Characters: Ulquiorra, Orihime
Summary: He wonders if he could have loved her.
Pairings: UlquiHime
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc
Timeline: Hueco Mundo arc
Author's Note: Okay, I know I've pretty much beaten the death scene, well, to death (please excuse the appallingly lame pun), but I've got a new angle on it, okay? Don't hurt me.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
When he asks himself the question, Ulquiorra still sees the word as just a word. A flat, one-dimensional word, that's all that 'love' is. It means nothing; it's nothing, it's worthless. Just a word, never more than a word. A foolish, stupid thing humans attach far too much value to.
But, being something he's never understood, something he's never grasped, love is something Ulquiorra has always striven to understand, and has always been frustrated when the meaning eludes him.
And now, at the last, he starts to get the feeling that maybe, he shouldn't have sold it so short for so long.
And now, when there's no time left for anything at all and Ulquiorra finally understands what love is, he still can't fathom what it is to feel love. He's not sure that, if he was to feel love, that he could recognize the sensation when it comes.
That girl… At the very last she's still reaching out for him, still stretching a hand out even though she knows he's worthless and knows he won't survive the next minute, let alone the night or any length of time at all. Trying to reach his hand for absolutely no reason at all.
Why is she doing that? Ulquiorra wonders with frustration, met again with a puzzle he can't solve. Why is she always trying to reach me?
In an instant, he understands. That girl has always tried to revive him, seeing him as a dead thing that she desperately needs to resuscitate, though Ulquiorra can't be sure why she wasted her time on him since he was so obviously dead from the start. Surely, even she could have seen that.
And, she did. She was a little foolish but she was never stupid and she saw straight through Ulquiorra in a way that made him more insecure than anything else ever could have. How could someone who barely knew him see past his skin at first glance? How could se know so much, from so little time?
And why, why, did she always try to help him?
As time went on, Ulquiorra realized that he no longer was averse to this girl's soft eyes, or to the sad look—What is sadness? What is this thing? Why is it on your face when you look at me?—that plastered itself on her face like a Hollow's mask every time he asked a question out of her. When he was out of her presence, he wanted to be back in it.
And he no longer curbed the foolish compassion of her whole body, no longer treated the pain, the anguish, the wanting-to-touch-or-be-touched of her with aversion, though he still rebuffed, still pushed her away to maintain that safe distance. As Ulquiorra was always forced to realize, no one but the red-haired human girl had ever been able to see past his skin. No one had ever seen and understood him so quickly as she did.
Eventually, Ulquiorra came to realize something. Though he was under orders to kill the girl if she ever betrayed Aizen Sousuke, he realized that he… that he couldn't do it anymore. That the idea of hurting her was something that was no longer palatable to him. If Aizen had asked him to kill that girl, he wouldn't have been able to do it. He wouldn't have been able to even open a cut on her soft, vulnerable skin.
Why was that? Why did the questions dog him so much at all? Why did any of this matter at all?
Ulquiorra can feel everything of him turning to ash now and he's confronted with a question that comes out of the blue. His logical mind assembling all the evidence, it jumps to the next question. It weighs her concern, the way he always dogged her, the way he wanted to be in the same room at her, the way he always looked at her. The way Ulquiorra eventually came to the point that he realized that he couldn't hurt her. And what Ulquiorra now knows about love, and the heart.
Could he have loved her?
Could I have loved her?
This is the one question that trumps all the others, the one that Ulquiorra thinks might be the most important of all.
He has no idea what love would have felt like. But he has read that girl's brown eyes, and has seen a wide breadth of emotions there. Pain, pity, compassion. Ulquiorra wonders if love was ever in those eyes, if it was something he missed, something that was always there, or something that was never there at all.
Ulquiorra lifts his head up and stares, long and hard, at that girl one more time.
That girl—Inoue Orihime. In his thoughts, Ulquiorra calls Orihime by name for the first and last time. He had always denied her that before, tried to make her less than human, tried to keep himself as far apart from her as possible by never referring to her by name, by always thinking of her as "that girl".
That girl, with bright copper red hair and wide, liquid brown eyes.
That girl with sadness etched on her like external veins.
That girl, who saw straight through him.
That girl, that maybe he could have loved, if he knew what loving someone felt like.
Could I, Ulquiorra Schiffer, have loved Inoue Orihime?
The question now troubles him greatly. Ulquiorra begins to understand how truly important this was at the last possible moment.
Ulquiorra never had a soul—the process of creating an Arrancar out of a Hollow extinguishes the soul but still allows the body to live on, animated, always seeking oblivion, never knowing why (And that's why Arrancar don't purify like Hollows; Ulquiorra isn't sure what will happen when he "dies"). A creature without a soul can not love the way someone with a soul can, can never love like that.
Ulquiorra knows he could never have loved Orihime like a creature with a soul could have.
But could he have loved her?
The ash finally claims him, and Ulquiorra's final thought is the wind, just before all goes black.
He's not sure. But he thinks that, maybe, he could have, if he had just tried a little harder.