This is probably the strangest thing I've written to date and I'm not quite sure how to describe it. I had the images in my head in for a long time before I could decide how best to tell the story, and finally picked the unreliable narrator routine. Stream of consciousness and verb tense shifts abound! Consider yourself warned. As always, reviews are greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer: Only Bleach I own is NaOCl. Near the end of the story, two quotations (one altered within the text, one direct) from T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men appear. I don't own that either.

Orihime doesn't remember what happened. Of course she can't remember it; she wasn't even there. But she knows what she felt when it all began. And she knows what she saw, when she arrived just at the end. She has to put the rest together bit by bit, like a jigsaw puzzle. Except not really like a jigsaw puzzle (puzzles meant Tatsuki-chan and cocoa and a bright happy whole picture at the end), maybe more like a broken mirror. Seven years bad luck, and the pieces are sharp when you aren't careful and they cut you ("Be careful, Hime-chan," she hears her brother say), and after all, you'd need a broken mirror to reflect broken people, wouldn't you?

So it is like a broken mirror after all. She has to hold the pieces carefully, try to put the image back together without cutting herself on the edges, but there's blood, so much blood and none of it is hers. And she doesn't have all the pieces, not nearly all of them, but she'd have to break them off of people to get the rest (break them off, turn them over in her hands and feel them to see but how would she ever be able to put them back again?). The pieces Orihime does have give her only the barest outline of events, but her dreams fill in the details.

Her dreams fill in the details.

Her dreams show her everything she didn't see and never really wanted to. Her treacherous, traitorous dreams offer depth and color and shading to her bare-bones sketch of second-hand accounts. Her dreams fill in the details, and it is almost the worst thing in the world.

Orihime was peeling potatoes for the cake she planned to bake when she felt it. She paused, knife edge poised just under brown skin. It was hard to explain what exactly she sensed; she wasn't that good at reading reiatsu in detail. It felt like a Hollow, but she had never sensed one with such malevolence and power before.

She wasn't worried. She closed the faucet in the kitchen sink and set the potato on the cutting board with the rest. She put on a sweater before she left her apartment (it did look cold outside, after all). She turned off the lights and locked the door behind her.

Orihime wasn't worried at all about the Hollow, no matter how strong it felt. Kurosaki-kun and Kuchiki-san would be there, and she believed with all her heart that they could handle anything. Sado-kun and Ishida-kun were doubtless nearby as well, and shinigami were always coming and going in Karakura town these days. There were simply so many people she could depend on to fix the situation, and she would be there for whoever came to slay the Hollow, be there to help them and heal them (if they needed healing at all, of course).

Orihime hummed softly to herself as she began walking toward it.

"We always visited her on the same day, the day she..." Yuzu sniffled and wiped tears from her eyes. She spoke again, but it wasn't a continuation of the same thought. "She said to run. I just ran and ran. Why did... Why did she..." She was crying in earnest. Karin put an arm around her shoulder and took over the narration.

"You can't understand... I mean, if you'd seen her when she said it. When Rukia told us to run, we did."

Orihime's dreams fill in the details. She sees Kuchiki-san sitting on a bench at the top of a hill with the Kurosaki children, a polite distance away while their father communes over the grave of his dead wife. And then: a subtle furrowing of her brow, perhaps her posture tenses slightly. She senses it before anyone else does.

Kuchiki-san stands and walks to Karin and Yuzu. She moves with ethereal grace and her skirt swirls gently around her legs in the breeze. She places one hand on each girl's shoulder, looks each of them in the eyes in turn. Orihime remembers from physics class that violet light has the highest energy in the visible spectrum. But in her dreams Kuchiki-san's eyes are ultra-violet: higher energy, more intense, burns your eyes and skin with too much exposure. In her dreams, Kuchiki-san looks at each sister with her ultra-violet eyes and says: "Run. Run as far and as fast as you can."

They run.

--

"She felt it before I did. I don't know how she knew." Kurosaki-kun's voice was dull and aching, almost inflectionless. He sounded stripped and raw, flayed by his own emotions. "She hit me, you know. It hurt." He touched the skin beneath his eye gingerly, as if it were still swollen and bruised. "I was gonna ask her where the twins were going, and she just decked me. Then she pushed me and we were falling... falling..." He was staring at her, but Orihime didn't think he could see her at all. Not at all. "She hit me when I was still me, and then she wouldn't raise a hand to me when I was--"

His voice caught and he turned away from her. Orihime wondered if he was about to cry. Kurosaki-kun never said anything more about that day and Orihime never asked. She didn't have to ask. She dreamed.

In Orihime's dreams dark tendrils form at the edges of Kurosaki-kun's reiatsu, spider-webbing inward and outward and everywhere. Subtle, so subtle, and insidious and sinister they wind around his soul and his mind and he doesn't even feel it. Kuchiki-san does. How did you know? dream Orihime asks her, How well did you know him that you could know? Kuchiki-san, did evil brush your face? Of course there is no answer.

Orihime sees her send the twins away (Hollows kill their families first, almost always; how like Kuchiki-san to think of this before anything else, to protect Kurosaki-kun's sisters even from himself). Sees her approach Kurosaki-kun, slow and graceful (such otherworldly grace in her small frame). Sees her draw her arm back (fist clenched, swinging, striking with all her weight and momentum behind her).

Kurosaki-kun reels. Kuchiki-san looks at him with inexpressible sadness. Orihime can't hear anything even though she sees Kurosaki-kun must be yelling. It's like she's underwater, except that doesn't make sense because sound travels faster underwater (she remembers that even though she doesn't know why), but anyway, she still feels like she's underwater and Kurosaki-kun and Kuchiki-san are moving like they are, too. Dreams don't always make sense, Orihime supposes.

Kuchiki-san throws herself at him then, flinging them both down the hill, and everything is happening so slowly Orihime hopes that it may not happen at all, but Orihime never had been able to control her dreams. They fall together, locked together, and Kurosaki-kun went over the edge but what stands up again at the bottom is... not.

Orihime was six blocks from her apartment when the feeling changed, when the amorphous "malevolent power" took new and distinct form. She stopped. Her knees felt weak. That particular energy, that surge of reiatsu she recognized. It was Kurosaki-kun's bankai, but distorted. Twisted, corrupted, hollow.

"Oh no," she whispered, "Oh no."

Orihime ran. As fast as she could, but not as far. Ran into the breach, into the fire. Into the nightmare.

Orihime had been right about all those people she could depend upon. Renji was there in a moment, Hitsugaya and Matsumoto soon after. Chad and Ishida came too, but they were too late; even more too late than Orihime herself. The rest of the pieces came from the three shinigami. She spoke to each of them separately, hours apart, but all the stories jumble together in her mind, their voices interlocked and over-lapping, words cascading together, tumbling down toward the bloody end. Orihime couldn't pull them apart now if she tried.

"She wouldn't fight!" Abarai-kun sounded angry. He had to be; it was the only thing holding him upright. "All she did was fucking block! And she wouldn't get out of the way and let me--" He stopped there but Orihime knew what he was going to say. She knew. Abarai-kun shook his head and spoke faster and faster. "She was talking at him the whole damn time, just talking and saying his name over and over like that was going to bring him back. His eyes were yellow, and that mask was growing over his face and she was talking to him!" His tone became desperate, frantic, like he was trying to convince her, like he didn't think she believed him. "I tried... but she wouldn't get out of the way! I tried to keep her safe!"

"I ordered her. I gave her a direct order and she disobeyed." Hitsugaya-taichou sounded more perplexed than anything else. Orihime wasn't fooled. The young captain had more control over his emotions than Renji or Matsumoto, but he was just as affected, just as traumatized. Perhaps even more so; as the ranking member of the Gotei 13 he considered himself responsible for everything that had happened. "I told her if I had to kill them both, if I had to kill her to get to him, I would. And she... she just..." Frustration, almost petulance, tinged his voice. Orihime wanted to hug him close and tell him it wasn't his fault, but she knew he'd hate that. Instead she nodded politely.

"And she said 'You will have to.' Not angry, or scared or anything, just as calm and pleasant as could be." Matsumoto Rangiku laughed, deep and throaty. "I don't think anyone ever talked to him like that before." She wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. "And then she said, 'I know I can reach him.'" Rangiku wore her heart on her sleeve; the tears fell again. She stared upward dreamily, blue eyes wide and unfocused.

"Just 'I can reach him,' not 'I'll be fine' or 'He won't hurt me.' I almost wish she'd lied to me." Abarai-kun looked down, deep in thought, and ran a hand over his face. "I guess that wouldn't've made it any easier."

"'I can reach him'," Rangiku repeated, her voice barely more than a whisper. "She did. Heaven help her, she did."

Orihime sees it in her dreams. Kuchiki-san dances. The word pales next to her speed, dexterity, and elegance, but words are meager things compared to the living image. Kuchiki-san is quick -- so very quick -- and careful, dodging and parrying his thrusts but never countering. The other shinigami arrive, one by one, and join the fight, but she's too quick for them, too. Any blow meant for them, she turns away. Any advance toward Kurosaki-kun and she is there, protecting him with her body even as she defends herself against his attacks. She weaves every movement into a dance that is hypnotic, deadly, and beautiful all at once.

It isn't enough. It isn't enough and it breaks Orihime's heart even though it is only a dream. The Hollow is too strong, Kurosaki-kun is too strong. They are a single entity now but Orihime hates to think of him that way (hates it hates it hates it). Kuchiki-san may be dancing, but the Hollow is dancing with her, matching every step with its own persistent, pernicious rhythm. It is toying with her.

Everyone knows it. Kurosaki-kun knows (is it really Kurosaki-kun, after all? it can't be but it is, but it can't be please don't let it be), the other shinigami know, even silly dreaming Orihime who wasn't even there when it might have mattered knows. And Kuchiki-san knows. There is resignation in her eyes but not regret, never regret (not even in a dream).

Kuchiki-san stops. The music stops with her even though there never was any music in the first place. The Hollow feels it. He stops too, dashing back cautiously, waiting and grinning. She glances over her shoulder at her companions as she sheathes Sode no Shirayuki, no movement wasted, no moment wasted.

"Stay back. I know I can reach him."

She walks toward him. Head high, hands at her sides, free of fear and regret, she walks toward him. She is still speaking to him in a soft and constant whisper, but Orihime can hear every word. Kuchiki-san is walking toward him, and Kurosaki-kun... (there is no pretending it isn't Kurosaki-kun, no matter how much Orihime wants it not to be) And Kurosaki-kun reaches out with his sword, reaches out like it's the easiest thing in the world, and stabs Kuchiki-san through the heart.

That doesn't stop her. She falters for an instant: impact of sword through breastbone makes her stumble, face twisted in pain, biting lip, trying not to cry out, ignore the blood, don't think about the blood, footing back now, that's good balanced steady face calm now push the pain away don't let it win don't think about the blood keep talking to him keep talking.

She takes a step forward, and then another.

--

"I can't imagine the pain she felt... and the willpower to keep moving... her resolve..." Rangiku was crying again and so was Orihime. The pieces were coming faster now, smaller and disjointed. Orihime had to struggle to catch them all. She couldn't avoid the edges. "She didn't stop. He was laughing and holding the sword straight out in front of him and she didn't stop."

"I keep thinking about her hands. They're all I see when I close my eyes." Renji's crutch of rage was crumbling out from beneath him. "The blood running through her fingers..."

In her dreams, Orihime can see everything. She wishes she didn't. She wishes she could run away and hide and not have to see any of it, but Orihime never had been able to control her dreams. Kuchiki-san wraps her hands around Zangetsu's blade, wraps her hands around the blade and pulls herself forward. Her knuckles are white with tension and her face is lined with pain, but she takes a step forward, and then another. Her hands crawl along the blade, one moving in front of the other, and then again over and over. Her blood is running through her fingers, blood made more dark and more red by her pale pale skin.

The hollow's laughter is high pitched, manic. Orihime feels it's never going to stop, but then it does. It stares at Kuchiki-san, perplexed and amused, stares at her impaled on his blade, struggling forward. The laughter may have stopped but the mask is still split by a wicked smile.

Kuchiki-san's breathing is labored and she gasps with each step and the blood is running through her fingers like grains of sand through an hourglass, but she's still moving closer to him, she's still speaking to him, and she's still smiling. She's smiling through the agony and the betrayal and whispering soft, encouraging words (Trust me Ichigo I won't hurt you I won't fight you but you have to fight it Ichigo everything's going to be all right just fight it don't let it control you I promise everything's going to be all right Ichigo).

It chills Orihime to the bone and she doesn't know why. She wants to shake her, just take Kuchiki-san by the shoulders and shake her and scream "Don't lie! Don't lie to us! Nothing is ever going to be all right again!" But Orihime wasn't there, and this is only a dream.

And in her dreams Kuchiki-san reaches him. Driving his sword through her body, the blade piercing her heart and exiting between her shoulder blades, pulling herself along its length with white lacerated hands (the blood running through her fingers), she closes the distance between them. She's close now, close enough to touch Kurosaki-kun, and that is precisely what she does. Moving slowly, dream-like (of course because it is a dream, Orihime thinks), Kuchiki-san lifts one slender hand toward his face. Not really a face anymore but a mask, a gruesome grinning mask, and how strange that it is white streaked with crimson, just like Kuchiki-san's pallid, bleeding hands. Red on white, drawing closer, connecting with an air of horrific destiny.

The tips of Kuchiki-san's fingers brush against Kurosaki-kun's cheek (where his cheek would lie, beneath the mask) and that is all it takes. The mask shatters. Porcelain white flakes fall around Kurosaki-kun like snow, fall with the blood from Kuchiki-san's hands. She looks up at him, violet eyes meeting brown, and smiles.

And that's where the dream ends, but not because Orihime wakes up. That moment holds the cruel intersection of dream and memory, the bitter convergence of fancy and fact. That was the moment Orihime entered the scene, breathless and terrified, and while what she saw invades her dreams, the details -- the memories -- are all her own.

Orihime had been running to get there and she didn't stop once she arrived. The first thing -- the only thing -- she saw for long minutes was them. Everything else receded into meaningless background, into white noise.

She was not there to see the mask shatter, but the pieces were still falling like cherry blossoms. Kurosaki-kun's face was red and raw and frozen in shock. He was still holding Zangetsu out, while Kuchiki-san... Kuchiki-san... There was so much blood. Orihime pushed past someone, she didn't know who, as she rushed to the other girl's side.

Kuchiki-san wavered, her whole body swaying gently, held up only by the slender blade through her chest. Her hand fell limp, fingers leaving a trail of blood along the side of Kurosaki-kun's face. Kurosaki-kun's face... He stared at Kuchiki-san: transfixed, devastated. Orihime knew there were no words to describe it (but she remembers it, she sees it in her dreams). Kuchiki-san collapsed, falling forward into his arms. He sank to the ground with her, removing the sword as gently as possible then flinging it away in disgust. Her head rolled backward and he moved his arm to support her, never taking his eyes from her face. Her lips parted. Orihime was close then, skidding to a stop and falling onto her knees beside Kuchiki-san, already summoning Shu'no and Ayame, already concentrating all her power to heal her. Kuchiki-san's voice was weak, almost inaudible, but Orihime was close enough to hear.

"...tol' you...it'd be...l'right."

And suddenly the rest of the world came into focus, a torrent of noise rushing all around her. Hitsugaya-taichou was shouting into a cell phone like Kuchiki-san's, demanding the 4th Division be deployed. Renji was howling out his grief and fury. Matsumoto's calm voice was even more disturbing than his anguished wails. "You can't kill him now. She'd never forgive you. Renji! Look at me, stay with me. Orihime is here and the 4th is coming, that's all we can do. She'd never forgive you." Kurosaki-kun was oblivious to everything but Kuchiki-san. "What the hell were you thinking!? Rukia! Rukia! Don't close your eyes, keep looking at me. Rukia... I'm sorry..." He didn't notice Orihime until she pushed one of his hands out of her way.

Orihime was cold (the wind was blowing right through the loose weave of her sweater, why couldn't she ever think of these things before--). Her knee hurt (scraped when she fell, scraped knee just like a child, but there's no one left to make it better, no one--). Orihime was panicking (so weak, lost so much blood, barely breathing, never healed anything like this before, not strong enough not strong enough I'm not--).

Only when she pushed Kurosaki-kun's hand out of her way did he see her. He looked up from Kuchiki-san, stared deep into Orihime's eyes. She couldn't escape. Her hands still worked frantically, but her eyes were locked on his, trapped by the undisguised vulnerability she saw there.

"Orihime!" (voice hoarse and ragged but he called her Orihime and he's never called her--) "Orihime, please! You have to heal her!" (trying, trying so hard but he said it again, didn't imagine it, but nothing makes sense right now he never calls her--) "Please, Orihime, save her!" (does naming a thing give it power or does knowing its name give you power over it? she doesn't remember doesn't understand there's no one left to--)

Dumbfounded, she nodded. He looked away first, back to Kuchiki-san. Orihime's mind was tangled and turbulent but one thought clawed and scratched its way above everything else. This is the most intimacy I will ever know from him. In that moment, with perfect clarity, she knew it was true. Kurosaki-kun looked deep into her eyes, he called her 'Orihime,' and that was as close as she would ever be to him. All she would ever have from him was this: an intimacy born of fear and supplication, his heart and soul bare before her, begging her to save Kuchiki-san.

She stared at her hands, at Kuchiki-san's wound, at the warm glow of light that encompassed both. Stared downward, keeping her face and her tears hidden from Kurosaki-kun. Not that he would notice... Kuchiki-san had his full attention again; he was yelling at her like before and Orihime didn't know how it was possible to put so much affection into insults. Kuchiki-san... I hope you can hear him, Orihime thought. Hear him, and come back to us.

It was silly, Orihime realized, so silly. If Kuchiki-san couldn't hear Kurosaki-kun shouting in her face then she certainly couldn't hear Orihime's thinking. She can't hear, she doesn't know we're here and she's fading she's just fading away and there's nothing I can... Orihime could feel the panic setting in again and forced herself calm. It was good, being calm. It stopped the tears and it brought her focus back to what really mattered. Kuchiki-san, you're my friend. You're my friend and I won't let you down. And Kurosaki-kun... you're my friend, too. If this is all I can do for you, all I can be for you, I accept it gladly. It will be enough for me.

It was funny, Orihime realized (but not until much later), so very funny. When her resolve was at its strongest, when she was most determined, just when everything fell into place in her mind it was taken out of her hands completely. She never saw the bright flash of the portal opening; the glow of her Soten Kisshun washed away all other light. She was concentrating too hard on Kuchiki-san to hear the footsteps. She felt the hands on her shoulders though, shaking her, pulling her away.

"No! No, please! I just need more time, she needs help--" The hands pulled her around to face a shinigami she didn't recognize. She saw four others, one checking Kurosaki-kun for injury and the other three placing Kuchiki-san on a stretcher.

The one holding Orihime released her, saying, "It's okay. We're taking her to Unohana-taichou."

Orihime nodded. Of course, of course the 4th Division was here. She realized she was still nodding when the shinigami touched her shoulders again, quickly examining her. "Are you all right?"

"I'm not hurt," she replied carefully (cold, knee bleeding, legs aching, heart breaking, adrenaline leaving, scared so scared but not hurt). "I think I should just--"

"Why don't you--"

"-- sit down," they finished at the same time. He was gone before Orihime could nod at him again, joining the other shinigami with Kuchiki-san. She fell more than sat. The ground was cold against her bare legs but she was too tired to care; the adrenaline rush had worn off and she felt light-headed and empty. Kurosaki-kun was sitting too, leaning forward with his face hidden and hands clenched, fingers dug deep into the bloodstained earth.

It was all her fault, Orihime realized (but not until much later), it really was all her fault. The worst thing in the world, the thing that haunts her both asleep and awake. And it never would have happened it she hadn't looked up. She couldn't look at him. She couldn't look at him, so she looked at Kuchiki-san instead. She looked up just in time to see a young shinigami crouched by Kuchiki-san's stretcher, just in time to see that girl glance to her superior and shake her head. Such a small thing, such a subtle gesture but it tore the bottom out from Orihime's world all over again.

Orihime made herself stand and stumbled over to Kurosaki-kun. She was speaking and pulling him to his feet all at once. "Get up! You... you have to--" The previous efficiency of the 4th Division had been replaced by inhuman rapidity. Orihime knew there wasn't much time.

He looked confused and his footing was unsteady. "Inoue?" (of course it was just Inoue now, of course she should have expected) "What are you--"

"Kurosaki-kun, they're taking her. You have to-- you have to go with her--" She was pushing him forward, while he looked over his shoulder trying to speak to her. "You have to be with her..." in case she...

She hoped she wouldn't have to say it out loud, to make it real. The set of his jaw told her he understood. Orihime strode toward the portal with him, still holding his arm like she was afraid he'd escape. It seemed so close -- the portal, Kuchiki-san, comfort, absolution -- and then he was there.

"Kuchiki-taichou," Orihime breathed. He didn't answer. He didn't seem to see her at all. He blocked their path and stared deathly still into Kurosaki-kun. Orihime had never noticed his eyes before. His eyes were like Rukia's in color and intensity, but cold, so very cold she shivered even though he wasn't looking at her. Like dry ice, she thought, it doesn't burn you because it's hot, it freezes the water in your skin (she remembers that even though she doesn't know why). Even when she is only dreaming she can't meet his gaze. There are eyes here, eyes in this death's dream kingdom, eyes in this valley of dying stars (she remembers that even though she doesn't know why), and she cannot withstand them.

Kurosaki-kun wasn't scared, he wasn't frozen like strange, silly Orihime. His voice was strong and clear, all the fear and vulnerability banished behind another mask (no, not a mask, anything but that, any metaphor save that one).

"I need to go with her. I need to be--"

Kuchiki Byakuya's face didn't change. He just stared, stared with his dry ice eyes (damnation in his blazing, freezing eyes), and said: "You have done enough." Each clipped word a separate condemnation with its own terrible power. He didn't see the aftermath, only spoke his four brief words (little things, but Orihime knows the littlest things can hurt the most) and turned and left, the portal closing behind his back.

He didn't see the worst thing in the world. But Orihime did, and she remembers; it haunts her both asleep and awake.

Kurosaki-kun... broke. There was no other word for it (but Orihime knows she isn't very good with words). He didn't flinch or move or speak (Orihime is sure he didn't even blink), but he broke and she saw it, heard it, felt it and a part of her will live inside that moment for the rest of her days. In that instant she knew something inside him was irrevocably lost and the only person who could ever hope to fix it was gone (out of this world, perhaps out of this life).

She remembered she was holding his arm and released it, watched it fall slack to his side. The only thing she could think to say were the last words she had heard from Kuchiki-san. "It... it'll be all right." She heard the crack in her voice, felt the tears welling in her eyes and tried to suppress it all, tried to be strong like she would have been. The tears kept coming; tears for Kuchiki-san who was (no, don't think it, don't think it, they were taking her to Unohana-taichou, she could live, she could be all right, don't even think anything else), tears for Kurosaki-kun who was (broken broken broken repeated in her head until it was almost meaningless).

"It will be all right!" Orihime said it again and again, with mounting desperation, not to be heard but to drown the words tumbled forth by her kaleidoscope mind: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends (she remembers that, and right now, in this moment, she knows exactly why).