Beta: Maiden-Chan, who's my absolute favorite author in this fandom, and Rusky-Boz, who's my absolute favorite artist in this fandom. Nup, I'm not feeling inadequate at all, why are you asking? ;) Look them on FFnet and DeviantArt respectively!

Oculus

Heart?

His eye reflects everything.

(Ulquiorra can suspect this doesn't start with him, even though he's never heard of Sartre or Epicurus, never thought to visualize the first person who put his hand to his chest, sensed the heartbeat, and still felt empty.)

"Lend us your eyes, Ulquiorra."

(Ulquiorra can suspect this will not end with Aizen-sama. But it might end with, it might start to end with --)

The corridors of the palace folded like paper at the corners. They really gave one a sense of being underwater, with all the silence, with all the suffocation. And this vacuum was penetrated only by the sound of Ulquiorra's footsteps, tapping against white marble with the constancy of a heartbeat. Tap. Tap. (Ba-dump. Ba-dump.)

Tap.

He had no destination. All his orders for the day had been carried through, all of them reported. The only reason he was weaving through the corridors of Las Noches, like blood through the veins of a slumbering giant, was to – feh – "kill time". He had no destination.

He hadn't meant to end up outside her door.

Ulquiorra paused. Like a hypnotist's pendulum, the white rectangle stayed his eyes, while the woman behind it stayed his body. Without preamble, he extended his senses to prod at her reiatsu…

…for what reason? The woman would have gone to bed by now, as she had the habit of doing every sixteen hours. He had already made sure she was fed, and bathed, and healthy, and had no more duties towards her. So for what reason --

Pet-sama… sweet deal… disciplined her…

Disgusted with himself, the black-haired Espada turned on his heel and headed off. He hadn't gone farther than a few steps, though, before a sound came from her room that squeezed his insides like a fist.

Something between a yell and a sharp exhalation.

On impulse (and he cursed himself for it right on the spot, because while hollows were supposed to be a pile of impulses, he himself was better than that scum, Grimmjow and Barragan and Aaroniero and), he slammed her door open.

The woman was sitting up in bed, clutching the sheets to her chest, and blinking at him much like Yammy's pet dog had the annoying tendency to do.

"What was that sound just now?" Ulquiorra demanded, skipping the pleasantries.

Blink. Puppy-eyes. Blink.

"Um. A sneeze?" Inoue Orihime responded hesitantly, as though she was filling out a questionnaire.

"Sneeze."

"Yes… 'cause I'm kind of… well…" She rubbed her arms. "…freezing-cold."

Now they were getting somewhere. That condition he understood, though as a result of his iron skin, he'd never experienced it himself. Without asking for permission, the Espada approached the bed and its single occupant.

Past the wild river of surprise, back on the shore of self-control, the details of his surroundings were finally beginning to sink in. Her room was as dark as the corridors outside had been bright, the shadows only sporadically broken by puddles of milky moonlight. One beneath the window; another in the middle of the carpet; another on the bed, by her bare foot.

"How can you be feeling cold, woman?" Ulquiorra asked brusquely, undeterred by an atmosphere others might have considered romantic. "You've been provided covers for just this purpose."

"Nooo, I've been provided a cover. One," the redhead corrected, indicating the sheet in her hands. "And it's constantly night in Hueco Mundo, with sub-zero temperatures… and I left my Electabuzz pajamas back home, so I only have this sleeveless nightgown to wear… and Aizen-san… umm, Aizen-sama didn't think to…" Ulquiorra always invested a lot of attention into what the woman had to say, but this was less of a speech and more of a drone – although the reference to her nightwear did momentarily reel him in. (It was short, and gauzy, and indeed very much sleeveless.)

He closed his eyes.

"Ulquiorra?"

"Woman," he deadpanned.

"Do you think you could find me another blanket or… something? I'm really sorry to bother you with such a small matter -- even if you're my caretaker, I know I shouldn't expect you to fret over me like this, but you're the only one I've got…"

The Arrancar had to feel pity for her, holding the sheet with both hands and trembling like a leaf. And yet…

"Aizen-sama knows what you need," he snapped. "He would not give you anything more or anything less than that."

And yet, and yet.

"Only this once will I overlook that precept. Come, woman."

He didn't wait for her to come to him; she wouldn't, never again. He went to her.

Inoue Orihime shuffled closer to the headboard as he approached, whether to make space for him or to retreat, it mattered little. Wouldn't change the outcome. The mattress dipped under his weight; his hands broke out of his pockets; the left one hooked under her knees, the right one round her shoulders; and Ulquiorra pulled the woman to his lap.

He must have broken some trivial rule of human etiquette again, because she yelped like an untuned instrument, and squirmed all fish-like, and blushed the colour of her hair. And kicked him in the face.

"Woman," he sighed (taking hold of the foot plastered to his cheek and lowering it back to his lap), "what are you making a fuss about now?"

Her answer wasn't especially enlightening: "Ulquiorra – what are you – I mean – just what – why – Ulquiorraaaaaa…!"

"What am I doing? I'm trying to make you warm, as you requested. And if you put an end to your idiotic protests, I might actually succeed."

"…ahaha, I'm not cold anymore! Wow! What a lucky and unexpected turn of events! You're really, so good at this! Now if you could please let me go-o-o-o-o-" Her voice hiccupped like static as he bounced her on his knee, searching for the position that would best solve their conundrum. He only stopped when he had her face-to-face with him, astraddle his legs. "O", her mouth still vocalized. Oh.

"Hold still."

Ulquiorra reached a hand out. He let it descend on her shoulder like a leaf, like a drop of rain, he was about to touch her, he would touch her –

"Your collar is unzipped."

It took him a good few seconds to process her words.

"…What."

"You usually keep your collar zipped up – at least while you're in my room you do – but this time you didn't. Did you forget?" The empty space at his sternum appeared to suck her gaze in like a whirlpool. She reached out, the tips of her fingers extended like a weapon, something hard and keen, and Ulquiorra's stoic exterior fractured at the thought of them invading his hollow hole. He'd have called it fear, if he had known what that was, he'd have called it rage. For the first time, he raised a hand not only to restrain her, but to hurt her.

She took his zipper between thumb and index finger.

Drew it up.

Shut the collar.

"Better," she declared, her smile like sunrays.

The Cuatro Espada stared at her levelly. He doubted if he'd ever understand her, this strange creature who slighted curiosity in favour of compassion; who barely fit in his arms, yet took up every nook and cranny of his thoughts; whose hand would never even wield a paper-knife, but felled towering ideologies with a slap.

He felt… not indebted to her for this preservation of his dignity, certainly not grateful… but protective, suddenly protective of her.

"I'm going to touch you now," Ulquiorra warned. He reached a hand out to her neck, flattening the palm, curling the fingers. Where his thumb met her vein, her heart was jumping like a nestling's.

The Espada got a hold of the long-abandoned sheet and wrapped it round her body with painstaking care, over and over, until he'd put all of the cloth to use and she resembled a burrito. To top that off, he threw his jacket over her shoulders, and fastened his sash around her neck. (Ulquiorra had had two sightings of human girls wearing similar neck-sashes while sitting on a man's lap, over the latest month. He could only hope he was neither fat enough nor bearded enough for the woman's imagination to go there.)

Thankfully, her whole attention seemed to be centered on where to place her arms and how far to spread her legs, so that they wouldn't come in contact with the expanse of bare, male chest in front of her. The result was some sort of aimless flailing, the likes of which he'd only witnessed when Wonderweiss had discovered his first airborne insect.

"Are you still cold, woman?" he asked, blatantly ignoring her toil.

Inoue Orihime's response was to squeak, and nearly flail her way off his lap. It was his hand on her elbow that caught her. "N-no", she stammered at length, and coupled his eyes with hers. They seemed two times as big, ten times as expressive when the rest of her body-language was stifled. "Not at all. So shouldn't you… Ulquiorra, shouldn't you be going now? Before someone, umm, gets the wrong impression?"

"Nonsense," he rebuffed, with a growing desperation, distress he couldn't quite place. Her cheeks were flushed too red, her legs spread too wide. His hand on her exposed skin injected heat through his body, as if he were the one who'd been cold all along. "I'm just doing my job."

"I know you are, but –"

"But what?"

"Someone might come in…"

"Yeah, Ulquiorra, someone might come in," an all-too familiar, mocking voice remarked from a distance. "Especially when you forget to close the frickin door before jumping your human's bones."

"Grimmjow," Ulquiorra acknowledged coolly, even though he was inwardly groaning. He reclaimed his jacket from the woman, acting on a newfangled desire to erase anything he had in common with the shirtless imbecile at the doorway. He didn't let the woman off his lap, though, nor did he eliminate the physical contact between them; that would imply he'd been doing something impermissible. "Inoue Orihime's clothing and accessories proved unsuitable for the cold of Hueco Mundo. Aizen-sama has entrusted her to my care, therefore I had to see to it that her body temperature was stabilized."

"You know, I don't think anyone's gonna buy that other than yourself," Grimmjow sneered. "You finally done us proud, Ulquiorra! Gotta admit, I didn't know you had it in you."

Red-faced and fidgeting, the woman rather looked like she wanted to catch the first Garganta to Mars. Ulquiorra placed a semi-reassuring, semi-restraining hand on her back.

"Are you finished?" he questioned his sky-haired rival calmly.

"No, but you are," Grimmjow snarked, grinning like a Cheshire cat, "once Aizen-sama catches wind of this. Good luck convincin' him that you were making her warm and she wasn't making you soft." Grin. "Or, y'know, hard."

He finally got what he wanted: the Cuatro Espada bristled.

"If you breathe a word of what you've seen…"

"Pfeh, I'm just passing by. And anyway, Aizen-sama won't need me to find out." Grimmjow lifted a hand to his eye-level; mimicked pulling his eye out; mimicked crushing it. "'Lend us your eyes, Ulquiorra'. Hah! Well, see you around, loser – possibly all around, depending on how many particles Aizen-sama blows you into when he watches the rerun." With a final chuckle, he sidled out of the room.

Ulquiorra waited patiently until he had lost sight of the lower-ranked Espada and had heard the tell-tale click of the door. Then, he lifted a hand to his eye-level; pulled his eye out; crushed it. Watched the film of memories sail away and away.

"Trash," he scoffed to the absentee. He was surprised that he'd managed to hold his poker-face as long as he had, but he couldn't have Grimmjow rebounding and running his mouth to Aizen-sama about his "interpretation" of the events. His Lord would not be amused. Or, worse still, he would be.

"U-Ulquiorra…"

A weight abruptly vanished from his legs.

The woman – Ulquiorra had forgotten about the woman. He picked himself upright to join her, took in her plate-round optics and gaping mouth with some confusion.

"Oh… oh no…" she lamented. "Your eye…"

Really. Why did she always vex herself over the smallest things?

"Quiet down. Regeneration is one of my most advanced skills; it will be fully restored before long. Woman, no, you don't have to –"

His empty eye socket was filled with the nurturing glow of her Soten Kisshun, the crackling warmth.

"Woman."

"No, let me…"

That look on her face. The same one she'd carried when she had prepared to attack Yammy, when she'd healed her two Shinigami guards, when she'd slapped him.

"Very well," Ulquiorra gave in. "But this eye of mine – it is a recording device used to deliver my reports to Aizen-sama. It sees everything, it captures everything… it replays everything. If you have any pending requests or comments, you must speak up now, because I want you out of my sight the second it's healed."

Inoue Orihime smiled at him gently. "No. I've got nothing."

Ulquiorra felt a vague sense of disappointment, but he didn't have time to examine it further: her shield was already stringing together the last pieces of his eye. Captor and prisoner stood in silence and let the ritual complete itself.

As promised, the second that his eye could function again, she was out of his sight.

Just more literally than he'd expected.

A waterfall of cloth fell over the Espada's head out of nowhere, shrouding his vision. He reached behind his neck to remove it (its texture revealed it to be Inoue Orihime's sole bedsheet), only to find her hands holding it in place. The brush of their fingertips in the dark drugged his senses, cast him adrift. He let his hand drop. Didn't even get a chance to question or reprimand her before she pressed her lips to his over the sheet.

There was the vertical layer of white and there was she and there was he, and there was her mouth touching the sheet touching his mouth. No, they wouldn't put it in those terms. There was a kiss.

And Inoue Orihime.

There was Inoue Orihime kissing him.

"Just a thanks… for warming me up. That's it; that's all. I really hope this works and you don't get in trouble… oh – you can pull it off now. I promise I'll be out of your way."

And his eye didn't record it.

"Woman."

"U… Ulquiorra…"

"…that you were making her warm and she wasn't making you soft…"

"Your collar is unzipped."

"Hold still."

"A sneeze?"

Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

"Lend us your …"

His eye… reflects… everything.

The date is November the 29th, or so he's told. It's one of the few occasions where the sable-haired Espada will have to take another individual's word for something, because he doesn't know or care enough to verify it himself. The snowed-in grey-white earth is joined to the hip with the snowing grey-white sky, and together, they look like one colossal field of dandelion clocks. The flakes tremble and whirl before they touch the ground. Ulquiorra Cifer finds himself quite literally on alien soil. He doesn't know how he feels about any of this.

Inoue Orihime and he are standing at the threshold of the building where he's temporarily housed under her supervision. He's staring at the wintry backdrop with a reflective detachment. She's tying a hand-knit scarf around his neck. ("I made it for you. I hope you like green," she'd told him an hour ago, when she first presented him with the thick piece of cloth. "It's supposed to bring out your eyes.")

She's talking about the scarf now, too, something about how it'll keep his neck warm while he's in this gigai, and help him blend in with the rest of the heavily-dressed crowd, and possibly attract scary anti-wool activists but also pretty pro-wool girls. Ulquiorra stands a world apart. He's musing about the desert outside the desert of Hueco Mundo, musing about this woman who's the sheer glass of water in it, the sheer bright-red ignition; wondering if she'll be enough every day.

Wondering if she'll be enough today.

"Ulquiorra? What's wrong?" Inoue Orihime pipes up, empathic as ever.

He's about to serve her up some generic reproof, when, without warning, an odd foreign knot rises up his stomach, climbs up his throat, makes its way to his mouth and nose and – before his fear or his curiosity even get a chance to inspect it – escapes in the form of… something between a yell and a loud exhalation.

The universe goes silent as they both try to figure out what happened.

Then:

"Ulquiorra sneezed!" the woman shouts triumphantly.

He stares at her blankly for some moments. "So this is it..." he wonders out loud, looking away to regain his focus. "And I think I can now distinguish the 'cold' that is supposed to accompany it, too. It's… just as unpleasant as you had brought me to believe." His brain finally catches up with his body and he shivers; the woman offers him a sympathetic half-smile. "It hadn't come to my notice before, but this gigai does provide an experience considerably different from my spiritual body…"

"See, it's all relative!" she exclaims, while he narrows his eyes at her in wonder. "That's why you shouldn't be… so gloomy all the time, Ulquiorra. Nothing's sad in and of itself. Like, for example, your scarf looks green to me now, but if I were a T46 I-ORI model robot with advanced sensors and a special monocle able to see through refrigerator doors, maybe I'd view it differently."

She beams at him with such an air of accomplishment that he decides the dadaistic parts of that sentence must be the norm for humans. The implication is not lost on him, though, and he doesn't waste a minute in challenging it:

"Nothing's sad in and of itself, indeed – because nothing has meaning in and of itself."

"Ah, but that's just because we live in an interactive world, Ulquiorra!"

"No," he insists, even though the words lodge inside of him, letter by letter. "Everything there is to see, my eye reflects."

The woman's joyful expression is replaced by a dejected expression, which is in turn replaced by a thoughtful expression. Ulquiorra's remains the same. "But don't you wonder how your eye can see 'everything' when you're part of that 'everything'? It's… I don't know… kinda like trying to get your hand to shake itself." She takes his hand in her gloved one. It's a seemingly absentminded gesture, but the timing is impeccable. Unaware of the demolition and osmosis of philosophies that she's sparking off in the Espada's mind, Inoue Orihime furrows a brow and carries on, contemplatively: "Besides, if your eye could really do that, how come you're not distracted by all the ghosts and emotions and microbes and galaxies floating around, instead of chatting with me?"

He puts his existential ruminations on hold just to comment on that.

"…You have too many thoughts, woman."

The redhead titters prettily.

"Eheh, you're not the first person to tell me so! But that's also because," she suddenly twines her arm through his, gazes up at him earnestly, "that's also because you make me think, Ulquiorra."

The light radiates. He doesn't know how his existence can hold.

"You make me think, too, Inoue Orihime," he says truthfully. And feel. You make me feel. That part he doesn't say.

"Me? Umm. You don't need to feed me compliments, Ulquiorra, I know how much smarter you are than me! Why are you – oh, now, what does that look even mean? …although, whoaaa. I was right. The scarf really does bring out the green of your --"

And on the last night of the world he'll take his eye out and crush it, and the only thing it will reflect is her, her, her.