Happy bday to our favorite dreamer, Inoue Orihime!

Sixteen

For her sweet sixteen, she received a fractured face and an even more broken spirit. It was also the day she first met him, but meeting him then only served to introduce her to pain and horror. Even worse than that was the fact that she had been introduced to her own weaknesses, and they were entirely her cross to bear. It was not his fault that he was the catalyst. From that day on, the day when she turned sixteen, she would be drawn down another path, towards that dark creature that caused her misfortune. And she had no choice but to follow.

She was only freshly into her sixteenth year when she met him again. He came at her with force, brutality, and crushing reality. He made it out to be an offer, a choice, but there was none. All other roads fell away to leave only one, which pointed off toward him into the darkness. She had failed to see it, failed to notice the claws reaching out towards her since their first meeting. Maybe it had been then that he had looked at her and decided she would be the martyr. She couldn't say no, she wouldn't, because she was so weak. Perhaps that was why she was chosen. The predator always separated the weakest from the rest as it was the easiest target. She looked into his bright green eyes and saw hopelessness, making her quiver under his gaze.

"Ore to koi, onna." A command. His eyes stared into her, through her, with scorching intensity.

As soon as she accepted, she imagined that he would become Death itself and take her away forever. Her life would end, and she would become as empty as the man before her. She was barely sixteen, but she felt certain she would not see another year's end. There could be no life with that pale man. So when she said her good bye, she meant it. Even an imaginative sixteen year old like herself had to face reality eventually; yet even a dreamer like herself would have never imagined her dark reality to be the sad looking being that was Ulquiorra Cifer. And his sadness seemed to increase in every passing moment that he was with her.

She was only sixteen when she entered the world of the hollow and was told to devote herself, her life, her soul to a murdering betrayer. Her only visitor was her green-eyed Death, who she believed to serve as her torturer. He was always questioning her, her values, her beliefs. And every time she looked upon his face, his tear streaks stood out vividly in her vision. As if he mirrored her own troubled soul, as if the dark part of her heart was standing before her questioning, threatening, attempting to bring everything crashing down around her. She wanted to look into his eyes and understand him, his motives, and his reasoning. But he was always unreadable, unblendable, some separate thing that was also somehow connected to her weakened soul.

At first she fought back, desperately. He was not her, she would tell herself, over and over. There should be no doubt. But every time she saw him, her heart felt clouded. She wanted to hate him but found that she couldn't. And this, more than anything else, caused her grief and anguish. Her tormented soul couldn't understand. Every time they met, the distance between them seemed to shrink. She drew closer and closer to him, to what he was, like opposite ends of magnets. Plus and minus. As to which pole she represented, she couldn't tell. He drew her in greedily, and those dark parts of herself became more and more clear. Soon, she thought, her own tears would etch themselves permanently down her cheeks, and they would match.

He always wanted more. There were always questions, as if he thought he could pick apart her brain and maybe glimpse something he was looking for. There was a brief moment when he asked her of the heart, and she remembered herself, pulling away from the shadows to remember color, beauty, and goodness. All things she had almost forgotten. And for a moment, she was sixteen years old, and her life stretched out before her in many directions, like it had before she knew of things such as arrancar and espada and green-eyed hollows.

She found her heart again, buried underneath all of the worry, grief, and fear of the unknown. But it was there, beating, waiting, and ready. It separated her from him, as if a thin barrier of light had cast him away. But he wasn't done. He would never let her go, not now, not after seeing it. The very thing that protected her in that moment would be her undoing. He would see to it that she felt all of his desperation, all of his fear and all of his darkness.

She was only sixteen when he carved an invisible hole into her chest, her innocence completely shattered. She remembers screaming. She remembers looking into his eyes and seeing her captive there, looking into the cage he would keep her in. He tells her -without really telling her- that she is like him now. Forever. Once a heart is lost, it couldn't possibly return. She begs and pleads, but there is no saving her now. He has her; he took everything. His eyes are insistent that she understand, that she accept his way of life as her own. He is right; she was always wrong to dream and hope and love.

But before he gains anything more, he is undone himself. In the same way she was torn down mentally, he is torn down physically. Still mirrors of each other. Both now hopeless and destroyed. He is about to be erased, and he accepts it almost eagerly. She thinks that along with him, she too will cease to be if they must always be the same in this dark world. Desperately, she tries to remember herself, to remember who she is. Was it really only a month ago that she awoke and found herself a year older? It seems like years on top of years have passed since then.

She blinks, and she sees the man she loves, loved; the feeling is strange now within her heart. She knows him, and she knows the other as well. They are her dear friends who she had always wanted to save. How had she forgotten what was once her entire life? Those people, those nakama… Now bubbling crimson was painting Ishida's pure-white Quincy attire. Ichigo, too, had been lost, and she screams his name. And, as if in reply to her call, that tear marked darkness is back. It seems she is not quite defeated, and neither is he.

Slowly, the colors begin to spring back into her vision. Her heart begins to beat once more and the emptiness starts to lessen. The tears stop flowing and she finds she can stand once again. He is there, near, watching her, waiting. They are two separate beings again. She has finally remembered herself, and he has accepted his defeat. He has reverted to his green-eyed form, but the sadness is suffocating. In his eyes she sees regret, and with sudden realization she knows he will truly disappear. He has decided, in the end, to leave her to the living instead of dragging her down with him. He will leave her a sixteen year old girl with a long life ahead of her.

But he makes one final request. His fingers extend in her direction, stretching so very far for what he is not sure he can ever really touch. He reaches for the sixteen year old dreamer that she is, just a child still and yet has become ageless to him. To him, she is everything. She will never be the same, and here is yet another change for her now battered soul. Everything divides them. Worlds, forms, souls, values, ideas, empty space that stretches forever. Yet she looks from his arm to his eyes. And there she finally understands. For the first time she reads him. His fear, his curiosity, his desire. His soul is completely opened up for her. And she becomes vividly aware that her next actions will change her life forever. That what she does will choose the direction of her path as well as his. Everything will change, she knows, because once she reaches she will never stop.

And she does reach.

She is barely sixteen years old when she reaches for a hollow. But to her, he is no longer a hollow. Her blindness has passed, and all she can see now is his sadness and all of his desire for what she has; his desire for all of her. He slips past her fingers, his soul breaking into millions of pieces. Into ash. But she does not stop reaching. Her arm suspends, and in her inner mind she takes a step. It is the path he showed her before, so long ago. There is darkness and uncertainty, but she knows that he is there and that is all that matters.

She continues reaching. The heavy reality is that she is forgoing what she had always dreamt for herself. She senses Ichigo at her back and knows that she will be giving him up too. But she does not, cannot turn, not even for a last glance. Instead she looks ahead, into the emptiness before her. Inside she can feel a power, something stronger than she has ever felt. It is as if all of her senses have retuned themselves, focusing on the soul that had just slipped away. He is still there, right there, waiting. All she needs to do is call him back.

She is barely sixteen years old when her soul touches another. No, not just touch; it is so much more than that. It is more like a binding of souls, as if she sowed together two separate things into one. She anchors him to herself and pieces his body back one atom at a time. She has finally reached him and will never let go. From that moment on, she knows she will never have a connection as such as this one. It saddens her somewhat, knowing that every other bond she has made will pale in comparison to this one. But it is a price she is willing to pay. No one will really understand either, no one but him who feels it too. She can feel him awaken, a rebirth, and she has never known anything more amazing. His first breath feels like hers, too. Just as his eyes flutter open again, she withdraws her powers to look at him.

The magic of the moment settles as she is brought back to herself. But she sees green, vivid, beautiful green, and he looks no where but to her. Somehow, she knows that he had felt it all too, that connection. Could he be scared? Worried?

Suddenly he moves and touches his chest, and his hand meets firm flesh. Then he breathes a word, but there is no longer any question. "Heart."

It is enough to make her emotions bubble up, and she experiences a joy she has not felt, she thinks, for years and years. The tears come, building up at the corners, and she can only nod over and over in confirmation.

She may only be sixteen, but she has created a heart and rebuilt a soul and body. He touches her cheek, her tears, a thumb moving slowly over them. He is not worried; somehow he understands she is happy. He had been given that brief opportunity to see into her heart, into her soul. He has gained an understanding he had never believed possible. Somehow, their two broken halves had made a whole.

She is only sixteen, but he tells her she is much more than that.

Beta'd by a cutie pie

-Miss Soupy