It was funny how he watched her that night while she stared up at the ceiling. She could feel his eyes. He didn't say anything.

All along the wall he had written some words. There weren't very many of them, and she hadn't read them yet. The only thing she could read without turning her head were the words at the top.

Apologies are words

She didn't want to read the rest.

She was on her bed, spread out instead of curled up. She imagined that above her was a blue sky and clouds with planes instead of white.

She had come to hate that color. She had come to despise it. It was not innocent, it was not pure.

The color white only hid things.

Her favorite color had become blue.

Her dreams were in blue, her thoughts were in blue. The map of veins beneath her skin was blue. The sky which she used to look up into was blue. The ocean was blue. Forget-me-nots were blue. His eyes were blue. Blue was open and honest. Blue had nothing to hide. Blue had so many shades, so many wonderfully different hues. White had only one.

She never told him that her favorite color had become blue.

He might have spoken. He might have said something. But she didn't hear him. She was completely deaf that night.

She slept under his eyes again.

When she woke up she was still looking at the ceiling.

Upon the ceiling there were still no clouds. There were no planes. There was no sky.

But there were words.

There weren't many words, but they screamed at her with such an intensity that it made up for their small number. It was only a few lines.

There are too many words

You think in words

You hear words

You sing words

But there aren't enough words

To make you see

When you are blind.

She knew he had written them. Hell if she knew how he had done it without awakening her.

She sat up and rubbed the top of her head to check the progress of the mysterious growths.

Still painful. But they were small. The lumps were possibly two or three inches wide and half as tall. They weren't big enough to part her hair yet.

She angled her head upward and let her hair cascade down her back and she smiled. She looked at the words until suddenly she realized that they had been written with a blue marker.

He had gone from the room and she had to wait longer than usual for his return. While she waited, she had gotten out of bed and gotten dressed, and examined the words on the collection wall which she hadn't bothered to read last night.

Apologies are words

But the words

Of an apology

Are not accepted

From someone

Who truly means

To apologize.

He had left the black marker, dry and overused, on the ground. But he had taken the blue marker with him.

She looked over all of the words on their collection wall.

She felt a little pang of sadness when she saw all of them. There were so many, but even these words couldn't explain what she had found while writing them.

She stood on top of her bed with the black marker and reached up towards the ceiling and wrote,

To Grimmjow;

To be blind of beauty

Is to be blind of ugliness and suffering.

But those of us who can see will have to find

And love

What they can.

-Blanca

She wasn't sure if he would understand. With the body of an adult, she knew that deep down, he was only a child.

He was a child who was lost and lonely and wanted nothing more than to rest.

She could see this child in his eyes when he wrote the words on the wall.

She knew that she had given him something, and he, in return, had given her something.

His gift to her, though possibly unintentional, was something that she'd had before, but not in this context.

In this little world they had created with all of these words and piano keys and songs and chess, he had given her a family.

When he returned, she couldn't quite stop smiling at him.