As days went by, Grimmjow slowly began to lose the pain. He was still aching, (I could tell from the looks he made while trying to move, even though he did his best to hide them from me), but it was time for him to regain his strength. One day. I walked over to him as he was waking up. I held a hand out to him. He stared at me blankly for a moment. He hadn't moved for three days and had complained of boredom twice. I beckoned.
"Come on," I said. "We can't stay here forever."
He took my hand and I pulled him to his feet. He moaned and teetered back and forth. I caught him and put one of his arms over my shoulder. Together, we limped down the stairs and out of the tower.
It was slow going, and I didn't really know which way to go. I led us in a somewhat straight line. After a while, I decided that I needed a distinct direction.
"Where do you want to go?" I asked. Grimmjow grunted in response. I looked at him. He was panting and sweating. "Do you need to rest."
"No. We keep going." He pointed. "That way."
We turned to the left and wandered that for a long while. Grimmjow was panting harder than ever by the time we finally reached the largest building in Los Noches.
"Do you need to rest now?" This was a rhetorical question. Of course he needed to rest. He heard the rhetorical and tried to walk towards the wall by himself. He held out a hand and a ball of red Cero shot out from it.
There was now a large hole in the wall. Grimmjow wavered and then fell against the part of the wall that was still there. I rushed forward.
"Grimmjow," I put a hand on his arm and looked up at him worriedly. He lurched forward and I followed him.
"I'm not weak." he muttered. I caught up with him and walked beside him.
"Of course you aren't. I never said you were."
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. His arm wrapped into mine and he leaned his weight into me.
Los Noches appeared to be empty. There were blast marks and holes all through the place that made walking almost impossible in some places. I heard Grimmjow whisper the Shinigami's name again. I felt smug about this. If Kurosaki had caused this, that meant Nnoitra was dead.
"Kryse," Grimmjow said. "Everyone's gone. That crazy-ass Aizen went to battle some Shinigami without me."
"Well," I said as we came out of a corridor next to a chair I assumed to be a throne. "You can hardly walk across Los Noches, let alone fight Soul Reapers. Now, would you please sit down before you hurt yourself?"
Grimmjow sat in the throne and slouched down, exhausted. He leaned his head back and shut his eyes.
"Your Hummingbird really can make a man suffer." he said. "At least I can move."
"Barely." I said. "I'm going to see if there is anyone else around. The emptiness of this place is creeping me out."
"I'll be here." He said as I walked away. If I were him, I would have been in tears by now. But I'm not. And he is so much stronger than I am.
I wandered down some hallways for a while. They were all white and shiny the farther in a went. As I walked along, my sandals making soft tapping noises, I began to hear voices. I stopped walking.
Two Arrancar came around the corner. One was tall and slender, the other short and somewhat square in shape. They stopped when they saw me.
"Hey," the short one said. "Who's Fraccion are you?"
"I'm no Fraccion." I didn't like the smell of these two. They smelled like they had just killed something.
"Then you're Aizen's slut." The tall one sneered. "Must soothe you to know he's dead."
