Author: Aeryan

Rating: T

Characters: Starrk, hinted Grimmjow

Summary: The second time she kissed him, it was the last.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything except my plot and original characters.

A/N: The meaning of the poem at the bottom is the following: I love you the way certain dark things are loved,/ secretly, between the shadow and the soul. The last line also reflects another of Mr. Neruda's poems, but I can't recall what it is called.

WASTELAND

I wish I could paint a thousand pictures in the sky. Maybe then you would see the colors instead of the spaces.

I. Open Ocean

The second time she kissed him, it was the last.

His mouth tasted like death on her lips, dusty and cold but sweet in a morbid fashion that made her sick to her stomach. It was a funny thing, to die twice. You would think that death would only come for you once, when your human body finally gave out like a candle's smothered flamed deep inside of you. She wondered if he could feel her there, hanging on to him as if she could breathe life into him. Probably not.

She held him because that was all she could do, brushing his face and his hair and his mouth in order to remind him that she was still here with him even though she knew he was no longer with her. She wanted to tell him that she would not leave him this time, not ever again, but it was too late and the words were dead in her throat. There was nothing she could do to make things better, nothing she could possibly say to make things okay. So she murmured a song, the one she heard from a little human boy and the only one she knew with it's half-formed words and off-key melody because she knew he liked it too.

It was all she could give him.

The sky was so pretty, so blue, and so different from the one she was used to with it's static paint and clouds. She wondered how it could stand above their heads and not chip from the sorrow and the pain as it watched everything beneath it wither away and die. She told him about the sky and how it looked like an ocean with white sails, trying to get him to open his eyes and see it for himself. It hurt when he didn't.

She folded him in her arms and her breath came out like a whisper in the wind.

"Starrk."

II. Colors

When he looked at her and saw her glazed-over eyes and unsteady smile, he knew she wouldn't stay.

She reminded him of a dancer, but he didn't quite remember what they were anymore so he settled for the way the word melted in his mouth. The way she walked was like flowing liquid, her movements languid and graceful in a manner that made her look as if she would evaporate if he tried to touch her. Then she'd disappear like a magic trick, something that was never real to begin with no matter how much he wished it wasn't so. She would have been just another illusion, a flicker of light too good to be true.

Starrk liked to think that if people had colors like she said they did, hers would be something like quicksilver. He had forgotten just what the color might be but it didn't matter when she shifted and changed like a mirage. He didn't talk to her at first and she spoke a language he could hardly understand, but when she just sat somewhere- anywhere- with him, it was enough. He wanted to think that it is enough.

But it wasn't and it tore them apart.

Nothing was ever enough when you had a hole in your chest that could never be filled, a hunger that could never be sated. You could only have a taste and you would never have a heart, and that was that worst part of it all. They were hollow and this was what they must bear.

So when she smiled at him, no matter how unsteady it seemed, he took what he could get.

III. Ataraxia

It was always night in Hueco Mundo. The sky was as black as tar with clouds of spiraling smoke, a cold moon hanging in midair like bleached bone. She hated it. She hated the way it made her feel so lost and empty like a helpless child lost in shadows.

When she met him, he looked as if he were starving, covered in billowing cloth with little Lilynette at his side. His eyes were sad but his face was bored, carefully blank. He never told her how he split his soul in half, how even then he was so unbelievably lonely. He drew her in like a moth to a flame, no matter how dim his shone because all she wanted was a little light in the darkness. She liked the way he didn't try to talk to her and how he breathed very quietly, almost as if he were not breathing at all. He was beautiful in the way beggars wanted the entire world.

He almost looked human.

He shielded her from the dark, from the world in which their very breathing stole life from others. How could she ever leave him when he made the world make sense? When he kept the shadows at bay?

She wanted to see the sky, a real sky with white clouds and sunsets, but for him she would stay in the night a little longer. She would try to make the suffocating loneliness go away and smile at Lilynette's abuse, at his lazy drawls. But once he showed up, everything changed.

IV. Black Balloon

Sometimes, she would sit very still as if she were an ivory figurine suspended by silver wires while she tilted her head towards the sky. Starrk would lay there as he pretended to be sleeping and ignored the little sighs longing she would let out, not able to bring himself to question them. Then she would stand up quickly, looking at him with her unsteady gaze as if she were not looking at him at all and tell him about her day. They never talked about him, just her, maybe Lilynette or other Espada and their leader, but never about Starrk.

She was selfish, a wonderfully selfish creature.

She would disappear for days at a time and come back swooning with a smile on her face and distant eyes. He wanted to trap her, to cage her in between his arms so she would never leave him again but he didn't because he had never been the type to chase after anything. It was in those times that she left him that Lilynette did not yell at him. Maybe she felt it too, that deep aching sense of wild abandonment that lingered over them like a ghost, always present. Lilynette stayed with him until she came back and he slept and she stayed quiet, unable to think of what else to do. When she did return, Lilynette began yelling about being lazy and not having self-respect even though they both knew he had none when it come to her.

He saw them once, you know. They were tangled up together, breathing the air from each other's lungs with their faces pressed painfully close together. They were so caught up in each other that they did not notice when he arrived and when he left. Starrk was accompanied only by his footsteps all the way to his quarters, not sure why he blinded himself when he had known the truth all along. He should have left her alone then, but he didn't.

Because if hollows had hearts, Starrk knew he loved her with it.

V. Sometimes

When she kissed him for the first time, she tasted like nothing and everyhting all at once.

She smiled and pushed his dark hair behind his ears, bringing his mouth to hers and he let her hold him there for a few moments to make sure she was real. The way her lips pressed against his was enough to drive him mad, tantalizing but hesitant on her part as if she didn't know why she was kissing him in the first place. Her nose kept bumping against his and her hands were jittery, flying to his shoulders as she raised herself higher. He would have to die in order for her lips to be against his again.

She poked his nose and laughed, saying it was worth a shot. He wondered if everything was a game to her, but as always he was too much himself to say anything and he couldn't even bring himself to be the slightest bit angry. She laced her fingers through his and drew shapes on his hand, inside his wrist, and they stayed like that for awhile.

She told him she was sorry.

Starrk shook his head just to make her smile again. She did and she laughed a little too, mussing up his hair and elbowing him the ribs as if nothing had happened between them out of the normal. A few weeks later he began to see less and less of her, then she began to disappear until it became so common that he hardly worried anymore.

But he was Starrk and he was sure he loved her, and sometimes Anni loved him too.

te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,

secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

-Pablo Neruda, "Soneto XVII"