HAPPY GRIMMULQUI DAY! 6/04/10. Ah ah ahhhh, I love GrimmUlqui with a passion. Also, this is my 13th story, and 13 is my favorite numbahh. Therefore this story is quite special to meeee. So enjoy, all, and don't forget to review :)

~CR

Vagary

Sometimes he was flying, and sometimes he was falling; but it didn't matter how plain and utterly torn he was between Heaven and Hell- he would always, inevitably, end up somewhere lost and lonely, far, far away from both the light and the dark. It was the median that was truly terrifying, shades and shadows half enveloped by glistening radiance. Voices too far away to hear, in a language he couldn't even understand.

What are dreams?

Sometimes when Ulquiorra walks, his head feels strangely light and his chest is bursting, full of feathers. Sometimes, he feels as if he's being pulled into the sky.

Other times, he is beleaguered with every torturous step, every labored, wretched heartbeat sinking deep into his stomach. The ground cracks and shudders and breaks- always, always, breaks.

Ulquiorra is neither seraphim nor incubus, though he is pulled in every which way. The nights are harsh, and cruel.

Why do we dream?

Sometimes he would see strange things, symbols, predictions, prophecies. Children with their eyes scratched out and tongues cut out. Mothers with ruptured wombs and no faces. Birds that soared into the ground, fish that dove into the clouds. Flowers. Moons. Little silver shapes, shining, beautiful. He knew that it all meant something. The singing black holes and bleeding fairies and blazing hyacinths- everything meant something. But he couldn't understand. He didn't speak the language of symbols.

Are dreams just a jumble of memories, forgotten, rued, tarnished flashbacks of our conscious self? Are they the random and unnatural arrangement of the information, desires, and ambitions in our minds, splayed and spattered indefinitely across time and space?

Or are they predictions, telling us, warning us, of things yet to come? Whispering in a language they know we can't decipher, because we only speak in blood and bone; mocking us, laughing when we wake, frustrated, and laughing when we die, because we are still unable to remember the many, many dreams that told us it would be so.

Why do we fall in dreams? Is it because we stumbled in life, tripped over our own inequities? Is it because we feel helpless, desperate, thirsty for the truth? Do we fall because it is a symbol of how we feel, blind to the future, unable to control our fate, our destinies always light-years beyond our reach? So it is how the mind feels...

Sometimes, there will be a time when one wakes from a dream with a certain feeling, and when that dream comes true in life, we'll say, "I feel as if I've been here before." But we don't remember why, because no one listens to dreams.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine are strange, and pointless, and forgotten. But then there is that thousandth dream that stays with you forever, and haunts you.

Can't you hear? It's trying to tell you something, but you aren't listening. You don't speak the language of symbols. You don't speak the language of dreams.

What do they mean?

Ulquiorra is proud, and cold, and stoic. Pain is irrelevant. Pain has been long buried under a crumbling wall of broken promises and agonized suffering. But love-

What was love to Ulquiorra? Love was like lust, like temptation, being lured, ensnared, engulfed, like being drowned in honey, sweet, cloying golden blood- surging lazily around you, through you, too thick to swallow, too thick to breathe. Love was like fuck- wasn't that what humans called it anyway? But the meaningless whispers and gestures, the hollow feeling that followed; it was always empty, and ironically so- never enough. Love was like hurt, like malice, like sly vows and venom darts, like the heavy, choking dust that settled in corners and never stirred- dead, and rightly thus.

Somewhere he is scared- obviously so, because he has hidden under that crumbling wall for ages. He's stashed a desperate and hysterical promise to himself; he'll never love, he'll never fall in love.

Because after all, when dust turns to dust and ashes to ashes, you're just a mask. All a mask. And under that mask is a mask, and under that mask is a mask, and a mask, and a mask, and a mask, until the final stones are scraped away to reveal that, there's nothing left underneath! only dust and cracked plaster.

Dreams are the irrevocable link between love and pain.

Dreams are whimsies. But whimsies are frail and delicate and more effervescent than mayflies and spider webs and snowflakes. For creatures like Ulquiorra, creatures with eternal souls and undying minds, dreams are a wonderful, terrible heresy.

Dreams are prophecies. But there is, there will always be, no Chosen One and no great catastrophe, only lost beings wandering in a lost ground, straddling the divide of Heaven and Hell.

A dream. A dream? He can't really tell.

He's standing; the world is four walls of fractured mirrors. Paper cuts and gashes and maybe gunshots too, but Ulquiorra curses at the fact that he can still see the brokenness within. When he moves, the glass warps and contorts until all he is, is a hollow hole and broken bleached bones.

Blue, brilliant, vibrant blue, almost enough to be beautiful. Ulquiorra smiles, a half smile, but through the mirrors, it's just another ugly sneer.

"Grimmjow."

His companion- or whatever he is, acquaintance, friend, enemy, stranger, it's all the same- stops, flickering nervous, and reaches out, unfamiliar, soft, almost pitiful. But not self-pity.

"Acta est fabula, plaudite." Ulquiorra whispers, and there is no echo to be found.

"The play is over, applaud."

Silence. Ulquiorra crashes down into the cracked glass that awaits him, grinning with jagged fangs and twisted claws. Silence. Dark, viscous warmth, bubbling and gushing, pours out from his lips, his cheeks, his eyes.

"Requiescat in pace." Grimmjow, unspoken soliloquies failing, eyes full of stars, unreadable blanks crossing and clouding his face- with what? Remorse? Grief? Love? There is nothing to be found, anyhow, anyway.

"Rest in peace."

Ulquiorra wakes up crying. His fingers are leaves in summer-fall and his breath catches exquisitely in a throat hoarse with prayers and incantations, uttered and chanted mindlessly, wordlessly, in a strange, symbol language.

He doesn't have any answers anymore; he doesn't even know- what does he want?

The tears- they were called tears, he would later learn- burn and fester as they carve rivulets, down, down, down. He's crying, but he doesn't remember why. He feels as if he has been there before, in the house of mirrors and Grimmjow- Grimmjow, strange and wild and wonderful all the same- but he doesn't remember why. He feels oddly light, happier, more content, and the tears, tears of joy? Tears of sorrow? Or just tears- tears of emptiness, and the need to be filled with something more?

"Grimmjow?" And for some reason he's there too, and the blanks are somewhat filled with grateful relief, and maybe something more.

Slowly the world is switched on and everything flows back into motion. The air is sweet with light, and the gravity starts to work again.

"Ulquiorra." One word spoken, in both the language of the body and the heart. Grimmjow smiles, and his eyes are so blue, and so soft, soft like the ashes of black holes and hyacinths. Shadows dance like dust, the last shattered remnants of the thousandth dream.

When Ulquiorra wakes up, he finds that he is not in pain, but in love.

But he doesn't remember why.