I wrote this years ago and have been working on it ever since, but I think I'm finally done with this piece! I'm quite pleased with it, and writing about Orihime and an alternative take on the Hueco Mundo arc was a huge amount of fun. I have more Orihime fic to post so I'll try to get onto finishing it quickly! Spoilers up to chapter 249.
Cage
Trapped; between here and never, in a lonely dimension dangling precariously on the edge. A psychological cage was suffocating and damning; which Ulquiorra knew, of course. It took away anything and everything you had – and then you realise it takes away more.
It snatches at clutches you never knew you leant against, and dissolves anything you stood on as your ground, knowing it was real, it was the truth. There was no truth anymore. Everything had been erased.
In this state, where she was very close to collapsing in on herself, and was losing her sanity and her soul to the one they called Aizen, the last thing Orihime recalled was Rukia. Rukia and her piss-easy imprisonment. How different they were!
Orihime remembered: Rukia acted sad and waited for her friends, and family, and lovers, and admirers to rescue her. She sat in her giant tower like a princess, and recalled every memory she had, self-pitying and faux noble right to the very moment Ichigo saved her.
A prison was different to a cage. A cage was free of glory and free of time for grace and thought. Orihime crouched like an animal in her humble, humiliating cage, and laughed as her soul was eaten away, eaten away, and nobody was coming, were they?
She fell, laughing, and joined Aizen and his comrades at their table of everything that had ever gone wrong.