"Let me see," someone is hissing, spitting out the syllables so that they crack the motion of the corridor with spidery fissures.
"Me too-"
"-wait-"
"Look."
He can hear their drawn-out sighs from his vantage point: idly floating in the midst of swirls and eddies of students. They push gently at him, quiet and unintentional urges of turn back, but he presses on against the tide.
Even bobbing in and out of sight, he sees that they have dark eyes to match their dark words. They trickle thoughts and fantasies that stain their hands with invisible ink.
One frowns, staring at the cell phone in his hand. "I can never get a clear shot…"
Someone shrugs. "It's hard to do it without getting caught-"
"If only-"
"-and with less on, preferably-"
He tells himself that he is quiet, he is rational, but, drawing closer, he isn't so sure. Distantly, he thinks that maybe the marrow of his bones burns like molten lava, that maybe the line of his jaw is hardened like scorched-white metal.
"Hey," he hears himself say. His voice is alien in his own ears: it's as though he's borrowed someone else's calm and draped it over his tone. Only his tone. "What've you got there?" he asks.
Something inside him is satisfied at their petrified expressions, the belated attempt to stow away the cell phone. He grabs it deftly before they can stop him, palming the cool metal, and stares at the small screen.
Her mouth is smiling, but that's all there is of her face. The focus of the photo is distinctly elsewhere and he thinks that such a thing is utterly pointless: any picture of Orihime is a stranger without her laughing eyes.
His voice is low and sharp. "Delete this. And any others you all have." He cuts them off before they can babble an excuse. "You don't want to know what will happen to you if this happens again."
He leaves then, keeping to the shadows, keeping quiet.
this was inspired by one of the earlier chapters post-timeskip, when some underclassmen are talking about secretly taking pictures of Orihime. I figured that Ichigo would probably have heard about it and just quietly dealt with any creeps XD