Abduction by the Death God
This is a Orihime POV fanfic on her and Ulquiorra's dynamic, or just what I believe would have been her take on her time in Las Noches with Ulquioirra.
I have met death gods. They look like us, wear obsidian kimonos and wield huge katanas, reminiscent of traditional Japanese theatres that I used to visit as a child. This was before my brother’s demise. The first death god that I met at 15, (albeit he was officially recognised as one sometime later on) gave my dead brother absolution and helped him pass over to the Otherworld. But unlike the lores of them being terrifying, the death god that saved me and my brother was both kind and familiar, his eccentricity only limited to his funnily scary face and orange hair. Thanks to him, I met a lot more death gods, and none scared me. Not even the ones who were 8 ft tall with bells on their head & a feisty pink-haired kid on their shoulder. Deep inside my heart, I acknowledged them as soldiers that protected the weak souls and not as death gods of the terrifying lores that I had heard as a toddler, ones that were much worse than my drunk father and abusive mother.
However, not long after meeting the good death gods, I met another. In creation, he was an antithesis of the death gods that I had met. But in my reality, he was the original death god, the one from my nightmarish childhood. He was the reaper of souls, of emotions who killed over 1000 people in my town, while I could do nothing to protect them. And that was the day hope in me started chipping away. The hope that I had onerously built after my brother’s death. The foundation of my hope was already built on shaky grounds and once he first arrived in my town, it didn’t take long to crumble. Being helpless that day felt like drowning despite knowing how to swim, so I tried to paddle harder and swim upwards towards the surface but I kept sinking and sinking until he finally dragged me to the bottom of the dark, insidious ocean of despair.
He dragged me, dragged me away from the world of happy mortals to his abode of eternal night. When my friends came to save me from this predicament I had landed myself into, he and his lot squashed any light of hope by torturing & butchering my friends. He taunted me every time their soul power vanished in the dark crescent night, extinguishing my hope, and slowly suffocating my will to live and return.
Amongst all of them, I thought he was the most terrifying, the most different. His presence constantly loomed over me, like death to the freezing. But the after spending a long time with him, I had a horrifying realization. He was the epitome of nihilism, of the despair emerging from an unfeeling void. Bonds meant nothing to him, while hope and happiness were a mirage for the weak. And I, the person who had been surviving off my recently built non-sanguine bonds and forced laughs found myself falling into that void. As repulsive as he was, he was a mirror that I resonated with, a bit too much for my liking. Which is why I put up a fight. In my own way, I tried to be foolishly human in that soulless land. In retrospect, some of my actions were questionable. Yet I was a human, and as a human, I tried to do everything that defied what he stood for. Life is hard yet we build our happiness, and despite the hardships, I had shakily built a lively life. Succumbing to his beliefs meant destroying my very conviction to live and embrace happiness.
His path was easy to follow. After all, who hasn’t looked at a dark void from a height and not been tempted to jump? And he was very tempting, with his words, actions and beliefs. Relishing in my dwindling hope and luring me into jumping in his abode of eternal void became a personal business for him. It was evident when he had my orange-haired saviour by the neck, blasting a hole through his chest. His eyes made it obvious - the fight was ours, and killing him was a way to kill any hope in me. Kill the human in me.
And in those few moments where time was running through molasses, he had won. My human protector was lying dead on the rocks of Las Noches while he reigned, the God of Death. My healing shield, that had a measly job of reviving my saviour’s body, failed. The cracks on its golden surface had mocked the state of my beliefs.
I wanted to be saved. I wanted to be saved from him, and from myself who found herself falling back into neverending despair. I had been there before when my only family had died, and I did not want to struggle anymore. I was too tired to struggle, to fight, I just wanted to be saved. Even if the one who saved me was the corpse in front of me. To me his dead body held more hope than my broken self did.
When my orange-haired human saviour rose back from the dead, he was no longer the warrior fighting to protect my humanity. He was the personification of violence. He had emerged from the grave to reap the soul of my soulless jailor. He hesitated none while brutalizing him, and his victim cried not once in his agony. To him, modus operandi of his swiftly-arriving death was was poetically fitting. His nihilistic soul being defeated by another, in a fight so quick yet destructive that it leaves the prey with no thought other than the primal instinct to protect his skin.
Sometimes I wonder if this is why he reached out to me in his impending death. As if being on the side of powerlessness made him realize why we humans do not give up hope even in despair. I wonder if he finally realized why my hope and belief only grew stronger with consecutive psychological defeats.
Ulquiorra was right when he said bonds and feelings were for the weak. Afterall the strongest usually walk alone. But he was not right when he said that the very bonds were meaningless. If today weak coexist with strong it's because of the bonds they have with other people.
If today's weak & disposable society like mine feels seen or heard, it's because of these bonds. They make life worth living, these indispensable friendships.
The fact that I was weak is the reason I found my friends for life and the reason I continue to live, live a life with meaning and hope. Hope, that he struggled to latch onto in his death.
I used to hate my weak, clumsy self. I loathed my powerlessness and my inability to help people. Today, I have grown past that. I am working harder than ever to become stronger, to become more capable. And it would not have been possible had I not forgiven the little powerless girl from that night. No matter how strong I may or may not get, I will continue being the girl who never gave up on her bonds or morals as it was what kept me myself in that eternal night of Las Noches. Though in this tug-of-war of ours, he had almost pulled me into his magnetic void of despair, I persevered because of those very bonds between me and my friends. And finally, with the strength of our humane bonds, I could forgive him and bid him adieu with a meaningful death, where he could finally see a heart in his hands.
