Author's notes: Just a short bit of fluff I wrote when I needed a smile. This can be seen either as shippy or friendshippy. :)

The pain was receding, slowly, slowly, and he watched in astonishment as his arm grew longer, millimetre by millimetre, as shards of bone, strands of lean, sinewy muscle and flakes of paper-white skin knitted themselves together, his stump of a wrist gradually lengthening as it reformed the shape of a slender hand beneath the soft golden glow of Orihime's barrier.

Orihime was silent as she worked, biting her lip in anxious concentration as she rejected the very laws of reality and re-wrote the past, to make things as if Uryu's horrific injuries had never happened. It was a most impressive feat, he had to admit; reversing the damage that Ichigo's sword had done to his torso was amazing in itself, but perfectly re-growing an appendage as complex as an human hand sounded almost like some miracle from a fantasy novel. If he hadn't been seeing it with his own eyes, Uryu wouldn't have believed it possible.

This girl was truly amazing.

Every so often, Orihime would glance away from Uryu's injuries and settle her worried gaze on his face, wordlessly asking how he was feeling. Uryu would respond silently to these enquiries with a gentle smile, reassuring Orihime that she had no reason to worry, that her powers were working perfectly. Orihime, however, remained unconvinced; she ran the fingers of one hand through her hair and sighed, before resting the hand on the dusty ground by the edge of her dome.

Unable to find any words which seemed good enough to convince her that he felt fine, he reached out his intact right hand towards the bottom edge of the barrier, its progress completely unnoticed by Orihime, until the tips of Uryu's fingers hit the dome and he gasped, feeling a powerful force repelling his fingers from the impenetrable orange blockade like two magnets pushing each other away.

Clearly, Orihime heard the gasp escape from Uryu's lips, for she glanced down at the floor where his hand lay just an inch away from hers. Orihime gave an half-smile and crossed the barrier herself, resting her dainty hand comfortingly over his.

Uryu immediately intertwined his long fingers with her smaller ones and gave her hand a short squeeze, tacitly reassuring them both that he would be okay and that they would be able to go home very soon.