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34. Pain

Hollows are creatures of pain.

They are borne out of this pain, the pain of watching their loved ones move on without them. They devour the source of their pain in an attempt to escape it. When this does not work they consume all in their path, desperate to fill their aching emptiness.

Ulquiorra Schiffer was no exception. He, too, was a hollow (although a far more powerful one than he had been before gaining his nearly-human arrancar form), and he, too, was despairingly empty. His emptiness was like a great pit within him, and it scalded him and clawed at his bones. He could not bear to look at the gaping hole in his chest, so he covered it with his high collar- but he could do nothing to escape it, and so marinated in his pain like all the others.

There was the pain of his emptiness, and there was the pain of his loneliness, and he could not decide which was the worse of the two. There was the pain of his impeccable control, under which he had to mask every other pain and so let it fester like a sore. There was the pain of meeting Grimmjow, the wild and passionate man who could see past his perfection and pointed it out often. There was the pain of letting Grimmjow inside his walls, where everything was tender and easily blistered and cracked and Grimmjow was not a man well known for his gentility. There was the pain of worrying, as he had never worried before, of losing the blue-haired arrancar and being left again to the pain of his loneliness.

And so, when Grimmjow began pushing his way inside of Ulquiorra in an act of coitus that he had begged Ulquiorra to engage in, the pain was not anything worth noting. It was a physical sting, but Ulquiorra's rapid regeneration quickly did its work and the pain was gone. And it was paucity of a price to pay for Grimmjow's reverberating groan. The pain came back again as Grimmjow began to thrust, but Ulquiorra again ignored it resolutely and simply. Once more, the look on Grimmjow's expressive face was well worth it.

And then Grimmjow sought out the same look from Ulquiorra, and Ulquiorra gasped as Grimmjow's head sunk into something within him with an accuracy that one rarely saw out of the panther hollow off of the battlefield. It was like nothing else, a deep-set pleasure that Ulquiorra (in all of his logic and knowledge) could not have thought possible. Perhaps it was because he lacked imagination. Grimmjow continued his

assault, and Ulquiorra could not keep his hips down.

Wave after wave of white rolled through him, and for the first time he could stop musing and return to his body, the one that he hadn't been in since he'd been in it alone. This was different. This was beyond his control, but something that he wouldn't have wanted to lasso in any way. And when it pushed him over his limit and he came, he could feel Grimmjow shudder and give in as well. They slumped onto each other, Ulquiorra caught between the soft bed and Grimmjow's warm body, as the effects faded and receded. They panted in tandem, and the near-quiet bobbed around them like jellyfish.

This had not changed anything. The pain of emptiness and loneliness, and the pain of control was still there, and would not go away. Tomorrow would be just the same, with the insistent burn of his pain. But for once, just this once in that night, the pain led him somewhere. The pain in the beginning did not remain that way for long.

A hollow was a creature of pain.

But suddenly pain was more than just pain.