I Don't Want to be the Rain

by Katie

Disclaimer: They belong to Tite Kubo and associated. I'm just messing with them.

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"Ishida-kun, have you ever wanted to be the rain?"

Ishida blinked in surprise, looking up from his quilt project at Inoue. She sat across from him, staring out the window, her half of the quilt lying forgotten in her hands. She had been doing that a lot recently, he noted absently. Ever since the trip into the Soul Society. She would pick up projects and then drop them midtask to stare off into space. She never seemed sad, but her former exhuberant imagination had turned inward into daydreaming. It wasn't exactly worrisome, and yet he found himself worried.

"Aah, no, Inoue-san," he said.

"I used to want to be the rain," Inoue continued, neither looking at him or really talking to him. "I thought that, if I were the rain, I could connect with people. I thought I could reach into someone's heart, connect with it the way the rain connects the earth and sky.

"But that's just it, isn't it? The rain connects the earth and sky, but it's never connected to anything itself. It falls from sky to ground, and evaporates from ground to sky, and in doing that binds the two together, but it's always alone." She let out a puff of air, too small to be a sigh and too lonely to be a breath.

Ishida bit his lip, feeling the earth go fragile beneath his feet. There was something more to Inoue-san's words, but it was obscured by her own brand of symbolism. Something involving Kurosaki? Knowing her, probably. But what? What in the world did she mean by "rain" and "sky" and "earth"? And what was he, the emotional dunce, supposed to do about it?

"...w-what would you rather be?" he stammed out at length, and mentally slapped himself for sounding like such an idiot.

"Hrmm." Inoue's face scrunched as she pondered this, for a moment looking like her old self. She didn't seem to notice or mind his awkward manner.

"A comet," she said after several long moments of thought.

"A comet?"

Inoue nodded.

"Comets are really bright, you know?" she said. "And you see a comet, and you think: 'A comet! How lucky!' and you make a wish. And a comet can go whereever it wants. And so, if it sees a planet it likes, it can say: 'That planet looks like good company,' and it would become a part of that planet's orbit."

"Not all comets become satellites, Inoue-san," Ishida pointed out. "Most of them, if they're even drawn to the planet, fall into the atmosphere and are destroyed."

"That's true." Inoue pursed her lips, trying to look cutely thoughtful as she would have before. The lonely light in her eyes, however, was obvious even to Ishida.

"I think, Inoue-san," he said, gulping a little, "that you are a star."

"Hn?" Inoue finally turned and actually looked at him, making Ishida jump and stab himself with his needle. He valiently bit back a cry of pain and, trembling, put his quilting square aside.

"Well, stars are very bright too," he said slowly. "And while people don't always look up and think: 'Oh, a star. How lucky!', we can't live without them. The sun, our closest star, provides light and heat and life, and the further stars allow us to see in the night and have been used for centuries to navigate the world. And many stars have planets orbiting around them, or even other stars, so they're rarely alone." He stuttered to a stop, not knowing how to continue or how even to elegantly conclude. In the ensuing silence, he again began beating himself internally. Could you have been any more trite? A greeting card would have been more original, not to mention more elegantly worded! Stupid, stupid, stupid! He didn't notice the slow, warm smile blossom on Inoue's face as she absorbed what he said.

"I like that," she said quietly, cutting off his self-recriminations. "Thank you, Ishida-kun."

"Aah, it was nothing," he stammered in reply.

Inoue giggled at something inexplicable to Ishida, and picked up her quilting square with her former bounce and energy.

"So, where was I?" She studied her square and frowned. "Oh dear, those stitches are really messed up." She began taking them out, her concentration now fully on the project on hand. Ishida shook his head, wondering what exactly had just happened. Oh well. He must have done something right, whatever it was.

And with that thought, he returned his attention to his own square.

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Fin