Pairing:
Orihime/Ishida, Orihime -- Ichigo
Word Count: 227
Rating:
PG
Orihime will go through a sad rocky period in which she
slowly comes to terms with the fact that Ichigo likes Rukia in the
way she likes him, and when she needs a shoulder to cry on, there
will be Ishida, the (as tomomichi put it) "gayest straight boy
ever". And I'm not just flipping this off out of my guilty need
to comfort poor heartbroken Orihime. It pinged at me madly way before
Orihime's crush on Ichigo penetrated my thick, thick skull.He
is laughing in the way he never laughs with her, a special laugh he
only laughs when he is around Rukia. He never seems to notice that
his laughter can be different, but Orihime notices. She's happy for
Ichigo, or she should be happy for Ichigo, and she shouldn't hate
Rukia so much, and she shouldn't feel her smiles grow weaker and
faker.
She shouldn't wish that Ichigo would notice and ask what's wrong, so she can maybe gather the courage to confess. It would only make it harder for him if she did. He wouldn't want to hurt her but he wouldn't be able to reciprocate, and that hurts her most. In her dreams, though, he notices and he asks and when she tells him, he tells her that secretly he's thought of her, too, and he's like that with Rukia only because she is a shinigami too.
She wishes someone would ask.
Instead she smiles blandly and acts as usual as she can, and Tatsuki notices but doesn't know why and Matsumoto knows why but doesn't tell.
And one day she hears the question, the right question but the wrong person. She looks up into eyes framed by glasses and cries into a narrower chest, a less rumpled shirt, and wishes the world could be right again instead of just a little less wrong.