Now and Then We Change, Here and There We Lose. [Ichigo, Nelliel]

It was so tiring, wandering through this barren place where nothing felt alive or promising. This whole world felt dead to her now, not that she did not care for it but for the fact that it had become stagnant and a place for lost souls. She didn't feel lost anymore but she was missing something. One of these days she wondered if she'd grow distant and forget about them but she wouldn't, couldn't abandon the fraccion she referred to as brothers who had tried to risk everything for her after her tenure as an Espada.

"It feels like days. Should I return?"

She asked herself with her reiatsu making no effort to conceal itself. She was attracting attention but it felt a lot easier to draw in and subdue weaker hollows and make it easier for her friends to locate her.

It had been a long time since Ichigo felt anything familiar in this place. That was really the most significant reason he'd even settled into this far off corner of Hueco Mundo. It didn't remind him of anything, and he didn't want to remember. People who came by this place were, as far as he was concerned, no different than sand blowing by on the wind.

But this was different. This was something he couldn't simply choose to forget.

Trudging through the sands slowly, his feet dragging across the desert floor with each step, Ichigo carried himself unceremoniously toward this unwelcome reminder of the past. To tell her to leave, to simply remove her himself. He didn't know, and he barely even cared. But, as his eyes fell upon her for the first time in centuries, upon a woman he had once called a friend, he found that all he could bring himself to do was speak.

"What are you doing here, Nel?"

It was a foreign kind of energy to her, no familiarity to her at all when she felt it approaching. That was maybe the only thing she'd recognise after four hundred years is that there wasn't many people with that kind of raw power but that didn't cross her mind. All that she felt was that she was going to need to fight him or could she fight it? It was immensely power. Her hand avoided resting on her zanpakuto she was not the type to idly hold a weapon - if she touched it then she intended to draw it.

Then it spoke to her from behind. A chill down her spine at the fact that he knew her name and had a familiar voice but that wasn't right. That was impossible.

When she turned to face him she felt like everything came to a standstill that made the sands stop blowing. Time stood still and the sight burned itself into her core. Even if she died she thought she might remember this in whatever formed her soul took after it.

"I...chi...go."

What had happened? How did this happen? There was a recoil and a step back taken just to make distance. It was not right, someone was using his appearance. This was Aaroniero who had somehow been able to imitate him. This was an illusion.

"What is this? How dare you wear his skin so shamelessly in front of me! Show your true form or end whatever spell you have me under."

Nelliel spat while her hand wanted to go to her zanpakuto and end it herself. This was not real she kept telling herself unable to accept what was in front of her face.

"I don't wear this skin shamelessly. But I'm glad you haven't changed."

His gaze wasn't particularly accusatory, nor inquisitive. His tone of voice didn't even seem to suggest thtat he was really all that glad about it. In a way, it seemed as though Ichigo wasn't even looking at Nelliel at all, more like he was simply looking through her, focused on some far away point. Even if he didn't much want to, he couldn't help but remember a great many moments, pictures of better times.

"You didn't answer my question. Something tells me you didn't come here looking for me."

It was obvious, just in the way Ichigo spoke, how tired he was. That just this conversation was something he found, more than anything else, exhausting, draining. He din't want to hurt her, not when he'd known her like he had. But he would, if it came to that.

"How? Who did this to you?"

She could not accept this outcome but she still bit her lip and replied in regards to why she was here. She wouldn't deny him an answer but that answer was just another question in itself as this situation deserved. Questions upon questions.

"I'm out here looking for my brothers, you shouldn't be here or like this. Did you do this to yourself? Run away into here and become this form!? Did you just give up on everyone, your sisters and friends. You came here before to find them, to move the sky and the earth for them. Why are you roaming this realm in this form?"

"Nobody did. It just happened."

That much was true, as far as he was concerned. The things that had happened, that led to all of this, didn't matter anymore. None of it mattered anymore, honestly. It was too late for him to look back at all that.

"There's nothing left for me to do. You weren't there to see how everything happened. I moved heaven and earth, alright, but it wasn't nearly enough. It all still fell apart, even when I gave everything. I guess now there's just nothing left."

Even Ichigo didn't really know the full answers she was looking for. More precisely, he didn't care to know.

"I didn't give up. I just lost."

He lost? No way. This man beat Aizen, this man defeated multiple Espada before her eyes and yet here he stood. She remembered the eyes that Orihime had towards him after seeing his mask. The fear of his monstrous nature that he never wanted her to look at him with and while she accepted it, she could not imagine him falling into that creature to become this.

"Even if you lose, that doesn't mean you fall down. You don't give up when you lose, that's not the you I know. Even when the Privaron beat you, even when Ulquiorra and Grimmjow beat you it didn't make you give up. You always get back up on your feet!"

She looked depressed, this was far worse than she imagined. She had left behind so much of her life but this was something that was impossible which stared back at her. An awful possibility which had been given form and overrided the once charismatic man who wouldn't succumb to anything. If he could fall does that mean that she could regress? Fall into violence and misery if she continued down the path of being attached to her brothers- no, that was absurd.

"Maybe. But it wasn't me that fell down. Do you know what happened during the war? I could get up however many times I needed to to protect them. But then I didn't. Then she was gone. You were all gone, and I was still there."

Perhaps, if he had not been in the state he was, his tone would have accusatory. But Ichigo simply couldn't muster the energy to put forward that sort of emotion. That final sentence was nothing but a statement of fact.

"I'm only one person. It doesn't matter if I get back up. It doesn't change anything."

It was so tiring, explaining himself to her. But it would be even moreso to try and make her leave. And, whether or not he'd admit it, it was almost pleasant just to see that one person was still around.

"You beat... You... You did all the things you did and you were never alone when you did it, you were so worked up trying to protect them that you never let yourself get their aid. Everyone else fell to the wayside when you fought, even if you started together you would always be at the climax of it. Surely..."

It fell short, her point was falling apart into ruin. She couldn't speak at all given that she had retired after the loss of her brothers. She had settled down and taken a simple life rather than tried to keep on pushing the tides of change that were simply too strong of currents. It was like a fish trying to swim upstream and Nelliel was not the person that wanted to be a dragon at the end of that climb.

"I'm sorry, Ichigo. If I had known.."

What? If she had known then what? She'd have fought? Her and her pacifistic ideals that made her not enjoy fighting to the point that until the last moment when it was necessary then she'd show her power and actually raise a hand against something. No, she wasn't there.

"You're right. At the end of everything, I was always alone. But when it ended, I could see my friends again. I could look at what happened and know that I didn't do it all for nothing. But that wasn't what happened in the war. I had no one to go back to."

It didn't necessarily please Ichigo to hear Nelliel so obviously upset, but it certainly didn't bother him, either. In another time, a better time, he would have hated it. But he couldn't. Not now. Not after everything.

"It doesn't matter. You didn't know, and you weren't there. Nothing will change that, even if you wish there was some way. So what now?"

And then, he simply sat down in the sand, unwilling to continue to stand. The idea that it was rude, that it was dismissive, didn't even especially cross his mind. He really just couldn't be bothered to keep standing.

"I'd thought you died. I'm surprised to see you here."