Characters: Orihime, Ulquiorra, Ichigo (in spirit)
Summary: Those five lives and five loves are all going to be thrown away for the sake of one life.
Pairings: UlquiHime, IchiHime
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc
Timeline: Hueco Mundo arc
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

When the shadows leave off on her enough to let Orihime think clearly and reflect, the guilt starts to wash over her like the aftereffects of some mind-altering drug—it's the morning after and she can finally remember what she did last night. While Orihime has never put a needle to her arm or devoured seemingly innocuous white powder, that possibly is what makes her regrets and feelings of having become a betrayer in truth worse.

Orihime wonders when she sold her heart away, when it wasn't free to give in the first place. Her memories are vivid: Ichigo unconscious on his bed, her leaning over, the tears pouring down her cheeks, and the promise… She remembers, most vividly and still feeling a flutter in her heart to recall, the promise to him, of five lives, and five loves.

Well, she's down one, and she's not even in love with the other she's pledged her heart to—she thinks.

But everything has changed—is changing. With pain and regret for things lost Orihime realizes that she isn't the same person as the crying, vulnerable girl who made promises over an unconscious boy.

And she didn't know what she knows now.

What Orihime knows now is that it's so easy to make promises of love, so easy to let her lips frame the words and couch them in longing glances and soft, quavering tones, but it's so much harder to live the way her words promise. It's so, so hard to keep promises of love.

Five lives is a very long time.

And life, by its very nature, seeks to destroy the promises people make to those they love. Seeks to make them betray themselves and the ones the love. What Orihime should have known is that life is not kind, and though she says she'll always love one person, life may push her instead towards another.

Even one she does not love, and one she suspects doesn't love her either.

What Orihime should have known is that even the most faithful heart can become untrue.

It is not love, or even desire, Orihime thinks—she can never be sure, not with him—that has bound her and Ulquiorra together. And she's not even sure when the fatal moment came that she finally betrayed her promise to Ichigo and gave her heart away.

One life has been taken, and given to another. There are still four left, but it will never be the same—imperfect, stained, tarnished, with the knowledge that once, even without loving another she still betrayed her heart's seeming desire with this other.

But what Orihime knows now is that life is not kind, and to go astray is simply to do what countless others before her have done: survive, and adapt, and obey the call that only she can hear.

This man needs her. Orihime knows it, and Ulquiorra knows it—it is the only thing that keeps him coming back to her, with his frustration, his questions, the loneliness he does not know he has but Orihime can see on him, plain as day.

And she wants to help him. Orihime wants to help Ulquiorra in a way she's never wanted to help anyone else—this is new and different. This has some desperation, some urgency, for Orihime suspects their time is short and Ulquiorra will not be here for much longer.

She can see the stamp of death on him, even without battle to spray mists of blood through the air.

So it is not love that makes her devote her life to another—or maybe it is, just love that is different from what she feels for Ichigo, less burning, less passionate, less ardent. Tarnished, quieter, colder. Maybe just the love someone feels for one they pity, one they know is deprived of that which makes life worthwhile. Maybe this is the love one feels to make up for the fact that the other knows nothing of love.

So Orihime survives, and adapts, and knows that she still has four lives which she can give to Kurosaki Ichigo.

But this one, this one is lost to an Espada with green eyes, a loneliness so cavernous and yawning that it echoes when he walks, and a need for her. Orihime won't be able to get this life back from him, and even if she could, a life already given can't be bestowed on someone else.