Thanks for waiting *checks watch* DAMN NEAR TWO YEARS EVERYBODY

She was reclining on a low couch near the fireplace, naked beneath a long dressing gown that was too big for her, bare legs stretched out and ankles crossed. Her hands cradled the back of her head. It was cold here, even near the fire. She should have been curled up around herself, but lately—it wasn't that she couldn't feel it. It was more like she'd stopped noticing it. Like it was just one more thing that was losing its grip on her.

"What are you thinking about?"

Ori opened her eyes.

Aizen stood over her, another robe, the twin of hers, casually open over his chest. He reached down to brush a few strands of hair away from her forehead.

"My brother," she said. It was mostly true. "He was turned into a Hollow and tried to make me one, too. Back at the beginning of all this."

Aizen nodded, but said nothing.

"Did you give that order?"

Aizen shook his head, and the sorrowful crook of his mouth made her believe him.

"I heard about it afterward. It was orchestrated by an Arrancar trying to curry favor. They thought I'd be pleased to know the process of Hollowification could be accellerated artificially, even on an otherwise balanced, whole soul."

Ori watched him, taking in the strain around his features.

"You have almost no control over them, do you?" she asked. The words came out easily, unhampered by fear or even awe. Those, like the cold, had also lost their grip on her it seemed.

"I deal in illusions, Ori," Aizen said. "Control is always an illusion. All that matters is who can be taken in by it."

Ori sat up and swung her feet down to the floor. "But you gave them their power," she said. "Went straight for the Hogyoku and used it whether you knew how or not. Were you really that reckless when you started all this?"

Aizen nodded. At least he didn't make excuses for his failings. "I was. Reckless and—unskilled. I didn't know what I was doing, only that I had to do…something…about what was coming."

"Did you never think you might be accellerating the inevitable by fighting it at all?"

"I did. It didn't change the fact that I had to start somewhere."

She was angry, but something in his tone—some kind of gravity comprised of the weight of hundreds and hundreds of years—made Ori feel uncomfortably young. No matter how old or not Aizen truly was compared to her, what she felt now was contempt for her own inexperience. The brittleness of her rage.

"I guess we all have to start somewhere," she said, though it wasn't a concession.

He was still standing. She was still sitting.

She reached for the loosely-knotted belt of his robe and pulled, slowly, until he sank down to his knees in front of her. She held his eyes, unsure of what she was doing but unable to stop. She put one hand in his hair, palm resting lightly just over his forehead, shifted to the edge of the couch, and spread her legs. He didn't look away as he braced his hands on either side of her. They looked at each other for long moment.

Ori's hand tightened on his hair, and she began to guide his head down. He didn't resist, but he also didn't drop her gaze. There was neither defiance nor submission in his eyes. Ori's breath came fast as something began to melt between her thighs, and as the anger in her chest crystalized into something else. Something like bloodlust.

She didn't want tenderness right now—not to give it or take it. If he asked her what she wanted—what she desired—she wouldn't give him an answer. This time, she wouldn't ask him for anything, either.

Earlier, in the hours before they'd put on their robes, she'd begged. He'd told her to tell him no, and she hadn't. Then he'd made her tell him what she wanted, and she had. She'd torn the clothes off him herself, wrapped her legs around him, said his name, and begged him not to stop.

It had felt so good to do it, too. With her wrists crossed and pinned by his hand behind her, back arched, breasts pressed against the wall, his big right hand around her throat, just under her jaw, fingertips trailing over her lips and tongue as he whispered in her ear, she'd lost control—gleefully thrown it away, even—and begged for him, and for a while, nothing else had mattered. Nothing else had even existed.

Now, everything was all too real. The grief and anger and impossibility of her position had flooded back into her from wherever it had gone until it felt like a storm brewing under her skin. It wouldn't be pushed aside again, no matter how he might tease or hold or fill her.

Right now, she wanted to control him. To use him. She wanted to watch him give her what she wanted—or no, she wanted to watch him as she took it. She wanted to feel her own power in the gesture, to watch it take hold and take effect and leave a mark. She wanted him to serve her, but without words, without tenderness or longing or desperation or even the smug satisfaction any man feels when a woman wants him. She wanted an outlet for the ferocity she couldn't seem to put down.

It started slow.

This time, neither of them disrobed, nor attempted to disrobe the other. There were no grasping hands or whispered nothings. Their breathing was tense and tight and rapid—controlled. When his tongue slid over, then into her for the first time, she didn't whimper or moan. She groaned, the sound low and hot in her throat, and moved her hand to the back of his head. She looked down, watching as she began to slowly rock against his mouth. He barely moved, though she could feel his mouth watering as he looked up at her. Other than her hand on the back of his head and his tongue between her legs, neither of them touched the other.

Heat coiled across Ori's skin, electricity seeking ground. Her hips continued to roll, all the surer, all the more sensuously, without his hands on her. His tongue began to drag against her faster, and his lips massaged her now, too, as she accellerated, matching her in a way that almost made her angrier.

She didn't want to spar.

What she wanted, she realized, was a fight.

And she wanted to win.

XXXXXXX

The golden field over Aizen's prone form flickered out, but the heat under Orihime's skin didn't dispel. She was breathing hard through her nose, trying to maintain her composure.

She had tried to form the field without suffering the accompanying memory, tried to reject and suppress it, but without it, the field had done nothing. It had continued to do nothing while Ulquiorra watched, implacable, hands behind his back, until he stated that—unless she suspected the roof was about to fall in on them—a shield was serving no particular purpose.

All the while, the memory had been swelling in her head like a sneeze. Only when she'd let it fill her, consume her, humiliate and tantalize and baffle her, had the healing begun to take hold.

Aizen's body resolidified beneath the field, seeming almost to reinflate slightly, or become more concrete, less of a memory himself, more a creature of now. The colors in his skin and even the cloth of his robes became richer and more saturated as she watched the memory unfold through a haze of borrowed lust and spite.

No matter how real and immediate it had been to her, it still felt like spying, like watching two people through a keyhole. The arousal felt voyeuristic, the emotions exploitative. That memory—no, that scene, she told herself—no matter how she felt it under her skin and saw it in her mind's eye, hadn't happened to her. It had happened to someone else. Someone who—wherever they'd come from, however they'd done it, to whatever end—had taken up residence in her head. Someone who wanted revenge only very slightly less than they wanted control, and that only slightly less than they wanted to save Aizen's life. If Orihime failed to comply, she had no doubt that the newcomer, Ori, would poison her from the inside out.

Aizen's fingers brushed her calf, and his eyes fluttered weakly as he looked up at her. The ghost of a smile was on his lips as he looked at her, but when he opened his mouth to speak, Ulquiorra cut in.

"Lord Aizen, you shouldn't speak yet," he said. "It seems your essence, whatever roots your soul to this plane, has been compromised. You must bend your will to maintaining your physical form throughout the healing process, sire."

Aizen hesitated, glancing from Orihime's rigid face to Ulquiorra's. He nodded, then closed his eyes, though not in sleep. Meditation, maybe.

Ulquiorra lifted Aizen's right arm gently by the wrist and slid his master's zanpakuto under his palm. Aizen seemed to relax with the familiar hilt in his hand. Neither of them spoke, but Ulquiorra's still face slackened. The tenderness in the gesture, and the loyalty that ran deep and swift beneath it, was unmistakable.

Orihime turned softly on her heel to go.

"Will you stay?" Aizen whispered to her back.

Ulquiorra didn't interrupt this time, and Orihime felt her heart clench with conflicting urges and instincts.

"I shouldn't," she said, turning toward him after what she hoped wasn't a too-long pause. "Uli's right. You need to focus your energy, and my being close by will—distract you."

"Uli?" Aizen asked, one eye cracked.

Ulquiorra gave her a look from just out of Aizen's view.

"A short name she has taken to using for me, sire," he answered. "I have insisted already that she desist."

"Wouldn't have thought you two would ever get that friendly." Aizen chuckled drowsily as his eye closed again. "Must have picked it up from Grimmjow."

Ulquiorra glanced away. Orihime didn't answer.

She made her own way out.