Would you like to leave?
The voice was fuzzy—static. White noise resolving into words. Distant, but familiar. A young woman's voice. Maybe a child's.
You still can. You've done it before, when things got too hard.
Orihime tried to blink, but her eyes were closed. Or she didn't have eyes anymore. She couldn't tell. It didn't matter. The darkness was soft and absolute, warm. Comforting. She was floating, encased but sublimely unattached. Untethered. There was power in that, she felt. She was wrapped in it like a butterfly in a cocoon, or cradled in it like a fish in a river. A part of her, perhaps, but not hers to command.
Yet.
"Where would I go?" she whispered to the darkness. "After this—after I've changed so much—I can't go home. I can't go back."
She knew it like she knew that the sun would shine and the rain would fall. The home she'd had in Karakura, the home that was everyone she'd loved—it had been too long. There was the uncertain passage of time, but also the intangible yet undeniable passage of change. Entropy that not even she could reject or reverse. Whether it turned out that she'd been gone from the World of the Living for a day or for a hundred years, whether her friends were alive or dead—they had loved and protected and enshrined an Orihime that was gone. Not dead, but—worn away. Crystalized, frozen in amber. A monument buried in the neverending stillness of the always shifting sand. Of time. Of Hueco Mundo.
A tiny point of light blazed in the distance like a falling tear. When it landed, Orihime knew, something would change. A ripple. A shockwave. A choice would be made. It pulsed gently, still falling, as the voice continued.
You could, if you wanted. You could have things back the way they were—Or no. The way they would have been.
Orihime's heart leapt, but—
"I don't understand."
Neither do we, always. But it is possible. It is within your power now.
Orihime almost agreed, wholeheartedly, without reserve—almost threw herself at that little flickering star—the way out—but she wasn't without reserve.
"Has this happened before?"
Not this moment, but similar ones. Twice now, we think, but there have been other—attempts—that failed.
So when? Twice…
It came back to her. That sense of double-exposure. Of two truths laid over a single moment in time. Ichigo healed and not healed. The room with the fireplace, where she was Ori the warrior in one, and Orihime the lost child in another.
"Twice now that I've—gone back in time?"
No. Time is not a puddle to be jumped.
"Then how is this happening?"
Time—if it exists—is a river. A river is never the same river twice, because the same waters do not pass through it twice. But the water itself—reality—can be shifted, diverted, channelled, when the need is great. Those branching channels can be followed in the same way as the source.
"Then I can't—I can't go back, after all. To before all of this happened."
No. Everything you've experienced will always be a truth. But you could pretend. If you wanted. You've pretended before.
Orihime might have wept, but she didn't. Not because she didn't have eyes, but because she was tired of weeping. She had shed so many tears—maybe it was her own tears that had worn her down, and not the sand after all. Whoever she was now—this worn and polished desert creature that didn't cry—still wanted to live. To be.
"I don't want to pretend."
Then you will stay in this world?
It was like she was back at the barrier at the edge of the world. She'd passed up her chance once before, she knew. She might never get another—
"Wait—when you say this world—?"
Choose, said the voice, as the falling tear—the shooting star—touched down in the distance, and then the voice became the roar of a coming storm, the riveting electric surge of a lightning strike, the crash of a cresting wave.
It became the voice of the river—thrashing and changing and dragging at her legs. A tide of power coursed through her, and she knew that when it reached her hands, a door would form.
On this side she would be—would stay—the Orihime she had become in Hueco Mundo. Ori? No, she thought fiercely. Aizen may have fallen in love with her—because she was finally able to admit to herself that that was what she had seen when she looked at him by the fire—but she would not be his Ori.
But her life would be—would continue to be—one of moonlight and wind and sand—of power and savage joy—of uncertainty and deep mourning.
On the other side would be the girl she was—or would have been—maybe in one of those five lifetimes she'd promised Ichigo.
At that her heart filled—she could do it—for Ichigo—to be with him—
Quickly. It is not safe to stay between realities so long. Choose.
"I will—"
But the vision ended before it began, because she didn't want it. It was just another outdated instinct—a habit to return to, even if it was no longer good, nor meant, for her. She couldn't picture it. She couldn't picture Ichigo's face, like she could no longer picture the sun or grassy, daisy-strewn fields or chocolate ice cream and wasabi-sprinkled donuts. He would always be her first love, but she knew that a life with him would never be her truth.
You must choose!
The river was cresting—
"I will stay."
The light winked out.
The voice was silenced.
The river closed over her head, and Orihime awoke to moonlight, and sand, and Aizen.