Congratulations to Nataliebug2 for being the 100th reviewer for Color. (Sorry this took so long...) Enjoy your prize!

She looks up at him, distant, frowning. She has that look on her face, like she's some sort of lost puppy that's been kicked to many times but is just too innocent to bite the next leg that comes along. She has a certain kind of sadness spun about her like some kind of thick webbing, but as her pink tongue peeks out between her lips to quickly dark over the dry skin there, it's clear that she can still move.

He stares at her.

No words are needed, because there is nothing to communicate.

She turns, the webs around her dragging with the simple movement of her slender neck. He watches for a moment as the blood pulsing through her living body throbs in a large blue vein on the side of her neck. It's slow and steady, just as it should be. Her body is functioning completely properly, it tells him. That pulse of blood beneath her parchment skin says she lives and breaths.

But her eyes scream something different; a slick downward slope coated in ice heading strait for poisoned waters. She's slowly crumbling away, folding in on herself and smoldering around her edges like a once-cheery love note set aflame.

It's sort of fascinating, actually, to see her slowly fall apart. There is something completely captivating about it, like watching a flower wilt. Even though it's dying, you can't help but notice that the petals are still lovely, even though they're dead and cracked and withered around the edges. Like a lily; a flower full of life, and yet when cut and put into the prison of a vase it became the death flower.

It's more horrifying than fascinating, though, when the flower is a woman who actually might mean something to him. If she's dead she'll be gone, and he'll be alone again and more gone than she ever could be in death. It will be different than before, a thousand years different, a thousand millennia different.

How can one hope to live after finally finding the sun, just to watch as it is shot from the sky?

She blinks once, her eyelids heavy and purple tinged. It's like she's been hit in the face twice but doesn't care to bother over the bruises, just like she doesn't care to notice her life ebbing away as it is.

He doesn't know why he speaks when he has nothing to tell her. She was always the one to start conversation, she was the one who rambled on about things that weren't necessary to speak of.

He would just give her messages from Aizen and tell her to eat.

"Woman." The word spills from his lips like it's both a prayer and a curse, because while he wants her he also wants her to turn her dying eyes away from her and show some other poor soul that her life is slowly trickling from her body.

He wants her to look at someone who doesn't know her well enough to realize that she's dying- anyone else. Even if they could see it, it wouldn't be him, and that suites him.

She looked up at him, her eyes lazing up to really look at him. There's a faint spark in her eyes- she's realized that he needs something, wants something, and she knows that it's something important.

Except he doesn't really know what he's doing- he just knows he wants to stop what she's doing and that's the end of it. But how does one go about stopping death when they themselves have already succumbed to it?

"I'm sorry." She says softly, and she means it.

She reaches up a frail hand, a hand that looks skeletal to eyes of those whom see through her façade and to the core of the matter. Her body is healthy but she was still dying, and so with that knowledge everything about her looked dead or half way there.

His hands are farther than her own down that road, though, so he finds it within himself to accept her outstretched fingers into the palm of his own. One hand in his pocket, the other holding her's, one hand in her lap, the other held by his.

"I'm sorry." She repeats, her voice breaking. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She chants her apologies like a prayer, her eyes never leaving his, and it's then that it hits him. He realizes he already knew what she was apologizing for, but that it hadn't quiet reached him. It wasn't painstakingly clear- that the reason and that it was true- until that moment.

She can't die. She can't die- it will kill him.

Suddenly she's not the sun of hope he knew, but a snake that slithered up his sleeve and bit him. Her poison somehow has infected him, and so long as she stays with him it won't kill him, but the second she's gone…

He needs her.

He returns her hand to her lap to join the other, his hand returning to his pocket. He stands there for a moment, looking at her, staring at her, trying to think some way around the fire they've started.

His hand slowly slips from the safety of his pocket and up to her face, where he brushes a strand of hair back away from her eyes and neatly tucks it behind her ear. He's done this many times before, the woman is not foreign to his touch, but this time is different and they both know it.

She lightly parts her lips as he bends at the waste, leaning over her and slipping his hand behind her head to hold it as death met life; their mouths brushing together in a gesture that was as loving as it could be coming from a dead man with no heart and a dying woman who's heart was the only thing she had left.

When he draws back he's the one with the spark in his eyes.

Her friends are two years too late to save her, but maybe they'll be enough to keep her safe the second time around. It's a gamble, of course, an idiot's chance, but any chance is better than none at all at that point so he decides to risk it.

He taps the air and watches as her eyes go as wide as the rip in the fabric of reality that he's made. She opens her mouth, her old demeanor coming back if only for just a moment and she opens her mouth to object. He quickly grabs her elbow and pulls her sharply up from the chair.

He silences her would-be objections with one last kiss. He draws back and smiles something akin to a grimace at her. "Live, Orihime Inoue."

She opens her mouth again, both hands coming up to grab onto him. "But I-"

Whatever she was about to say is cut off as he pushes her lightly a step back. Her hand reaches out as if to pull the garganta back open as it slams closed, swallowing her, sending her back to a world she can breathe in. Sending the lily back to the garden before it can wither away.

He sits in her chair, the chair that he can still feel the webs of her despair clinging to. He waits. He sits in a silence that Orihime herself has woven from the very strings of her soul, and finds a certain kind of solitude that includes her own company there. It's something he wishes to experience again, though he knows he will not, so he drinks in all he can while he's still able.

He drinks in the last taste of her before he can taste nothing at all.

When his Lord comes, he doesn't bother to say a word as a sword is raised up to his neck. He's been waiting for this, patently like the good soldier he should have been. He doesn't flinch at the scowl aimed at him, the eyes full of malice, the killing intent. He just takes in a small breath of his flower as soon as the cool of the sword touches his skin.

When the blood starts to drip, he smiles. It's more sad and broken and nothing like a true smile, but it's a smile nonetheless. He smiles because for once in his after-life he wants to, because he's finally found something worth smiling for.

Something worth dying for.

Anything is worth the sun's light.