Thanks to all reviews as well, I love reviews so please continue to spoil me!
-
I remember a time where there was nothing but this plain room that had nothing but a bed, and there was a window, a window that held bars and beyond that? There was a moon.
I always looked to that moon and for a short time, it was my only friend. My only confidant as I talked with it in soft, hush tones. Half way in I would snap out of it and laugh at the insanity I was clearly displaying and bonk my head to get the crazy thoughts out but then? Then I would sit there, hands in my lap, head down and eyes even lower, and I'd wait.
I never really knew what I was waiting for.
-
"It's dark."
"It is a dark room."
"Yeah…" there is a moment of silence and a shuffle clearly audible within the isolated room. "We, kissed." And she finds herself blushing and trying to hide it even though she thinks the darkness should be enough to cover it.
He makes no acknowledgement towards her statement and soon the silence gets to become too much for her to bear. "I-um…" He notices her hand bawling into a slight fist. "The day you came to get me, I remember. I remember how you had hurt those Shinigami whom only wanted to protect me."
He grunts and she peers into the darkness.
A few seconds in she had realized that she was kissing a stranger, despite the unnerving familiarity of him, so, she pushed him away softly "gomen, gomen" and he got up without a word of protest or question to her hot and cold actions.
So now she looks for him and she's missing that cold yet warm feel of him and she's wondering, how could you feel so strongly about someone you barely know, yet do know that that person is capable of hurting innocents?
"My order was to retrieve you. Senseless killing is not something I take pleasure in. I merely disabled them in order to obtain you and complete my mission."
"Was that what I was to you? A mission?" and she can't deny that she couldn't keep the confusing hurt from her tone.
"Yes."
And her heat sinks.
"At the time." He moves again, but it's so languid, filled with ease and confidence she barely registers that he does. "At the time I would have done anything for Lord Aizen." She nods into the obscurity of him before he continues and she notices the ever so slight change in his tone. "Even if it killed me in the end."
As if he was actually, possibly, capable of true warmth.
"That was before you died."
"Di…died? Wha-Matte-what do-died?!" And with this astounding note of literacy, then there is light, a different kind of light from that of the sunrise, or when waking up throughout the night as you turn on your bedroom light, and it blinds you momentarily. No, this light was no mere instance of light, it was a signal.
And she was brought back to the place she had long forgotten.
-
"Will you sit with me? Just for a little while."
Self-pity, like evening shadows, came to darken her eyes.
"I cannot. You need to eat what is given to you and then I will be on my way." He hesitates only for a moment; it's as if instead of her slumped form upon the bed she is griping onto his arms in protest at the very moment.
"Leave us be." And he doesn't know if he says this to her or to the bringer of the food.
Listlessly, the lesser being leaves the room and as the room engulfs them she feel she is suffocating because she has a fleeting moment of insecurity, a thought that they would not come from her, that she is really left here to her own. She's drowning in the corruption yet asphyxiated by his eyes and his movements and the hole nearest his heart as opposed to the hole nearest his neck.
"… please." And she is meek with her words and he's not giving in-just playing along, conceding so he can get her to do what he wants in the end, what is wanted from him.
He doesn't sit but he does stand near her. He's not very close but her eyes smile, just a tad bit and he hates to admit that he notices this and somehow it causes him to wonder what it would be like to have her smile, with her lips, and her eyes.
"The food here isn't really what I am use to."
"Hmm."
"Heh, well, I guess it's not something you can relate to huh? Sorry, but you know? Sometimes I really am just not hungry!" She says this last part with spunk as she looks over at him for a response but when there is none she continues, a little bit more despondent than before.
"I mean…well, the reason is because I don't feel hungry." She looks to the ceiling, to the small cracks here and there and then, finally, at his expressionless face. "Do you know what it's like to feel hungry?"
"Yes." He says after a moment. "I do." And the implications is that of consuming souls and reluctantly she moves away, breaks eye contact and what if she had just been a soul he merely consumed?
"Why are you so difficult?" she's startled for a moment and then, pure genuine laughter escapes her lips for a brief moment before she halts herself and looks remorseful. She shouldn't laugh in a place like this, shouldn't laugh while in a situation such as this.
But it feels so good to feel even the slightest bit alive again.
"I don't mean to be." Her voice is light and she is looking across the room. At the food. "Like I said, I sometimes really just don't feel hungry; it's like-when you just don't feel happy, even when you watch two people across from you hugging with great big smiles across their faces!" She imitates this by flailing her arms a little bit before hugging her form tightly, a plastered smile on her face that is so fake, it's cold.
"Or, when you see a sad movie and you just don't feel sad." She's still hugging herself, he notes, and maybe-maybe it's because no one else will.
"It's right in front of you, and you know you should cry-after all, the character was a good character and in no way should have died. But you don't cry, or feel sad-or…with me, I do. But for all the wrong reasons."
"I feel sad because I don't feel sad." His eyes look as if she has sparked true interest in him, so she continues softly. "I think about my brother…my brother was a wonderful person, you would have-" she laughs because the person she is confining in, as if just realizing this, is not a normal 'person' but instead is an Espada and her enemy for all intensive purposes and he would, for all causes not have liked her brother.
For he was bad, and her brother was good, right? There's no gray, shaded area within that.
"I think about him. I think, and I feel, and I am sad. I am sad that he left me, and I am sad to think about all that could have been-I started to think maybe only those who really haven't experienced such personal sadness are able to feel sad alongside the fake sadness represented in movies, and those who have…"
"Are you sad, Orihime Inoue?"
She looks up at him, slow and steady, painstakingly measured and her sight becomes blurry and her form is hunching over and her body is shaking and she is nodding, yes, yes she is very, very sad.
And he knows this, knows it was a pointless question and that he would, at any and every other time, not even have bothered to ask it but he needed to see her give in, because maybe? Maybe if she gave in first, plummeted into the darkness below awaiting her, it would be okay for him to follow, just this once.
The funny thing is, as she looked upon him and fell into him, not literally but with her heart in her hands and eyes, if she had known just a little bit of what he was thinking, she would have told him,
"You wouldn't be the one following."
And he knows this to be true.
For Orihime Inoue's decent into darkness that really, wasn't so engulfed in shadows as one would imagine, was caused by him. Her abduction (by him) her company (with him) and now, her fall (into him) all of it, because of him.
"You'd be the one leading."
And he knows this to be true.