Title: In limbo between memory and dream
Character/Pairing: Arisawa Tatsuki
Style: Drabble
Genre: General
Rating: PG
Theme: May 1: between the click of the light and the start of the dream
It ached, like she was sick. Her chest and legs, abdomen and lower back. Every breath felt as if it should send splinters of pain through her ribcage and her nose felt clogged and stuffy, like the time her nose had been broken and had needed setting.
All over, her muscles felt prickly, the kind of sensation that came from exercising too much or getting hit too many times in karate. Not exactly a good feeling, nor a particularly bad one either. Just... there was something not right about the situation.
It wasn't limited to just her body either, her mind was similar, knotted string and hard candies rattling around sorely and weirdly, hitting tender spots. Like physical bruises they reacted, flashing fragments of images and sounds instead of pain, showing scattered remains of memory of the initial injury.
The fragments were different from the what she knew and there was no way they could be true, right? There was no way she could have been thrown against a wall by something she could barely see, by something Orihime called 'Brother' and there was no possibility that Ichigo, Ichigo, the one who had quit from the dojo during middle school, could've come crashing through, carrying a gigantic sword and dressed in black robes.
Only dreams could be that type of weird, though who was to say a wrestler barging in through the wall wasn't?
Tatsuki's head ached from thinking. She hadn't fallen asleep that night over at Orihime's, but everything that happened, that those fragments told her happened, seemed to be parts of a dream. Half real, half truth; half forgotten, half imagined.
She wondered which was what and feared that one was the reason why she felt pain for bones that weren't broken and phantoms flickered at the edge of her sight.