The last time Orihime felt loved, her brother had been alive.
Sora lived for twenty-seven years. He had technically been an older brother for only twelve of those years, but Orihime could not imagine a version of him that was free from the title. He had taken her when she was very small, just three years old. As a child, Orihime would ask him about the night they ran away the way other children asked about the day they were born. As far as Orihime was concerned, this had been the start of her life. A toddler and a teenager, running into an unknown future.
Their parents were largely a mystery to her. Sora had been fifteen when he fled with Orihime – more than enough time to learn about the people who raised them – but he had always declined to tell her much. Instead, Orihime learned about her parents through Sora's own actions. The pointedly gentle way he raised her.
One of Orihime's earliest memories was spilling a bag of flour in the kitchen. The billowing clouds of white powder in the air had settled onto every surface. She had panicked immediately, gripped with a fear she did not understand. When Sora found her she was frantically trying to scoop it back with hands that were small and clumsy – teary eyed and shaking.
Sora had smiled widely, grabbed a broom, and cleaned the mess without a word. Afterwards, he ran her a warm bath to wash the flour out of her hair. She remembered what he told her exactly.
"Hey listen, you can tell me anything. I won't hurt you if you do something wrong. Nobody gets hit here ok? Not ever."
And it was true. In their little apartment together, nobody raised their voice or their fists. Mistakes were not met with derision or violence. Safety was the backdrop of her childhood, and she grew into a happy confident girl. Any ugliness in their past was carried by Sora alone, present in the way he flinched at loud noises or wrinkled his nose at the smell of alcohol. When Sora joined the police academy after years of waiting tables and stocking shelves, Orihime did not even know to be afraid for him. How could he get hurt? He was safety itself.
He was killed when she was only twelve – during an afternoon Orihime did not care to remember well. A man had simply walked into their living room, raised a gun, and shot him in the chest. Orihime had been arriving home from school, walking up the stairs to their apartment when the gunshot rang out, followed quickly by the sound of a man running down the steps. Their paths had crossed on the stairway, and he had made cold eye contact with her for the briefest instant before flying past her.
He was never identified, never arrested. Orihime had done her best to describe him, but even she could see that her conjured image – impossibly tall, cold brown eyes, a black tattoo on his neck – sounded more like a cartoon villain than a real person. If she closed her eyes, Orihime could bring that moment on the stairwell back, but his features were undefined and hazy. The crime had been labeled an attempted robbery, though not a single item was missing.
Twelve years. Orihime had been loved for twelve years. She tried to remind herself that this was lucky, that many people never experienced even a moment of such real, unconditional love. She swallowed her anger and built a life for herself, tried to become a person Sora would be proud of. She told herself that the memory of her brother's love could sustain her for a lifetime.
But then, Ichigo.
God, I love you so much.
Had those really been his words? Those words in that order?
Orihime shook her head as she made her way to the kitchen. She had awoken from a fitful sleep with the desire to bake, desperate to think of something other than Ichigo. He had appeared and disappeared last night as unpredictably as a magic trick, and Orihime was frustrated by the stranglehold he had on her mental real estate. His words, his scars, the black hole of questions that was his life.
Today she would not see him. Today she would make bread.
Bread was what Orihime made when too many hours lay ahead of her. The slow methodical process of mixing dough, letting it rise, punching it down, letting it rise again. These steps could fill an entire day. The idea of spending hours and hours in service of something so simple was appealing. The morning was quiet after a night of thunder and rain, light streaming deliriously through her windows. Orihime hummed to herself as she combined flour, salt, yeast, and water into a bowl. The mixture was unruly at first, sticking to her fingers and the sides of the bowl, but it came together into a smooth pliable dough after some kneading.
Orihime had vaguely planned to do this with Ichigo someday – spend the day baking a loaf of crusty white bread. It was soothing tactile work, and she suspected that he would enjoy the quiet reverence of the process. But Ichigo could not be relied upon for so many hours in a row. Bread needed commitment, consistency, predictability.
Sora would have been good at making bread.
Her brother's had been the only love she'd ever known. Sora's love had been safe, certain, a net always waiting beneath her if she should fall. Orihime tried to imagine being loved by Ichigo, tried to metabolize his confession and let it settle into her heart. But Ichigo slipped constantly out of her grasp. Could love really look like that?
A lock of hair fell into Orihime's face, and she flicked her head back to move it, hands occupied in her mixing bowl. She thought back to the previous night. Her desire to care for him always at odds with the intense power he wielded over her. She wanted to feed him, bandage his cuts, make sure he got enough sleep. Yet when she was in his arms, she grappled with the irresistible urge to allow her body to go slack in his grasp, as pliable as the dough beneath her fingers. It was a dangerous thing, to be so devoted to a man who slipped away into the night at a moment's notice.
God, I love you so much.
Orihime wanted to call him, text him. She wanted reassurance that her sleep-clouded brain had not manifested those words of its own accord. But his cellphone had been lost in whatever altercation marked up his body. Additionally, she wasn't entirely prepared to respond to those words herself. She wanted only to confirm them, nod, and return to her kitchen so that she could turn them over in her head until they made sense.
Orihime perched herself on the couch, setting a timer for her dough's first rise. She was still wearing his hoodie – the black cotton now speckled with flour. Orihime remembered the way goosebumps had covered the tan scarred skin of Ichigo's forearms and wished she'd insisted on making him wear it.
I'll need to wash this. She thought, a little sadly. He'll leave for good someday, and he'll need his hoodie.
As if in unconscious defiance to this thought, Orihime let her body curl up into the hoodie, wrapping her arms around her knees. She could still smell his soap, could almost feel the rough skin of his hands. Love. It had been an insane thing for him to say to her. An entirely unreasonable thing.
The next several hours were spent as planned, pacing back and forth between the kitchen and her couch. She baked, she studied, she picked book after book off her shelf. Orihime fed her mind a steady stream of distraction. When thoughts of Ichigo slipped through, she shook her head in almost childish rebuff. He couldn't love her. Ichigo had been tired, he'd been injured, he hadn't been in his right mind.
It seemed that violence was the background instrumental to his life. Ichigo's body was in a constant state of healing and disrepair. Scars forming on top of scars. For the first time Orihime allowed herself to earnestly wonder about the blows Ichigo collected with so little fanfare. Perhaps, if he were a more violent person this would all make sense. Perhaps if his eyes darkened with fury at a moment's notice, or his jaw tightened in annoyance at the slightest provocation. But his temper was even, feeling at times more placid than her own. When Orihime had looked at the dark bruised skin of his knuckles her brain had gone blank, unable to create an image of Ichigo using his fists on anyone.
But he must. A small but undeniable voice whispered in her mind. He must hurt people. He must hurt them often.
She could offer no rebuttal to this voice. By the time the bread was out of the oven – filling her apartment with a thick and heady scent – Orihime had almost succeeded in convincing herself that everything could return to normal. She would see him at school on Monday. He would walk her home. The tentative rhythm or their lives would fall back into place. Love would become another unspoken word between them, like the word boyfriend. They would orbit around the gravity of these words like planets to a star.
The fact that she loved him was an entirely unrelated piece of information – a fact so obvious it barely needed acknowledgment. Of course she loved him. She felt a need to care for him so acute it was at times physically overwhelming. Lovingwas easy. Orihime loved her friends, her neighbors, the stray cats she fed in the park. Being loved was different. Being loved was impossible.
As she stared down at the bread, Orihime had the ridiculous urge to see him. Not to speak, not to interrogate. She simply wanted to share this small and simple thing with him. Cut thick slices and smear them with fig jam, honey, fragrant olive oil. She wished she could invite him over. Give him her time and care. He was still injured after all, and Orihime was certain that Ichigo would never allow his sisters to see or assist with his collection of wounds.
This image turned over in her mind – Ichigo alone and in need of care. She never did get the opportunity to tend to him properly. Orihime let herself catalogue what needed to be done. The bruises could heal on their own, but there were deeper cuts that needed thorough cleaning. Fingers could be finicky, and she wouldn't be surprised if he needed a splint or at least some thick bandages to stabilize any fractures. Orihime could do small stiches in a pinch, though a butterfly bandage would likely take care of the cuts near his forehead.
Without really intending to, Orihime made her way to the bathroom, pulling out boxes of antiseptic solution, bandages, suture thread. She was glad to have these things on hand, and it soothed her to tuck them securely into her backpack. Returning to the kitchen, Orihime wrapped her bread in a clean dishtowel. She changed into worn baggy jeans and a faded pink sweater. Before she really knew it, Orihime was outside, walking to Ichigo's house. The bread feeling warm and heavy in her arms, like carrying a sleeping kitten against her chest.