Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters, situations, ideas, etc., of Bleach, and I am making no financial gain off this fic.
Remake
Orihime knocks on the door once and then turns the knob. She steps inside, humming brightly, and closes the door behind her. "Ishida?" she asks. She sets down her bag and sheds her thin cotton jacket, arranges it over her arm.
She wanders down the dark hall and peeks into the rooms. No Ishida, she thinks, and makes it a merry game. Where is Ishida?
On the couch, sleeping, dark circles under his eyes, glasses crooked on his nose. Orihime smiles. His shirt will have wrinkles when he wakes up.
Still humming, she spreads her jacket over his shoulders. Ishida moves in his sleep and his unbuttoned sleeve wrinkles up. The scar is faded on his wrist, and she touches her fingers to it, gently.
Poor Ishida, she thinks. Her heart feels swollen in her chest, expanding out and pressing against her ribs like bittersweet daggers. Poor Ishida.
The sound of breathing near his ear wakes him. Ishida blinks into the dark of his apartment and rubs a hand over his mouth before straightening his glasses. He wonders who is breathing - the room is so dark, he feels it weighing down on him and pulsing through his skin - and runs through the people who have keys to his room: him, and Inoue.
She is curled up in the chair, red-brown hair tied up in a tidy knot.
Ishida swings his legs over the side of the couch. "Inoue," he whispers, reaching to shake her shoulder. His hand has another idea and rests on the curve of her shoulder, a warm insistent weight. "Inoue."
Inoue shifts, wriggling down in the chair. She opens her eyes and blinks at him; her eyes are sleepy and dark in the scattered moonlight.
"What are you doing here?"
His tone doesn't alarm her. Inoue smiles. "I brought you early morning dinner," she says. "Lollipops, too."
"Thank-you," he says. What else can he? He drops his hand from her shoulder after a moment, massages it with his other fingers, uncomfortable. "Would you like to use my bed, Inoue?" though he thinks it stings his moral precepts.
But this is hardly the first time; he suspects it is not the last, and wonders why it matters that Inoue smiles, again, and yawns as she wobbles on her feet.
Wondering, though, implies not knowing.
They make breakfast together, when the sky is still dark outside and the moon has light remaining. Orihime hums as she cracks the eggs. She reaches over to drop them in the trash can and sees the old scars tracing Ishida's arm where his sleeve is rolled up.
He starts - a simple underreaction, a jolt of his heel on the floorboards - when she presses her fingers to the junction of three white-pink scars in a knot of hard flesh as if to baptise his loss with the soft-cool touch of her skin to his.