Ulquiorra saw the slap coming, watched it over the course of its long, slow arc. It began with her hand tilted up, wrist exposed and glowing in the moonlight from the window. As it neared his face, her hand rotated forward, lining up the now shadowed palm with the plane of his cheek. He noticed her stance, the strike coming from her center, the follow through. How had he not seen that she had some martial training before?

He should have snapped her wrist, but instead, he turned his face away, attenuating the blow so that she wouldn't break her own hand.

How had it come to this? Had he not broken her?

Ulquiorra hadn't come to her right away upon Sado's defeat, but had seen to his duties first. There were preparations to be made for Aizen-sama's departure. When it was time for her evening meal, he finally went to see what, if any, effect her friends' status had on her. He was disappointed. She was anxious. On edge. He sought to remind her of her situation. She was one of them now. Her friends were irrelevant. Their fate was merely the inevitable product of their own ill-conceived actions.

She reacted… illogically. She contradicted obvious facts. She argued with him. She… struck him. Any other creature beside Aizen-sama would have found themselves instantly crushed if they had acted as she had. Look at her now, eyes wide, sweating, heart beating fiercely beneath the pale, soft skin. He hadn't seen her look so alive in days. Was this anger? Regret? Fear?

Did she fear his reprisal? There was no need. He had already torn and crushed her body (and replayed the events for himself so many times that it made him ill to think on). And still, he seemed to have missed something. Something that couldn't be found in the exposed viscera, the jagged spaces between bones, the clear saline that streamed from her eyes.

He had failed.

It hadn't worked. Or perhaps, he had only crushed half of what made up her foolish notions of friendship and hope. This new defiance arose with the arrival of her companions. It would brook nothing to tear her apart. To tear out the roots, he would have to rip them out where they dwelt.

He turned away, threatening to force feed her himself if there was any food left on the tray when he got back. It was a rote exchange. Meaningless. A return to old patterns. A bitter indication that all his progress of the past weeks was undone.

Immediately, he sought out the tainted reiatsu of the boy, Kurosaki Ichigo. Choking down the sudden, inexplicable sense of loss, he hurried toward the source of his pain, the roots of the woman's hope.

In his haste to destroy the intruder, Ulquiorra overlooked his habitual sealing of the door.

—-

Grimmjow stalked his way back to the surveillance room. These orders were bullshit. There was no way the intruders were going to just 'stumble across' him in his quarters. Especially not with everybody else breaking the rules. He knew the others were going out to battle. He was driven nearly insane by the flashes of reiatsu all over Las Noches.

The door was locked, but he kicked it open with a bang anyway, pleased by the way the lesser hollow manning the screens cowered before him. He gave them a toothy grin, and they cowered even more. Hm. Okay, that might backfire. He needed them to run the machines. He yanked one out from under a bench and put him back at his terminal. "Find me Kurosaki," he growled.

It was difficult to read an expression through the round, featureless bone mask, but the creature was bobbing its head manically, eager to be helpful, especially if it avoided crushing and rending. It was excessive, Grimmjow thought. It wasn't as if he had killed any of them the last time he was here. He glanced at the crumpled monitor where he had thrown a hollow out of frustration. There was hardly even any ichor. He was sure the previous hollow could have been patched up just fine.

The monitor in front of him came alive with a shot of his spiky-haired prey flying backward into a wall. Who was he fighting? Grimmjow leaned in, only to leap back hissing when he saw Ulquiorra cross the screen. "You fucking hypocrite," he accused the monitor. He glared at the other espada, who was moving almost too fast for the cameras to follow.

The blast of a cero whited out the screen for a moment. When the flare died, it revealed a torn, burnt shinigami, on his knees before the cuatro espada. "Get up, you little shinigami bitch," Grimmjow whispered to the beaten figure on the screen. "The only espada you should be kneeling to is me." As if in response, Kurosaki Ichigo mustered enough energy for one more effort, striking with his zanpakuto, but it was weak. The blade barely pierced Ulquiorra's jacket. He shrugged it aside, and thrust his hand fatally deep within the boy's chest. They appeared to be gazing intently into each other's faces, until Kurosaki's eyes glazed over, and he began to slowly slip down. Lifeblood followed Ulquiorra's hand as it withdrew from the body.

Grimmjow gripped the recently vacated chair in front of him. "Aargh!" he screamed in frustration, throwing it into a bank of monitors at the far end of the room. Lesser arrancar scattered. Grimmjow grabbed another chair, prepared to demolish all of Las Noches, starting with the surveillance room, but he glimpsed something on one of the other monitors that stopped him mid-fling. It wasn't another battle. It wasn't even a picture of anything moving. It was just a door. A door he knew very, very well. A door that was lying loose from its hinges.

His eyes widened as he dropped the chair. He looked back to the scene of Kurosaki's slaughter. Uquiorra seemed to consider the blood dripping from his hand for a moment before disappearing from the view. Then Grimmjow looked back to the broken door. Then he began to laugh.

He was still laughing as his sonido took him through the halls to the woman's quarters.