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“If I open up your chest, will I find a heart?”
The question was sudden, pale fingers reaching out for that spot on your chest behind which your heart beat. Ulquiorra’s only colourful feature bore into you, cold, apathetic, bored even.
“Physically, yes,” you answered slowly, involuntarily taking a step away from him. There was something dangerous about the arrancar, unhinged even in the way he had questioned you. As if he would really tear open your chest to find your heart. You knew why he wondered, after observing the solemn man for so long you had figured out why his interest went to the heart of man in particular, but that didn’t reassure you any when he approached you so suddenly.
“But, I hear a contradiction in your voice,” Ulquiorra was harsh as he made that observation. It wasn’t only you who had gotten to know the other.
“But,” you sighed, wondering if he would understand. If the two of you would ever come to understand each other in this desolate place called Hueco Mundo.
As much as the soul reapers claimed to be opposites of arrancars you had only found similarities. As much as they claimed to be different, declaring the other their mortal enemy, you had found that both were perhaps the most opposite to a human. To you. And in that they were the same.
“The heart of man is passion,” you explain and there is a twitch in his gaze, green eyes shifting as the arrancar tries to progress the words. He didn’t understand, not yet, but kept quiet as to encourage you to continue. It did give you the push needed, “my passion comes from my mind. My heart doesn’t feel quite so much, I fear.”
You tried to explain it to him in simple terms, yet Ulquiorra found it hard to grasp, still. His eyes furrowing further as the fingers pointed at your chest wavered. It was your truth, however. You had never been the type to feel with your heart, or even chase after it. Despite all of the pretty words that the world liked to be filled with you had found that your heart wasn’t so much located in your chest as much as it was in everything you did instead.
“Will I see it if I open your head?” he asks and the position of his hand changes, his arm shifting up as he is pointing at your forehead instead. Once more you shake your head, holding his hand in yours as you pull it down towards your face and press his palm against your cheek.
The move startles Ulquiorra, eyes flinching as he feels the warmth radiating from you, warmth unlike his cool, unlike the cold that always lingered onto him.
“No,” you smile, and for a split second Ulquiorra finds that there is a change in you, or perhaps it is a change in how he saw you, “but if you talk to me you might see it.”
And that was another truth. For your heart lied in everything you did and said and believed. Not in your chest, or your head.