The Cold Is To Be Endured.

Chapter Five.

The day seemed to drag its feet.

All she could think of was the way that his lips had met hers, and she was confused, because by all rights she should have been furious and disgusted.

The monster that had killed the man who was everything to her had kissed her - her first kiss. She wasn't even angry about it.

Puzzled, yes, incredibly shocked, yes, but not horrified or enraged, or even just a tad put out. The fact that she couldn't muster up the hundreds of negative feelings she felt she was entitled to did annoy her, so she held on to that irritation stubbornly, nurturing it into a mild self-righteous indignation, because it was better than nothing.

Perhaps it was because he was no longer such an enigma to her, because she had tangible proof that he was more human than he wished others to know. He had always reminded her of an iceberg in the centre of an ocean - cold, unforgiving and unapproachable, until last night. He had with one action turned everything she thought she knew of him on its head, and her with it.

And, enlightened as she was, she found that she couldn't dislike him.

After all he had done to her, to everyone, he had redeemed himself in one little action. In that small action she knew that he felt loneliness, which meant that he wasn't heartless. Even if she wanted to, she could never bring herself to loathe him. Not now.

She honestly didn't know how she was going to face him that evening. Even thinking of it made her nervous and awkward. She would be hopeless when he actually got there. What should she say? What should she do? Should she pretend that it didn't happen? Should she confront him about it? Or should she just pretend she was angry at him and accuse him of kiss raping her, the pervert.

The last one would save her dignity, but it would be a lie. It wasn't as if she said no, was it? Hell, she couldn't even manage a freak out session the next day (which puzzled her to no end). Pretending it didn't happen would definitely be easier, but acting as if something that monumental didn't happen would drive her crazy.

She would have to confront him. She groaned aloud. That was probably going to be the most embarrassing thing she will ever have to do. She couldn't imagine him making it easier for her.

And then a troubling thought occurred to her.

What if he tried to do it again? What would happen if he wanted more than just a kiss this time? It wasn't as if she could exactly stop him if he really wanted to...not that that was something she could see him doing.

Something one of the other Espada might do, but not Ulquiorra.

It was settled, she would ask him why he did what he did. She couldn't do anything else. She could never bring herself to let it go, and even though she had no idea what she would actually say, she would say it anyway.

She just had to wait until evening.

It seemed so very far away.

So caught up in her own thoughts of almost cold lips and green eyes, Inoue came quite close to leaving a girl-sized indent on the roof when the door hissed open.

Landing on shaky feet, she turned to face the door, feeling very much as if she were facing the death penalty armed with nothing but a sponge and a bucket of soapy water. She was however, clothed in a fragile shield of self righteous indignation and the resolve to put this rather odd event to rights.

The two Arrancar (one of them male, which was surprising) did what they always did, wheeling the metal trolley into the room, and placing the silver platter on the small hideous table in the centre. All the while paying as much attention to her as they would a fly on the wall: which was throwing her the occasional dirty look but otherwise ignoring her.

Spectacularly rising above their petty behaviour, she looked to the door expectantly, clenching her hands into fists as if she could physically grasp her tenuous resolve and strengthen it.

She waited for him to come in.

And waited.

And then waited a little more.

The pair who had brought in the food tray had left a while ago, but she barely noticed. Whatever was hiding beneath the silver cover was doing its best to tempt her to eat it by throwing out tantalising smells, and she eventually allowed herself to be seduced.

Pulling the chair around the table, to where she had the best view of the door, she slumped into it, and picking up her chopsticks, Inoue picked at the food in front of her, her eyes trained on the door.

Why was he late? He had never been late before.

At first she was puzzled, and then a little worried, but then she relaxed a little: Aizen might have had some order for him to follow.

...But why would he ask Ulquiorra to do it when he had to watch her?

He must just be running behind, she rationalised. He wouldn't not come - after all, Aizen told him to. He wouldn't dare disobey an order.

Content with that explanation, she attacked her noodle dish with a little more enthusiasm. It would have been much nicer if it had sweetbean paste in it, she thought. She always put sweetbean paste in hers.

And pickles, and sultanas and those funny white stalks you get from the market for three hundred yen.

Once she even put chocolate buttons in it. Oh, she wished this stirfry had chocolate buttons in it. Where was Ulquiorra?

He wouldn't be this late, would he?

...He wasn't avoiding her, was he? No, he wouldn't. He probably didn't even realise that kissing girls was bad anyway. Well, not that it was bad. Well, it wasn't, unless the girl didn't want it - but Orihime hadn't exactly said no, had she? Wait, did that mean that she wanted it?

But...she would know if she wanted it, wouldn't she? Yes, she would! She told herself firmly and she knew that she most certainly did not want it now, especially from a Hollow.

Did she?

No, wait, no she didn't!

A little panicky, she hurriedly devoured all of her food and gulped down the glass of water placed by it, managing to get at least half of it in her lungs and nearly drown herself.

During the gasping and spluttering that ensued, her tray was taken away and the Fourth Espada still hadn't made an appearance.

Once she had finally stopped dying and settled down, she made her way to the adjacent couch and sat (she was sick of the bed, if truth be told), propping her elbows up on the arm.

At first she was nervous, but that slowly made way for boredom, and then mild concern, which eventually turned into annoyance.

Where was he?

She peeled herself off of the couch and paced in front of it. Then she sat down again.

After many hours had past and a few holes had been worn in the stone floor, it slowly became obvious to Orihime that he probably wasn't coming.

She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of crying, so she fumed instead.

After all of that time she had spent waiting for him, he didn't even have the courtesy to show up! She had even been worried at one point!
She cursed herself for a fool and her pacing became a frantic whirlwind all about the room.

So he can kiss her, and then not bother showing up the next day - as if she was some type of cheap floosy!

In her frustration she kicked the leg of her unoffending bed. Unfortunately it hurt her more so than the inanimate object she abused, and after the customary single footed dance that always follows a severely stubbed toe, her frantic whirlwind slowed to a mere angry limp.

She had forgotten that she was wearing sandals.

Telling herself she had calmed down enough to sit back on the mattress (it wasn't because her toe hurt something awful), she did so, and irritably chewed a thumbnail.

Forcing herself not to glance at the door (he wasn't coming!) she kept her eyes resolutely on her knees, and then flopped on her back angrily. He wasn't coming.

She should probably sleep. She would be tired tomorrow if she didn't, and everything always seemed ten times worse when she was tired. She crawled under the covers, looking at the door (just in case) and found it bereft of a thin man in white.

She scowled at it as if it were entirely its fault, but it didn't have any effect. Figures.

She stared at the ceiling, wondering why everything was still so bright - and realised that the light was still on. She eyed the switch on the other side of the room, and then rolled over and buried her face in the covers.

She told herself she was leaving it on because she couldn't be bothered walking all the way over to the other side of the room. Not for the bone white man that wasn't coming.

It didn't stop her from waking at every little noise with her heart in her throat.

He didn't come with her meal the next day either.

She contented herself with jabbing as many pieces of food as she could with her chopsticks and pretending that they were his face. Serves him right.


The third day, he still hadn't come and she was a little disappointed.


By the fourth day, she was getting worried. Perhaps he was hurt?


The fifth, six and seventh day passed with stubborn slowness. That feeling of loneliness that had slowly begun to dissipate returned in full force plus relief troops.

On the eighth day, she was so bored that she attempted to start up a conversation with one of the Arrancar girl's that was wheeling in her trolley. She was a pretty thing, with pert little yellow curls and the hollow mask that covered her lower face made her look somewhat like a gypsy, albeit an angry one with big teeth.

The look that the Gypsy-Hollow gave her could have melted stone. Much wiser, Orihime kept to herself from then on.

Unfortunately, keeping to herself meant courting boredom and more than a little loneliness. There was nothing at all to keep her mind occupied - her room was sparse, and nobody in Hueco Mundo had ever heard of a board game as well as things like manners and fun food.


By the ninth day, the redheaded girl discovered that the moon was excellent for making shadow puppets, so she kept herself entertained by making rabbits and monsters and puppies and people until her hands cramped. Apparently eternal night was good for something.


The twelfth day came and went, and Orihime had made shadow puppets to resemble each and every one of her friends, plus as many of the Shinigami Captains she could remember, and put on plays, usually musicals.

With robots.


By the fifteenth day, Orihime was going mad. She was frightfully bored, miserably lonely and so sick of shadow puppets that if she ever saw one again she couldn't be held responsible for her own actions. She never realised just how much she relied on others until she had been removed from them for such a lengthy period of time. Sure, she used to get lonely, especially after the loss of her brother, but she saw now that that wasn't loneliness at all, that it was nothing compared to what she was enduring now.

Meal times, which she used to look forward to, became something to dread, because having living, breathing beings right there and being unable to talk or interact with them in any way was somehow worse than having nothing at all.

She was drowning in her own isolation and she didn't know how much more she could take before she lost it, before she would start talking to herself, or seeing things that weren't there, or whatever crazy people did.

When the door opened and an angry figure stormed in, her first thought was, Oh great, I spoke too soon.

When the said figure grabbed the front of her clothes and wrenched her upwards and shoved its angular face in hers however, she began to have doubts as to whether this really was an hallucination, because if it was, it was a very good one.

Then the Possible Hallucination pulled her out of her bed and dumped her on the floor, and she became certain that this was not a figment of her imagination, because that darn well hurt! With this deduced, that meant that Grimmjow Jaggerjack, the Sixth Espada, was indeed standing over her with his fists clenched and his face like thunder.

She eeped.

"What the hell was between you and Ichigo?" He demanded, his voice harsh with a million things that she couldn't quite grasp. The words hit her like icy water, as if she had been thrown in the waters of the Antarctic unexpectedly and she hadn't had time to get a breath.

Ichigo?

Kurosaki Ichigo?

Her state of mind, already unsettled from a long period of near total isolation, tipped dangerously. A rush of emotion, like blood, overcame her at the sounds of another, of Grimmjow speaking the name of the man that had haunted her dreams. The blood was everywhere, there were rivers, and she was drowning in it. The iron taste was invading her nostrils, her throat, her stomach, and she retched.

Kurosaki.

KurosakiKurosakiKurosakiKuro-

And then Grimmjow kicked her brutally in the stomach.

Gasping, she curled up into a ball. The sheer shock of the physical pain restoring the tenuous balance of her consciousness.

Goodness he had a kick on him.

She laid there on the floor, with the wind knocked out of her, her mind running a million miles a minute about nothing at all. He nudged her again with his shoe.

With great difficulty she righted herself, looking up at him with unfocused, hazy eyes. The hand clapped over her mouth ensured that she stopped dry heaving. She was breathing rather heavily through her nose, trying to stay the throes of nausea washing over her.

However, she wasn't allowed much recovery time.

He advanced towards her and she scooted back as quickly as she could, dignity overcome by the overwhelming knowledge that she really didn't want to be kicked again.

He said something, but she was rather distracted trying to avoid his feet, lest they decided that they wanted to be intimate with another body part.

And then the question that he had actually asked penetrated her currently bewildered conscious.

...Wait, what?

"...Pardon?" She asked, quite sure that her brain was still a bit overstimulated from inventing all of those shadow puppets, because that question made so little sense that it had to have been made up.

"I said, you little bitch, what was between you and Ichigo?" His face was a picture of wrath as he descended upon her and she attempted to slide back out of reach.

Nope, it wasn't made up.

Being a lot taller, stronger and overall far more upright than she, he caught her easily. He reached out and grabbed her hair, yanking her up to eye level. Agony lanced through her scalp, and she cried out, desperately grabbing his wrist, trying to lessen the weight pulling on the hunk of hair he had clenched in his hand.

"Please," She begged.

"I asked you a question!" He snarled, spittle splattering on her skin and his rancid breath in her face. He was angry at her and she didn't know why.

"I don't understand what you mean!" She cried back, and he slapped her viciously.

His grip on her red locks was the only thing that prevented her head from snapping around, and she bit her lip to hold back a cry. Tears stung her eyes and her right cheek burned as if it were aflame.

"Were. You. Screwing. Ichigo. You. Little slut?" Each word was enunciated as if it were painful to say, his face was twisted up as if he had eaten something vile,and when the words finally sank in it was as if he had slapped her again. She stared at him, too shocked to do anything else.

He shook her, and she whimpered. It felt as if her hair was being torn out, and she tightened her grip on his wrist.

"Were you?"

"Why are you asking me this?" She wailed, and her heart was breaking a little bit because she didn't know why this was happening and she wanted it to stop.

"I saw the way your face was when you talked about him. I saw the way you looked at each other. I saw it and I know so just spit it out already! Were you two fucking? Mashing bits? Rocking the casbah? Doing it? Gett --"

"NO!" She screamed, and he fell silent. Her breath was coming in short desperate gasps, "Kurosaki and I...weren't together. We didn't do any of those...things."

Shame flooded her at the idea that he thought that she would.

Abruptly, he let go of her hair. Her grip on his wrists too lax to hold her body weight, Inoue dropped to her knees, wincing as they slammed into the hard stone. Her head was pounding and her scalp throbbed.
She looked up at him through eyes swimming with tears, and he stared down at her, eyes bright and incredibly hard. His teeth were bared, his grimace as fearsome as the animal jaw fixed to his face.

He looked more like a panther now than his released form ever did.

He made a sound, a sound of disgust and hate and misery and hopelessness that wasn't directed at her and it tore at her heartstrings because she had once felt the same way, then he turned to leave her there half prone on the floor.

No! Her mind cried.

He couldn't quite go, and he turned back to see why: Inoue had grabbed the hem of his flowing white pants. He looked as surprised as she felt, but she realised that her subconscious knew better than her, because now that he was still there, it seemed right.

"Don't go," She murmured, "...Please."

And miraculously, he didn't. He merely stood there, staring at her as if she had grown another head, because what kind of girl allows someone to hurt her, and then begs them not to go?

But the redhead clutching his clothes so desperately was that kind of girl, he already knew that. His mind flitted to the two pitiful Arrancar that had beat her until she could barely stand, and still she had saved them, because that was the kind of person that Orihime was, the kind that saved other's, even from themselves.

He thought it was pathetic, disgusting; foriegn to the Hollow who was accustomed to violence and greed. But, almost against his will, his feet remained where they were.


And she was lonely, so so lonely, and Grimmjow was the first being that had spoken to her for so long. She was so grateful towards him, and even if his words were cruel ones he still had thought she was important enough to speak to. It showed her that he was miserable too, so she held the fabric tighter, then she yanked on it, and he made a noise of surprise.

Her other hand reached up to grab his wrist, and then he allowed himself to be pulled to his own knees, it just seemed so unlike him to allow such treatment. She was awed that he tolerated from her things that he probably didn't from anybody else, and she swore to him in her own mind that she would do nothing to betray what he had given her.

Inoue looked into his sharp blue eyes. He looked back into her mild grey ones, and it was as if he could no longer hold everything in. His eyes were so naked, and in their nakedness they exposed all of the grief that he felt. His futile rage, his hopelessness, and over it all a despondent miserable agony that was like a solid punch to her, because how can one being hold so much hate and sadness and not explode with it all?

He reached his rough hand up and touched her hair, as uncaring of the callouses that snagged the strands as she was, because there was a peculiar sense of wonder in his face.

She thought she knew why: But for a shade or two, the colour was the same as Kurosaki's.

Grimmjow said nothing, but his eyes were glued to her hair; looking at it as if for the first time, and then she couldn't hold back anymore. Her pale arms slid around his neck; a curse tore from his lips as she wrapped herself around him and he tried to push her away, but she clung tighter and unthinkingly she curled her fingers in his hair, regardless of the knots that snarled around the digits, and pushed his brow to her neck.

He froze.

She rubbed her free hand soothingly along his back, tracing the curve of a spine that was rigid with resistance and anger.

The jawbone was sharp and distinctly uncomfortable, digging into her soft flesh even through her collar, but she couldn't care less.

Eventually, the stiff shoulders and the clenched fists relaxed, if in increments, worn down by her patience and her unfamiliar kindness. Softly, she began to cry.

The tears were trickling down her face, slowly at first, but then running thicker and heavier as she cried, because he was just so sad. He wouldn't cry for himself, so perhaps she could cry for him.

And so she sobbed quietly, and the evidence of their sadness dripped down her cheeks, down her neck, some of it pattering into his skyblue locks. He knelt before her, and she before him: she held him and shed the tears that he refused to. Or perhaps couldn't.

Slowly, she felt large hands slide over her back, cool even through the white jacket, and snake their way around her. At first they were hesitant, as if unsure of what to do, and Inoue wondered if the Sixth Espada had ever been embraced before. Then they lost all sense of decorum and crushed her to the hard masculine body that she held.

He pushed his face into the junction of her shoulder and her neck as if he could bury himself inside of her, and his grip was so tight that she could hardly breathe. His hollow mask was boring into her skin, his nails almost impossibly sharp as they clawed her shoulder.

But none of it mattered, because the only thing that mattered to her at that very moment was him.

She didn't know how long they were there, leaning into each other on the cold hard stone, but it seemed too soon when he eventually pushed her away roughly and stood.

She remained kneeling, because her knees were aching; her calves and feet were so numb that she physically couldn't feel them and she knew if she tried to stand now she would fall over and probably hurt herself. She didn't want to do that.

The Sixth Espada's face was drawn in annoyance, and something else she couldn't quite identify, but she smiled tremulously at him anyway.

"Don't --" He began.

"I wouldn't," She interrupted, keen to reassure him, and he nodded stiffly.

She had expected him to pretty much tear right out of there, so when he stayed, that peculiar look in his eyes, she was mildly surprised.

He watched her for a while, and she shifted uncomfortably.

"I don't get humans," He said gruffly. And with that, he stalked out.

And she couldn't help the smile that twinged the corner of her lips...his swagger was back.

She watched him as he left, and idly wondered how the hell he could walk when she wasn't even sure she existed from the knees down anymore.

So unfair.

She was sore, and aching, both from the cold and the uncomfortable position she was in for so long, but still, she was smiling when she half walked, half crawled towards her bed, and climbed up on it.