Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It's not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.
-DL
Orihime knows that during the middle of the day when her parents are sleeping she can slip out their apartment door. She likes to play on the stairs with her friend, Hero.
The people who pass her on their way out don't think twice about seeing her on her own. She is only three, certainly, but she can talk well enough to make most people think she is older. Not that it matters—there are plenty of dirty kids that run around the dilapidated neighborhood with no adult to answer to.
Sometimes the nice old lady from apartment 42C—right by the stair case—will bring Orihime juice and sandwiches for lunch. Her name is Mrs. Tanaka, her dresses always have flowers on them, and she smells cleaner than Orihime thinks she's ever been.
"You're such a pretty little thing! Like a sweet baby fairy." Mrs. Tanaka laughs as she smooths her thumb over Orihime's cheek. Orihime was heading down to play with her friend when she saw Mrs. Tanaka heading up with a few bags of groceries and decided to help. She's only strong enough to carry the bread upstairs for her, but Orihime hopes one day she can carry both bags.
"I'm not a princess, silly!" Orihime thinks Mrs. Tanaka is so funny.
"Well, you could be someday, sweet heart!"
"Actually, I wanna, actually I want to be a donut." This makes Orihime's friend laugh very much. She likes the wrinkles that show on Mrs. Tanaka's face when she smiles—they're like happy rivers.
"I think you'd make a fantastic donut!" This makes Orihime happy. She thinks she'd be good at it too. She wonders if donuts can be sparkly, because if they can then that's the kinda donut she wants to be.
"Okay, well, I gotta go play now. I'll see you soon!" She hears Mrs. Tanaka call out her goodbyes as she shuts the door and skips down the hall to meet her friend at the foot of the stairs.
She likes Hero a lot. He is older than her by a few years, but he doesn't care that she's still pretty little and plays with her anyway. He always wears a super hero shirt, so she calls him Hero as a nickname, because heroes are her favorite thing in the whole wide world.
They like to play hide and go seek in the scarce apartment lobby and fish through the faded couch cushions for treasures. When they play school, he teaches her the alphabet and she's getting pretty good at it. Daddy thinks she's a genius.
"Oh, Hero!" She sing-songs in her silliest voice. It takes a few moments before she hears him bounding up the stairs. "Hey Hime!" His smile is missing one tooth and even though Orihime's daddy says that a fairy takes teeth and leaves candy, Hero says he didn't get any. She smiles so big when she sees him her cheeks hurt.
They decide to head down stairs into the basement to look for lost coins around the laundry machines.
"Where'd ya get that bruise from?" He asks as they trot down the creaky staircase.
She feels herself blush as she cups the ugly violet kiss on her cheek. Mrs. Tanaka never says anything about her bruises. Her eye sight isn't the best—but Orihime figures if no one says anything about the bruises then they must be normal.
(But her brother gets really angry whenever they show up on her. Deep down Orihime knows that its wrong.)
"Mommy wasn't real mommy today, she was monster mommy." She tells Hero.
"Oh." His face is hesitant. "Why did she do that?"
Orihime looks down at her small hands. Her eye lashes are flush against her full cheeks and a grimace forms across her mouth.
Early that morning she had been waiting for her mother in the kitchen…she usually feeds herself but there was no food, and her brother hadn't been home for a long time. Her tummy hurt because it was so empty and, she didn't mean too but, tears welled in her eyes.
Her mother walked into the dirty yellow kitchen to see Orihime in tears sitting in front of an empty cereal bowl.
Orihime looked up at her mother and saw something different. Her eyes looked…not there. Instead of the warm honey brown Orihime usually saw, they were mostly black—and swallowed up light like the mouth of a monster.
Her mother started throwing ceramic mugs at the walls and tearing up papers from the counter. She was screaming so loud that Orihime had to cover her ears and crouch down low into the chair. Her mother yelled "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"
Orihime lifted her head once to tell her mother to stop it as loud as she could—and then her monster mother used her open hand to hit Orihime across the face. The force of the slap sent her flying off the chair to land painfully onto the floor.
Orihime was shocked into silence. She saw her mother crumble onto the floor, her body shaking with gross sobbing. She started to pull at her hair and Orihime was sure she heard her mother apologizing over and over again.
Orihime slowly stood up, ignored the throbbing of her face, and stumbled over to her mother's skeleton body. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders and stroked her hair.
"It's okay, mommy. Everything will get better." She said this over and over again, and her mother embraced her hard against her chest. Orihime could feel the quick beating of her mother's pulse and it was as if nothing before had ever happened because she felt so at home beside her mother's lullaby heart.
When she looked back up at Hero, Orihime just shrugged her shoulders. "Let's just keep on playing." She said smiling.
They must've been down stairs for an hour pretending to be treasure pirates before another tired tenant came down stairs.
"What're you doing down here by yourself, kid?" Orihime looked up to see a woman, young and pretty, with dark hair all the way down her back and old make up smeared into her skin.
"I'm not by myself! Hero is right here with me!" She pointed to her sheepish friend as he sat on a dryer. The pretty girl paused, looked at Hero like he was empty space, and quirked her eye brow.
"Okay kid, you better go upstairs because the mildew has clearly gone to your head. Aren't you Ito's daughter?"
Orihime pouted. Could this pretty girl not see Hero? "Yes I am. And I do not have a mildew head, that is not a nice thing to say."
"Honey, you're down here alone. No one else is here." At this point the young woman has stopped putting her clothes into the washer and her full attention is on Orihime.
"No, look—"Orihime turned to point to Hero again but he was gone. Maybe he ran really quick upstairs?
"Yeah." The older girl said to Orihime. "Where is your mother?"
"Sleeping…how do you know her?" The little girl asks.
"We…um, work together."
Orihime nods her head and starts to walk back up to her apartment. She uses the few coins she finds from the laundry room to buy a snack from the vending machine in the lobby on the way. Her stomach feels better once she fills it with a little food.
She wonders why her friends sometimes disappeared like that…because it's not the first-time Hero ran off. And sometimes she'll make friends with the old people above or below her hall, and people will call her a liar when she talks about them because they say that her friends left a long time ago and are never coming back.
Hey! Thanks for the reviews guys :)
It's a little late I guess, since I am already 4 chapters in, but I just wanted to clarify what this story is. Disclaimer that this is all my personal opinion and you are under no obligation to agree with me.
So, from watching anime as a child/teenage/...and even as an adult, I have always been super disappointed in how male authors write female characters. Its like they've never talked to a real girl or have never tried to get to know a girl beyond surface level. Any way. Orihime's character is curious, and I like her. So, I wanted to take an imbalanced character and, I don't know, balance her out? I want to write her into something that resembles a real multidimensional female character. With this story I'm kind of giving Orihime a "hero's journey" treatment.
I'm going to try to not mess with the plot too much, but there will definitely be changes-because some of her actions just don't add up! If there were any moments in Bleach that you were like, "That doesn't make any sense" in regards to Orihime's character, let me know! I'd love t hear your thoughts.