The Miracle of Change
Change.
It was a fact that change was a progressive disorder, a domino effect wherein one change would affect another and another; changing the amount of food one fed an animal, for example, would ultimately change its lifestyle and behavior, or even change its life expectancy. An example that hit more close to home was the concept of taking a creature from one environment and placing it within a completely different setting, and observing how it would change and adapt to its new home.
This led Ulquiorra to a theory that he found quite unsettling, and one that he was unwilling to share with the others.
The genesis for this theory came partially from the facts about change and adaptation, and partially from a quote attributed by a human philosopher.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Ulquiorra had found it an interesting and insightful quote, and after a moment's thought, he had seen a variation of it that was much more meaningful to himself and his brethren.
"He who lives with humans might take care lest he thereby become human."
Biologically, of course, they would not, could not become human, despite how closely their artificial bodies might emulate human form and condition.
No, it was the mental and emotional aspects of the Espada that were vulnerable, and after having developed his theory, he had begun to recall several instances of the Espada changing their behaviors since moving to the human world.
He supposed the first change they had undergone was his decision to move in with Orihime, inhabiting the spare bedroom that had once belonged to her now-deceased elder brother. It had been an illogical move from the start; many of her closest friends were shinigami, her cooking was far more inhumane than the madness inside Grimmjow's skull, her excessive optimism and cheerfulness was a stark contrast to everything the cuarto had ever known, and he knew she had developed an unhealthy affection for him.
And yet he had accepted the offer to live with her regardless, despite the fact it was illogical and something he never would have considered for even the slightest moment in Hueco Mundo.
Worse still, he could not find it within himself to regret his decision. She had become oddly important to him, though this was not something he could ever admit to anyone.
He wasn't alone in changing; over the past few months of living in the human world and working a normal job, Starrk had become more animated and energetic, talkative, and even responsible; he had become more like a father figure for Lilynette than the older brother story they used as a cover in front of the humans, and she was doing fairly well in school as a result of his efforts. More interesting to Ulquiorra was the way Starrk had taken to harassing the sexta, mocking him on a daily basis anymore; back in Los Noches, the primera had never displayed even a hint of this kind of behavior, which meant the only logical conclusion was that it was another change brought about by living in human society.
Lilynette had become somewhat less-obnoxious in the past few months and had begun to act like a true human child, with an intense dislike of school (despite having adequate grades), a group of friends that she had begun to hang out with, and an interest in soccer.
Halibel had become excessively moody and angry since coming to the human world, although Tyn had assured him earlier that morning that the two of them had finally talked through their issues and reached an agreement. Ulquiorra found himself wondering if the tercera would fall back into her old habits from Hueco Mundo now that the anger was gone, or if she would reinvent herself to be someone entirely new.
Tyn Tethis, the Espada's new quinto… In many ways, he had remained largely unchanged; devoted to the idea of a "pack" and suffering through whatever hardships that came along with it, all while questioning all that was conventional and looking at the world through a rather simplistic and often savage point of view. The logical conclusion was that sharing an apartment with Halibel and dealing with her extreme change in behavior had stunted Tyn's own personal growth, and Ulquiorra couldn't be sure what would become of the quinto now that Halibel was over her rage issues.
Grimmjow had also shown some change, although not in the direction that any of the others wanted; instead of calming down, he had become more and more confrontational, and there was not a day that went by where he did not attack Tyn or try to do harm to a customer. He had yet to take a swing at Starrk despite the primera's taunting, but it was only a matter of time before that too changed. In fact, the only positive change in Grimmjow's behavior had been in the last month or so, with him gradually becoming more patient and tolerant…with the humans, at least; with Tyn, he was still as short-tempered as ever.
Still harboring some resentment over their fight was the logical conclusion there.
It had been a particularly busy afternoon for Burger World, enough so that Grimmjow had been forced to run a second register since noon and deal with a nonstop stream of customers since just before lunch. While the crowds were finally dying down and Ulquiorra and Grimmjow rang up the last of the customers inside, the cuarto could see that his blue-haired companion was about to reach his breaking point for the day.
For hours now, every human in Grimmjow's line had been laughing at him; some loudly and openly, some chuckling lightly, and others trying to cover their mouths with their hands to stifle their giggles, and the sexta was becoming furious at it all.
As he rang up the last laughing customer, Grimmjow finally lost it.
"What the hell is so goddamned funny?" he snarled, placing both palms on the countertop and leaning over menacingly as if he were about to jump over and beat the human to death.
"Your nametag…" said the man, still laughing as he wiped away a tear. "That's just…ahahaha!"
"The fuck is wrong with my name?" asked Grimmjow, tearing the nametag from his red employee shirt and reading it himself in an attempt to see the humor.
Cutey-Kitty.
Ulquiorra watched, mildly fascinated as Grimmjow's face turned red with unparalleled rage, redder than his shirt or Tyn's hair, and he began to shake violently.
Everyone knew it had to have been changed before they had opened the door for customers that morning; Grimmjow never came in wearing his shirt or badge and would always change in the dining room shortly before the start of the business day.
"Which one of you fuckers did it?" he demanded as he whirled around, showing the offending badge to Tyn and Starrk. "Who's the slimy little human-wannabe shit, twinkle-toed cocksucker back there who signed his own death warrant?"
Both Tyn and Starrk were shamelessly laughing at the sexta and his rage. His death threat, while unusually colorful this time, was such a common occurrence that no one paid it any mind at all; all the mattered was the nametag declaring to the world that his name was "Cutey-Kitty" and that he'd been wearing it in front of customers all day.
"Nobody, huh? Did the fairy-fucking-godmother switch my tag?" he roared, trembling rage as he tightened his fists so hard that his fingernails began to dig into the gigai's palm, with blood slowly beginning to drip from his clenched fists.
"Take it easy, Cutey-Kitty; we didn't do it," said Starrk, shaking his head and turning back to his window as his laughter finally began to subside.
"It was you, wasn't it?" bellowed Grimmjow suddenly, pouncing on the unsuspecting primera and knocking him to the ground before pummeling him with a barrage of punches to his face.
"I've had it with you, Starrk!" he screamed as he continued to rain his bloodied fists down on Coyote Starrk, who was too dumbfounded and dazed to block or fight back at first.
"Get off of me!" ordered the now-bleeding primera as he took his headset and smashed it against the side of Grimmjow's head roughly, knocking the crazed Espada away momentarily.
"Grimmjow, calm down," Tyn said, trying to interject. "If Starrk says he didn't do it, then he didn't do it."
"Then it was you!" declared the sexta, grabbing a stainless-steel meat tenderizer as he came up from the floor with a wild swing that connected with Tyn's jaw hard and sent the red-haired arrancar spinning to the floor.
"Grimmjow!" barked Ulquiorra as the sexta jumped on top of his dazed enemy and raised the tenderizer for another strike, "That's enough!"
"The hell it is! I'm going to kill these worthless pieces of shit!"
"No, you are not," said Ulquiorra, brazenly walking over and snatching the makeshift-weapon away from Grimmjow before he could swing it down, "Go clean the toilets."
"But—"
"Now."
Angrily, Grimmjow stormed off to the back of the restaurant to begin cleaning the bathroom, cursing the entire time as Tyn and Starrk slowly picked themselves up off the ground. Starrk retrieved a napkin and held it to his busted nose to soak up the blood as Tyn rubbed his aching jaw and looked over at his friend.
"You didn't do it, did you?" he asked Starrk after a moment of massaging his almost-broken mandible.
"Of course not. You?" replied Starrk, tossing his stained napkin into the trashcan and grabbing a new one.
"No," admitted Tyn. "How the hell did it happen?"
"Not a clue…" said Starrk. "But that was funny."
"Right up until the point where he kicked our asses, yeah," agreed Tyn sourly as Ulquiorra impassively bent down and retrieved the name tag in question from the floor, taking a long, hard look at it before dumping it in the garbage can.
Change truly was an interesting thing.
After all, he would have never considered doing something so juvenile in Hueco Mundo.
Shopping was an activity that humans seemed to enjoy, spending their weekends throwing away their hard-earned money in favor of useless baubles and toys that were neither essential or practical. It was apparently a staple of human life to crave the latest and greatest items on the market, regardless of how wasteful it was when their current models still functioned perfectly.
Of course, when one's current items were smashed beyond repair courtesy of a life-or-death brawl, shopping suddenly became less of a waste of time.
Halibel stood in Karakura's resident electronics superstore, Better Buy, with Tyn by her side as they looked at new televisions and blu-ray players.
Back in Los Noches, had someone described a television to her, Tia would have called it a pointless machine and refused to own one. Now, though, both she and her roommate had become accustomed to technological wonder and the entertainment value it offered, and going through the last week without a TV had been a fairly miserable and boring experience.
"Hi there! Can I help you two find anything today?" asked a human clad in a blue shirt off to her side, and Halibel turned to look at the pimply-faced teenager smiling broadly at her, showing off the braces on his teeth.
"We need a new television," she stated as if it were painfully obvious, looking away from the disgusting youth. "Our old one had an accident."
"Well, ma'am, we have plenty of models and sizes to choose from; did you have anything specific in mind?"
"Our old one was a twenty-six inch, so—"
"I want this one," said Tyn abruptly, and Tia turned to see him standing in front of a seventy-three inch monster HD television, eyes wide with wonder.
"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen…" he said, completely entranced as he gently stroked the screen. "Picture watching movies on this thing, Tia, and tell me it's not worth it with a straight face."
"It's not worth it," she told him flatly, feeling strangely insulted at him throwing such praise at an inanimate object. "It's far too expensive and way too big for our apartment."
"But—"
"No. We'll take a twenty-six."
"How about sixty-five inch?" Tyn asked hopefully, clearly trying to bargain with her.
"Twenty-six," Tia said icily, folding her arms over her chest as if to say the debate was over, despite knowing full well he wouldn't surrender that easily.
"Fifty-five?"
"Thirty-two is the most we need," said Halibel, reluctant to spend the extra money despite also harboring a slight desire for a larger television.
"Forty-six?" asked Tyn, practically pleading with her. Jesus, how pathetic! What was it with guys and big televisions, anyway? Did large, HD images of gratuitous violence tap into some primevil part of their psyche that as a woman she simply couldn't understand?
"Forty and that's my final offer; take it, or we're taking home the twenty-six," she said, narrowing her eyes threateningly in an effort to end the argument once and for all.
Tyn took one last, almost-loving look back at the seventy-three inch television before looking back at his roommate sadly.
"Deal," he sighed finally, and Halibel bit back a victory smirk for a brief second.
"I suppose I should take what I can get since you're paying," Tyn added with a shrug, and Halibel's happiness at having won the debate dissipated instantly.
"What do you mean since I'm paying?" she demanded. "You're the one who broke the damn TV in the first place!"
"It was your head!" countered Tyn confrontationally, raising his voice.
"And who decided to shove my head into the TV, moron?" she asked, seething. How dare he try and pin this all on her! It was his stupid fault, not hers!
The human sales associate had turned pale in the last several seconds and was slowly inching away from the bickering pair before Tia shot an arm out and grabbed him by the back of his collar roughly, yanking him back over.
"And where do you think you're going?" she hissed at him.
"I…I don't think I'm really qualified to give you two the 'help' you need…" he said meekly, trembling in fright under her menacing gaze.
"What do you mean by that?" thundered Tyn, curling a fist in rage as he growled at both Tia and the hapless human.
This wasn't good; it had been less than a week since their fight, and while things had been relatively peaceful since then, Tia knew that emotions were still running high for both of them, and their tempers were dangerously close to exploding once more.
The good news was that Ulquiorra still had their Soul Candy, which meant the damage wouldn't be city-wide and the potential for loss of human life was greatly reduced. The bad news was that right here in the middle of a store full of expensive electronics would not only get them both arrested, but they would be paying for the damages for many, many years to come.
"We'll split it," she said finally, forcing a smile to try and diffuse the volatile situation. "We're both equally responsible for the damage, so we'll split the price of the television."
There was a tense silence for a moment as Tyn visibly weighed her offer in his mind, with the only sound either of them could hear with their keen ears being the nervous thundering of the teenager's heart as Tia kept an iron grip on his shirt to prevent him from fleeing.
"Fine," said Tyn, eyeing her closely. "What about the blu-ray player?"
"Well, it was your head…" she said slowly, hoping Tyn would pick up on her attempt at a light-hearted jab and allow his anger crack apart into something more relaxed and less dangerous before things turned ugly.
"And you're the one who decided to smash it against my head!" he countered, still growling angrily.
"Tyn…" she sighed, not sure how to get him to calm down short of offering to pay for it all herself after all.
"But I suppose I did kind of deserve it for stepping on your copy of Jaws during the fight," he said with a smirk, dropping all pretense of being ready to tear her throat out.
Halibel chuckled slightly, partially in amusement and partially because she was glad to see that they were going to avoid another battle.
She left him to pick out the model, trusting his judgment on television quality more than her own, and went to peruse the blu-ray players in the store; many of their discs had been destroyed during the struggle, though at least some of their favorites, Jaws not included unfortunately, had survived.
The destroyed coffee table would need to be replaced as well, although she thought that could wait another week or two as both of them placed a higher priority on a new television.
The damages to the apartment itself had been repaired finally; the hole in Tyn's wall was patched and all that remained was for him to paint his side of the wall back to his jungle motif, Tia's door had been replaced, the balcony and its railing had been restored and the building maintenance crew had installed the new sliding glass door earlier that afternoon.
She picked up a ticket with the model number that she wanted since the store kept most of their stock locked up in the back and looked up just in time to see Tyn terrorizing the poor human, raising his hands as if he were about ready to throttle the life out of the unfortunate teenager.
Sighing, Halibel headed back over to her roommate before he decided to snap the puny human in half and simply steal a TV.
"Tyn, what the hell is going on over here?" she asked as she neared them.
"O-oh!" said the terrified teenager as he turned to face the blonde, "I was just telling your boyfriend here—"
"Roommate!" they both corrected him sharply.
"Roommate that I just remembered we're having a sale today and everything is forty percent off!" he explained, nervously shaking as he looked over at Tyn, and the redhead gave him a toothy grin and nodded in approval.
"I'll just go in the back and grab your merchandise and you can be on your way!" said the human, taking the ticket for the television and the blu-ray player and practically running off to the stockroom. Tia looked her roommate in the eye.
"What did you do?" she asked suspiciously, knowing he was definitely guilty of something.
"Aggressive negotiations," he replied with a shrug. "I negotiated a reasonable price, and threatened to get aggressive if he didn't comply."
"Tyn, why?" she asked, exasperated. Couldn't he go anywhere without causing trouble?
"Monster…" he reminded her with a proud grin as they went up front to the register to wait for the human to come out with their merchandise.
"Is it a good TV, at least?" she asked, shaking her head as she found herself once again unable to argue with his reasoning.
"The best!" he announced happily. "You'll love it. What about the blu-ray?"
"I made sure to get one with an extra-sturdy, reinforced metal casing this time," said Tia with a teasing, almost-malicious grin.
"You're evil," Tyn chided her.
"Monster…" she sang lightly, eliciting a laugh from him which made her own grin change from something that was almost-evil to something more genuine and contented.
It was incredible to her to think that only a few days ago, they had been trying desperately to kill one another, and now they sounded as if they were almost friends, almost human. It was such a radical shift from the past eight months that she could scarcely believe it, no matter how many times attempted to understand the how and why of it all.
Truly, change was a miraculous thing.