Hope is the Thing With Feathers
Author: songstar13
Fandom: Bleach
Claim: Inoue Orihime
Flowers are like birds, she decides, fingering a delicate white bloom. The satiny petals give easily, slipping over her skin with a pleasantly ticklish sensation. Not in the conventional sense, of course. She holds one petal between thumb and forefinger contemplatively. With but a bit of sentience, it, too, could dwell in the sky.
But it does not have that bit of consciousness to lift it from the ground; tangling roots anchor it down, discouraging the lure of airborne freedom. But still, it yearns for the heavens: twining tendrils reach up, up, up toward that intriguing domain as though, if it only stretches far enough...
The bloom longs for the sky and the bird cannot keep it. He flits through it, freed from the constraints of earth and soil only momentarily. Invariably he returns to the realm of living things, never truly free no matter how high he climbs. Earth is a demanding mother; as he wanders farther from her embrace she calls him back to her with increasing insistence until he cannot but heed her.
No, the bird cannot keep it, but the flower will never lose it. Fixed upon the ground as it is, it will never know the fleeting exhilaration of completely escaping Earth's hold, but neither will it ever know the bitterness of relinquishing such freedom.
The bird is like the flower, then, because they are both residents of two worlds; one an inconstant traveler forever slipping between the two, the other neither here nor there yet somewhere in-between and within. The bird, forever the optimist, forever sure that this one last flight will be the one that never ends. The flower, ever the realist striving for the sky with no chance of falling.
Hope may be feathered, she surmises, but promises have petals.