Joy health love and peace
Be all here in this place
By your leave we shall sing
Concerning our King
Ichigo Kurosaki dreamed deeply that night.
He saw himself. He was walking down the familiar hallways of his school, clean and white, strangely silent. Students walked by him. He didn't recognize any of them. Silently moving their mouths.
He bobbed in the air behind himself. Staring at the white walls. Bare columns smoothed the corners. The windows were half-shuttered. He couldn't help but imagine beyond them, a wasteland of spirit sand. He tried to look into the classrooms with their warm, inane posters for comfort. They were all closed. No-one seemed to notice. Everyone seemed to be going somewhere, and yet, no-one seemed to be going anywhere.
He stared into the crowd. Only the crowd could distract him. But they didn't. The more attention he paid, the more he stared through them. As if they were hollow.
Then he recognized one. At the end of the hall, shifting in and out of the crowd. She didn't move; the motion around her created the illusion that she was moving. Deep red-brown hair tumbled around her face, over her shoulders, drifting almost down to her chest. The shine of a hair-clip – a very particular hair-clip – suddenly stabbing at him in a ray of light from somewhere he couldn't see.
Orihime Inoue. He knew something bad was about to happen.
His heart beat and as his eyes locked onto where hers waited to turn, expecting them to turn – when is she going to turn? as she moved, motionless – he started drifting around, over himself, around himself…
Orihime looked and he snapped around, away from her look, his heartbeat knocking the wind out of him as he realized he was dreaming and began counting the seconds until he would wake up.
He stared into his own face. He was alone in a glistening white desert like an eroded moon, with himself, staring into the mirror-wall of the air.
It was not himself. It was himself. His face was white, precisely defined, sharpness of moon-marble. His eyes were black, a gold iris floating in the void. A snake tongue flickered between fangs.
"Hello," it said.
***************
He didn't wake up.
Orihime saw him start as if he was waking. Did his eyes open? Did he scream silently? They closed again. He fell back into his position, gasping, then settled down, until his breathing was impossible to hear, until he slept so deeply he seemed dead, and she briefly shook his body to disrupt his sightless dreams.
She touched his face and it was cold. She disappeared from where he lay, into a street of screeching sightless cars and dark-light midsummer puddles, where a dark rain slowly let fall strained last tears.