SILENT PRAYER AT THE FINGERTIPS
Neliel Tu Oderschvank will never know the type of agony that Nnoitra suffers whenever she casts her serene deep green eyes at him, filled with what amounted to be pity. At times like those, violent and uncontrollable rage fills him to the brim of his soul and it is as if his sword acts on its own accord – all he wants to do in that moment is to cut her down, to split her in half, to make her bleed to death just to wipe that all-knowing, pitying look from her eyes.
Nnoitra Jiruga is not a man who needed pity, much less hers.
He wakes up every single day – if it could be called day in this godforsaken world of eternal darkness – to see the same old silver crescent moon hanging in the seamless ebony night. The moon is a constant in this damned realm, always a waning crescent, never neither full nor new – as constant as the violence and race for survival that pervades the lives of the hollows that live in Hueco Mundo.
Oh, how he hates and revels in this life. It's in this hell of a world Nnoitra kneels down in the sand of the never-ending, infinite dunes and prays at the top of his lungs, ranting and screaming mantra after mantra: I want to be strong, let me be strong, I'm gonna kill everybody out there, I'm gonna be on top, I gotta be the best. It's a killed or be killed type of world; Nnoitra has known this since the beginning of his existence.
And so, with Santa Teresa (oh, just the mere sight of such a pious, prayerful lady being wielded by the Espada, who is the embodiment of pure bloodlust itself, was enough to send shivers down anybody's spine) in hand, Nnoitra strives forward with that ever present sardonic grin plastered on his face. Santa Teresa is a familiar weight in his hands, her sheer size balancing out his skeletal form; her two large, black crescent blades positioned back to back looks like it's made to take lives – many, many lives. Santa Teresa is always in his hand, similar to how the moon is always in the grip of darkness.
His tall, lanky body hardly casts a shadow on the sides of the sand dunes. Lowly, menial hollows mill around pathetically in the dips between the hills as if to seek protection from the unknown force agitating the air, upsetting the tiny grains of sand that seems to get everywhere – in his clothing, in his eyes, and in his mouth. Nnoitra's eyes narrow even more into mere slits. Good, he thinks, it's time for Santa Teresa's breakfast.
He swings the blade and Santa Teresa breaks out in a high, beautiful screech of metal splitting through dead air, punctuated by the sickeningly loud crunches of bones and masks crumbling beneath her deathly touch and accentuated by the ear-splitting soprano screams of hollows meeting their sudden ends. He laughs maniacally at the sight of hollows trying to climb on top of each other to reach safety and endeavoring to claw their way out of piles of dying hollows, never aware that the source of danger looms overhead rather than hidden among their numbers. Nnoitra brings back Santa Teresa and slides a finger across her enormous blade, his snake-like tongue flickering out to catch the blood collected on that finger. Santa Teresa hums happily and ends her meal with a prayer of thanks for such bountiful food and Nnoitra laughs as he tastes power literally at his fingertips.
Tomorrow, the same ritual will unfold, for Nnoitra knows that the only way to cleanse the sins off the blade of Santa Teresa is to wipe it liberally with the crimson blood of inferiors.
Neliel looks on, her face twisted and contorted by pure, unhidden disgust. Nnoitra puts on an unaffected front but secretly he is raging that she simply doesn't get his point of view. He seriously wonders how Neliel had ever survived in this primal world where instinct is king, not conscience.
"It wasn't in your orders to exterminate the entire colony," she says calmly, observing the carnage that surrounds them.
"Yeah?" Nnoitra snaps back. He doesn't have time for her high-brow philosophies today. "If I don't kill them, they gonna kill me. So you don't like the way I do things. Watcha gonna do about it? Kill me?"
Nnoitra seethes when he sees yet again pity swimming in the dark depths of her green eyes. "I wouldn't waste my time on you, nor sully my blade to simply extract a meaningless victory from you. I already have, many times before; the next battle will not be any different. To kill you would be useless."
He snarls out loud. "One of these days, you gonna pay."
She shrugs. "Until that day comes, you're going to pay as you always have," she replies enigmatically.
Neliel kills only when she has to – namely, whenever her pride or her very life is in danger.
She rose to the top like everybody else – after all, there is really only one way – through blood and sweat. Killing is the business here in this godforsaken, desolate place, in this Hueco Mundo where sun never shines and where day never comes. It is one ageless night, reflecting the timeless struggle of hollows and Arrancar alike to stay alive.
Once upon a time, Neliel was a beast, the very thing she despises now about Nnoitra. She clawed her way on top of everybody else, knowing only one thing: reach the moon, reach the sky, reach the stars that nobody can see.
Her path to the summit was too easy. Is there no Arrancar or hollow out there man enough to beat her, to put her in her place? Or is she destined to be the one who always does the beating, the winning, the gloating? She is a masochist, yes; she's known that for quite a while. When you win all the time, sometimes you just want to lose once in a while, just to see how it's like.
Losing. It's foreign to her. If she's beaten into submission for once her life, maybe she'll appreciate the supposed struggle for survival more. If she was ever to feel pain, maybe it'll take away this dangerous apathetic feeling that's growing inside of her.
She thinks of Nnoitra and his constant struggle. Maybe I really am still the beast. It is our endless fate since there is little to no difference between a hollow and an Arrancar; we are one and the same. Our instinct still tells us to kill, our hands still yearn for the warmth of blood.
Someday Neliel would like to know how her own blood tastes like.
Often Nnoitra swears to make Neliel his next sacrifice to his beloved Santa Teresa, the next victim to fall before the great, oversized crescent moon blade. There's an agitation, a restlessness that consumes him and does nothing but feed his anger and irritation even more until Nnoitra is absolutely convinced that Neliel must be his next target if it's the last thing he does, no matter what. He drives his mind to such a psychotic fervor that whenever he sees Neliel, he believes that he sees a mark on Neliel that makes her his victim. It doesn't matter to him that this is an irrational thought to begin with; he doesn't play by the rules after all, why should everybody else?
Nnoitra seeks to dominate anybody and everybody, but there's always one person in the way of his gory and vile pursuit: that obstinate Neliel. She never fails to foil his plans of domination and of superiority. While she lives, he could never be the best. Even he cannot deny any longer that Neliel is his better.
She drills this into his head – he cannot deny it. The world sees the two of them as they are: the dominant woman who does not want to dominate and the submissive man who does not want to submit.
They can converse only through the singing of blades, so it seems.
"You insist on following me everywhere I go as if you think I can't handle the tasks that Aizen-sama assigns me," he accuses.
"No," she answers simply. "It's because I know you. One of these days your anger is going to get the better of you and you'll end up hurting yourself."
Nnoitra lets out a derisive cackle, sounding almost gleeful. "You? Know me?" He clutches his sides, doubles over as if this is the funniest thing he has ever heard in his life. "As if! You are the last person to know anything about me, Neliel!"
"That is what you think, and it is your flaw that you don't believe me when I say that. Tell me, Nnoitra, are there other women that you bully so ruthlessly or am I the only one?"
He knows the answer but doesn't want to think about it. "You puttin' words in my mouth now, Neliel?"
"Not at all, Nnoitra," she responds with the composure that Nnoitra always lacks. In reality, it doesn't matter how nicely or harshly she answers him, because inevitably anything she does will provoke him to violence.
With all his might, he swings Santa Teresa in one full arc, wanting to bring it clashing down on Neliel's head as he has imagined doing so many times in his dreams at night (that is to say, every waking and every sleeping moment because it's always night) but the blade never meets the dense bone of the skull. It's met yet again by the clang of Neliel's blade and crimson sparks fly, illuminating sea foam green hair that seems to surf the nonexistent winds of the airless atmosphere of Hueco Mundo. Nnoitra's mesmerized by this, his eyes unconsciously following the hair's flow like fine silk ribbons until Neliel gives him a warning blow to the side; he grunts, more annoyed at himself than her, retreats a step and gears himself for another attack.
"You are growing careless again, Nnoitra," Neliel calmly observes. "What is the matter? Don't you want to beat me – because I am a woman?"
He grits his teeth. "Shaddup, woman!" Gripping Santa Teresa with both hands, he charges at her again, fine sand (never the sand of beaches, but rather the fine ashen dust particles of bone decayed over millennia) getting into his eyes; he hastily blinks them away, he has no time for such trivial things when the sole focus should be to defeat Neliel once and for all. She parries his lunge easily and sends him flying. Santa Teresa slips out of his hand – how? he wonders, he had a vice-like grip on her yet she leaves him so easily – and Nnoitra is sprawled out, moaning, on the sand dunes. He can see nothing but black because he's looking at the obsidian sky with no end and no beginning.
He hears Neliel picking Santa Teresa up and he hisses audibly, disbelieving this breach of propriety. She's broken an unspoken rule among Arrancar – never touch another's sword unless in active combat. He watches as she tests Santa Teresa's weight in her hand, as she acclimates to the heavy crescent blade that threatens to sink headfirst into the sand.
She gives an experimental swing, both fascinated and revolted by how the blade easily cleaves the air in a wide arc, emitting a hollow, high-pitch whistle. "Do you," Neliel slowly begins as she approaches the spot where Nnoitra lies, "Do you want to know what I think?"
"I don't give a damn what you think, you're a woman," he growls.
"I think that you don't give a damn what any other person thinks, but," – here her foot stops a couple of inches away from his head – "I think you do give a damn what I think." When he doesn't say anything, she continues. "You think you're the only one here with a superiority complex? You're wrong. You're not. You pretend that you hate me because I am a woman – yet I doubt that's the only reason."
She slowly walks away, Santa Teresa still in her hand. "I used to be like you, Nnoitra. A beast. A hollow. And that is why I pity you."
His reaction is easy to predict: Nnoitra hauls himself up and charges at her unprotected back; Neliel turns, and suddenly Santa Teresa's long handle is held in front of her with both hands to block his blow. She pushes with such force that he's blown several feet away, landing again on his back.
"Why, you – " Nnoitra sputters, spitting out fine, gray sand.
Santa Teresa lands blade-first into the sand inches away from where his hand is splayed out. Neliel gives him one last, meaningful look before slowly walking away.
"Is there nobody in this world who can take me down?" she wonders.
It's a challenge that's thrown down in front of Nnoitra with both his and her pride at stake. Frustrated, he howls into the night and begins plotting; he had never been one to back down from a fight.
With one fell swoop, Nnoitra cracks open her skull (cracked open, unlike the sky he could never reach with his crescent blades to split in half with his rancor) and he will never forget the look of shock intermingled with something akin to disappointment in her face: I never thought you would stoop to this level, Nnoitra. Neliel hasn't said a word – she can't – yet Nnoitra snarls loudly anyway as if she had. There are no codes of conduct or accepted rules of honorable combat – such a thing as honor does not exist in this hell. Deception is allowed in the fight of the fittest, so why shouldn't he use it to his own ends?
"You should know by now that I don't play fair," he spits, but the words are said more for his benefit than hers.
He had expected more satisfaction out of this than what he is feeling right now. There is no feeling of a giant burden being lifted off his back, there is no urge to laugh in triumph. Santa Teresa feels weird in his hand, suddenly feeling too bulky and too large for him to wield.
Without warning, Neliel's reiatsu explodes and in her place is a child version of herself, a mere toddler with a cracked piece of off-white bone crowning her head. Nnoitra doesn't know whether to laugh or to scream. His long time enemy is now standing before him, completely vulnerable, entirely his for the taking. One swing of Santa Teresa and Neliel would be erased from the rest of his life.
She is his for the taking. This time there is no doubt – Nnoitra would win.
Instead, he walks away and promises to kill her at a later date.
That night, Santa Teresa sings praises of the delicacy that was Neliel's blood. In Nnoitra's mind, Santa Teresa asks for more. Previously, it had only been the master's mission to destroy Neliel; now, it is also the zanpakutou's aim.
Santa Teresa, in her sandy, coarse voice, admonishes Nnoitra for not delivering the final blow for the kill. She demands Nnoitra to explain himself, but Nnoitra has no answer to give.
"Next time, I will," he says.
Perhaps there won't be a next time? she questions.
"Oh, there will be." He is sure of it.
He is also sure that next time will be the first time Nnoitra will ever deny Santa Teresa's wishes.
Neliel wakes up with grains of sand in her mouth, not knowing where she is or who she is or why she has a splitting headache that makes it difficult to think or remember.
For several weeks after, she wonders why she stares up at the moon that is never full nor new, always waning, so much, as if she had a certain affinity with it. It lasts only a little while before that, too, fades from memory and the last traces of Nnoitra are gone.
He takes an eternity to fall.
His ink-black eyes are wide open in disbelief and awe as he watches the ground rush up towards him and suddenly he's face down in the sand. There's something warm trickling down his chin and it's dying the sand crimson red – Nnoitra realizes too late that it's his own blood that's coloring the colorless sand.
He finally understands when darkness – the same inkiness of the nights of Hueco Mundo – begins to invade the edges of his vision and when his breathing becomes uneven and rattles with every inhale. It's his time. After all these years of killing in order to survive, of killing in order to be on top, of killing in order to be the uncontested, Nnoitra was reaching his quick and sudden end. In this life where the arms race of survival is the key to everything, Nnoitra knew that eventually he would die, but he never contemplated before how he wanted to die. It certainly wasn't like this. His death, his final hour of glory, was not supposed to be at the hands of an unknown shinigami. If he had to die, he wanted it to be in a battle where he was defending his title of the best of Arrancar – not in a battle that held no meaning to him...
His last thoughts are of Neliel. The last things he sees are locks of sea foam green hair and serene turquoise eyes slowly opening up, marked by a sudden look of lucidity.
Nnoitra...
His name lives and dies on her lips and he lets out a strangled gurgle from deep in his throat, but the strange sound isn't from choking on the blood that's fast filling his mouth (although he really is, he just ignores it; he's dying, the method with which his death comes hardly matters to him at this point) – it's from despair. Despair that consumes him whole as he realizes what a fool he's been his entire life.
Nnoitra has been fighting, battling, and murdering since time began and now he can't remember any of it except the last time when he crossed swords with Neliel before tonight. Because of him, she has retrogressed into nothing more than a shell of her former self, retaining no memories whatsoever: a mere child.
It was life's cruelest trick on Nnoitra that the moment when Neliel suddenly remembers who he is by her own will is the moment when Nnoitra is taking his last breath.
Without quite knowing what he was doing, he manages to inch his hand across the coarse sand, reaching as far as he can, but of course it's never enough. Blood trickles down the fingertips, leaving delicate scarlet drops on the fine layers of Hueco Mundo dust, and finally Nnoitra can't reach any further – his hand falls through empty air and clutches at a handful of dirty white grains of sand. The tiny grains slip through his fingers and his hand grows limp, his breathing slows...
Neliel doesn't take her eyes away from him and – was it just his imagination, his mind playing tricks on him in his last moments? – he discerns something other than pity in her eyes: sorrow and regret.
Neliel hears every last thought of his but is unable to do anything, too weak to move, too grieved to act.
Santa Teresa let me live to see her return to being the woman I know she is and if I have to kill a thousand souls for a thousand nights and live this miserable life a thousand times over I will because only now do I realize that what I have been seeking my entire life has been here all along and I've learnt the source of my despair because I never once let her get close although she was the only one who ever understood me or cared for me and now I repent my sins if only I can live a little longer...
And the prayer dies with the last exhalation.
fin
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