Title/inspiration is taken from a line in the song Alone/With You by Daughter.
I Should Get a Dog or Something
This love story was never mine
I
When she told the story to herself, it used to sound romantic.
A lovely young girl with a boundless heart and a punk with a selfless soul battle monsters and demons and fight through countless obstacles until they finally settle into a nuclear life together. Their friends, the childhood friends, finally end up together after the boy spends his considerably long afterlife trying to win her back. They all end up married to each other like some bad western sitcom. This is how it's always supposed to end right?
(Except they went off script.)
It used to motivate her in some perverse way. She might not have changed his world or known all the right words but she was there in a way that other girl wasn't, her heart beat real and raw and was not the work of a madman with too much time and too little restraint. She couldn't enable but she could support and cherish and weren't those things just as important?
She sleeps next to a man she calls husband in name only, who holds her with the kind of detachment she sees when he's telling people sorry there's nothing more I can do to help. It used to hurt.
II
She'll occasionally wake to him saying her name. It would be soft, almost imperceptible, but there was always a tone he used when he said it (Rukia) she would recognize no matter how jumbled with sleep his voice was because that tone used to haunt her dreams. When she was younger she used to think if she could just get him to say her name like that, say Orihime like a prayer and an answer and his favorite sound all wrapped up in a few letters and syllables, it would mean something. She understood too late the key to his heart was something far deeper, something forever out of her reach.
She is not that other girl. She is tired of living her life as an apology of that.
III
The story used to sound romantic. It ended with a love for the ages, with a boy and girl who were the kind of soulmates that were hard to picture apart because they fit so seamlessly together, two pieces of a perfectly realized puzzle.
Orihime understands now it did. She was just not the girl.
She wants to hate him a little, for marrying her and having a son with her and loving her to the point of satisfaction but never completion, leaving her with gnawing emptiness and a growing pang of loneliness. She was the means to an end, just not his end.
Sometimes she wonders if he even realizes how empty he is. How hollow his smile has become over the years, that fire of his soul fed only by lingering smoke and ashes. She wants to blame that other girl, that other world, but it's useless now.
What's the point of hating the ghosts when you're married to one?
This should be moot by now but don't bother writing a nasty review because I will just delete it. (Looking at you lurking origos)
I should be doing homework. Or sleeping. Anything but writing this trash angst that I'm getting way too old for but oh well.