Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach. If I did, I wouldn't be biting my nails waiting for the next chapter.
Warnings: AU, bad words, death
AN: Welcome to my Orihime Appreciation Fic, because she doesn't get enough of it. It's mostly just one big speculation about exactly how powerful she is, and what she would do with her Shun Shun Rikka if she wasn't so darn sweet and lovable. Also, if anyone wants to write more on this topic, be my guest. I would love to read a full-length fic about a powerful Orihime who isn't all sunshine and rainbows that isn't limited by my squirrelly attention span. Anyhow, on with the show!
Abnegation
I reject your reality and substitute my own. -Adam Savage
Orihime's Shun Shun Rikka's power was simple, almost ridiculously so. She had the ability to reject anything that she didn't like. If an attack was hurtling towards her, she would reject the attack. If a friend was injured and bleeding out, she would reject the wound. If an enemy was trying to hurt her or her friends, she would reject them in half. Those three techniques were the first she learned to do, which made sense. She had developed her power in battle after all, and those skills were the most useful at the time. She so loved to be useful. Nothing stung more than being the weakest link. However, when the fighting stopped and she had time to kill instead of enemies, she realized that she could do so much more than that.
She was in history class a few weeks after they invaded Soul Society when she first managed something that wasn't defense, healing, or offense. History was a boring class, taught by the rudest teacher in the world, Mr. Saito. Mr. Saito thought she was an airhead with more breasts than brains. He never picked her to do anything and always had some condescending comment to make about her in that awful, nasal voice of his. She hated him, and often wished that the patronizing idiot would just shut up. So one day, as she walked out of a particularly nasty lesson of his, she gave the back of his head a mean look and muttered, "I reject your stupid voice."
The next time Orihime went into his class, he didn't talk the entire period. Every time he had to say something, he wrote it on the blackboard. Finding this odd, she went to Tatsuki for answers, but when she asked, her friend stared at her pile she was an idiot. Apparently, Mr. Saito had never spoken, ever. There was something wrong with vocal chords that made him unable to talk and he'd had it since before he had come to teach at the school.
After learning this, Orihime excused herself to the bathroom, though she went to the roof instead. She needed someplace quiet and isolated to have a panic attack over how she made a person lose their voice. Though no, she didn't make him lose it, she made it so that his voice never existed. There were a thousand injuries and illnesses that could take away a person's speech, but she wiped it from existence, bent time and space so that this man never spoke in the first place. It was terrifying and horrible and just plain wrong, but in a dark corner of her mind, a quiet little voice whispered that it was also kind of cool. Who knew what else she could do? It was a mean thought given the circumstances, but it lingered in her head long after she went back to class. If she could reject Mr. Saito's voice, what else could she reject?
Orihime started testing her Shun Shun Rikka soon after that incident. Well, not so much tested as played with. She rejected a broken pencil tip when she couldn't be bothered to sharpen it. She rejected some pimples breaking out on her chin. She rejected a bad haircut that Chizuru got. She even managed to reject a rainstorm that was ruining her walk home from school, though that one took a few tries. All the while, her fairies stayed strangely silent. It worried her a little, but she was too busy pushing the limits of her abilities to get in a tizzy about it.
It wasn't until a few weeks later that she discovered the most incredible aspect of her power. It happened when she was studying with Ichigo for an English test. They were having fun together, spending more time idly chatting about some new movies that they wanted to watch than reviewing vocabulary, when it started to get dark out and it was time for her to leave. Orihime didn't want to leave though. Ichigo was actually paying attention to her without any hollows or shinigami being involved. He was calm and relaxed, and even smiling a little. She didn't want this to end, and with that thought it was suddenly a half an hour earlier. She had wished so fervently to spent a little bit longer with Ichigo that she had rejected time itself. She didn't panic though, since Ichigo was laughing at a joke past-Orihime had told and looking so happy that she jumped right back into the conversation with only a shaky giggle to show for what she had done.
It was fun exploring her abilities in small, relatively harmless ways, but she knew she could do better. She was strong, probably the strongest of all her friends, because their powers were do limited compared to hers. They could only fight, but she could make it so that they wouldn't have to fight, so no one one would have to fight. She didn't fully realize that herself until Aizen tried to have her kidnapped. When that pale Arrancar had grabbed her, she felt a cold, hard feeling well up in her. She was barely able to recognize it as rage before she rejected the hollow trying to capture her from existence. The feeling didn't go away though, so she rejected all the other Arrancar, and then Aizen, and then all the hollows, and then Hueco Mundo itself. It was easy, almost too easy, like swatting at an fly buzzing around her ears, though she hadn't experience that annoyance since she figured out how to reject the flies.
In that moment, as the tension eased from her chest, she was hit by the realization that she was powerful, not all-powerful but pretty damn close. If she could reject an entire dimension in the blink of an eye, what couldn't she do? She could reject war, poverty, disease, natural disasters. She could reject murderers, rapists, dictators, abusive people like her parents. She could reject all the things that kept the world from being a nice and happy place. It wasn't like anyone could stop her. If they did, she would just reject them, too. Maybe she could even reject whatever kept Ichigo from noticing her. The possibilities were beautiful and endless, but there was no rush. She couldn't exactly run out of time when she could reject the passing of it.
Orihime giggled to herself and began the long walk back to her apartment. As she skipped along, humming a tuneless little song, she didn't notice the tiny cracks that had formed in her hair clips. They shattered simultaneously, falling onto the sidewalk outside her building in a hundred shining little shards. She stepped on them as she walked inside, too consumed in her daydreams to notice. They were scattered beyond repair by the time she finished her planning and had begun bending the universe to her whims. She eventually did realize that they were gone, but she paid it no mind. She had a lot to do after all.