

"What is wrong with you? You cannot hesitate like this! Even when Karin was one of Aizen's pawns you found the strength to face her eventually. Retreat and you will die! If you keep this up you will die. You must keep moving forwards."

"That's all you ever say. That's your answer for everything, isn't it, real effective! But it doesn't work. I'll just keep doing it, Zangetsu. I'll keep killing people. It'll keep happening, as eternally as war. I'm destroying everything I go near!" The storm pelted them both, self-punishment.

"That was not done by you, it was the Hollow! How much of a fool are you, have you learnt nothing since taking up a sword?"

The reaper let go, stumbled backwards, retreating nearer and nearer to the sea of torment that threatened to swallow his entire world. His head shook gently, hopelessly.

"Zangetsu…I realised, a while ago…I already am the Hollow."

He was almost shrinking, an ant that had finally understood that its environment was far too vast for it to cope with. He had learnt how small he was, and weak; only seeming strong in comparison to his minute size.

"You know what it's been doing; it's been eating all my memories, all my heart, all my Soul Awakening… It's consumed all of me and left me with nothing…"

Back, and back, and back…closer and closer to drowning…

"See? The Hollow killed her and went crazy with regret. But I can't feel anything, Zangetsu. I'm empty. I'm hollow too. Probably since the start in the Shattered Shaft. Or before Rukia. My parents were both dead before I was born, that can't have been right. I could have always been Hollow. I can't go out...without hurting everyone I care about."

"Ichigo. You're overwhelmed, that is clearly not the truth. Stop! Fight it!"

"Actually," whispered the shadow as the water hit its back; "I'm a Hollow and you're a zanpakuto…so… Zangetsu… I don't want to eat my family…"

The waves ate his shoulders, his legs, his ribs, framed his face. There was only half a step left.

"ICHIGO!"

"I know you won't hesitate." The water rushed into his mouth, the words bubbled out. Damning. They had never been negative before. "I know you won't run away."

Zangetsu halted, dark cape drenched to the skin. He pulled off his amber shades, staring at the thrashing sea in disbelief. Ichigo was just a distorted smear of colour, sinking out of sight.

"How can you be so cruel?"

The sword knelt down, abandoned in a broken soul.

"…Don't ask me to kill you..."

o)0(o

Alliriyan~*