Title: Carry-Ons
Pairing/Characters: Orihime-centric, briefly featuring Ulquiorra, with (onesided) IchiHime.
Rating: PG
Warnings/Genres: ... I dunno. IchiHime? XD Angst, brief, mild violent imagery.
Word count: Approx. 350
Author's note: This is a late (::kicks self::) submission for the LJ comm bleachhet's October drabble meme. The prompt I chose was "wishing on a star".
Summary: In the strangeness and the chaos, Orihime clings to the only part of her she trusts.

The blank-faced arrancar with his fake green tear-trails (they would make him look like a clown, Orihime thinks, if he weren't who he is, and because he's who he is they remind her of paths which promise they lead to some secret treasure—like a scavenger hunt! or pirates!—but then you take one too many steps and you're falling off a hidden cliff to your bloody, mangled death below—and usually she's not this gruesome but somehow, oh, somehow she should just stop thinking)—

He leads her to her room and leaves. Orihime can, oddly enough, hear the door closing before it actually does.

With the measured steps of a queen (so hyper-aware of the crown on her head, its balance and its weight) she walks over to the window. For a long time, she just watches the dark expanse, the tiny endangered sliver of light.

Orihime knows that sometimes (in those odd books with their lyrical, straightforward heroines who don't seem to know the meaning of fun) the women separated from their lovers look out a window and think that that sky they see, it is the same sky which is stretched over their beloved.

But she cannot even comfort herself with that. Orihime watches the eternal, foreign moon and knows, with the abruptness of a slicing guillotine, that Ichigo is not there.

Yet a part of her insists: he is there! He will always be there, she will always hold him with her love but what if she's a sieve, just a sieve and he's like the sand of the deserts surrounding her? But that makes no sense and—

And she will keep him in her heart like a candle, a private light that's hers, no, that's theirs and theirs alone and does not belong. She will make the vow and it will have nothing to do with Aizen, even though it's made in solitude and strangeness. It will be hers. It will be Ichigo's.

So, closing her eyes and bowing her head, Orihime wishes on a star which she cannot see.