Characters: Ishida, Nemu
Summary: If he breathes in hard enough into her hair he thinks he can smell decay with her perfume.
Pairings: Ishida x Nemu, Mayuri x Nemu
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers
Timeline: Post-manga
Author's Note: Obviously, this is purely speculative.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

Her skin is cold as a block of ice and flawless as diamond. Ebony hair is neat and pulled back into a gleaming braid, not a single hair out of place. Emerald eyes are unbroken in hue and vivid as the gem itself, when they aren't dull as unpolished glass.

Perfect as a porcelain doll with years of fine detail by an expert put into the making.

Unblemished as a marbled corpse, poisoned by toxins that leave no trace.

Nemu is completely silent in the bus seat beside him—they've both decided to take the bus instead of faster routes; both are tired and it puts off the inevitable return to reality a little longer—hands fiddling with the sleeve hem of her dark gray coat. She isn't staring out the window or looking at him; just staring into space, eyes downcast and dull as usual.

She isn't smiling.

And there's nothing unusual about that. Ishida can count on one hand the number of times he's ever seen her smile. He wishes the number was higher.

Face as expressionless as a cadaver. And probably dissected as many times as rendered dead. Ishida can't see any scars or stitch marks but can tell that those limbs aren't her originals. Sometimes, she treats her fingers like they're strangers, and stares down at the rosy fingernails like she's never seen them there before. She isn't accustomed to her arms or legs, the limbs grafted onto her body, and her first set are probably long gone and decayed.

Another thing for him to be fascinated by, in the close, in the numb yet intense fashion of an artist viewing a still-moist clay sculpture, the clay gritting beneath his fingernails.

It may just be another thing to hate about Mayuri, that whatever he's done to her—and he's done a lot—has left her blood like rivers in winter, frosted over and sometimes frozen solid enough to skate on. Of course, it may have been just the way he made her in the first place, so she'd still be pliant and submissive. He couldn't take someone who would cry or laugh or smile or even breathe out of time; he wanted cold, dead perfection, and harvested Nemu's lifeblood and warmth to get what he wanted.

She's never cold until she's warm and even then it doesn't last long, because she's just borrowing his warmth and not subsisting on her own. She goes back to being a nearly inanimate doll, a nearly dead corpse soon enough, and Ishida misses those moments when she's not any of that.

It would just be nice to know that she's not too far gone in rigor mortis to smile.

But she's been conditioned to act like this, to never speak up, to never voice her opinions, to never give anyone the indication that she's actually alive. They both figured this out the night they met and since then the poison's set in, the things left unsaid and undone and the person standing between them. He's afraid to feel and she simply doesn't know how.

Her fingers are cold in his; it's a sudden action, spontaneous and impromptu and not planned for. Neither one of them really expect it. The chill of Nemu's skin could just be due to the fact that she's not been wearing gloves, but Ishida hasn't either, and his skin's gotten red-chapped and much warmer now that they're on a heated bus, not alabaster and blue-veined and cold and dense as lead as hers. She is inherently unnatural; again, what Mayuri wanted. An animated, organic woman, one with a will of her own wasn't what he required and even seeing his stamp on her Ishida ignores it and puts it out of his mind. It's not her fault.

She looks at him, and green eyes are almost like marbles, or glass eyes on a mannequin. Face somber and toneless, not a single break in pale, ice-block or diamond skin, and she doesn't say anything.

Nemu turns away, black hair falling like a caul over her face, and doesn't object to being touched as she normally does, edging closer to him in the bus seat but never actually touching.

She still seems a corpse and Ishida looks at her expecting to see mottles of black on her skin, but there is instead only unbroken snowy white. If he breathes in deep enough into her hair he thinks he can smell decay along with her perfume, but the moment passes and there's only the slightly acrid chemicals mixed in with some flower extract.

No decomposition, though she seems a corpse.

He spends the day until nightfall bringing his thumb across the ridges of her knuckles, trying to chafe warmth into her skin.

It won't work, and both know it, but there's no objection. It's not unpleasant, for either of them.