Disclaimer: Blah, blah, blah, me no own, blah, blah, please don't sue me. Blah.

Mini-Summary: In which Ulquiorra discovers Orihime's cat and realizes that going for two weeks without sleep is almost as disastrous to Szayel as a high fever with hallucinogenic medicine is to Grimmjow. Also, soda is tasty, but is it a good idea to randomly drink from abandoned soda cans?

Note: I'm sorry this is so late, you guys. This semester's kicking my ass. No excuses, I know. I'll try better. It's not as humorous, but I did opt for a new point of view this time.

Sleep Deprivation and the Arrancar Psyche

"I have to eat all this," the woman complained, "and then toast, too?" She looked up from the well-stocked cart. "But I'm not even hungry."

Ulquiorra blinked at her, keeping his expression otherwise still. "The toast is not for you, woman." Occasionally when he was cold towards her, the prisoner quietly shrank in on herself, a reaction he did his best to encourage. Over the past few weeks--after she saw Aizen-sama's newest arrancar born--she'd seemed more lively, however, and his stoic demeanor continued to have an effect opposite to the one he desired.

She sat up eagerly, her eyes wide and her hands clasped to her chest. "Oh! Who's eating toast, then? Can they eat it in here? I'd be more than willing to sha--"

He held up a hand to silence her. "You will be eating alone. When I return, your meal will be finished. That is all."

The woman seemed to wilt a little at that, dropping her eyes and hands as her chest heaved in a sigh. "Can you tell me who's eating toast, at least?"

"It does not concern you. I'll return for your dishes in an hour." He left the cart and turned toward the door, toast in hand, but stopped short at a scuffling sound coming from the woman's couch. Slowly, he turned around. "Who is--"

"Hah, hah!" The woman leapt to her feet and slapped her stomach a few times. "Sounds like I'm hungry after all!" she chirped, breaking into a fit of nervous giggles. "My stomach's just grumbling away, isn't it? Funny how it does that sometimes."

Ulquiorra set the toast back on the cart. "That was not the sound of an empty stomach," he said softly. From the hallway, he had sensed nothing out of the ordinary, no reiatsu that didn't belong, and yet clearly something was amiss. He approached the couch with slow, steady footsteps, waiting for the intruder to panic.

Within three steps, a small blur of white zipped from underneath the couch to hide behind one of the room's chairs. It looked like one of the messenger-eating hollow cats, though he couldn't imagine how one had gotten in the woman's room. Ulquiorra let his eyes narrow slightly and prepared to cero the miserable pest as soon as he had a clear shot. No doubt Aizen-sama would be unappreciative of his efforts if the furniture were to be damaged in the process.

"No!" The woman dove from the couch to snatch up the hollow cat and crush it against her chest. "You can't hurt him, I won't let you!"

"Woman," he began, stepping forward to remove the beast from her arms.

She shook her head and backed away, keeping her grip on the struggling hollow despite its teeth in her arm. "I don't care what you have to say about it. He's my pet. I won't--" The woman squeaked as she came up against a corner and could get no further from him. She looked at him and bit her lip, tears starting to trace along her cheeks. "Please, Ulquiorra."

Ulquiorra studied her for a moment, confused. He thought he could understand her need for friends, if he looked at it logically. No amount of logic, however, explained the woman's attachment to a soulless hollow with nothing to offer in return for this protection. He determined that this was a human issue and therefore beneath him. Whatever the reason for her devotion to the hollow cat, it wouldn't matter beyond when the cat was destroyed. "Give the animal to me, woman."

She shook her head again, heedless of the claws drawing additional pinpricks of blood through the fabric over her arms alongside the semi-circular bite marks. "If anything happens to Frill," she whispered, "I'll... I'll cry inconsolably for a month. I- I won't eat. I won't sleep." Her voice gained in strength as she continued her threats, though her eyes remained tearful and pleading. "I'll wail, and moan, and sob, and beat on the walls, and scream at the top of my lungs!"

Ulquiorra blinked, feeling a certain amount of control over the situation slipping away from him. Even level-headed Halibel was suffering from the pneumonia-spawned havoc on the East wing, and the human woman seemed to be threatening to create similar havoc on the West wing should he harm this hollow cat. And there was, of course, Aizen-sama's desire for the prisoner to remain as comfortable as possible within her confinement. "Frill?" he asked, struggling to keep his face from conveying his uncertainty.

"It's his name," the woman said. "I named him for his mask. It's frilly, like yours."

Like... mine? She thinks my hollow mask is 'frilly?' For a moment he wasn't sure how to take that comment, and then he felt a grimace pulling at the corners of his lips. "How did it get into your room, woman?"

She swallowed and looked past him toward the window. "He squeezed in through the bars on my window," she whispered.

"That is a lie."

"No it isn't!" She shook her head so hard that her hair almost hit him in the face. "He did! He came in while I was sleeping and he woke me up. Like Santa Claus, only without the jelly belly and the pipe. And he's a cat without any reindeer."

This was the reason he hated dealing with the prisoner and her conversation. Almost half of what she said on any given day made no sense. Ulquiorra chose to ignore that half and focused on the rest. "The cat cannot fly. It cannot jump high enough to reach your window. There are not enough cracks in the wall for it to have climbed up. I'll ask you again, woman. How did that cat get into this room?"

"Through the window," she maintained. "He came in through the window. I heard the scraping from his mask on the bars, and then he was in here, and so I thought I should give him some water because I don't have any milk, and there aren't any cookies in Las Noches, but he could have rice maybe, even though he didn't bring a bag of presents, and--"

"Enough." Ulquiorra held up his hand to silence her. He didn't have time for this. He spun on his heel and started for the door, plucking the toast off the cart as he went. "I'll return in an hour to collect your dishes and to kill that cat, unless Aizen-sama decides otherwise. By then you will have eaten and said your goodbyes."

Ulquiorra closed the door on her shriek--closed it a touch more firmly than usual in fact--and then stood outside a moment listening to her pound on it with those tiny little fists. He knew she was lying about the window. Aizen-sama granted his messengers the ability to manifest portals through the walls of Las Noches, and some hollows had enough power to do so on their own, but this hollow didn't seem nearly strong enough. Someone must have let the cat in through the door.

On his way to the East wing, he began to tick arrancar off the master list, looking for one that might have smuggled in the hollow cat. The only name he came up with was Neliel, but while she'd have done it in a second when she was still here, she wasn't here, and none of the other arrancar were so abysmally kind and soft-minded. Perhaps it was Ichimaru, he mused. As a joke. It seemed vaguely his style to provide a pet and then watch the woman's reaction when it was taken away.

He reached his destination sooner than he'd anticipated, and stared briefly at the six. A few days ago, Szayel had requested that he bring food directly to Grimmjow's room, since it was apparently hard to guess when the Sexta Espada would be either sleeping or lucid enough to be left on his own for a few minutes. These circumstances didn't bode well for the meeting scheduled in a little over an hour.

The last time he'd come, Ulquiorra had been able to observe the hotly debated French rambling. He'd found the juxtaposition of smooth, musical language and Grimmjow's generally harsh and abrasive nature to be disturbing. Through the door, he could make out muffled yelling, and after the fiasco with the woman's cat, he wasn't sure he wanted to deal with whatever would meet him this time.

He opened the door and found that the individual doing the screaming was not the one he'd expected. Grimmjow was quietly persisting in his foreign mutterings, while Szayel stood over him waving one fist and clutching at a handful of pink hair with the other. Ulquiorra almost turned around to go back the way he'd come.

"Parlez espagnol, débile! Esangnol!" Szayel's free fist crashed into the wall and his forehead followed it with a thump. The rest came out as half whine, half sob. "For the love of all things scientific, speak so I can fucking understand you, Grimmjow. Espagnol. Parlez it. Please."

Ulquiorra cleared his throat as he shut the door behind him. Zommari must have tried to teach Szayel some French phrases, though the effectiveness of this wasn't readily apparent. Szayel seemed not to have heard him, and he quietly moved further into the room to set his toast down on the table next to a bowl mounded over with fist-sized bags of ice. He was about to reannounce his presence when Grimmjow mumbled something about squares.

Szayel pushed back from the wall and bent over his patient. "What isn't square, Grimmjow?" he asked softly, apparently too exhausted to stay angry for long.

"Pi're roun'."

There was a pause, and Ulquiorra could almost hear the Octava Espada thinking.

"Yes," Szayel agreed, nodding as though this made all the sense in the world. "Yes, they are. I've never known a pie that wasn't round." He turned to meet Ulquiorra's eyes and then continued. "Ulquiorra thinks so, too, doesn't he?"

For his part, Ulquiorra kept silent, wondering how the delirium could be contagious where the coughing was not.

"Pi. Not pies," Grimmjow corrected, staring at a point about five feet beyond the ceiling.

Again, Szayel nodded. "Right. Pie are round and so are pies. Go back to sleep. Dream about pastry behaving properly."

Ulquiorra frowned at that. "I believe he's talking about math."

"What?"

"Pi," Ulquiorra said. "The mathematical figure." He'd have thought Szayel would know this, though he wouldn't care to hazard a guess as to how Grimmjow knew.

Szayel stared back at him blankly for a moment, long enough for Ulquiorra to see that the bags under his eyes had bags underneath them. It seemed to click suddenly.

"Oh." Szayel nodded yet again, as though that was the only nonverbal signal left in his repertoire. "Well now a lot of things make sense. Pi. Right," he rambled. "And sum, not some. Okay." A curtain of messy pink hair bobbed back and forth as Szayel continued to nod. "Heh, heh. He's been doing math. Grimmjow's been doing math." Szayel clenched his teeth in a grin. "In French." He started laughing and didn't stop.

Ulquiorra frowned at the Octava Espada and then looked away as Szayel struggled to compose himself. It seemed he might have to amend his report to Aizen-sama so that it included a section on Szayel's fading abilities as caretaker. He'd rather not have to do this, especially as the possibilities for replacement were few and included himself. He'd have to wait and see.

The room was considerably better lit on this visit than it had been on previous ones, and as he glanced around, he could now see that Grimmjow had a surprising number of books, organized according to color. Two whole walls were lined with shelves that reminded him of the binder filled with colored tiles that Ichimaru flipped through when bored.

Ulquiorra looked from the books to their owner. He wondered whether Grimmjow had read any of those books. It didn't seem likely, but then, neither did the French. Grimmjow tossed to the side then, and Ulquiorra paused his thought process to focus his attention on the deep scratches around the jawbone mask. One of them cut into Grimmjow's bottom eyelid parallel to a gash down his temple. Another seemed to disappear underneath the mask from the corner of his mouth.

He was about to mention this to Szayel when his view was obscured briefly by the newly calmed Octava reaching over to press a gloveless hand against Grimmjow's forehead.

"Well damn," Szayel muttered hoarsely before turning to pluck an icepack from the bowl on the table. "Just when I think it's going to stay down." He settled the pack against Grimmjow's forehead with one hand and used the other to fend off Grimmjow's attempts to remove it. "Oh, just stop fighting me, stupid. Your brain's going to melt in there."

Ulquiorra pulled up a chair and sat. He hadn't originally planned on staying long, but now there was a definite need for observation, and at least one conversation that would have to take place before the meeting, one that would require a cautious approach. "I don't think he knows he's fighting you, Szayel."

"That doesn't make it any less irritating. Hand me another, would you?" He took the second icepack and jammed it in the crook between Grimmjow's shoulder and neck. "Once I get him cooled down again, he'll drift off to nightmare land and I can rest for a while."

A few minutes later, Szayel took a deep breath and sank into the chair closest the bed. "So. Tell me something I couldn't possibly know. Something that doesn't involve medicine or fevers or--"

"She has a cat," Ulquiorra interrupted. Mentioning the bruises on Grimmjow's wrists and the gouges on his face could wait a while, he figured. He'd get around to that part in a bit.

Szayel frowned, reached for an icepack to settle onto his own forehead. "Who does?" he asked. "The prisoner?"

"Yes." He watched as Szayel moved the ice from his forehead to his cheek to the back of his neck. "She says it climbed in through the window. I don't know how long it's been there. I only saw it today."

Szayel looked at him. "Well you killed it, didn't you?"

"I'm waiting for my orders on the issue."

"Your orders?" Szayel's voice was hoarse, and almost broke on the question. "Policy is to kill them," he continued. "What's there to wait for?"

Ulquiorra sighed. "She says she'll cry inconsolably for a month if the cat is harmed in any way." And there was yet another thing bothering him today, in more ways than one. He wondered whether it was possible to get an extended leave from Las Noches. Perhaps a lengthy assignment, like the one Halibel was on.

Szayel shrugged. "So let her cry."

"She's stationed on my wing, remember?" Ulquiorra looked down at Grimmjow, who was quiet enough to be asleep but frowning too much to be enjoying it. "Inconsolable sobbing is, I'm sure, very similar to uncontrollable coughing."

"Good point," Szayel said. "You think Aizen-sama will let her keep it?"

And wasn't that one of the questions of the day? It would certainly be easier if the hollow cat was allowed to live, but he'd get no small amount of pleasure out of killing it, if only because of what the woman had decided to call it. "She's named it Frill," he muttered.

"Frill?"

Ulquiorra shook his head rather than explain the irritating story behind the name.

Szayel didn't press for an answer, and instead reached forward to slap Grimmjow's hand away from the ice packs. "Leave them alone. They're good for you." He added a third.

"That's quite a fever, Szayel." Ulquiorra sat forward in his chair. "Have you considered putting him in an ice bath?"

"I've considered drowning him in one," he muttered darkly before shaking his head with a sigh. "I've got fraccion fetching ice every two hours, Ulquiorra. But I'm afraid too much cold all at once will only make things worse."

This seemed as good a time as any, and Ulquiorra decided to broach the subject at the forefront of his mind. "There are bruises on his wrists."

Szayel sighed again, and pinched the bridge of his mask. "He's been trying to tear off his hollow mask. Last night I was afraid he'd finally succeed. It's been an off and on thing all day today." He dropped the ice pack into the bowl and the ice split open with a pop. "It just isn't as simple as imaginary external objects attacking anymore. Now I've got to make sure he doesn't attack himself."

Ulquiorra eyed the deep scratches and bruises. Given the angles, the evidence fit Szayel's explanation perfectly. The Octava seemed to be handling the latest issues well enough that there wouldn't be any need to report this, or to have him replaced for the remainder of the recovery process. Doubtless, this news would only upset Grimmjow's current caretaker. Still, he found himself curious about the whole thing. "And if he had succeeded?"

"It's not pretty," Szayel said. "I've..." he glanced to the left and shifted nervously in his seat. "I've seen the results previously."

"You would be referring to Nel's fraccion?"

He nodded. "I wouldn't have gotten off with a scolding if anyone had actually seen them before we dragged them all off into the desert. If we had access to those two, I'd love to do a follow up study on the long term effects of forcible removal of the entire hollow mask."

Ulquiorra wondered briefly what sort of hallucination would make Grimmjow want to remove the remainder of his jawbone mask, but decided he wasn't curious enough to ponder it for long.

"Szayel," he said, getting to his feet. "The meeting is in thirty minutes. Do you require anything before that time?"

"No." Szayel rubbed his eyes through his mask and leaned back in his chair. "I'm holding off on this evening's dose until afterwards so I can keep an eye on the side effects. I'll add more ice and have three of my more expendable fraccion watch him while I'm gone."

Ulquiorra stared at him. "Exactly three?"

"If Grimmjow wakes up singularly unhappy, there will be one to get killed, one to come get me from the meeting, and a third to watch my patient from a safe distance until I can get here." He stretched. "I've been planning my way around this meeting all day."

Ulquiorra nodded. "Very well. I will see you in half an hour."

"Yeah. Thanks for the toast."

Ulquiorra pretended not to hear him as the door shut.

OMAKE: It's like a wine tasting, without the cheese.

Earlier in the week...

Ulquiorra surveyed the abandoned park, making a note of the aluminum containers littering the ground and benches. There appeared to be more than usual this evening. Possibly a number of them would still have the fizzy liquid inside. Given the utter boredom that an espionage assignment to Karakura held these days, he'd found that sampling the random leftovers of human activity was a relatively entertaining way to pass the time.

In the back of his mind, he monitored the locations and strengths of the various individuals Aizen-sama was keeping track of. No appreciable change, especially in that one. The substitute shinigami seemed to have hit a plateau in his progress and hadn't advanced in over a month. Ulquiorra didn't find this at all surprising.

A breeze rolled one of the cans at his feet against another with a soft clink. He stooped to pick both up and deposited them in a nearby bin designed to hold trash. On the picnic table to his right, another can was knocked over in the wind and clattered off the table. Its partner still stood, which meant it was at least half full and therefore worth investigating.

He sat on the bench, careful not to catch his uniform on the rough wood, and took a sip. It was still fizzy, more powerfully so than many of the others had been. It was also a dark brown, where the others had all been clear. There was likely a correlation between the decorations on the can and the contents within, but it didn't seem like something to waste his time on. He held the can up to his lips again and took a longer swallow.

Hm. Still sickly sweet, but not citrus-flavored. This was more robust, with a hint of something he didn't recognize. It made him feel... perky, almost. That seemed to be the right word. More awake than before, like the strong tea they'd had at the meeting while sorting through the bags of trash Szayel and Grimmjow had purchased from the human world.

He felt he should point this out to Stark when he returned so that maybe the other Espada could remain awake for his shifts here. Another five gulps saw the end of the drink, and Ulquiorra got up to seek out another.

Stark hadn't been scheduled to come back to the park since he fell asleep on the bench that once and got sick in the rain. Ulquiorra wasn't sure whether that arrangement was a coincidence or an attempt by Aizen-sama to keep Stark from being sick again.

It would help if he knew exactly how Stark had gotten sick in the first place. Or how one got sick in general. He'd been rained on here, and had not seen any ill effects except the discomfort of clinging, rain-heavy garments. Grimmjow had been here without rain and had started coughing what seemed like the next day. Others had been here several times in various weather without consequence.

Ulquiorra mentally judged the time he had remaining until dawn. Two more hours, approximately. That was time at least to scour the park for more of the brown liquid. With luck, he'd find another can that was nearly full.