Title: Home, or The Place She Lives In
Characters/Pairings: Orihime/Ichigo
Rating: PG
Word Count: 975
Warnings: contemplative Orihime, fluff, tl;dr
Disclaimer: Standard disclaimers apply.
Prompt/Theme: "This is no place for me" (A Fine Frenzy - Think Of You) at prompt_in_a_box's Round 23
Notes: Written in February 2010.
When she opens the door, it's like stepping into a new world, one she has never been to. Not the place she had lived in for years. The whole atmosphere feels strange, but beneath the smells of mold and neglect, there is still a sense of familiarity. Here at the low table she spent many evenings drinking tea with Tatsuki and confiding in her. Here, she first told Tatsuki of her crush on Ichigo.
Or there, in the kitchen, she can remember cooking exotic dishes Tatsuki would never try, but would sometimes help prepare, cutting onions, carrots or lettuce. No one has prepared anything on the counter for some time; it's gathering dust, a fine carpet of hairs like those on spoilt bread or cheese.
Everything rots and vanishes with time: food, traces of habitation, her sense of belonging. This would still be her home, if she were the same person. Now her home has been warped into another dimension and all that remains is a copy of it, stripped of all emotions she once embellished it with.
The tinkle of her keys sound hollow in the emptiness of the room. It's the past that dwells here, or a shadow of it. She is not the same person anymore and it frightens her.
These walls encapsulate a space she spent part of her normal life in. After all that has happened between Hueco Mundo and here, could she revert back and live a normal life? She has never thought about what would come next, when she followed Ulquiorra. She has thought about her friends, how they would react and what she could do to stop Aizen, but never about what she would do once it was all over.
"Inoue," Ichigo grasps her shoulder. The silence makes him uncomfortable, too. "Are you sure you'll be all right?"
"Of course," her smile is forced, her laugh weak, when she needs it to appear strong. She cannot fathom what he has been going through for her sake, for all of their sakes, but he needn't worry anymore. "I'll be fine."
He scratches his head, unsure how to continue. She can see the many options zipping through his skull, blurring with the speed of thought. "Listen, I don't like the idea of leaving you all alone out here. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I'm afraid you might vanish again if there's no one around to keep an eye on you."
She drinks his words in like they're cough syrup, something sweet and healing. He wants her to stay, he would miss her, is what she hears; he maybe even wants to be the one to keep an eye on her. Her smile is honest this time. "There's no reason for me to go anymore."
"Still," he's struggling again, the fearless fighter who faced adversaries much stronger than himself, who stared straight in the eyes of death without flinching, without backing down, now reduced to a mere boy, floundering in front of her. "I could rest so much easier if I knew Arisawa was here with you or... maybe— ah, I don't know."
She can only imagine the words he doesn't say and hope for them to fit with what she wants to hear: that he wants her to come with him, to sleep in his house, under the protective roof of a family that's as crazy as he is, a family she longs for.
"It's late. Tatsuki needs her sleep. I don't want to wake her." She's evading the main issue, unable to make the first step. The truth she can't accept is that she can't stay here, but has nowhere else to go. "Besides, I can manage."
She jerks in surprise, as Ichigo takes hold of her shoulder and, for the first time that night, looks into her eyes. "I know you can. But that's not the point." His arms slip around her back and then she finds herself pressed against him, cheek on chest, and when he speaks again, a tingle shoots all over her head where his breath stirs her hair. "You don't have to bear this all on your own. I can imagine how tough it must be to come home and find no one is waiting. But in fact, there are people who are waiting for you. I'm sure Arisawa is worried sick already and would pick knowing that you're safe over sleep any day."
"Thank you, Ichigo." It takes a while to gather her thoughts. Right now, she feels at home in his warmth, breathing in the scent of cool night air, of distant rain and clothed skin. "Then, if I may be frank, I don't want to stay here, at least not tonight. Maybe in the morning it will look different, but now, it's so desolate, and I don't feel like I belong here."
Somehow, her chest feels lighter now that she said it, as though the words themselves could lift weights she can't.
"Why didn't you say so before? Let's go." With one arm across her shoulder, he leads her out of the door.
She stops and blinks up at him. "What? Where to?"
He shrugs. "I don't know. Wherever you want. Wherever makes you feel better."
No sooner have the words reached her that she knows where she wants to be. It may be true that this place has lost its homely qualities and that she is not the same person anymore, but there are core parts that time and neglect cannot spoil: her feelings. If anything, they've only grown stronger.
So she locks the hollowness and doubt into this warped space she would air some other time and skips over to Ichigo. He's surprised to see her honest smile, because he doesn't know she has found a new home that is not walled in while she wasn't looking.