Chapter 16: The Reversed Bond
The silence after the storm was absolute, broken only by the ragged hitch of Ulquiorra’s breathing against her chest. Orihime lay frozen, her own body still thrumming with spent pleasure, her skin cooling where his tears had fallen. They weren’t water. They were thin, silvery trails of energy, the last ghost of her magic leaking from him, evaporating on her skin like mist.
He did not move. His weight, usually so controlled, was a dead, heavy press. She could feel the frantic beat of his heart, a thrumming bird trapped against her ribs, so unlike his typical eerie stillness.
“Ulquiorra?” Her voice was a whisper in the dark room.
He flinched, a full-body shudder that went through him and into her. Then, with a sudden, violent motion, he wrenched himself away. He rolled off the bed, landing in a crouch on the bare floorboards, his back to her. The emerald afterglow of her magic had faded from his eyes, leaving them dark pits in the pale moon-cut lines of his face. He was staring at his own hands as if they belonged to a stranger.
“What…” He stopped, his voice shredded. He swallowed, tried again, forcing it back to flatness. It cracked anyway. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Orihime said, pushing herself up on her elbows. The sheets were cool and tangled around her legs. “You drank from me. When you… finished.”
“I have consumed witch-blood before,” he said to the floorboards. “In vials. For analysis. It is inert. A fuel source. Nothing more.” He looked at his palms, turning them over. “That was not inert. That was… an invasion.”
He stood up, his movements stiff. He walked to the grimy window, putting his back to the room, to her. The moonlight sketched the tense lines of his shoulders. “You were inside my head. Your feelings. Your… memories. The warmth of the sun on your skin. The smell of paper in your bookstore. The taste of…” He stopped abruptly.
Orihime’s face heated. She knew. The taste of him on her own tongue, the memory of his thrusts, the way her body had clenched around him—that feedback loop had been part of the torrent.
“It was a feedback loop,” she said quietly, putting the clinical term to the overwhelming intimacy. “My magic in my blood. You took it. It reacted with… whatever makes you, you. And it came back to me, through you.”
“It was a breach,” he corrected, his voice cold again. The wall was slamming back into place, brick by brick. “A catastrophic system failure.”
She watched him, the rigid set of his spine. The man who had wept onto her skin was gone, replaced by the assassin. But she had seen the cracks. She had felt the raw, unfiltered shock of emotion through the bond—his horror, his awe, his devastating, unmoored wonder. It was the most real thing she had ever experienced from him.
“Did it hurt?” she asked.
A long pause. “No.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold under her bare feet. She approached him slowly, as one would a wild animal caught in a trap. He didn’t turn, but she saw the minute tightening of the muscle in his jaw.
“Then maybe it wasn’t a failure,” she whispered, reaching out a hand but not touching him. “Maybe it was just a different kind of truth.”
He turned then, fast, his eyes flashing in the dim light. “Truth is data. Logic. That was… chaos. Noise.” He gestured sharply at the space between them. “It has no utility. It compromises function.”
“It made you feel something,” she pressed, her own frustration rising to meet his denial. “Isn’t that a kind of function? To feel?”
“Feeling is a defect,” he snarled, the controlled mask finally slipping. “It gets you killed. It gets others killed. My mother—” He cut himself off, turning his face away, his breath coming in short, controlled bursts.
The silence stretched. The ghost of his unspoken past hung in the room, a third presence. Orihime didn’t push. She just stood there, a pace away, her body humming with the echo of him, her skin still marked with his teeth and his spend.
“We cannot stay here,” he said finally, his voice empty once more. “The energy signature of your… episode… will have tripped every sensor in the city’s underbelly. We have six hours until sunrise. We need to move to a secondary location.”
He moved away from the window and began gathering his clothes with mechanical efficiency. The moment was sealed shut. Orihime felt a dull ache settle in her chest, but she nodded. Survival first. Philosophy later.
They dressed in silence. He handed her a dark, oversized hoodie and a pair of sweatpants he produced from a concealed panel in the wall. They swallowed her frame, smelling of dust and male sweat—his, she realized. They moved through the predawn city like ghosts, using service alleys and rusted fire escapes. Ulquiorra was a shadow ahead of her, all lethal precision, but she noticed a new tension in him. He checked corners twice. He paused, listening, his head tilted at angles that seemed subtly wrong. He was processing sensory data, but she wondered if he was now also drowning in its emotional texture.
The secondary safehouse was a windowless room in the basement of a decommissioned garment factory. It was colder, bleaker, stocked with tasteless nutrient bars and bottled water. A single cot stood against one wall.
“Rest,” he commanded, standing by the sealed door. “I will monitor the perimeter.”
“You need to rest too,” she said, sitting on the edge of the thin mattress.
“I do not.”
“Your system just processed a foreign magical catalyst. Your vitals are elevated. You’re processing stimuli differently. You need to recalibrate. That requires rest.” She was parroting his own logic back to him.
He stared at her. For a moment, she thought he would argue. Then, without a word, he crossed the room and sat on the floor, his back against the wall opposite the cot. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t sleep. It was a vampire’s version of stasis—a deep, meditative trance.
Orihime lay down, but sleep wouldn’t come. She stared at the water-stained ceiling, feeling the unfamiliar hum of the city’s infrastructure through the floor. Her magic slept within her, a warm, satiated pool. But it felt different. Thicker. As if it had learned a new flavor.
She must have drifted off, because the next thing she knew, she was jerking awake to a sound. Not from the door. From him.
A low, guttural groan.
In the profound dark, his eyes were open. And they were burning. Not with their usual cool emerald light, but with a feverish, hungry silver-green—her color, tinged with his.
He was staring at her from across the room, his body coiled tight. She could see the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
“Ulquiorra?”
“It’s not subsiding,” he said, his voice strained, each word clipped. “The resonance. It’s amplifying.”
“What is?”
“The need.” He unfolded from the floor in one smooth, predatory motion. He didn’t walk; he seemed to simply appear at the side of the cot, looming over her. The air grew charged, crackling with the same silver-green energy that now flickered in his irises. “Your magic. In my veins. It’s… hungry. It’s creating a feedback loop of its own.”
He leaned down, bracing one hand on the wall beside her head. His scent, frost and ozone and now something wilder, like a lightning strike, filled her senses. “It wants to return to its source.”
“What does that mean?” she breathed, her heart pounding against her sternum.
He didn’t answer with words. His other hand came down, his fingers tangling in her hair, not cruel, but desperate. He pulled her head back, exposing her throat. But he didn’t bite. He just stared at the pulse fluttering there, his breath cool and ragged on her skin.
“I can feel it,” he whispered, a confession torn from the depths. “Your heartbeat. Like it’s in my own chest. Your fear. Your curiosity. It’s a… a tinnitus in my soul.” His gaze lifted, locking onto hers. The hunger there was no longer purely physical. It was existential. “I need it to stop.”
“How?” The word was a breath.
“By completing the circuit.” His hand left her hair, traveled down her body over the hoodie, and hooked under her knee. He pushed her leg up and out, opening her to him even through the clothes. “I need to consume it. At the point of origin.”
Understanding dawned, hot and liquid in her belly. Her magic stirred, answering his call. A warmth pooled between her legs.
He saw her understanding. A sharp, pained smirk touched his lips. “Not my cock. That’s for me. This… this is for it.” He looked down at her body, at the junction of her thighs. “It wants to feed there. Where the magic is hottest. Where you’re wet with wanting me.”
He released her knee and grabbed the waistband of the sweatpants, yanking them down her legs in one harsh motion. The cold air hit her exposed skin, followed immediately by the heat of his scrutiny. He shoved her thighs apart, his eyes fixed on her cunt, glistening already in the low light.
“Look at you,” he murmured, his voice dripping with a dark awe. “Soaking for me. Your magic is dripping out of you.”
He climbed onto the cot, his knees forcing her legs wider. He didn’t undress. He just loomed over her, his burning eyes holding hers, as he lowered his head between her thighs.
The first touch of his tongue was a jolt of pure, live current.
It wasn’t the cold, clinical lick from before. It was a raw, open-mouthed press of his lips against her core, his tongue delving deep inside her as if he could drink the magic straight from her womb. A violent, silver-green arc of energy snapped between his mouth and her sex, illuminating the dark room in a strobing, erotic flash.
Orihime cried out, her back arching off the cot. The sensation was beyond pleasure. It was a conduit being opened. Her magic surged out of her, not in a burst, but in a rushing torrent, pulled directly into him through his mouth.
He groaned against her, the sound vibrating through her entire body. He ate her out like a starving man, with a frantic, messy desperation. His tongue fucked into her, licked up her slit, circled her clit with a rough, relentless pressure. Each movement pulled another surge of energy from her, each crackle of light syncing with the slap of his mouth against her wet flesh.
“Yes,” he snarled, his words muffled against her. “Give it to me. All of it.”
He hooked his arms under her thighs, pulling her cunt harder against his face, devouring her. She was dissolving, her consciousness fragmenting into pure sensation—the rough scrape of his stubble on her inner thighs, the sinful wet sounds of his feasting, the blinding, ecstatic rush of her power leaving her in waves.
An orgasm built, not from tension alone, but from the sheer, overwhelming transfer of energy. It felt like her soul was being siphoned out through her clit. She came with a broken scream, her body convulsing, her magic erupting in a geyser of gold-tinged silver light.
He didn’t stop. He drank her through it, swallowing her climax, her magic, her essence. As the shivers subsided, he latched onto her swollen clit, sucking it fiercely into his mouth.
“No, I can’t—!” she begged, oversensitive.
“You can,” he growled, his breath hot on her sensitized flesh. “You will.” He drove two fingers inside her, curling them, finding a spot that made her vision whiten. His tongue went back to work, a ruthless, focused weapon.
A second peak, sharper than the first, ripped through her. She sobbed, her hands fumbling in his messy black hair, not to push him away, but to hold him there, to anchor herself as she fell apart again. The magic flowed, a continuous stream now, painting the room in pulsing light.
He was trembling above her, his own body rigid with the effort of containing the influx. Still, he didn’t stop. He worked her through the second orgasm and, with a cruel, beautiful persistence, straight into a third. This one was a silent, full-body seizure, a profound emptying that left her boneless and gasping, her magic sputtering to a faint, satisfied glow.
He finally lifted his head. His lips and chin were slick with her. His eyes blazed with a stolen, luminous power, silver-green fire dancing in their depths. He looked dazed, intoxicated. He knelt back, staring at his hands. They were crackling with faint, visible energy—her energy, now under his skin.
The feedback loop had closed. The hungry, desperate need had vanished from his face, replaced by a stunned, heavy satiation.
Slowly, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes never leaving hers. The chaotic light in them gradually dimmed, settling back to their usual cool emerald, but deeper now, somehow changed.
“The signal…” he said, his voice hoarse. “It’s gone. The noise is… quiet.”
Orihime could only breathe, her body a hollow, sated shell.
A heavy thud echoed from somewhere far above them. Then another. Footsteps. Too heavy for a human. Too deliberate for the building’s inhabitants.
Ulquiorra’s head snapped up, all languid satiation gone in an instant. The hunter was back.
“They’re here,” he said, already moving, pulling her up. “The magic flare. They traced it.”
He shoved her sweatpants into her hands, his own movements a blur of efficiency. “Get dressed. Now.”
As she scrambled into the clothes, her body still singing from the brutal, magical feast, she saw him press his hand against the cold concrete wall. A faint, silver-green residue—her residue—lingered on his fingertips. He closed his eyes, listening.
“Three,” he whispered, his voice deathly cold. “Above. They’ve triangulated the source.” He looked at her, his new-old eyes holding a strange, grim certainty. “They’re not just hunting a witch anymore.”
He touched the smear of their joined essence on his lip.
“They’re hunting the abomination we made.”
His words hung in the chill air, a final, grim truth. Another heavy thud sounded from above, closer this time. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, glittering in the residual magic still fading from their skin.
Ulquiorra was already moving. He tossed her the oversized hoodie. “Now, Orihime.”
She yanked it on, her fingers fumbling. The scent of her own arousal on him, mixed with ozone and blood, was a sharp, confusing brand in her nostrils. He listened at the door, his head tilted, a predator parsing footsteps.
“They’re transitioning to the lower stairwell,” he whispered. His eyes, still glowing with that strange, stolen luminescence, met hers. “They know we’re here. They will have ordnance.”
“What do we do?” Her voice was steadier than she felt. The three brutal orgasms had left her hollowed but weirdly clear, her magic a quiet, warm pool instead of a storm.
“We do not let them take you.” He said it simply. He drew a long, curved blade from a sheath strapped to his thigh. The metal was a non-reflective black, etched with faint, spiraling runes that drank the light. “Stay behind me. If I tell you to run, you run. Do not look back.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Sentiment gets us both killed.” The words were his old mantra, but the delivery lacked its usual conviction. It sounded tired. A shudder passed through the doorframe. Something heavy slammed against it from the other side. The metal groaned.
Ulquiorra stepped back, pushing Orihime behind him with a flat hand to her stomach. “They’re here.”
The door exploded inward. Not with fire, but with a concussive wave of null-energy, a sucking, silent blast that dissolved the hinges and deadbolt into rust-flakes. Three figures filled the doorway, silhouetted against the dim hall light.
They were not human. They were Hollow-Sentinels, the Order’s elite clean-up crew. Their armor was polished obsidian, molded to forms that were too slender, too jointed. Their faceless helms were smooth ovals, reflecting the cracked concrete of the room back in warped mockery. In their hands they held galvanized steel cudgels, crackling with the same null-energy that had blown the door.
No hesitation. The lead Sentinel lunged, its movement a jerky, insectile blur. Ulquiorra met it, his black blade a whisper of absolute darkness. Steel met cudgel with a shriek that vibrated in Orihime’s teeth. Sparks, real and painful white, showered the floor.
He was faster. His blade slid off the cudgel and traced a line across the Sentinel’s chest plate. Instead of cutting, the runes on his knife flared a sickly green, and the obsidian armor sizzled, smoking where it touched. The Sentinel staggered back, silent.
The other two flowed into the room, splitting to flank him. Ulquiorra moved between them, a dance of brutal efficiency. He wasn’t fighting to kill. He was fighting to disable, to create an opening. A cudgel grazed his ribs, and the null-energy seared through his shirt, biting into flesh with a sound like frying fat. He didn’t cry out. He reversed his grip and drove his elbow into the Sentinel’s helm. The polished oval cracked.
“The window,” he snarled at Orihime, parrying a blow that would have shattered her skull.
There was no window. Only a rusted ventilation grate high on the wall. She stared at it, her mind racing.
The Sentinel with the cracked helm focused on her. It raised its cudgel, the air around it wavering with null-intensity. Orihime’s magic surged in response, a defensive golden flare erupting from her skin. The null-field latched onto it, feeding. It began to drain her, a cold, leaching pull that started at her fingertips.
She gasped, the warmth inside her dimming. Panic fizzed in her veins.
Ulquiorra saw it. With a feral snarl, he abandoned his other opponent and threw himself at the one threatening her. He didn’t use the blade. He grabbed the cracked helm with both hands, his fingers digging into the fracture lines. With a raw, tearing sound of wrenching metal and something wetter beneath, he ripped the helm clean off.
What was underneath was not a face. It was a void, a swirling mass of dark, greasy tentacles surrounding a single, pupilless amber eye. The thing screeched, a high-frequency sound that shattered the remaining glass in the room’s single lightbulb.
Plunged into near-darkness, the battle changed. Only the sickly green glow from Ulquiorra’s rune-blade and the occasional crackle of null-energy illuminated the chaos. Orihime stumbled back, the draining sensation lessening as the creature reeled.
“The grate!” Ulquiorra yelled, grappling with the faceless horror. He had its tentacle-mass in a chokehold, his muscles corded with strain.
Orihime acted on instinct. She didn’t try to summon a blast. She focused on the rusted screws holding the ventilation grate. On their age. On their brittleness. Her magic left her in a thin, hot beam, not of light, but of accelerated entropy. The screws turned to dust in their holes. The grate clattered to the floor.
A gust of fetid, free air swept in. An escape.
The third Sentinel, the one he’d wounded first, was back on its feet. It swung its cudgel in a wide, whistling arc aimed at Ulquiorra’s head. He was pinned by the shrieking, helm-less one.
“No!” The word tore from her, fueled by a terror deeper than thought.
Her magic didn’t flare this time. It lashed. A whip of golden energy, sharper than any blade, snapped from her outstretched hand. It cut through the null-field like a hot wire through butter and severed the Sentinel’s arm at the elbow. The cudgel, still sparking, clattered to the ground alongside a limb that immediately began dissolving into black sludge.
Ulquiorra used the distraction. He wrenched the head of the creature he held, twisting with a terrible, final crunch. The amber light in its eye-hole winked out. He let the limp, twitching body fall.
The remaining Sentinel, the one-armed one, stared at its dissolving limb. Then its smooth, oval helm turned slowly toward Orihime. A low, mechanized hum emanated from it. It took a step toward her.
Ulquiorra was a blur of exhausted, pained motion. He drove his black blade up through the Sentinel’s jaw-analogue, deep into whatever passed for its brain. The hum died. The thing went rigid, then collapsed.
Silence, heavy and reeking of ozone, blood, and chemical decay, filled the room. Ulquiorra stood panting over the bodies, his side bleeding where the null-energy had seared him. He looked at her, his chest heaving. In the gloom, his eyes were wide.
“You cut through a null-field,” he said, his voice hoarse with disbelief. “That is… impossible.”
“I saw it hurting you.” She was trembling, the after-effect of the adrenaline and the vicious, precise expenditure of power.
He limped to the hole where the grate had been. “They will have sent a distress signal. More will come.” He peered out into a narrow, brick-lined shaft. “It goes up. Three stories to a roof access.”
He turned back to her, his gaze sweeping over the carnage. “You need to understand. What you just did? The Order has no record of any witch capable of that. You are not just a target to be captured now.” He wiped his blade clean on his pants, sheathing it. “You are a theory to be disproven. And they will do it on a dissection table.”
He extended a bloodied hand toward her. “Come.”
She took it. His grip was iron, his skin cold. He helped her climb into the shaft, then followed, his body blocking the ruined opening below. They began to climb, using old pipes and brickwork as handholds. The shaft was tight, claustrophobic, smelling of damp and rats.
“You’re bleeding badly,” she whispered, looking down at the dark stain spreading on his shirt.
“It will clot.”
They climbed in silence for a minute, the only sound their labored breathing and the scuff of their shoes on brick. The residual warmth from her magic, from what they had done on the cot, still hung between them like a third climber.
“Back there,” she said, her voice echoing slightly in the shaft. “When you… when it was feeding. The magic. You said the noise stopped.”
He paused on a ledge, looking up at the distant square of grey sky above. “It did.”
“What’s it like now?”
He was silent for so long she thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he spoke, his words measured, each one chosen with care. “It is not quiet. But the… tinnitus, the screaming static… it’s gone. What remains is… a signal.” He looked down at her, his face shadowed. “One signal. Clear. And strong.”
Her heart hammered against her ribs. “What does it say?”
Before he could answer, a roar of twisted metal echoed from far below. Then a voice, amplified and mechanically distorted, boomed up the shaft. “Subject ‘Witchblood’ and contaminated asset. Surrender. The shaft is sealed above and below.”
Ulquiorra’s lips drew back from his teeth in a silent snarl. He looked up, then down, calculating. “They’re lying about below. They can’t have sealed it that quickly.”
“And above?”
He didn’t answer. He just climbed faster, his injuries seemingly forgotten. Orihime followed, her muscles burning. The square of sky grew larger. They reached the top, a rusted hatch leading to the roof. Ulquiorra put his shoulder against it and shoved. It screamed open on corroded hinges.
They spilled out onto a tar-paper roof under a flat, grey dawn sky. The air was cold and tasted of industrial smog. The city sprawled around them, a canyon of concrete and glass.
“Run!” he shouted.
They sprinted across the roof toward the far edge, where another, lower building abutted it. A ten-foot gap separated them from the next roof.
Behind them, the hatch flew off its hinges, propelled by another null-blast. Three new Sentinels emerged, moving with a grim, unhurried certainty. They raised their arms. Not cudgels. Their forearms reconfigured, sliding open to reveal polished snub-barrels.
“Halt.”
Ulquiorra skidded to a stop at the roof’s edge. He grabbed Orihime’s arm, spinning her to face him. The wind whipped his messy black hair across his glowing eyes.
“You have to jump,” he said, his voice urgent.
“I can’t make that!”
“You can. Your magic responds to need. You need to not die. Now jump.” He gave her no time to argue. He shoved her backward toward the ledge.
Orihime screamed, her feet scrambling for purchase that wasn’t there. She fell into open space, the gap yawning below her. The terror was instant, total. Her magic, dormant and drained, did nothing.
A hand clamped around her wrist, yanking her to a jarring stop.
Ulquiorra leaned over the edge, holding her entire weight with one arm. He had thrown himself flat to grab her. His face was a mask of strain, the muscles in his neck standing out in sharp relief. The Sentinels leveled their weapons.
“Ulquiorra!”
He looked down at her, dangling over the deadly drop. Then he looked back at the advancing Sentinels. A strange calm settled over his features. The green glow in his eyes intensified, swirling with threads of her silver.
“I can see it,” he said, his voice almost conversational despite the effort. “Your signal. It’s very loud.”
He let go of the roof’s edge with his other hand. For a heart-stopping second, Orihime thought he’d released her. Then he swung her, once, with all his preternatural strength, and hurled her across the gap.
She flew through the air, a cry torn from her lips. She landed hard on the adjoining roof, rolling awkwardly, the breath knocked from her lungs.
She scrambled to her knees in time to see the Sentinels fire.
Three bolts of concentrated null-energy, silent and dark, lanced toward Ulquiorra as he pushed himself up from the edge.
He didn’t try to dodge. He raised his hands.
And caught them.
The bolts of annihilating energy slammed into his palms with a sound like the world tearing. Silver-green light, their light, erupted from him in a desperate shield. It was her magic, but filtered through him, hardened by his will, shaped by a vampire’s cold resilience.
The conflicting forces met in a maelstrom of screaming light and shadow. The roof beneath his feet cracked. The null-energy pushed, hungry and endless. His stolen magic resisted, brilliant and defiant.
Orihime watched, helpless, from the other roof. She could feel it—the strain in the bond they now shared, a psychic filament stretched to snapping. He was burning the power he’d taken from her, from her body, from her sex, to hold back the void.
“Run!” The command wasn’t shouted. It was a raw, psychic scrape across her mind, propelled through the very connection that was killing him.
The Sentinel’s barrels began to glow, cycling for another volley. Ulquiorra’s shield flickered, a hairline fracture of darkness splintering through the light.
Orihime ran.
She fled across the new roof, toward another fire escape, the image of him outlined in failing, beautiful light seared permanently behind her eyes. She didn’t know if he was following. She didn’t know if he could.
The only thing that mattered was the signal.
His signal.
It was still there, in the back of her skull, a clear, strong beacon of emerald and silver, screaming one word, over and over, into the dying dark.
Live.