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Orihime squeezed her eyes shut tightly, covering her ears with her hands; yet that voice still drilled through.

"Why won't you save me from isolation as well?" The Hollow scratched its ice-white talons across her shield and it began to shatter, every shard that fell chiming sweetly against the ground. Clinging closer to its elusive prey.

"The memories alone, they're not enough alone; it's burning me inside out. I'm the embodiment of his loss, and I hate it. But when I found out about these past lives, and knew things about the both of you that even you didn't, it made me more than just his shadow. It gave me a life of my own, almost. Have you any idea how badly I want to be more than despair?

I was born a side-effect, not even a real Hollow, with nothing – feeling like everything was stolen from me. I'm tired of starving and the torture of knowing every single thing I have ever lost and never had... I am so sick to death of being Ichigo."

Can't you save me from isolation as well? Well, perhaps she could, mused Inoue distantly as the funnel of vicious black rage contracted, spinning tighter and faster and with every heartbeat reeling her into the apparition's reach. No one ever tried to give the Hollows what they wanted, did they? Well, she had, just that once. That first time, the echoes of which still resonated through her every subsequent action. Sora hadn't killed her, not on purpose. No, and she had offered the same love as before, once she realised how deeply her betrayal was cutting him – to tremble at a curse he had not asked for and disown him. Ah, murmured her mind, dancing away from the reality of her imminent death and into the past; no, she had lent him her heart and he had accepted it until his own returned. Support. That was all they asked for. Devouring their most loved ones first, in search of the care and healing they craved. Arrancars Anonymous, she told herself with surety, was the way forward. Hello, my name is Ulquiorra Schiffer, and I am a recovering Hollow-oholic.

Her eyes glazed over in an effort to block out the mask leering at her. The term was tossed around so casually it became desensitised, but what horrible things masks were. Thin, expressionless shells: the lie of another life. The heart of a soul extracted and dissected, blanched to marble white and boiled to stone stiffness, like any sheet of muscle could be. And, still patterned with old broken veins that had not completely lost their colour, they were then moulded into strange designs and cauterised onto the faces of the spirits trapped in limbo. Stifling their voices, veiling their identities, burning out their eyes. Had Ichigo-kun ever noticed that Hollows had two sets of teeth when they screamed? The fangs of the mask and the jaws of the skull still trapped beneath it. She wondered if Hichigo would have two smiles.

Hell Butterfly, Chapter 37