Grimmjow quirked an eyebrow when Orihime returned to his tower instead of Ulquiorra's that night. She looked at him. She could feel the hollowness in her own eyes—she didn't even have the gumption to ask permission to stay—but he just shrugged and nodded.

"Anyone asks, I'll say I took you on as a Fraccion." He nodded again, getting into it. "Yeah, to—to replace the ones that Kurosaki and the others took out. Nice, ironic revenge."

Orihime snorted as she headed up the stairs. "And you say you don't play games."

"Only fun ones," Grimmjow called after her.

xxxxxxxxxxx

Grimmjow watched her go. He felt it again, that tug in his chest that said he should go after her. He ignored it. Clingy as a cat, he was lately. The fact that she looked like she needed to be alone just made him all the more frantic to offer some kind of solace.

It wasn't something he was used to feeling. Angry, possessive, competitive, belligerent, confused—all those were old hat. This was something new, that filled him with unease. He felt infected by it. It was some nameless poison corrupting him, reshaping him—but there was no antidote for evolution.

"Is there something between the two of you I should be aware of?"

This time, Grimmjow was ready. He didn't flinch or even look around for the source of the incursion.

"Nope, nothing to see here," he replied airily.

Ulquiorra materialized a few feet away. "I find that—unlikely," he said.

Grimmjow rolled his eyes, but he caught himself rubbing the scar tissue across the back of his hand. He made himself stop. "Oh, it's true. I've taken great pains to honor his royal dickhead's list of bigtime no-nos."

Ulquiorra blinked at him. He was very good at blinking, with those huge, dreary, melon-candy eyes. Grimmjow's mouth watered. He cleared his throat. "Anyway, you're the one skulking off with her at all hours, popping in unannounced, keeping an eye on her all the time."

Ulquiorra looked away. Grimmjow had almost given up on getting rise out of him by the time he replied: "I am—concerned. For her."

Grimmjow had felt a retort queuing up, something biting and playful, like always, but it died in his throat. It wasn't like Ulquiorra to be so antsy.

"I know what you mean," he said instead, quietly, and Ulquiorra blinked at him again. Grimmjow laughed—just a quick huff he loathed for sounding so self-conscious. "It doesn't suit us, does it?"

Ulquiorra's mouth curled, almost imperceptibly, at one corner. Grimmjow licked his lips as whatever magnetic force lived in his chest threatened to break out of his ribcage and drag him across the few feet between him and his so-called nemesis.

For the first time in a long time, he just looked at Ulquiorra. It made it easier that Ulquiorra didn't look back. Made it possible, probably.

He took a deep breath, greedily, hungrily tracing and retracing the familiar lines of Ulquiorra's fine, sharp jaw where it nearly met his high collar. The collar he wore as though he were ashamed of the Hollow in his throat. He'd told Grimmjow once before that it was vulgar, how he showed his own empty stomach off. No harm in giving people some warning that I can't be satisfied, Grimm had leered, face too close to Ulquiorra's. That had been before he figured out that he wasn't just trying to beat Ulquiorra. That had been, he realized, a long, long time ago. And true to form, he'd proven himself right. He was longing for something he could never have.

"Something is changing," Ulquiorra said. "I feel—" He trailed off.

"I know," Grimmjow said. "It's something to do with having her here."

Ulquiorra looked at him sharply. Something clenched painfully in Grimmjow's chest, but he stayed still and looked back. "I don't like it, necessarily," he added warily, "but I also can't picture going back."

Something unthinkable happened then: Ulquiorra sat down. He closed the space to the couch where Grimmjow reclined, and sat on it. He took a deep breath, back to Grimmjow, and tilted his chin up toward the ceiling. Grimmjow couldn't breathe.

"It doesn't bode well that even you have picked up on it," Ulquiorra said at last.

"Even me," Grimmjow sighed. "God, you are such a jackass."

"What?" Ulquiorra asked, turning toward him. "I meant only that you are not as watchful as—"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it."

They were quiet for another minute. Ulquiorra's hand lay very close to Grimmjow's burned one.

"You and I," Ulquiorra began carefully. "You and I are not as—we do not loathe humanity—even the notion of resembling humans—like the others do."

"I get it, Uli." Grimmjow's fingers itched. "I really do get it. If they think something about her is making us—" he shrugged. What the hell would you even call it? "Human-ish—they'll kill her. And she's not strong enough yet to—"

Ulquiorra cleared his throat.

"You—" He started, stopped, and restarted jerkily. "Should rest, too. You seem more worn than before."

Grimmjow nodded, not looking away from Ulquiorra's profile. "You're telling me I'm getting crow's feet," he said, grinning, if a little lopsided.

Ulquiorra gave him a quizzical look, then his eyes drifted from Grimmjow's face to his bare, scarred chest, then, Grimmjow thought, to his burned hand.

"Tell me something," Ulquiorra said, before Grimmjow could ask. "What was on the—the list you mentioned earlier?"

Grimmjow scoffed. Ulquiorra only stared at him. "Oh, you're serious—no, okay, of course you are. Shoulda known you'd be too good a boy to sneak a peek."

"Well?"

"Orders not to rape, seduce, or otherwise entice the fair maiden, and likewise to resist any suggestions, implications, or overt fits of feminine desire that might she might initiate."

There was a long, quiet beat. Ulquiorra's eyes narrowed. "And—I gave you that list."

Grimmjow felt his brow furrow. "Yeah?" he said, and lifted his hand. "And burned the shit out of me to make your point."

Ulquiorra stared at the scar, the weight of his gaze almost a touch against the sensitive skin of Grimmjow's wrist.

"Look," Grimmjow said, suddenly desperate for Ulquiorra to say something. "Is this about what happened the other night? Tell Aizen, if you just gotta, you spying prick, that it was only because I wasn't healing and she—" Ulquiorra's hand stirred, as though he'd been about to reach out to touch him, but then pulled back. Grimmjow flushed. "Whatever, man, that was your doing anyway. If you didn't want me to do whatever I had to do to heal, then maybe you shouldn't have fucked my shit up so bad."

He swung his legs over the opposite side of the couch and started to get up, ready to storm off until he realized he was in his own home and that was stupid, but also remembered that he lacked the power to kick Ulquiorra out if he didn't feel like going—

Ulquiorra was standing in front of him by the time he got to his feet. Grimmjow jolted and nearly fell back onto the couch, and only just managed to stay standing.

"I—" Ulquiorra started. His eyes slid away as Grimmjow's heart pounded.

It wasn't that Grimmjow feared what Ulquiorra could do to him.

It was that he feared what Ulquiorra already did to him. Everytime he looked at him, everytime he stepped close to him, everytime he couldn't stay away from him, everytime he offered himself up, bared his throat like a fattened calf to an angry chthonic god.

"I wasn't myself. At that moment. I didn't mean to—"

"You did," Grimmjow growled, and close as they were, as much as his heart ached, he even raised his hand and pointed a finger at Ulquiorra. "You were exactly yourself. You were more yourself at that moment than you are right now—"

At those words, Ulquiorra looked so pained that it silenced Grimmjow midstream.

"It was something to do with the regression of reality," Ulquiorra said. "It made me—briefly—into what I used to be. Again. I did tell you not to put me under the field."

"You would have died."

Ulquiorra bristled, drawing himself up sternly. "I would never be so disloyal to Lord Aizen as to die."

Grimmjow…laughed. He laughed. He crowed. First in disdain, sour and belligerent and jealous and hateful. Then he laughed until the laughter became a strange, sad, heady glee, and the moment transformed into something so heartily ridiculous that he thought his heart would break.

Because he did have one. He still had a heart. Whatever had been torn out of him to make him Hollow wasn't his human heart. And if it broke, like he was always tempting it to, he wondered if he'd be too loyal, too, to let it kill him.

He looked down at Ulquiorra and felt, for a moment, so utterly human that he forgot to see Ulquiorra as the god he was.

He put his hands on Ulquiorra's stunned face, running his thumbs over the green tattoos that ran from cheekbone to jaw, pressed his forehead down against Uli's, and whispered, still breathless with laughter:

"What—the fuck—do I see in you?"

And then he kissed him, and wondered whether Ulquiorra would be too loyal to kill him for it.