A-10-tion: Hello everyone! It will be my pleasure to welcome you to my first UlquiHime fic. Before anything else, I would like to post some few warnings: First their would be slightly out of character (ooc) in this story, though i will try my best to maintain what original personality they have. Second, the story will be a bit dark, more on the angst category. And lastly, this story is Rated M.. If you find it so hard to comprehend then feel free to hit the back button. Anyway, please do enjoy reading!

Full Summary: Now Orihime and her older brother Ulquiorra have a chance for a decent, respectable life, and Orihime's secret, precious hope to study singing can come true. Ichigo Kurosaki, the handsomest boy in school, sets Orihime's heart on fire. She is deeply devoted to her brooding brother; but with Ichigo, she imagines a lovely dream of romance…

Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach or any of its characters.

"Hime"

Momma once told me that

She and Daddy named me Orihime

They said, I looked like a little porcelain princess

Because of my orange hair and fair skin,

I was name Orihime.

That was the first of a thousand lies

Momma and Daddy would tell me and my brother

Ulquiorra. Of course, we wouldn't know they

Were lies, not for a long time, not until the day they

Came to take use away…

Chapter I: Departure

The sound of dresser drawers being opened and closed woke me. I heard Momma and Daddy whispering in their room, and my heart began to thump fast and hard. I pressed my palm against my chest, took a deep breath, and turned to wake Ulquiorra, but he was already sitting up in our sofa bed. Bathed in the silver moonlight that came pouring through our bare window, my seventeen-year-old brother's face looked chiseled from granite. He sat there so still, listening. I lay there listening with him, listening to the hateful wind whistle through the cracks and crannies of this small cottage Daddy has found for us in Las Noche, a small, rundown town just Hueco Mundo. We had been here barely four months.

"What is it, Ulqui-nee? What's going on?" I asked, shivering partly from the cold and partly because deep inside I knew the answer.

Ulquiorra fell back against his pillow and then brought his hands behind his head. In a sulk, he stared up at the dark ceiling. The pace of Momma's and Daddy's movements became more frenzied.

"We were going to get a puppy here," Ulquiorra mumbled. "And this spring Mother and I were going to plant a garden and grow our own vegetables."

I could feel his frustration and anger like heat from an iron radiator.

"What happened?" I asked mournfully, for I, too had high hopes.

"Father came home later than usual," he said, a prophetic note of doom in his voice. "He rushed in here, his eyes wild, bright and wide. He went right in there, and not long after, they started packing. We might as well packed out belongs and dressed up," Ulquiorra said, throwing the blanket off him and turning to sit up. "They will be out here shortly, telling us to do it anyway."

I groaned. Not again, and not again in the middle of the night.

Ulquiorra leaned over to turn on the lamp by our pull-out bed and started to put on his socks so he wouldn't have to step down on a cold floor. He was so depressed, he didn't even worry about getting dressed in front of me. I fell back and watched him unfold his pants so he could slip into them, moving with a quiet resignation that made everything around me seem more like a dream. How I wished it were.

I was sixteen years old, and for as long as I could remember, we had been packing and unpacking, going from one place to another. I always seemed that just when my brother Ulquiorra, and I had finally settled into a new school and finally made some friends and I got to know my teachers, we had to leave. Maybe we really were no better than homeless gypsies like Ulquiorra always said, wanderers, poorer than the poorest, for even the poorest families had some place they could call home, some place they could return to when things went bad, a place where they had grandmas and grandpas or uncles and aunts to hug them and comfort them and make them fell good again. We would have settled even for cousins. At least, I could have.

I peeled back the blanket, and my nightgown fell away and exposed most of my bosom. I glanced at Ulquiorra and caught him gazing at me in the moonlight. He shifted his eyes away quickly. Embarrassment made my heart doki-doki, and I pressed my palm against my bodice of my nightgown. I had never told any of my girlfriends at school that Ulquiorra and I shared even a room together, much less this dilapidated pull-out bed. I was too ashamed, and I knew how they would react, embarrassing both Ulquiorra and me even more.

I brought my feet down in the freezing-cold bare wood floor. My teeth chattering, I embraced myself and hurried across the small room to gather up a blouse and a sweater and a pair of jeans. Then I went into the bathroom to dress.

By the time I finished, Ulquiorra had his suitcase closed. It seemed we always left something else behind each time. There was only so much room in Daddy's old car anyway. I folded my nightgown and put it neatly into my own suitcases. The clasps were as hard as ever to close and Ulquiorra had to help.

Momma and Daddy's bedroom door opened and they came out, their suitcases in hand, too. We stood there facing them, holding our own.

"Why do we have to leave in middle of the night again?" I asked, looking at Daddy and wondering if leaving would make him angry as it so often did.

"Best time to travel," Daddy mumbled. He glared at me with a quick order not to ask too many question. Ulquiorra was right, Daddy had that wild look again, and a look that seemed so unnatural, it sent shivers up and down my spine. I hated it when Daddy got that look. He was a handsome man with rugged features, a cap of sleek brown hair and match with its dark brown eyes. When the day came that I fell in love and decided to marry, I hoped my husband would be just as handsome as Daddy. But I hated it when Daddy was displeased, when he got that wild look. It marred his handsome features and made him ugly and sometimes I couldn't bear to see.

"Ulquiorra, take the suitcases down. Orihime, you help your momma pack up whatever she wants from the kitchen."

I glanced at Ulquiorra. He was only one year older than I was, but there was a wider gap in our looks. He was tall and lean and muscular. I was small with what Momma called "China doll features." And I really didn't take after Momma, either, because she was tall. She told me she was more like a boy until she was thirteen, when she suddenly blossomed.

We didn't have many pictures of family. Matter of fact, all I had was one picture of Momma when she was fifteen. I would sit for hours gazing into her young face, searching for signs of myself. She was smiling in the picture and standing under a cheery blossom tree. She wore an ankle-length skirt and a fluffy blouse with frilly sleeves and a frilly collar. Her long, dark hair looked soft and fresh. Even in this old black and white photo, her eyes sparked with hope and love. Daddy said he'd taken the picture with a small box camera he had bought for a quarter from a friend of his. He wasn't sure it would work, but at least this picture came out. If we'd ever had any other photos, they'd been either lost or left behind during our many moves.

However, I thought that even in this simple old photograph with its black and white fading into sepia and its edges fraying. Momma looked so pretty that it was easy to see why Daddy had lost his heart to her so quickly even though she was only fifteen at the time. She was barefoot in the picture, and I thought she looked fresh and innocent and as lovely as anything else nature had offer.

Momma and Ulquiorra had the same shimmering black hair, though Ulquiorra had green color eyes. They both had this pale complexion with beautiful white teeth that allowed them ivory smiles, but then again it was rare for Ulquiorra to smile, and the reason is unknown. Daddy had dark brown hair, but mine was orange. And I had gray color eyes, no one else in my family had this eye color.

"What about that rake and shovel we bought for the garden?" Ulquiorra asked, careful not to let even a twinkle of hope show in his eyes.

"We don't have room for it," Daddy snapped.

Poor Ulquiorra, I thought. Momma said he was born all crunched up as tightly as fist, his eyes sewn shut. She said she gave birth to Ulquiorra on a farm. They had just arrived there and gone knocking on the door, hoping to find some work, when her labor began.

They told me I had been born on the road, too. They had hoped to have me born in a hospital, but they were forced to leave one town and start out for another where Daddy had already secured new employment. They left late in the afternoon one day and traveled all that day and that night.

"We were between nowhere and no place, and all of a sudden you wanted to come into this world," Momma told me. "Your daddy pulled the truck over and said, 'Here we go again, Retsu.' I crawled onto the truck bed where we had an old mattress, and as the sun came up, you entered this world. I remember how the birds were singing.

"I was looking at a bird as you were coming into this world, Orihime-chan. That's why you sing so pretty," Momma said. "Your grandmomma always said what ever a woman looked at just before, during, or right after giving birth, that's what characteristics the child would have. The worst thing was pregnant."

"What would happen, Momma?" I asked, filled with wonder.

"The child would be sneaky, cowardly."

I sat back amazed when she told me all this. Momma had inherited so much wisdom. It made me wonder and wonder about our family, a family we had never seen. I wanted to know so much more, but it was difficult to get Momma and Daddy to talk about their early lives. I suppose that was because so much of it was painful and hard.

We knew they wee both brought up on small farms in a small village in Roppongi District, where their people eked out poor livings from small patches of land. They had both come from big families that lived in rundown farmhouses. There just wasn't any room in either household for a newly married, very young couple with a pregnant wife, so they began what would be our family's history of traveling, traveling that had not yet ended. We were on our way again.

Momma and I filled a carton with those kitchen wares she wanted to take along and then gave it to Daddy to load in the car. When she was finished, she put her arm around my shoulders, and we both took one last look at the humble little kitchen.

Ulquiorra was standing in the doorway, watching. His eyes turned from pools of sadness to emerald-green pools of anger when Daddy came in to hurry us along. Ulquiorra blamed him for our gypsy life. I wondered sometimes if maybe he wasn't right. Often Daddy seemed different from other man, more fidgety, more nervous. I would never say it, but I hated it whenever he stopped off at a bar on his way home from work. He would usually come home in a sulk and stand by the windows watching as if he were expecting something terrible. None of us could talk to him when he was in one of those moods. He was like that now.

"Better get going," he said, standing in the door way, his eyes turning even colder as they rested for a second on me.

For a moment I was stunned. Why had Daddy given me such cold look? It was almost as if he blamed me for our having to leave.

As soon as the thought entered my mind, I chased it away. I was being silly! Daddy would never blame me for anything. He loved me. He was just mad because Momma and I were being so slow and dawdling, instead of hurrying out the door. As if reading my mind, Momma suddenly spoke.

"Right," she said quickly. Momma and I started for the door, for we had all learned from hard experience that Daddy was unpredictable when his voice turned so tight with anger. Neither one of us wanted to invoke his wrath. We turned back once and then closed the doors before.

There were few stars out. I didn't like nights without stars. On those night shadows seemed so much darker and longer to Tonight was of those nights, cold, dark, all the windows in houses around us black. The wind carried a piece of paper through the street, and off in the distance a dog howled. Then I heard a siren. Some where in the night someone was in trouble, I thought, some poor person was being carried off to the hospital, or maybe the police were chasing a criminal or chasing us,

"Let's move along," Daddy ordered and sped up as if they were chasing us.

Ulquiorra and I squeezed ourselves into the backseat with our cartons and suitcases.

"Where are we going this time?" Ulquiorra demanded without disguising his displeasure.

"Karakura Town," Momma said.

"Karakura Town!" I said.

"Yes, your daddy's got a job in a garage there, and I'm sure I can lend me a chambermaid job in one of the motels."

"Karakura Town," Ulquiorra muttered under his breath. Big cities still frightened both of us.

As we droved away from Las Noche and the darkness fell around us, our sleepiness returned. Ulquiorra and I closed our eyes and fell asleep against each other as we had so many times before.

To Be Continue…

A-10-tion: So, what do you think? Did you find it quite interesting? If yes, then don't hesitate to click on the Review button! Are you curious to know who's Orihime's Daddy? then I hope you already had an idea as to who he is.. specially on the clue I stated there. And if you don't know, just give me a review and i'll be willing to answer your question. As for Orihime's Momma, well.. i stated her name already!

Next Chapter: New place, new face.. What will going to happen to Orihime and her family? Will their be hope and joy, or... despair awaits them.