Soft snipping sounds filled the white room as Ulquiorra Cifer cut the hair of Orihime Inoue, her long orange tresses floating down to the floor soundlessly. She had asked it of him personally, and he had agreed to do it himself. Why, she didn't know, but he had and was carrying out that promise right now. She sat at the window, watching the duel between Tatsuki Arisawa and Nnoitra Jiruga silently, and Ulquiorra could see the side of her profile and noted that she kept a distant, uninterested look on her face even as Tatsuki fell. Ulquiorra continued on, until her hair was just barely brushing her shoulders. "I am finished." Ulquiorra told her, and she turned away from the window as Nnoitra followed Tesla within the wall of Las Noches, looking in the mirror. She flipped it a bit, before nodding at his reflection. "Very good. Thank you, Ulquiorra." She told him, turning around and walking past.
Immediately, Orihime froze and glanced back at Ulquiorra, who had a hold on her wrist. She turned her cold gray eyes up to his vivid emerald pair, her stare just as piercing as his. "What are you doing, Ulquiorra?" She asked dully, and he pulled her back towards him with a slight tug. It was with an odd sort of interest that he stared straight through her, and she didn't flinch even a moment from the piercing gaze. That was completely new to him. "You...interest me." He told her quite plainly, and Orihime scoffed. "Interest? In what, pray tell?" She asked incredulously, taking a step back from him in an annoyed sort of way. Ulquiorra let her go, putting his hands back in his pockets. "Your adaptability. Most humans of your temperament when you were taken would have collapsed in on themselves by now and died." He told her plainly, and she scoffed again. "That was back then, when I was an airhead. Thought everyone had good in them, that I would be saved and helped, other silly things like that." Orihime spoke with spite in her voice, and Ulquiorra stared on. "Then you have abandoned hope?" He queried, cocking his head ever so slightly. Orihime stopped, closed her eyes gently and then began to laugh in a merry sort of way.
"Ulquiorra, hope never lived. I was dragging around its corpse for years, chained at the wrist to a skeleton. Recently, I actually saw it for the pile of bones it was, clicked off the handcuffs and left it to rot." Orihime told Ulquiorra, smiling just as warmly as she had to her friends five years ago. He stared on, his thoughts masked as always as Orihime dropped the smile and turned on her heel, heading to her dresser and smoothing her clothes out in the mirror. "In any case, I can feel them fighting the Espada. It's quite useless on their end, really. Tatsuki already fell to Nnoitra, Rukia is up against the Novena, and losing from the feel of it, Renji and Uryu seem to have encountered Aporro Grantz, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." Orihime muttered, bored. Ulquiorra walked and stood beside her, turning her head gently and staring straight into her eyes. "You don't care?" He asked her, curiously, and she shook her head. "Not in the least." Orihime told Ulquiorra, before feeling him kiss her. It was a test, she knew that for a fact. He was the kind of person to do anything to understand something that he didn't know through and through, and the face heel turn of Orihime Inoue was something that the Arrancar hadn't experienced before. And at the moment, he was testing how little she really cared. Neither of them closed their eyes, staring straight into one another's pair. After another moment of intense staring, he broke the kiss and she stepped back, still looking bored, but with a strangely serious light in her eyes.
"There, were you trying to see if I would melt like a schoolgirl in your arms? No, that era is long past. I want attention, I want affection, I still want that." Orihime turned, heading back to the window and staring at the bloody patch on the glassy white Hueco Mundo sands. Ulquiorra remained silent, as she continued. "Right now, I don't have the time nor do I have the interest. Possibly when my saviors meet their ends, we can attempt something. But it won't be easy, not in the slightest. I don't know if I have the capacity to love again at all." Orihime told him, glancing back over her shoulder with a slight smile, something that had become alien to her lips. It didn't feel right to her anymore, though she kept it up. "And besides, you don't love me right now either. I'm something interesting, not something you'd die for. I really don't want to be something you'd die for, actually." She was messing with the sleeve of her uniform, distractedly. Ulquiorra could see the barest traces of her past self's nervousness showing through right then, as she went on and he listened. "There's a chance it could happen between us. It's a small chance, admittedly, but it's higher than it was when I was first brought here. I've lost this idiotic naivety, traded it in for your cynical and detached view of the world. The world has lost it's color. I only see in whites and blacks."
Ulquiorra listened to her, closing his eyes a moment after she finished. "The world never had colors. They were illusions of the mind, a feeble mind's invention to validate fate through refracted light. They mask tragedies, blind the broken and the weak to the truth in rainbow blankets. Only when one abandons colors and the skeleton of Hope, do they see the world for what it is. The whites and blacks." He spoke, his words crisp through the stagnant air of the room. "We are beings alike in that manner. The husks of humans that gave up colors to see through them, see everything clearly in monochrome."
Orihime turned back and looked him dead in the eye, keeping that small smile on her lips. Her skin was pale from lack of sunlight, not paper white like his but ghostly pale and only barely different. Her lips had lost color as well, once bright gray eyes dull in cynicism and her vivid orange hair lost of glossy shine. Las Noches had stolen the life from her, left Orihime Inoue just as lachrymose as Ulquiorra Cifer. He'd always been there with her, as a captor, as her only friend, as the object of which the embers of her dead heart were being stoked for once again. Maybe someday, something would develop, in a physical sense. But not right now. She smiled, the dead angel Orihime Inoue smiled warmly to Ulquiorra, laughing very softly.
"Then let us be allies in the lack of color in our eyes and in our souls. Maybe, we could even be lovers, maybe you could steal my breath away and take the red from my blood, leave it black." She spoke softly, reaching out to him. They weren't far from each other, within arm's length as Ulquiorra reached out as well, taking her slightly warm hand in his own cold one. Their skin tones were barely any different, though his black nails did stand out glaringly against her flesh. He brought her hand to his lips, kissing it gently and speaking against her barely warm skin. "Once they die, once I remove anything of your old self from you...I will." Ulquiorra told her, and she laid her palm against his cheek. "Thank you, Ulquiorra. I look forward to it." Orihime told him, as he very slightly leaned his face into her hand and closed his eyes. After a serene moment, she dropped her hand at the same time as he stepped back, and the two of them turned back in their own opposite directions as Orihime leaned to look out the window and Ulquiorra headed for the door. The both of them knew that something had already developed, a bond that was quickly growing to something much more than just trust. Lima syndrome and Stockholm syndrome, both developed between captor and captive. They wordlessly agreed that when Orihime's former friends were dead, when their blood painted the floors of Las Noches, then they would allow it to happen and indulge in some twisted sort of colorless romance.
Their pact would be signed with Ichigo Kurosaki's blood.