"Tell me why you came here."
"Please," Ori scoffed. "You already know I'm here to stop you."
"Hm. Close, but I don't think that's quite right. Tell me—really—why you came. What made you take the first step?"
Ori watched Aizen across the fire. It was her second?…what, night? in Hueco Mundo. She had no idea how long she'd been there, only that she'd eaten roughly two days worth of meals since arriving. Such stale, joyless food that she'd eventually demanded fresh fruit, citing the likely onset of scurvy to the latest fretful, confused Arrancar who'd brought in her most recent meal. And now there it was, sitting on the little side table by the fireplace like a dragon's hoard of gold and jewels. She couldn't keep her eyes off it. Her mouth watered each time she glanced over: black-speckled dragonfruit, mangos the color of lovebirds, plump and glistening clusters of grapes so dark that in the firelight they became a rich, plum black. There was even a pomegranate under there, cracked open and vaguely gory with all its arils spilling out, plus strawberries—oh, sweet Lord, strawberries. What a cruel joke, she thought, but she'd stuff every one of them into her mouth in an instant if she got the chance.
"Ah," Aizen said, following her gaze. "On that note, I am happy to send for human food more to your tastes, but I must ask you not to bully the lower ranks. You had your minder certain you'd be dying within the hour of Vitamin C deficiency, and that I'd string him up by his own guts if you so much as swooned."
Ori took a chance and walked past Aizen to the table of fruit. Food had always exerted the kind of power over her that would make her risk even a god-king's wrath. She plucked a grape and, keeping her back to Aizen, popped it into her mouth. It burst like a firework in her mouth. She closed her eyes and only just managed to stifle a moan. She hadn't even realized how thirsty she'd been until it was flooding her mouth with juice. Aizen stepped up beside her and selected a mango, then produced a slender knife from somewhere. He began to cut the skin away from the mango in a bright spiralling ribbon. He carefully sliced an irregular chunk of the fruit away from the pit and held it out to her, thumb pressing it against the blade.
"Genuinely," he said, when Ori reached for the fruit he offered. "I can't believe you'd come here as a sacrificial lamb any more than I can believe you'd go off on your own with some half-cocked idea of teaching your peers a lesson."
"You don't know me."
"No, but I'm trying to." Aizen held out another odd-angled fruit slice. "And to be fair, I have had a great deal of research done on you."
"Research." Ori echoed. She shook her head, still chewing. "You sound like Urahara."
She saw Aizen's eyebrows bob from the corner of her eye as he huffed a tiny laugh. "He and I did train—and research, and then captain—together for many years. It's not surprising. But unlike him, I know there's a limit to what a report can tell me about the person inside the body, beyond the abilities."
Ori said nothing, only took another bite of mango.
"I think you came here looking for allies."
The chunk of mango almost lodged in her throat. Aizen patted her soothingly on the back.
"Fine," she said, pulling herself together and waving off his hand. "I came to unmake the Hogyoku."
"Of course," said Aizen with equanimity. "And?"
"And I think you're going to help me."
"I'm going to help you…stop me?"
"If that's how you want to see it. I see it as you helping me unmake the Hogyoku."
A smile. "Brazen."
A shrug. "Whatever. I knew you'd guess I was up to more than just posing as a sacrificial lamb for my friends when I came along as quietly as I did. And if you were going to kill me, you would have done it by now."
"Well, you're not wrong."
"About which?"
"Both. So what's your plan that I'm supposedly going to go along with?"
"I don't have one. You're the scheme-and-illusion master. I just know I can do it."
"Are you seriously suggesting that I…supply you with a plan to sabotage me?"
Another shrug. "You agreed to give me something to go on."
Another smile. "Brazen, indeed."
The memory had come easily, pouring into her head as soon as Orihime fired up her healing rejection field over Aizen. What unsettled her most, perhaps, was how neatly it fit into her brain, how it filled in spaces that it seemed to fit already. Just puzzle pieces snapping home.
She was chipping away, ever so slowly, at the oath she'd made in that in-between space. The moment she'd rejected Ori. Aizen's Ori. But what would happen if and when she unpicked the last tangles of that knot? Would she go back in-between? Get lost there? Snap back to wherever or whenever—or whichever world, if Ulquiorra had the right of it—she'd come from before?
It had been several days—or if not days, then replays—of this now: Ulquiorra smuggling her into Aizen's secret chamber where he lay resting in a pale but semi-stable state, then rushing her out again once she hit her limit. And in general, Orihime was happy to be rushed out, for more than one reason. Not least among them, even if Ulquiorra had allowed her to speak to him or him to speak to her, she couldn't imagine what she might say.
Did you actually hurt me? If no, why did it seem like it at first? Am I being hypnotized or did I travel through time? Is any of this real? If it is, are you the monster or am I?
And perhaps strangest to contemplate but no longer difficult to imagine:
Are you in love with me?
And then, a little sadly:
Or with some other version of me?
Orihime had seen a number of movies in her life that dealt with amnesia—it made for a good plot twist schtick—but what no one in the movies ever discussed was how much reintegrating lost or rejected memories affected the body. It was always shown to be a big cathartic lightbulb moment in which the passage of time obligingly screeched to a slow-motion crawl so the revelation could be made in the course of a single drawn out moment, at the end of which suddenly everything made sense, and the character stood up straight, puffed their chest out and looked suitably grave and intense, and declared to the world they knew exactly what happened then, and exactly what do to now.
But this was nothing like that.
First of all, it took a huge amount of time, and time was a slippery thing in Hueco Mundo.
Secondly, it took a huge amount of—not focus, necessarily, because if she focused too hard it slipped away from her.
Energy, then—it took a huge amount of energy. Orihime began to grow bone-achingly cold, shivering uncontrollably during the sessions and long after, whether she was seeing or feeling or somehow just getting the sense of knowing things she hadn't before or just empty-mindedly performing the dance with her fields and shields. Then, if she pushed it any further, reaching for just a little more progress, a little more strength, she began to retch, doubling over with (if she was lucky) dry-heaving. She learned early not to eat until after she'd done the day's work. Past that, her muscles began to spasm—everything from an incessant, maddening eyelid twitch to sudden excruciating seizures in her back and leg muscles.
She didn't know if what was happening now was her reclaiming or even rejecting her own memories, or somehow taking hold of someone else's, but it remained that it was taking a toll. She felt like she and Aizen were just swapping the same hundred yen bill back and forth over and over: her feeding strength into him until it drained her, and then as she recovered that strength overnight, he slipped back into the same frail, insubstantial state as before.
It wasn't that she didn't know how long this could go on—it was that she did, and it was forever, and somehow that prospect was far scarier than running out of time.
"What in the hell did he hope to accomplish," Orihime said, still catching her breath, "with the Hogyoku?"
Ulquiorra was walking her through the glimmering caves. She didn't know why he felt the need to walk her back each day on the return trip to Grimmjow's tower. It certainly wasn't to answer questions, he'd made that much clear with his stony silence, but she couldn't stop herself from asking them when she had the energy. But today, he slowed his pace. Then he stopped. He didn't turn to her as he spoke.
"It seems a very long time ago to you, I know," he said, and she raised her eyebrows as if he could see her confusion. Probably he could. "It probably seems like he has always been as he is now. Or maybe you feel he is the same as he was when he decided to create and feed the Hogyoku. But even he—we—change in time. It just takes a comparatively huge amount of it to you. Meanwhile to us, human life is excruciating to watch. It surges by, hectic and inane. Over before it begins."
"I don't understand," said Orihime. She leaned on the wall for support, impatient but sensing that if she rushed him or so much as acknowledged her own exhaustion, he would take the opportunity to side-step her questions again. "Just because it's short compared to yours?"
He paused, as if he was puzzling it out for himself, too.
"Would you," he began again, "feel satisfied by watching your people's footage—films—your so-called 'movies'—" he said the word as if it tasted sour in his mouth, "if they happened at incomprehensibly high-speed? If they flashed by, not in a matter of hours, but a minute or two? Would you absorb, savor, internalize the particulars? Find them meaningful? Be able to put their principles to work in your own mind?"
Orihime slid down the wall to sit. Still not looking at her, so did Ulquiorra.
"Would you likewise be able to do so—even tolerate the viewing of them—if those films were horribly slowed-down, a single frame flicking by every minute or two?"
"What I'm hearing," Orihime offered, "is that we live at wildly different speeds. Is that what you're getting at?"
"I am."
He took a breath. Rubies and emeralds winked in the shadows each time Orihime's head rocked against the rough-hewn stone walls.
"We do change. We have. Lord Aizen has. But you've seen merely the briefest flickering instant of his life in terms of our lifespans. Not even a blink's worth. It takes us many of your lifetimes to change in a way that you would consider substantial. But in our terms—in my own—Lord Aizen has changed, is changing—even before the events of a few days ago—very rapidly. When he began this, he sought only power. He fetched me and others like me out of an endless half-life to serve him, while he in turn served only his obsession. In time he achieved his goal. By various winding ways, he created the Hogyoku, hid it, lost it, retrieved it, redoubled its power. He created enemies along the way. Even the allies he created—most of them with the Hogyoku itself—were untenable. He realized too late that they served what he served—they did not serve Aizen himself, but power. He was merely leading the charge toward it. And no amount of power gained quenches the thirst for it. In a way, perhaps the only one that mattered, he was helpless before his own thirst. And when he realized this, he lost his taste for it. You might say he grew up. But he also shortly realized that if he stopped seeking it as their leader, they would continue the search anyway, trampling him and perhaps even entire worlds as they stampeded recklessly ahead. We've always been a group prone to hasty action and infighting, but in a largely barren realm like Hueco Mundo at least we can do very little lasting damage. If Lord Aizen was dethroned and the restraints and enticements keeping the Arrancar contained here prematurely dissolved, you cannot conceive of the carnage that would ensue."
Orihime held her breath. It was like Ulquiorra had put himself in a trance and was speaking without realizing it. She had never expected him to say so much.
"Perhaps in the world you came from," Ulquiorra added, "he still is the same person as the one he was when he began all this. But in mine, in this one, he has changed. Has been changing for many years. He has been trying to mend the rip in reality the Hogyoku was forged from without unleashing worse in the backlash. But dispelling it isn't enough. I believe he wanted to collaborate with someone who could—" He abruptly shook his head, stern and frustrated, as if at the antics of a very young child. "He has always been a hopeless idealist. He brought you here because he believes there is such a thing as a perfect solution. He believes it is you."
Orihime couldn't help herself. A bitter chuckle escaped her.
"Men always do," she said sourly. She didn't know where this world-weary woman had come from, the one who spoke from the corner of her mouth with such devastating cynicism—and worse, with what was often such perfect accuracy.
Ulquiorra took it well enough in stride.
"This is what it is to be a god," he said, with a gesture as close to a shrug as she'd ever seen from him. "The mistakes one makes in their godly youth still tend to be of a correspondingly godly size."
They sat in silence a while.
"You say he's a god. Did he make this place?" Orihime asked. When Ulquiorra glanced at her, she waved limply around at the world. "Hueco Mundo, I guess."
"It was perhaps what you'd call an act of co-creation," said Ulquiorra after a moment of contemplation. "Of consensual making. Like me before him, it was here as a shell. You might say it existed, but became real when he took up occupancy. Though it is still somewhat—shallow—though it deepens in fits and starts."
Orihime thought she knew what he meant. Take this place, this undiscovered basement of the world, where no wind howled or sand shifted, where water trilled in shadowed arroyos and innumerable little gem-lights winked out of black soil as if about to take flight on batswings. How rich and lovely it was here, she thought. How unlike the stark and arid surface.
"Do you think he could make a whole world from scratch?" she asked.
Ulquiorra seemed ready to answer right away, but he hesitated like to say it would be blasphemy.
"Uli?"
He shot her a withering glare that she didn't dignify. But it seemed he couldn't stop himself from answering.
"I do not know if he could. Probably the Hogyoku has the power," he clarified. "But I suspect he lacks the—you might call it faith—to try."
Orihime's eyebrows went from scrunched in concentration to halfway up her forehead.
"Faith?"
"He has so gravely overreached in the past." Ulquiorra shook his head. "His creations run afoul of him in worlds that already exist. How much worse to create another just to be befouled."
Faith in the human world was almost always discussed in reference to gods. But if Aizen, by human standards, was one…was a god supposed to have faith in itself? How did that work?
"I suppose you're going to tell me I need to have the faith in him that he doesn't have in himself," Orihime ventured grimly.
"Sentimentality suits me even less than it does you," Ulquiorra said tersely. "I'll thank you not to drape me in it."
Orihime smiled, then laughed out loud with relief.
"Good," she said. "Because that might be too tall an order for me, too. But tell me something else." Something had been tugging at her all this time, since the last vision she'd had over Aizen's prone form. "How much faith do you think the Hogyoku could grant me?"