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Chapter 54 - where Ulqui is not what you expect him to be, and I feel really sorry for him.


Time.

Sands.

Both endless mirrors and measures of each other – for time turns even mountains into sand.

Ulquiorra Schiffer did not dream; he'd rid himself of the unpleasant capacity for it half a century into his Hollow life, at the time when he'd learned to fold his wide, dark wings and descend from Hueco Mundo's skies. His Vasto Lorde awareness had come to him slowly, one grain of sand for each kill – but though the return of his memories had not been an assault, their disjointed nature and the fact that, initially, they'd refused to form a continuum had sometimes left him prey to unexplainable and dangerous states of anxiety. Since in those days life itself had seemed to be apportioned in well defined cycles of feeding and hibernation, in which one did not necessarily preserve the memory of the previous cycle, he'd thought of his memories as dreams, and fought them with all his might.

For a century and a half, as time had coursed, and grains of sand had slowly filled out and completed his inner and outer shape, he'd won, and banished dreams. The flow of history had then carried him here; Aizen-sama had turned ever shifting sands into solid pavement, and Ulquiorra had gratefully followed at each step, sensing that the pieces of his existence's puzzle were finally falling into place, and finding himself free of the anxiety of having to personally extract meaning or depth out of a world that blatantly had none.

Dream and memory were, in themselves meaningless, even more so now, under Sereitei's starry sky. Power had been gathered, and he was holding it. A war had been fought, and he had won it. A hierarchy had formed, and he'd been assigned meaning. There was no need for dreams.

Despite all this, Ulquiorra Schiffer now dreamt.

They keep the Sabbath every week. Just before sunset, a woman whom he recognises as his mother lights four candles – one for in the day's honour, one for the house's peace, one for his sister. One for him.

The others hate them for it, and their hatred is meaningless. His mother lights the candles each week, waves her hands over them, then covers her eyes and whispers a blessing. The language she speaks is long lost to him, but he knows she's whispering a blessing nonetheless.

The hatred of the others grows, or perhaps he grows far more aware of it as he ventures further and further into their world on his own. He learns signs and arithmetic; these make sense. He learns the Laws, and these he needs to remember, even if he does not really understand their significance. His people think him wise; his father is proud and encourages him to keep company with the learned.

Every day on the way to the temple he passes a girl who tries to hide her fire red-hair under a white scarf. He should not look her way, but he does, noting that she'd looked his way as well. The first time their glances meet, she blushes, and he feels unsettled. The second time, she gives him a smile, then runs away as fast as her feet carry her. He thinks he loves her. He speaks to her once, then returns home to find his mother in tears and his father enraged. On the next day, the girl's white scarf fully hides her hair, and she looks as if she'd been crying. He does not understand, seeks meaning, and finds only pain. He never speaks to her again, and returns to keeping the Sabbath.

This, Ulquiorra remembers without fail, even though sleep only allows him partial oversight, he knows what should come next.

Black death, and bodies in their thousands. Now, mother not only lights the candles, but draws the curtains too; for some reason, the others think that it is them bringing the darkness. Holy men wearing white robes and golden crosses proclaim the disease out of God's law. The disease can't care less, and claims thousands more; he learns that the girl with the red hair is among them. The others come and break their windows with rocks, so they peg planks across the windows. Instead of gathering their bodies, the others try to break down their door – for once, come sunset, mother is afraid to light the candles. She helps father nail the door shut instead. She doesn't cry. His sister, however, does.

For weeks, father only ventures outside after dark to fetch scraps of food, and water from the well. It is only as all four of them lie in deaths' agony that they realize the others had poisoned their water. During those final minutes he tries to understand, but he cannot. Death, as life, has no meaning.

Something is amiss, though, and the dream goes awry; he is still there, still going through the motions of his life, but this time all the figures come and go without touching him. This time, he knows that all of them, his mother, his sister and his father, the girl with the red hair and the others are just specks of dust who happened to be arranged in a particular shape. In the dream, he understands this, and never seeks either understanding or meaning. Days come and go, shaped and reshaped by random gusts of wind – splintered seconds run, one after the other, sequenced by no more than chance.

The final minutes of his mortal life pass in this way too, and, sensing himself meaningless, Ulquiorra seeks no understanding and feels no pain before the sand he's made of scatters to the wind.

Meaning is an invention of the weak, a voice whispers.

Ulquiorra Schiffer woke up and stood, intently listening to the silence. He heard nothing but the rustle of leaves outside. With deliberate slowness, he looked about himself – to the walls of his chambers, which he'd chosen to keep bare, and to the fleeting shadows of the world outside his window. He unwillingly frowned, then lowered his glance to his hands; for the first time in two centuries, he'd found his fingers shaking slightly, and his frown deepened.

Aizen-sama is meaning, the Cuarta thought to himself; the notion alone should have made his hands stop trembling, but it did not – unspeakable panic, such as he'd never thought he'd feel again gripped him with iron claws.

He realizes that he is not truly awake a moment too late; the speed at which the walls of his chamber and the shadows disintegrate into nothingness makes him feel nauseated. He tastes Hollow flesh, and remembers what he'd long sought to erase from his mind – the fact that even though he'd been unaware of himself, and though his body had not felt like his own, he'd taken months before he'd managed to keep his feedings in. This sensation is similar, but far worse; he retches and falls to his knees, but the malevolent energy has already dissipated into his flesh, and though his body entirely rejects it with every fiber, his muscles' efforts are vain. Ulquiorra remembers this too.

He is reliving the first time that he'd consumed a Vasto Lorde, and become one himself. The hunger which has consumed him from within for months that seemed without beginning and without end, recedes, leaving him to wonder what its purpose had been, in the first place. He does not understand why the others begin to gather around him. He sometimes feasts on them, they feast on each other, but when he moves, they continue to follow. Some of them grow, but few are like him; he guesses he should find their presence reassuring, but he does not, for the constant noise of their energy makes him feel blind - in his hibernation, he senses larger predators circling in the distance.

When his first colony gets too large, he leaves it behind, knowing that he can easily return to it if the lands ahead prove poorer. The distant eastward horizon beckons, and he advances on it, as if hoping that some sense or some purpose lie beyond the distant dunes. One after the other, more colonies stretch behind him, learning to expand on their own; he rarely retraces his steps. Time regains meaning, but while its flow is still deprived of causality, Ulquiorra comes to see how far he has risen, though he himself fails to understand why he has.

One after the other, lesser colonies and lesser Vasto Lorde fall to him. He does not even have to fight most of them – his simple presence is enough. He pauses for a decade on the borders of a hunting domain larger than anything he has ever encountered. He thinks it wise; the presence at its center seems too powerful to be contended with, and several entities that rival him surround it from all sides. Employing caution, Ulquiorra continues his journey due north, keeping respectful distance of the other's border; the northern horizon is as deprived of sense and purpose as the eastern one.

All changes within a year.

A reiatsu storm unlike anything that he has ever encountered or felt rages across the sands. Like a pack of wolves, the smaller entities set upon the massive one, devouring it whole. The battle rages for months, and makes him halt his own advance – logic dictates that now, he can individually overtake the younger upstart kingdoms. Logic fails him. Only one kingdom emerges from the cover of the turmoil of energy, and Ulquiorra does not even have the time to grasp that the pack of wolves has turned on each other.

His shredded wings barely save his life upon his first encounter with Stark. White light scalds him from behind as he flees from the coyote's fangs and claws. Both come upon him without warning, and even when the light fades, the charged blue stare shining from behind the enemy's mask follows, burning itself into Ulquiorra's brain.

With injured wings, he hovers and looks down towards the new enemy; Stark's dark cape gathers about his shoulders, and burning light stretches at his feet. Within the confines of the menos shroud, the coyote's contours shift. It rises from all fours, stands upright and gazes up. Ulquiorra knows that this has been a test he has failed. He rediscovers fear. Over the next century, he knows he should rediscover hate.

He does not, and the dream goes awry. A gust of wind erases all, shredding his hatred, his fear, and Stark's contours into fine dust, leaving the Cuarta to stand alone over the white sands. The foreign energy he felt before, which continues to writhe within his form, remains the only constant.

We can erase the meanings he gave himself, the voice says. We can erase the false meaning you gave him.

Ulquiorra doesn't understand, but feels at peace.

'Aizen-sama already did,' he answers.

The world shatters once more.

Order arises from the sand, and now, he understands. The Creator's arrival justifies all, and finally restores causality to the passage of time; it was this that he'd been waiting for, without even knowing it. His hollow hunger had created him, to lead him here. The lone coyote and his shimmering shadow had served in teaching him caution and steadiness in hatred. The disembodied skeleton had taught him that arrogant numbers can be defeated, if their ambition is hollow. The shark had warned him that patient things could be more dangerous than savagely aggressive ones.

With Aizen's appearance, all finally makes sense, and though life and death are still meaningless, Ulquiorra himself is not. He finds his place and settles within it – vast battles and figures gain contour, and no longer drift across his consciousness like grains of sand. They remain solid within the contours Aizen-sama draws – sketching them with his will alone, at first, but then, carving them firm with the Hougyoku.

Answers are offered before questions are asked; those who do not accept their places are destroyed or forced into them, and the Creator forces purpose beyond all horizons. He rewards Ulquiorra's faith with leverage over his enemies; within Aizen's trust, he feels complete.

Did you? the voice laughed. Did you truly? Was causality the release you craved for? And do you think you have found it?

This time around, it didn't give Ulquiorra time to answer.

The memory of Inoue Orihime rages through his heart like a hurricane. But for her part in Aizen-sama's plan she too is meaningless – why then is she the only one who preserves her colours in a world which has long been tinted only in the whiteness of the sand and the darkness of the sky? He slips a bracelet on her wrist, and her skin feels warm. Her fingers feel scalding across his cheek.

She doesn't hide her red hair under a white scarf. She cries when she means to. She hopes against hope; he doesn't understand why. This hurts, and Aizen-sama cannot answer, because he does not ask. Ulquiorra thinks he hates her. He is unsure.

He is unsure why he keeps Nnoitra from her door. He is unsure why, upon finding her room empty, his vision is obscured by bloodied white silk – not only the image of her tear filled eyes and the feel of her fingers across his cheek, but Grimmjow's chaos infect him, and once more plunge him into a world of actions without meaning.

It takes so very little to return him to his senseless primordial state.

The voice knows it.

'No,' Ulquiorra Schiffer growled, willing himself out of the vision, and swimming towards the conscious surface of his mind, with no more bearings than he'd had finding his way out of the Sexta's Caja Negacion. 'No,' he repeated, forcing his reiatsu over the other energy. He flushed it out in full, eliminating the painful tug of its foreign hooks – he breathed in deeply, and stared down at his hands, finding them as unwavering as ever.

Yet, while Ulquiorra could sense his reiatsu was in order, and that he'd overcome the sudden assault as he'd overcome all the others he'd consumed over his centuries, the other consciousness lingered. The Cuarta frowned; normally, it was the consciousness that faded first, leaving the body to overcome the energy. He would still not give the invader the honour of conceding defeat, and addressing it within his mind.

'What are you?' Ulquiorra asked out loud.

The voice paused – its silence caused a painful void to stretch in the Cuarta's skull, the sensation so painfully acute that he almost doubled over in pain, pressing his fingers to his temples.

We are without meaning, it responded, at length. We are without cause.

Ulquiorra gritted his teeth.

We are peace and we are chaos. We are within you and without you. We are that which you seek, what you have always sought. Set us free, it howled.

Yet more uninvited visions, future, not past, more whispered words drifted through the Cuarta's mind, and though he didn't let himself acknowledge them, his inner eyes registered all, not in fear, but in bewilderment. Despite himself, he heard whispered words, and saw Sokyoku Hill crumbling – on the edges of his vision, Sereitei dissipated to the winds, no more than another picture drawn in meaningless grains of sand. Aizen himself, swept in the storm, was no more than a twisted whirlwind of contour less, disjointed colours.

Chaos is universal. All order is random. There is no meaning, and only the weak, those who cannot face the truth, seek to invent it.

Ulquiorra closed his inner eye as well.

'Laughable,' he said, simply. The entity's consciousness writhed painfully within his, as his thoughts overcame it. He lay back down, and immediately fell into a dreamless sleep, not taking note of the fact that waves of darkness drifted across his sword's blade.


Nestled within the Cuarta's mind and energy, as it was nestled in the minds and energies of all who had touched it, it waited; to it, not even sands and time had meaning.


Up next- one of our OC's gets in trouble, Stark is a bad boy yet again (as if he were anything but).