"One day, whether you are 14, 28 or 65, you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find––
is they are not always with whom we spend our lives"
-Beau Taplin
The Concession
Renji
Passivity
He fell in love with her when they were young. They were children running barefoot through grimy streets, just trying to survive on wit and luck and the sheer determination to live another day in that sad excuse for what the living called heaven. He was enamoured with her, a small girl who was somehow still regal with dusty skin and a dirty kimono. Among their friend group they were always the closest, the only two with significant power and awareness for how their cruel world worked and the will to survive through it all.
They had always walked the same path until they didn't and he really didn't know how it happened until she was signing her life and humanity away to a group of people who called themselves noble yet seemed everything but. Her eyes seemed to reflect what they all truly are but try to forget (dead) and he wonders how he can watch her walk out of his life without so much as a please don't go.
She may have once returned his feelings, she may have not, but now the answer presently is painfully obvious to the later. He watches her with him, how her eyes narrow and dance with exasperation and mirth, the way her voice jumps from tone and octave so quickly in their never ending squabbles. He remembers seeing her like this, so alive all those years ago running through the streets before they had duties and roles that changed whatever they were. He wants to hate him, gods he know he did at first, but time has mellowed his anger into something closer to resignment. He had her, he lost her, and now he will yield gracefully to the man who probably deserved her more in the first place.
Orihime
Sight
Tatsuki says she's a bit foolish for saying something as serious as love when she describes her feelings for him. But she's not foolish, she's never foolish in fact she's much smarter than everyone perceives her to be. Maybe it's part of her power over reality but she feels this uncanny ability to see things about people, to see right through their fronts and acts and see the beauty of their souls, the good people they truly are under whatever pain and hurt has hardened the exteriors of their hearts.
And she sees he has such a good, pure spirit under all his scowls and sarcasm and exhaustion with the world. She sees he is caring brother and a good son and relentlessly puts his own life at risk for others without a second thought. She sees all of this and wonders how it is possible to not fall in with him, this boy who makes her weak with a slight upward turn of his mouth and softening of his eyes.
However that does not mean he sees the same in her.
What she does see is the way he uses annoyance and exasperation to cover the vastly different emotions he feels for her. She understood a long time ago he loved her and while she denies this for a long time it becomes painfull obvious when they get a little older there is something more to the relationship between the boy with hair like fire and the dark haired girl who changed his life. She sees it, she sees it all and can unsee nothing until her heart is raw from the painful reality of rejection. She waits and ponders and wonders when it will be until someone will truly look past her attractive exterior and see her.