Chapter 10: Distant

Orihime bolted upright in bed, her hair flying around her, gasping and choking as she struggled to fill her lungs with air. She noted another presence at her side, yelling, trying to reach her, but she ignored it. With trembling hands she reached up and ripped open her top, inspecting her chest through the tears for any sign of the hole or blood.

"Orihime! Orihime!" She finally realized that Tatsuki was shaking her shoulder, calling her name.

She turned to the girl quickly, sitting up on her knees, and threw her arms around her friend. "I almost had him!" She sobbed. "I almost reached him! I was so close!"

"O-orihime? What are you talking about?!"

"I could have saved him!" She screamed into her friend's collar. Her tears were soaking the pajama shirt that Tatsuki wore, but nether noticed. "His life was right in my hands!"

"Orihime!"

"He's dead! I killed him!"

"Orihime!"

And then, suddenly, the girl with the cinnamon hair stopped crying. She stopped shaking, talking, holding on. She went limp in her friends grasp, falling back into a tormenting sleep.

"O-orihme?" Tatsuki gently pushed her friend up, laying her down on the couch again, as she had been before her screaming had woken Tatsuki up. The blood chilling terror that had been in that scream led Tatsuki to believe that someone had broken into the house and was in the process of killing her best friend. So of course, she had run out, ready to beat the hell out of whoever had dared lay a harming finger on Orihime, but all she had found was the girl- sleeping fitfully on her couch.

She had called out in her sleep. At first it had just been a chorus of horrified 'no's but then the scream had evolved into a name. It sounded like she had been screaming over the dead body of her lover. When she had screamed "Ulquiorra" Tatsuki had felt her eyes go wide. Because that wasn't anyone she knew, but she was pretty sure she had heard Ichigo angrily muttering about "that bastard Ulquiorra" around the time they had come back to school.

The last time she had screamed no had made Tatsuki's eyes go wide. The pure agony and torment she voiced in the scream was unbelievable.

Then she had broken down into sobs, and Tatsuki had desperately tried to rouse her. She shook her shoulder, trying to wake her friend up, but the girl was unresponsive to her attempts. She just kept whimpering, tears streaming from her closed eyelids.

Then, she had suddenly gasped. When she spoke again, the girl's voice was full of hate, an emotion Tatsuki had never heard from her friend. "Aizen!" She had gone complete still for a moment, her breath hitching, until her screams bubbled forth again, her form thrashing about. "No… No! …NO!"

"Orihime!" Tatsuki, fighting back tears herself at hearing her friend, shook Orihime's shoulder as hard as she could, shouting out her friend's name.

When Orihime had awaken she sat bolt upright in bed, frantically yanking her top open to inspect her chest as she sobbed and babbled in panic. She had turn to Tatsuki, her eyes full of heart-stopping sorrow, and then launched into her arms, shaking with her cries.

Orihime was spouting things that didn't make any sense, choking on her tears as she tried to get the words out. She finally got out a clear sentence, looking straight at her friend. "He's dead. I killed him!"

"Orihime!" She needed to get a grip on herself. This was the most distraught she had ever seen her friend.

And then the orange haired girl had collapsed, totally limp, back in her dream world.

"What… what the hell is going on here?" She pulled the covers back over Orihime's body, and then stood. With shaking fists clenched at her sides she walked numbly over to Orihime's desk, plopping down in the chair stationed at the desk in order to stare out the window. She wiped the cold sweat from her brow, staring out at the moon.

"I don't know what's happening." She whispered to herself. "This isn't right… Orihime's never like this. She has nightmares, sure, but… never like that." Just thinking of the girl's tortured eyes made the martial artist shudder.

She idly glanced down at the desk, trying to make sense of everything, and was surprised to see the moon again. There it was, a perfect replica of the crescent moon. It was backwards, for some reason, drawn in pencil. The perspective was from behind bars…

"Orihime drew this." She said to herself, not realizing she was talking out loud again. Her friend had always drawn odd things, to be sure, but never morose things like the picture before her.

Curious, Tatsuki slid the top paper over, revealing another drawing. This one was of a face. One side showed, concealed almost completely. The top half was hidden by hair falling over the eyes, and the jaw by what looked to be another set of jawbones. The underside of the eye was barely visible, and had strange makeup marked quit visibly. The grin that stretched up from underneath the second jawbone was sinister, completely psychotic, and there seemed to be blood running down from the hairline and all over the face.

Tatsuki shuddered again, pushing aside the drawing in disgust.

The next one was strange. It was just the right breast of a male, tattooed with a Gothic-looking four. Picture after picture, following that one, were various versions of the number. Sometimes there was a strange pattern over the side of the four, looking like half a shell with a horn producing from the side, and other times the four streaked down in a pattern like a falling tear.

She finally came across another drawing that wasn't centered on the number four. It was of an ugly man's face. He had markings on each cheek, and bones all along his jaw and just under his lip, so that you couldn't see any skin before his neck or after his lips. He looked to be dark skinned, with four odd ridges on the top of his head. He was smirking arrogantly, his eyes holding malice. And then she realized it.

"I've seen this man before."

She searched her memory, thinking hard, and then finally broke through what felt like a wall built up in her mind. And then there was a memory playing through her mind. One she hadn't known she had.

She was jogging, just after school, once her karate practice was over. She had made it to a park, when suddenly something hit the ground in front of her. When the dust cleared, she found herself and many other people staring in confusion at the huge hole before her. She felt strange, like something wasn't right. The air around the dent in the earth felt sinister, and heavy. People started asking what had happened, trying to find the meteorite that had hit the ground, when suddenly there was a man standing on the edge of the crater. He was the one in the picture Orihime had drawn. He had shouted about people staring at him, yelling back to another guy, but no one else seemed to notice. He puckered her lips, and suddenly, everyone in front of her was dropping to the ground. She felt something tugging painfully at her heart, yanking at something vitally important within her. Before she knew what was happening she hit the ground. She started to push herself up, hearing the man yelling that one was alive. She looked up, and he was right there in front of her. She filled with pure terror, unable to move or look away, as the inhuman thing before her asked about spiritual pressure and powers she didn't know anything about. And then he was talking to the man she hadn't seen before, asking what to do with her. He had lifted his foot, about to send her flying with a kick, when out of nowhere Chad and Orihime were there. She had watched Chad block the kick with his arm, which was now turned into something unlike anything she had ever seen. Orihime had calmly pulled her back, like she knew what was going on. Then, everything had gone black.

"This isn't just a coincidence." Tatsuki muttered in anger. "It's all connected. Ichigo, running around in those weird clothes and that huge sword. Chad, Uryuu, always disappearing with him. Rukia's a big part of it too. What, at first it was just her and Ichigo disappearing from class when the air got heavy. Then eventually Orihime started leaving too… and now she just stays. Something is going on here. Something big."

She glared at the picture that had triggered her memory, sort of awed in the back of her mind that Orihime had drawn it so close to the exact reflection. She punched a hand down on the desk, making the stricter rattle, and grit her teeth. "And I know just who's gonna tell me." She snarled, already imagining beating the crap out of Ichigo until he talked. She paused, then, her anger draining, and looked back over to the couch to where her friend slept. "But first…" She smiled a little bit, the expression bittersweet. "I need to be there for Orihime."

She looked over to where the shine for Orihime's brother, Sora, was, and felt her smile slipping. Even though she had never known the man, she found herself talking to his picture as is he was there. "Hope ya don't mind, Sora. I know I'm not the greatest role model or anything, but it looks like I've sorta taken over watching over your sister for you. But hey, at least she's got someone, right?" She sighed. And now I'm talking to a picture. Yeesh, I need to get some sleep. I'll deal with this all in the morning.

So she stood, casting one last glance over to where her friend was now sleeping peacefully, more or less, and returned to her sleeping spot. She closed her eyes slowly, frowning, wondering just what it was they were all getting mixed up in.