Orihime remembers when Ichigo was very small.
She liked him then, but it was for his hair. She liked boys in orange hair. She thought they looked sweet and kind, but – she curses herself for this – Ichigo had a scary face at the time. She was afraid to approach him because whenever he looked at someone she thought he was going to start screaming at them. Because she was young and naive, she didn't understand why he always looked like that. Orihime knew that he was a nice, sweet boy underneath – he couldn't be all bad, could he?
The night the accident occurred, she doesn't think anything of this and instead carries he brother (he was so much heavier that time; she was still young, so she didn't understand why) to the nearest house. She didn't see the usually stern face of the person opening the door turn completely pale, instead hearing the familiar voice shout Dad!Dad!Daaad!Getoverhere! and she can't help but begin to cry even harder. It was bad, it was so bad.
Orihime knows her brother's died when Ichigo (looking not so mean anymore) appeared before her with a somber look, and before his mouth opens a sob fills the empty space between them. Her hands envelope her eyes and mouth and nose and she cries.
-
Ichigo remembers when Orihime was very small.
He thought she was a bit too spacey, but he liked her. Actually, he liked her smile. He liked how she was always beaming, laughing. Especially when she took the route to the grocery store where she passed his house; Orihime was always talking cheerfully to her older brother. For a very long time he thought that if you looked up 'cheerful' in the dictionary, then it would say 'Inoue Orihime' in bolded letters. He tried it once.
It didn't say that.
He forgot everything about cheerfulness though, the day that he opened the door to leave for school and found the overly too small body carrying the overly too large body on their back. It was strange really, because he didn't see the smaller body at first because it was hidden in the large body's shadow, but nonetheless he screamed for his father.
The news in his household is never good news, so Ichigo knows what to do without being asked. He's gotten quite used to it, actually. But there's this strange tension in the waiting room when he enters, and he soon realizes it's coming from the one who had carried in the man – Orihime, whose brother was the one that had passed on.
But Ichigo, for once in his life, can't do it. He can't explain to her that her brother's gone; he's never coming back, because he feels like a horrible, horrible man. He feels like he's deliberately taking her brother away from her, this cheerful, smiley, adorable, loving girl who no one can possibly hate. It's destroying him. It kills him even more when she breaks down in a fit of sobs. She isn't supposed to look like this. She just isn't. This isn't her. This isn't Orihime. She doesn't look like Orihime, she looks like – Him.
Driven by guilt and some unknown emotion, Ichigo drops to his knees and locks his arms around her frail form in an all-too awkward hug.
"I'm sorry," He says. "B-But don't cry. The Good Lord has … Taken him to a better place."
Orihime, a few seconds later, returns the hug. She takes a breath, one, two, three – "Y-You p-p-promise … K-Kurosaki-kun?"
He doesn't know why he said it. Probably because he wanted her to stop crying – and yet, she looked so similar to the little boy not to long ago who lost his mother in an unknown occurrence, and her face doesn't suit that look. It just doesn't. Because the Orihime he knows doesn't cry, she stops the cries.
"I promise."