31_days | Dec 11 (Bleach) Innocence Lost

Title: Innocence lost
Day/Theme: 11 December // what shall I say from a heart that loves you?
Series: Bleach
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Orihime, Tatsuki, Ichigo, Uryu
A/N: Um, so this is not quite what I planned on writing. Not really at all. But I still need to work on Code Geass verison of this prompt and I'm not quite sure how to alter this without making it more blocky and chunky.
On the other hand, a sort of realistic occurance of what Orihime might have gone through between the end of the Aizen arc and the beginning of the new arc.
Summary: She thinks she must have left childhood a long time ago, left those dreams and jokes back when Rukia was just a girl and Ichigo was just a crush and Tatsuki was all that could protect her.
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"It's quiet," she whispers, looking around her room. Her apartment is bigger than she remembered, darker and emptier than she wished. Even turning on the lights didn't help, only revealing the rotten fruit and the small sketches lying on the floor.

Picking one up, she grins. "I never did hand in that art project."

It's rather lonely being like this, after being surrounded for weeks. She puts the papers on her table, turns on the light in her room. Her bed is still soft, unmade. Her notebooks are on the table.

She thinks she might have come to the wrong place.

Ding dong.

"Oi," Tatsuki holds out a bag, a relieved smile on her face when the door opens. "Brought some food for you--don't know what's still ready in your fridge and I don't really trust you to figure it out."

It just takes that one phrase, that one ordinary ritual, and she can't hold it in anymore.

"Hey, wha--" she splutters as Orihime squeezes her, tears running down her face. An understanding look crosses her face and she strokes her hair. "I know."

-x-

Tatsuki sits there, watching Orihime sleep. She can't quite bring herself to go home yet, not after her best friend finally fell asleep.

Best friend. That word sounds odd right now, after all they've been through. After that searing pressure and that long absense, using an ordinary word seems...unusual. Misplaced. As though this is a temporary reprieve between battles and before they can settle down they will be dragged to something else.

"Fruit car...." Orihime mutters, one of her hands balling up and rising before she frowns and shifts slightly. "Robots..."

A smile crosses her face as she listens. At least this hasn't changed--the strange meals and eccentric dreams. The way she sleeps on her front only to rotate on her belly, the salty warmth of her tears. These small things that tell Tatsuki "I'm here, still, I haven't completely changed."

That tell her--"I've seen and experienced things you can't possibly relate to." Orihime doesn't cry anymore. Doesn't leave her hair rough and unattended too, doesn't look frightened when the wind bangs on her window. Doesn't do any of those things until she came back from wherever she went.

Her voice is muffled now--face planted squarely in her pillow, arms motioning slightly.

There is a promise she made years ago, a promise that she has kept until this moment.

Getting up, she thinks it's about time she started her morning runs again.

This is a promise she needs to start keeping again.

-x-

"Orihime!" Chizuru jumps out to attack her, Tatsuki managing to block her in time.

"Chizuru!" It feels like years since she's last seen her. She feels almost old as she greets everyone again, excusing her absense with a sudden illness.

She sits and takes notes. Pen scrawls across paper, carefully copying equations and theories on the blackboard. Her teacher speaks, quickly, dropping useful hints for the exams. Classmates smile and chatter and pass secret notes along rows and columns.

Uryu sits a little behind her, to the right, and she listens to his slow breathing, his soft tapping. Ichigo twitches slightly in front of her, hand under his head as he faces the clouds, shoulders relaxed. Tatsuki is scratching her notes, boredly scribbling in the margin. Chad is still calmly staring at nothing, a rock in the room.

She times her heartbeat to their pulses and tries to remain calm.

- x-

Orihime doesn't like being alone in rooms anymore, doesn't like the colour white. Green is something she looks on sadly and black makes her shiver.

And whenever someone stands behind her, she has to supress the urge to scream.

-x-

"It's nice to see you're thinking of your future," the teacher tells her, looking at her form. "I didn't think you'd put anything...serious," he adds with a grin.

She tries to smile back.

If he was Tatsuki, she would have said, "I didn't think I would either."

Or "I look at those drawings I used to make and I can't understand them."

Or "I don't know who that girl was."

(and I can't connect to her anymore, I can't look at the world through her eyes, I just can't)

But he isn't Tatsuki and so she doesn't say anything.

-x-

She dreams sometimes about haunting green eyes and an outstretched hand. She can never reach that hand, reach that heart. He is always too far, always too quick, and erodes just as her finger tips brush his.

She tries hard not to cry whenever she wakes up from that.

The worse ones are when she remembers the fists and choking, the death that stalked the edges of her sight. When she sees the blood pooling around Ichigo's body.

Those are the dreams she wakes up from drowning, as though maybe this safe reality is the dream and she hasn't escaped the grim nightmare.

-x-

She hasn't changed basically. She still says things without understanding their implications, still moves before she can think. Still is oblivious and hopeless and everything that Tatsuki needs to protect.

However, there is a steel in her now, something that tells her that this girl doesn't need to be protected anymore. Not physically at least.

So she instead tries to keep the smile bright, willingly eating tasteless concotions and complainingly liberally. And if it makes her meader through thoughts, string together words that really shouldn't be in the same sentence, then that's even better.

What's worse is when she almost freezes, in the middle of a conversation or at the edge of a laugh. When she fakes a smile or pretends to yawn, trying to get away from it all.

Tatsuki spends those nights sitting by her bed, scaring away the nightmares.

She made a promise, after all.
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A/N: Okay, the next two sections are things I originally put in the story but I'm not sure anymore if they should go in there. Because this story was primarily from Orihime, with Tatsuki because you can't really separate them.
I'm not sure if I should put them in the main body of the story or leave them separate...>.>
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Her smiles are more thoughtful now.

On top of everything--his daily 'missions', his continous training, this readjustment to the calm and the quiet--he doesn't quite know why he notices that.

She gave him that look when she wanted to go through the dome, a look that melded fragility with strength, that showed him something he couldn't understand.

Uryu doesn't really need to but sometimes he catches himself glancing at her, taking in her smiles, and thinking, no, that's not quite it, before relaxing.

Her smiles aren't all that cheerful either, he notes before pushing the matter out of his mind. He really needs to stop thinking about this.

-x-

Ichigo waves to her from outside, before running off to practice.

Their relationship is fundamentally the same. There is a sense of solitude that still premeates from him, even though he has nothing to hide anymore.

(only, he does, and that is the hole Rukia left behind. That all of soul society and his powers left behind.)

She knows she's not enough to break through the barrier. Which makes sense, he isn't fully enough to break through hers either.

Only they talk in class and he sometimes walks her home and even if this is paranoia from the kidnapping, she doesn't mind.

She still loves him, still loses track when she thinks of him, still tries to slowly chip at his wall just as he unconciously does to hers.