Three weeks had passed since Orihime faced that first Menos at the edge of the forest and won. There had been dozens more enemies and six more Menos since, four of which had flocked together to attack Orihime and Grimmjow's encampment one night while they slept. Grimmjow had bestirred himself to assist with that battle, but only after Orihime's right arm and leg had been severely burned by a close range Cero. It had taken her over twenty minutes of running around and dodging and shielding and Tsubaki-ing the massive pests to wear even two of them down, only for Grimmjow to step in and clean up the other two in about three seconds. It was done before Orihime had even finished healing herself. If nothing else, Grimmjow must have quite a bit of Zen-like patience stored up to bear with these so-called practice rounds.
It still felt deeply weird to be fighting Hollows alongside another Hollow, though it was surprisingly hard to think of Grimmjow in that way. Even the highly visible hole in Grimmjow's always-bare stomach had become commonplace. She just didn't notice it anymore, like a birthmark. Grimmjow also tended to steer sharply away from any topics that touched on questions of his Hollowness relative to the Hollowness of other lesser beings in Hueco Mundo. The last time Orihime had brought it up, he'd cut her off with: "I don't know, what makes you any different from any other shit creatures in your shit world?" He'd gone on to mumble something about rats, and Orihime had lost interest in talking to him for a while.
Grimmjow also hadn't let her heal the burn on his hand from Ulquiorra. She'd pressed him when it started to look infected and blistery, and she'd even gone so far as to try to sneak a rejection field over it while he was distracted, but she stopped after he threatened, pretty believably, to use his Zanpakuto release on her.
"You can't push so hard about healing," he'd said hours later, as if no time had passed. It was the first thing he'd said since losing his temper, and it didn't sound like he had it completely under control yet. Orihime had never been one to fear being alone with her thoughts, and constant travel with someone like Grimmjow hadn't changed that. Mostly, she relished the peace when he decided to sulk, but this time, she sulked back. She was tired and scratchy and hadn't had a proper bath for weeks, and barely even a spit bath with the refilling water bottle. Sand got everywhere.
"Oh, please," she said. "You were plenty excited for me to reattach your disentigrated arm and remove the scar tissue from your tattoo. And it's about all I'm good for, so, excuse me if I—"
"Not this shit again," Grimmjow growled. "I thought you were past this by now."
"What?" Orihime asked, hands up, shocked by the disdain in his voice.
"I'm sick of hearing about you're not good for anything but healing. If that was really all you wanted to do, you know, whatever—fine—but I've seen enough of Ulquiorra's recordings to know that's bullshit. You'll beg Urahara and Yasutora and that dick Kurosaki to let you fight, even hit 'em with the big, sad eyes when they tell you no—but you come over here and act like you'd never do such a thing. It chaps my ass more than this fucking sand."
"So what?" Orihime asked, voice rising. "So I feel a little guilty and want to help. What's wrong with that? It was my fault you got burned, anyway."
"Ugh," Grimmjow groaned. "That might be the dumbest, fakest shit you've ever said. Well, except for all the other times you've twisted reality to justify taking blame." He rolled his eyes and Orihime flushed with anger and embarrassment.
"Twisted reality?" she repeated incredulously, staring at him over the campfire. "How would you feel if you did nothing but stood on the sidelines and let other people protect you and hurt for you?"
"I wouldn't care." Grimmjow snorted. "What do you think I've been doing for the past two weeks?"
This brought her up short. It was true, she realized, that she'd been the one doing most of the defense work during their wandering. It was only when it looked like Orihime might get hurt past the possibility of recovery that Grimmjow stepped in. She'd broken both wrists and a leg by now, she'd been burned and bruised and concussed and cut. She wasn't as scared of being hurt now as she had been before, but even if the hurt only lasted as long as it took for her rejection field to kick in, it still took a toll. But even after all that, she still hadn't thought to blame Grimmjow for sitting those fights out.
"God, what is wrong with me?" she whispered, mostly to herself.
Grimmjow sniffed, pulling back, and scratched his scalp. "You're a product of your shit world, just like I'm a product of my shit world. Just because you jump between the World of the Living and Hueco Mundo doesn't mean anything about you changes with the scenery. That takes time and effort. You're making the effort, and I'm letting you. That's why I don't care when you get hurt."
Well, that stung. "What are you getting at?" she asked. For the first time in weeks, tears of frustration closed her throat. "I thought—" I thought we were friends, she wanted to say, but stopped herself.
"People don't always do what they want, but even when they do, you still can never know exactly what their reasons are. You think Ulquiorra was just protecting you when he burned me?"
"I think I know how to recognize the signs by now," Orihime answered. The bitterness in her tone surprised even her.
"Yeah, you're right. He protected you, but my guess is that his main interest was in using you, and his directive to protect you, as a reason to hurt me."
Orihime stared at Grimmjow. He looked away, eyes distant. "Why would he do that—"
"Never forget that we've been here, living and fighting and competing and eating each other, for a lot longer than you've even been alive. Most of the things that look like they're about you, aren't." He sighed. "And don't forget that it's been an even longer time since any of us were even remotely human. Your reality isn't ours, so you probably can't understand this, but—sometimes—our scars are worth keeping."
Orihime fell asleep that night without another word being spoken between them, but his last comment kept her awake many hours into the night. She thought of her brother, and how he'd become a Hollow when his feelings of being forgotten were exploited. His love and regret had bound him to the World of the Living as a spirit; he'd even protected her, but when those feelings—those scars—were taken away and corrupted, he'd gone on a rampage and tried to kill her.
For the first time, Orihime wondered why Grimmjow had never asked her to heal the horrible, disfiguring scar he'd gotten from Ichigo, and why she'd never thought to offer.
They didn't speak for the next few days. Anytime a Hollow attacked, which, given that Orihime's was probably the only human spirit in all of Hueco Mundo, was pretty constantly, she took simply took care of it. She started saving her shields for herself, without worrying about Grimmjow. The first time she did it, it felt spiteful, but once she faced the fact that she only shielded him out of guilt, and that her guilt was ultimately as dangerous as it was meaningless and self-serving, she made her peace. If he got hurt, she'd heal him. Letting herself get hurt only complicated things. Grimmjow seemed to approve, because that night he made her tea from some tiny bitter leaves he'd gathered while she fought. It wasn't entirely unlike green tea from the World of the Living.
They were getting deeper and deeper into the forest now, and Grimmjow led her down below the sandy upper crust of the landscape and into the strange twilit underworld of sprawling root systems and bioluminescent spore. They still hadn't spoken, but there was no reason to start up again just yet. It wasn't the kind of place to chat in, anyway. Eery, tapeworm-like hollows—apparently they were Gillians controlled like a hive mind by some distant Adjuchas—appeared here in droves, and attacked silently and en masse like rushing water. They pounded against Orihime's shields from every direction, writhing mindlessly over each other as they struggled to reach her.
Orihime's stamina and concentration expanded under the constant onslaught, until she was able to form denser, wider shields, and could heal wounds on the fly. She even learned to form and move a shield farther away, usually in the middle of the largest squirming mass, slicing in two any hollow that was caught in its area. Tsubaki wasn't pleased with this innovation, since it meant he wasn't called on as much, but he'd been becoming more still and quiet lately, and had grown more responsive when he was needed.
Although she was too exhausted to dream most nights, the silence did give Orihime a chance to think about the dream she'd had. In it, as unthinkable as it was, she'd looked at Aizen without fear, and he'd held her close in joy and relief.
It nagged at her, largely because it felt more like a real memory than what had actually happened. The original sequence, the one where she'd cried and been led away like a child, now felt unreal and unreliable, as washed out as a bad watercolor painting. It was fading thinly away like a mirage, and just behind it, the dream sequence was growing brighter, and clearer, and firmer to the touch. And whoever she was now, whoever she was becoming out here in this bleak, fight-or-die wilderness, knew which sequence she preferred.
But if what Grimmjow had said was true: that even the things that looked like they were about her probably weren't? Why had Aizen brought her here at all? Why was he going to the trouble of having one of his top officers—top creations, as she understood it—train her? If she was bait, she should have been rotting away in Ulquiorra's tower this whole time. He would have issued a ransom note, or provoked her allies in the World of the Living more directly to instigate a standoff: he and Ulquiorra and whoever else wouldn't have gone to the trouble of clouding the situation to make it look like she defected.
More to the point, Urahara had observed that it would take Aizen til winter to make the preparations he needed to use the Hogyoku—hadn't that much time passed by now? She hadn't felt the Hogyoku stir since the time he'd shown it to her right after she came to Hueco Mundo, and she didn't think that Aizen could do what he was planning to do without all his officers on hand, Grimmjow included.
As best she could tell—and this thought only complicated all her others—was that Aizen was waiting for something. And no matter how much she told herself she was being foolish, or self-important, or deluded, she couldn't shake the feeling that he was waiting for her.
Orihime stopped waiting for Grimmjow to break the silence. At least a week had gone by since their argument, and neither were angry anymore, that much she was certain of. They didn't avoid each other's gaze; even prolonged eye contact had lost its awkwardness. With that, small gestures and nods were more than enough to communicate. Out here, needs were simple, so action was only what it needed to be, and nothing more.
Grimmjow began taking over combat occasionally, indicating that she should rest or set up camp a safe distance away. Nothing here was a match for him, but he took his time—he seemed to need to stretch his muscles as much as Orihime needed to rest hers.
At night, deep underground, strange creatures approached their campfire: bright, spectral insects like dragonflies that nested in Orihime's hair and nibbled ineffectually on the hairclips her brother had given her. Grimmjow didn't shoo them away, so neither did she. She spent the time before she went to sleep practicing with her shields: using wide, featherlight leaves, she played keep-away with gravity, floating them from one shield platform to the next, breaking and reforming and breaking each one in rapid succession to catch the leaves before they hit the ground. She eventually learned to make tea by holding water above the fire until it boiled. Much of the trick was in purposefully thinning the supporting shield's surface until heat could pass through evenly. It was harder than it looked.
Orihime began to realize, after some time, that Grimmjow was leading them somewhere. During the day while they walked, he kept his nose in the air, snuffling now and then. They eventually took to the trees again, back on the surface. Orihime was surprised at how sad she was to leave the stillness of the underworld behind, with its scattered shafts of moonlight and silver sandfalls and campfire fairies, but she couldn't suppress a feeling of anticipation anytime Grimmjow put his hand on a huge, slate grey treetrunk like he was greeting an old friend, or when he closed his eyes and tasted the air before minutely changing course. The farther they went, the more peaceful it became—attacks from even Gillian class hollows tapered almost to a halt.
A few days of this brought them to a high cliffside riddled with holes. When they stopped at the treeline and looked up, Orihime thought she could see the top—a long, flat-lipped ledge—but when she squinted, she saw that it was just a gap. The wall itself continued even higher, out of sight into the sky. Some foreign instinct told her as she looked that it had no end—not above, nor below, or even along the horizon.
"This is the barrier to the World of the Living," Grimmjow said. His voice buzzed and crackled from disuse; hearing it at all was like being snapped in the ear by a rubberband. Orihime blinked at him for a while, stunned, before she thought to answer.
"Why are we here?"
"So you can decide if you want to stay."