Characters: Orihime, Ulquiorra
Summary: A thousand eyes look up at her.
Pairings: Ulquiorra x Orihime
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc
Timeline: post-Deicide arc
Author's Note: Readers beware; I've taken leave of my sanity again. As a result, this may be one of the weirder things you read for a while.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
Spill from the silence called 'life' and drift across the floor until all of your blood paints the pale house and cloaks the ugly darkness, what pollutes every fiber of you. This couldn't be avoided and you know it.
She still sees him. Her fingers clench at the air where he should be, and she sees him. Whether she reaches for him to hold on or banish the shadows not even she knows. He still stands there, his green eyes unwavering, and Orihime wishes, as she always has, that he wouldn't look at her that way.
I am not a creature in a cage to be studied. I am not yours. Not anymore.
No man's possession anymore, Orihime feels her blood give him temporary life and she wishes nothing more to be left alone. To wake up and find the world empty. At least then she would be free again. She might even forget the names of those whom her heart thinks of with love, but at least he would be gone.
He has trapped her freedom. He has trapped her in a cage that moves around her, moves as she moves. Orihime can see the bars, can see him running his fingers across the ivory bars and looking at her that way—the way he has no right to be looking at her.
As though he still wants something from her.
Dead, dead, you are gone. Ash. Scattered across a world as dead as you are. I could not save you. There was nothing I could do. Why are you here? What is it that makes you think I can do anything for you now?
Have you not already seen that I am powerless to do anything more for you?
The image tears in front of her, like a broken mirror, and the pieces of him fall to the floor, and a thousand green eyes look up at her.
It is because of you that I linger on. You and I are linked.
Your compassion is not something that I understand. But it sustains me in the abyss, and the blood that ties us can not be broken.
So he says.
-My dreams are my own
My heartbeat only mine
You have no right
Even if I regret you
Leave now
Before I will you away-
The illusion has a voice. The illusion says it can not leave her. The illusion says it will be here, forever, in the blood that spills across the way.
(You can't touch me. You can't. I am here, and yet I am not. I am only smoke, and I slip from your grasp with each desperate pawing.
I am the silence in the long night hours.
I am the shadows that stretch across your room.
I am the dust that gathers on your shelves.
I am immune to you, but you are infected by me.)
He sees the world's pollution on her—she's not pure anymore, no more pure than tap water or an infant out of the womb—and she sees blood running down her legs and arms. A sliver of her life, shards of her soul, they escape in every drop of blood and she can't stop it. He scoops her blood and drinks it, and grows flushed and bloated where she withers.
He lives on her compassion. She would murder it, if she could.
But instead, she stretches her hands out, braving the smoke and the blood and the world's corruption to reach him,
and then
she
wakes
up.
(Or falls into a deeper dream, where he is waiting, just out of sight, to come to her again in the dark night.)