I was thinking, she's the catch. Large breasts, long brown hair, face of an angel, hopelessly in love with me… Inoue Orihime was this particular person who could make the impossible happen. She could, well, reverse certain occurrences, granted that the scale of its damage was well within her range of reversing abilities. That was something, I guessed. So as I sat across her now, I began to be more direct with my input to try to get to the point faster than necessary. Yeah, I had always been an impatient bastard, even to my girlfriend. Yeah, Inoue Orihime was my girlfriend.

"When he reached out a hand to you, right before he disintegrated, what was that all about?"

Yeah, I know. I was being a huge, prying son of a gun. Now, for whatever reason, there would always be this unspoken thought that I had to ask something so bold now or never. She answered,

"Kurosaki-kun, it could mean a lot of things. It may have been that he found his heart right at the last moment or he wanted to cling to life, and in attempting so could only extend a hand to this only soul which could have bound him back to it."

"Oh."

I should say she regarded herself more highly than what I might've expected. Come on, I was sure someone who was as much a bastard as Ulquiorra was couldn't have procured something as nice as attachment, not even towards someone like Inoue.

"I've been meaning to tell you something, Kurosaki-kun, but was too cowardly to take it into action."

"Speak to me."

"I-I perhaps wouldn't have known the darker side of sorrow if you hadn't killed him. I don't hate you, for you are and always shall be dearest to me. But now I reckon sorrow can really sway something as solid as love itself. I fear that I love you less today than before the day you saved me. Forgive me, Kurosaki-kun, I love you, but…"

"But you fell in love with the beast, with Ulquiorra Scheiffer, right before you had the chance to assess your feelings. Stockholm syndrome much?"

I couldn't tell why I was being so calm about this when my girlfriend had just practically cheated on me. Perhaps it was more of a pretense of civility- you know, just trying to appear reverse to what I ought to.

"I'm sorry. I had to tell you now. But if it's any comfort, nothing would've changed between you and me if he were alive."

"As if that's anything much more than empty consolation… but listen, Inoue, you want him back, don't you? You want him alive and well. And I do too, and so does someone else, someone of great impact concerning this fallen Espada."

"What are you saying?"

"Let's bring him back. Let's resurrect the fallen."

Oddly enough, instead of harboring doubts as to whether I was acting sane or not, she seemed rather curious, even enthused by the absurdities shooting off my goddamn mouth. But for propriety's sake, I supposed, she tried to look alarmed,

"Ichigo, he's-dusts and wind! Not even something as powerful an artifact as the King's Key can bring the dead back to life… there's just no way for Ulquiorra…"

"No way, you say? Well then, my love, we're gonna have to find one or make one."

The strange thing about me was, I was perhaps the most psychotic person you ever saw. You see, if I was doing this other than for my own benefit, it must mean the world had gone upside down or inside out or that Byakuya Kuchiki had decided to stop being a pompous prick. Only that, I didn't know what was gonna be the benefit of all this, seriously.

"I-If that's how it is, I'll stay by you, and assist you, go with you wherever you may go." She said.

"That being settled, I'll have to make you sit tight and wait for further instructions, from me. And I'm breaking up with you. I hope you comprehend."

We were going over the familiar sands of Hueco Mundo when I realized I might have simply been asking too much. Worse, I couldn't really say much to her since the breakup, naturally, and she wouldn't utter a damn word in return. Who the hell returns silence for silence these days? In any case, what we were doing was illegal, in all respects, just so you know and, more than that, we couldn't exactly gauge the odds of its fruitfulness-if truth be told.

We were looking for the departed.

"This is the place, is it not?" I asked the ex-girlfriend.

She nodded. She was probably thinking what I was thinking; combing for the dead, as it turned out, wasn't nearly as enjoyable as a quest for some challenge, especially in my case where I wasn't really looking forward to meeting someone whom I had just murdered. But could the dead be brought to life? And if that was so, who had the power?

"What if it doesn't work?"

Just what I was thinking. Well, the story went as such that someone, rather something, inside me who wasn't me at all had done me a huge favor of defeating an opponent against whom I stood very little chance. If you wanted to hear the whole of it, well, I only had guts for an advantage, and nothing besides that. Frankly, I couldn't remember any of it. As such, I didn't see what I thought I saw. Ulquiorra Scheiffer turned to dusts. He was in pieces, countless of it, right before my eyes, and somehow it hurt me too, just as it tore Inoue's heart in as many pieces. That wasn't the way I had wanted to win. Going back, I knew for a fact that Inoue had gathered the ashes that Ulquiorra had become. If she was trying to keep that from me, she surely made a very poor job of it. And she was carrying him now.

"You have the ashes with you?"

"Yes, always."

"Take it out."

"Knowing that I have his remains with me, have you ever stopped to consider that I tried this before? I can't turn ashes back to flesh and blood. I'm strong, but I'm not that strong."

Time to tell her what I knew.

"Ulquiorra didn't die. He was decimated only."

"What?"

"He entrusted his heart to you, didn't he? His body passed on while everything that's immaterial in him he left behind-to you and to Grimmjow, possibly."

I could probably blow the next scene and start hopping around like mad to polish the stupidity of this all. Even worse, she, who had always held this unreasonable trust in me, was starting to look skeptical. And who wouldn't?

"If he is indeed still out there, how can my grief resuscitate him? And what's Grimmjow got to do with this?"

"He grieves too, believe it or not. He's only just admitted it to me, in his own way, and now it's your turn."

That was the best I could pull for a grand persuasion, which was received as if my words were accompanied by a plague of some sort.

"W-what do I have to do? This is impossible; we need power for this, at least magical equipments-if it's even going to work in the first place-"

"-you said you trust me. Now go ahead and vent your grief. Just do it, for once, dammit, just this fucking once, Inoue."

I was looking as though I was all set up to strike her with my fist, but that was just how it looked. After all, she was the type who would succumb to any humane favor by merely being there standing beside her. So she subdued, took a long breath and recited tearfully,

"I-I loved Ulquiorra Scheiffer. Loved him the first time he came up to my room in Las Noches to tell me the dress suited me well. I loved him more when he asked me what a heart was. I loved him to his death."

She didn't have to unload that much, at least not in front of her recent ex-boyfriend. It was probably painful to hear, and even harder was to bear the scale of this revelation. In fact, I was so out of composure that I hardly noticed the ashes, Ulquiorra's remains, begin to rise from the container, before darting towards a definite direction. No one was expecting them to materialize into Cuatro Espada and, of course, that didn't happen.

But something was clearly happening. The countless grains, lifeless though they were, fled from us, to gather in a place leagues from where we were. And there, I just knew, a rebirth was starting to take place. I felt it, and she felt it too, felt the reality of it all that he was coming back.

Apocalypse confirmed. That reiatsu couldn't have belonged to anyone else. It was weak, so weak that it was hardly even there-even likely that years and lots of hardship would not be sufficient to restore what it once was. Nevertheless…

Ulquiorra Scheiffer.

"Grimmjow Jaggerjack, you bastard, you owe me one big favor." I muttered to myself.

TBC