A girl with worn-looking red hair makes her way through the July streets, streets that are silent and sweaty and dreary for all their sunshine.
The people sweating in the streets tell her it's okay when they bump into her, but Inoue Orihime is not okay.
When she finally gets where she wants to be, she buzzes up to his apartment and enters. The doorman's gone. Orihime's never seen him in, only the evidence at his post – a greasy half-eaten bag of potato chips, or sickly sweet donuts. Her stomach churns when she sees those things and she half feels like vomiting. Today the compulsion surges stronger than usual, because the heat already upset her stomach.
She climbs up the stairs, her legs breaking under the weight and stress of the clothes. Finally she gets to his door, on the fifth floor (the fourth, really, but you know how superstitious those buildings are, skipping four just because…).
She can hardly say 'shi'anymore, because something's wrong with her mind, and she breaks the thought before she can complete it. More like, the thought loses itself before she can find it. She has no desire to.
At his door, she drops the load of clothing with a sigh and a thump, before knocking – jarringly – on his door.
He answers nearly right away.
"Orihime-san," he says. The smile in his voice left her name long ago, although he still looks at her wistfully, lovingly because - He is the only family she has left.
"Uryu-kun," she replies, forcing a smile into her face, although she knows her eyes reflect the same happiness at being able to see him. "I brought over the clothes." She's already taking the first blouse out, unfolding it and smoothing it. "Look, see, she wants it initialed here, tightened here… and taken in a bit, at the breast."
Uryu looks at Orihime. "Would you like some water?" he asks, gently. "Or something to eat?" He says it so gently and subtly that she cannot be offended by what he could have been implying, although really, he implies nothing. He just wants her to eat.
She falters. "Just a little bit of rice, maybe. And some water, that would be nice. It's so hot out!"
He bites at his lip, the same way she does, and opens his door wider to let her in. She moves to collect the clothes, but he stops her. "I'll get it," he says, "Just go on inside and wait for me in the kitchen."
She hesitates, but obeys. It sometimes worries him, how docile she is, especially now. But the thought of her straining herself worries him more… especially now.
He is the only protection she has left in this world.
His muscles are more capable than hers, even though he nearly looks as thin and weak. He lifts the clothes basket with ease and places it near the door, where he takes a moment of care to lock up and tuck Orihime's shoes into the cubby.
When he sees her in the kitchen she's sitting at the table, hands in her lap.
He wants to tell her that there's no need for her to be so uptight, that his home is hers, that she has no fears here. But he doesn't. Instead he pours her a cup of water and sets it before her.
"Thank you," she says.
He moves to the refrigerator and takes out a cold bowl of rice left over from his lunch, which he heats for her. He puts that before her, too; she repeats her 'thank you'.
"Did you eat breakfast this morning?"
"Um, no, I didn't have any time… I woke up so late. And I haven't had lunch yet." She looks confused for a moment. "Oh, it's about lunchtime now, isn't it? I'm sorry, my clock at home is broken…"
"It's three o' clock," he tells her. It's actually four. He won't say it. "Is your air conditioner fixed?"
Her eyes flutter to stare into her glass of water. "No, but it's all right. I have all the fans, and I think I like them better anyway."
"If it's too expensive-"
"Oh, no," she exclaims, and for a moment he sees a hint of the old, overly-apologetic, bouncing Orihime. "It's all right! That's not it! Honest! I just keep forgetting! And besides! My cousins takes care of that kind of thing! And that's why we're doing this, right? This sewing." She stands up, before she can say any more. Uryu notices that she didn't touch her rice, which makes him ache. "Come on, Uryu-kun. Let's get to it!"
The two sit on the floor of Uryu's tiny room and she smiles at him radiantly before beginning. She's very convincing today, and he even smiles back.
Now that it's not so hot she lets herself think, even though her thoughts flow heavy and sickly like maple syrup. She takes a deep breath in and smells the summer. Somewhere, maybe in her imagination, a cricket chirps.
She wonders if all this will do any good. She wants to go to college. Really, she does. She still has no idea what she wants to do with her life, but she knows that she's guilty and she doesn't want to make her cousins pay for it all. That's why she and Uryu are doing this, she assures herself, because they need the money. She hardly knows her cousins; hardly knew their mother, her great aunt. Maybe the reason her great aunt supported a child she didn't know was because she was guilty, too, about having a sister who raised a monster. Orihime wonders if monstrosity can be passed down, like hair color.
When she gets home, she sets the laundry near the door and stumbles to her table, where she sits in the dark, listening to the whirring of the seven different fans. After she calms down she remembers that she forgot to lock to the door, so she locks it and then she forces down a little rice and drinks some water and goes to sleep, without putting any of the sheets on because it's so hot. Besides, she kicked them off last night.
She wakes up early and dark-eyed and goes through the motions, although she still sees him when she blinks and even imagines that he's standing behind her as she breaks the yolk of her egg in the pan.
She pokes at her egg and stares with those dark eyes out the window, where everything is sunny and a natural, verdant green. She turns on the television.
"-It's going to be another hot one, Karakura, and today she's really going to be a scorcher-"
Orihime tunes out the television and stares out the window.
She's thinking of him.
Something about a bank robbery briefly catches her attention. Back in reality, she eats half her egg and then ends up throwing her breakfast out the window, hoping some starving orphan or pregnant bird will eat. But that's silly. There are no starving orphans in Karakura, and birds don't get pregnant.
And yet he's showing up in her dreams, night after night. It's been this way for nearly two years.
The weatherman was right: the sidewalk nearly burns her feet through her sandals, and by the time she's at work, she's sweating. She dons the uniform and stands behind the counter, smiling faintly as she rings up milk and liquor, and ice-cream for eager children.
When she hangs up her apron and heads home, she's more exhausted than ever. She hears a whisper and stops in the street, so abrubtly that a businessman on his cell phone bumps into her. He hardly takes note and keeps walking without a thank you or a dirty look.
Orihime continues to stare wide-eyed at nothing.
She closes her eyes and pretends that it's something.
"Iced tea?"
"Thank you."
He sets the glass before her and then drinks his own in a single chug, unusual for him, with his tiny sips and good manners. She watches his throat as he drinks and thinks vaguely of Kurosaki-kun.
"Excuse me," he apologizes with a sigh, "It's been so hot outside. When do you think the heat will break?"
"I don't know, I didn't watch the weather this morning." She pauses, and Uryu notices her knuckles whiten as she clutches at her skirt. "Um, Uryu-kun?"
He tenses, too. "Yes?"
"How's Kurosaki-kun doing?"
Uryu avoids looking her in the eye.
He wonders if Kurosaki's message to Orihime was less detailed than the message he received, if Kurosaki omitted certain delicate details and if this means that he should omit them, too. We've got one. The word – torture - curled his stomach, especially when he had an apt idea of who conducted the torture around the Seireitei. He was sure Kurosaki and Kuchiki-san, not to mention other shinigami, approved of it even less, even on such a despicable subject. He wondered how Matsumoto was dealing with it.
"He's doing well," he replies, a bit tightly, "He's fine. He and Kuchiki-san are working hard. The last time I received a message from him he said they had made… progress."
Orihime stares at him, and then into her tea. "Oh."
She knows, he thought. She knows Kurosaki is leaving things out.
"Uryu-kun?"
"Yes?"
"We do good work here, too, don't we?"
Uryu looks down at his hands and mourns that they can do so little.
"We're living our lives. That's no small feat." He smiles a little at his hands, at the band-aid where he pricked himself on needle. He does not delude himself.
Not everyone can be a hero, he reminds himself, but it hurts him just as much as and more than it hurts Orihime – to be stuck in this limbo, this scorching hell-on-earth, and not to be capable enough to protect the ones you love.
He cannot even protect Orihime from herself, which may be the worst thing of all. He has too soft a heart for a guardian.
Orihime saw Tatuski-chan come into her convenience store once in June, but before Orihime could say anything Tatuski-chan saw her and left. Orihime can still remember the way those little bells on the door laughed at her, all tinkly and pleased with themselves. They were mean, like mischevious nature spirits.
Every year, Orihime and Tatsuki went to festivals together, holding hands so they wouldn't get lost (maybe more for Orihime than for Tatsuki-chan).
This year, Orihime goes alone.
She leaves her apartment late in an old yukata that she hasn't worn since her first year of high school. It doesn't fit quite right – too loose in some places, too short or tight in others - but she didn't think to check beforehand and adjust it. It works, anyway. So she twirls up her hair and slips on her wooden sandals.
She makes a detour and stops by the empty little area with a dinky little shop, where people can buy detergent and melon chews and soul candy. She stands outside and stares at the window, kind of like a stalker. She hasn't been here in months, since they sent Kurosaki-kun off after graduation.
She thinks she sees motion behind the window, and for a moment she wants to go in and demand that Urahara-san take her to Kurosaki-kun, that she do something. She stands paralyzed by indecision for at least ten minutes. But she remembers the humiliation of uselessness, of Urahara-san's cruelty, and when the dark swallows the twilight she leaves for the festival.
The darkness welcomes her, comforts her. It's hard to believe that for nearly six months she couldn't go to bed without leaving every light in her house on - she was sure, then, that if she woke up in the middle of the night she would forget where she was, and then she'd hold her breath until she was dizzy, until she died. It happened once – she lost all her breath and passed out, and woke up because she thought she heard him.
That was when she started having the dreams. When she was a child, the things in the dark spoke to her, telling mean jokes, but also stories about the demon worlds that they came from. It wasn't scary when Sora was right next to her, frightening the demons from coming too close. After Sora died, she was wary of the darkness, but now – now the demons respected her. She went through the frightening rite of initation and was now the darkness' own, its friend. And having a friend means you're not alone.
At the festival, Orihime feels a little bit lonely, because of all the lights. All the people make him less tangible, but they make her more cheerful. She eats a cake and gets so caught up in her cheerfulness that she almost offers him some before she realizes that everyone else will think she's strange for talking to thin air. She walks around with a smile on her face, reaching out to touch the streamers and pray for better sewing, pray to get into college, pray that someday Kurosaki-kun will come back and love her, and then she prays that she will never be alone again.
An old couple stops to smile at her as she touches the streamers.
"My name is Orihime," she tells them, when she meets their eyes.
"My," says the old woman, "Why, this is your festival! Were you born in August?"
"No, September."
"Maybe you were due in August," the old woman suggests, "That makes sense."
Orihime smiles. "Maybe," she says. "I don't know. I always wondered."
They say goodbye, the old man insisting that she take some of the mochi they bought for their grandchildren. "You look just like Rimi-chan," the grandmother explained, "Our new granddaughter. Big brown eyes, just like yours." They all laugh before the grandparents leave, and Orihime tries to eat it, but that and the cake and all their niceness and she feels like she's going to throw up.
She walks home humming to herself. He whispers to her: You're off-key, woman. She ignores him. He's imaginary. She thinks that maybe she wants something real, but she's not sure.
Why do you sing to yourself?
It's not dark enough, she wants to say, and I'm lonely.
They're both sewing when some string catches on one of Uryu's buttons and the same end of the red string sticks on one of Orihime's hairpins, which she still wears, but mostly out of habit. Uryu finally manages to untangle it (with a little counterproductive help from Orihime), but when that happens they stand nearly nose-to-nose, so close that Orihime feels sure he can see the bags under her eyes, even though she tries so hard to hide them. She can see the bags under his. She can also see the blue of his eyes under his glasses. She never knew his eyes were so blue.
He leans forward and she sees that his glasses are broken and taped at the center, sliding down his nose. She sees what he is doing. She takes his face in her hands and stares at him.
"Orihime-san?"
"Uryu-kun," she whispers back, "Your glasses are broken."
She pushes them up his nose, because that's all she can do, and now he can see that she's crying.
"I have to go," she says, her voice choked, and she leaves, walking fast, still trailing the red string that he untangled.
She wakes up sweating to the whir of all seven of her fans. Still crying.
Only this time because she saw him die again, and his eyes were ten times greener than Uryu's were blue, even though he's a dream.
She returns to Uryu's the next day. He seems surprised to see her, eager to have her sit down, eager to stand a good foot further away than usual, to show how totally friendly he can be.
"Have you gotten any new messages from Kurosaki-kun?"
"No… I'm sorry, Orihime-san."
She looks up at him and sees how sorry he is.
"Uryu-kun," she says, "I dream of him-"
"Kurosaki."
Her mouth moves but no words come out.
"Orihime-san-"
"No," she says quickly, "Not Kurosaki-kun. Not for a while."
Uryu doesn't say anything for a moment. "Is it Aizen?" he asks in a whisper, "Orihime-san, I don't know what you went through while you were there-"
"It's not Aizen," she says, and her voice threatens to choke like it did yesterday, something Uryu can't bear. Her voice lowers so he can barely hear her. "It's Ul-"
She gulps down a breath to keep from crying, and his name is cut off.
Uryu's eyebrows furrow. "It's natural, Orihime-san." He remembers the dust and Orihime's last grab, her mad compassion. "You felt guilty. You felt attached. There are names for this kind of thing-"
She sniffs over and over as the snot runs down her face. Uryu wants to put his arms around her, but he settles for getting her a tissue. "What kind of names?" she asks, eyes huge and trained on him. The tissue sits in her hand, already forgotten.
He hesitates now. "They're not important." Syndromes.
"He talks to me," she says. Her eyes get gradually larger and larger. She doesn't blink. "And… I like it that he talks to me. It's nice. It's like I'm never alone."
Uryu doesn't know how to calm her down. All he knows how to do is listen.
But Orihime gets up, still sniffing violently. "I-I'm sorry," she sobs out, so loud that his neighbors can probably hear her. "I-I'm so sorry, Uryu-kun."
"Orihime-san-"
"I didn't want to burden you with this but I thought that-that- you might be able to help me – I don't know what to do anymore, I've tried white noise and not drinking caffeine and not eating sugar and trying soothing lavender body wash and candles – but none of them work, and the candles nearly burned my apartment down and – how do you get rid of this kind of thing – how do I get rid – I don't want to get rid of him-" Her entire body rocks with sobbing and gasps punctuate her speech. He can hardly look at her, but he can't look away.
"Orihime-san," he says, he himself nearly ready to break. "It's all right. It's fine."
"What about Kurosaki-kun?" she asks, more softly now. "I thought we were friends. I love him. I love him. And he just left me, and Uryu-kun – I don't think I'm okay." She pauses, snot running down her face so that Uryu takes her tissue and wipes it off for her. She bursts into tears again.
"Sometimes I feel the same," he whispers, "I… We all relied on Kurosaki-kun. We all want to do something to help."
She turns to Uryu, eyes big, and even under the bags and the hints of bloodshot he can see how big and brown they are and how much they love the world. "You help me, Uryu-kun," she says. They sit there for a minute, and she stares at her shoes. And then she stumbles up and out his door, walking this time, and Uryu wonders for the second day in a row what he did wrong. This time he knows. You help me, Uryu-kun. And he can't do anything less.
One slow day at the convenience store she looks up and finds Tatsuki-chan there.
She doesn't say anything for a minute, because she can't tell if Tatsuki-chan is still angry or not. When she finds her breath, she asks:
"Are you still angry at me?"
"Orihime," Tatsuki says, wearily, "You left for weeks without telling anyone where you were. Ichigo wouldn't tell me, no one knew. And then some shady guy comes along and tells us you've been kidnapped and taken to – to hell, or something. I had no idea what was going on. These past two years I had even less of an idea of what was happening to you, and here you were getting further and further away from me. Then Ichigo left for good, too. I didn't know what to do."
Orihime flings her arms over the counter, trying to reach Tatsuki. Tatsuki leans forward enough for Orihime to hug her.
"I never wanted to worry you."
"I'm your friend, Orihime. Of course I worried. Ishida called me –"
"I need to thank him," Orihime replies weakly, "I need to bake him a cake. Oh, I can use that melon-taco flavored icing..."
"You'd probably kill him. Just… get some more sleep or something, okay? I'm sure that'd be a good way to pay him back."
She wakes up thinking of the green of his eyes, of his voice, like it used to be, how his hands were so dry and cold. She reaches for her face and she can still feel his touch. It feels so nice to think that she didn't kill him, that he's still alive, so she ignores everything that Ishida tells her is wrong with this picture. She feels herself tearing up.
Don't cry, she thinks, don't cry, don't cry, don't cry.
The idea that anyone could still believe in her hurts her as much as it helps.
Orihime stares at the glaring red of her alarm clock. Four in the morning. She can hear the birds chirping, can hear that the world is tired and that it's waking up anyway, and she can't get back to sleep after his words.
Orihime wakes up bright and early, even before the birds. She makes her way, steady step after steady step, until she gets to the area where that dinky little shop sits. The sunrise glows behind it, blinding her temporarily, and she makes her way to the door. Each of her steps thumps in the silence, and she has the feeling that Yoruichi-san can hear her already, with her cat-ears. The 'CLOSED' sign on the door doesn't deter her, in fact, she hardly sees it under the blur of sunlight on glass. She knocks, then kneels down to look into the peephole. A big, blue eye appears, then its owner starts, startling Orihime. In moments, Urahara-san appears at the door, with Ururu-chan behind him. He wears his usual expression, but this time his smile rings false, even to her.
"Ah, Inoue-san. Why are you here so bright and early in the morning?"
Orihime loses the words she wants to say. Her mouth goes dry and her confidence deserts her. And then she opens her mouth and the wrong words tumble out:
"Do you think somebody could be haunted?"
He frowns a little at her. "Yes, somebody whose family recently died." He pauses, searching for a delicate phrase. "But you know this."
"I know, I do," she says quickly, before her air can run out, "But this is different – he isn't – well, he isn't haunting me like a hollow, or else I'd see him, wouldn't I? Unless hollows are really, really good at hiding, and he'd have to be hiding pretty quick. I feel like he's stuck with me, and I feel it all - all the time." Her brown eyes stare to him imploringly.
The frown deepens, so slightly that Orihime doesn't register it. "So that's what this is about."
"Huh?"
"Inoue-san. Go home."
"Wai-"
He shuts the door on her, without so much as his usual politeness.
Her hands curl into fists, and for the first time in a long time anger takes over.
She bangs on the door, she stomps and she cries out Urahara-san's name, until finally, he opens it again.
"Please," she says, "Urahara-san - Give me something to do, some way to help. I know I can. I know… I know I can."
She's not so sure, but she has it on good word.
Urahara-san gives her a long look, then sighs.
"You're not asking me just to see Ichigo?"
She shakes her head so feverishly that for a second afterward she's sad that she didn't think that over more.
He stares at her, and she knows he is, although she still can't see his eyes under his hat.
"You know," he says, "I always felt guilty that I let it come to what it did two years ago."
"It…" She can't say it was your fault; as soon as it comes to mind, she realizes that it was probably her fault all along, because everything is her fault.
He sighs. "You can come in if you want."
Elated, she steps across the threshold, but as soon as she does she stops cold.
There.
Just for a second there.
She peeks over her shoulder and she can't feel him there quite so much, which scares her.
She thinks about leaving before she remembers. When his words come back to her she regains control of her body and steps into the shop, just as the first office workers pass by, sweating in their suits.