Bleach Fan Fiction ❯ Hell Butterfly ❯ Lazarus ( Chapter 13 )

Hell Butterfly

 

Lazarus

~13~

 

o)0(o

 

The slowly opening door draping a scarf of warm light over her cold and frightened form....

 

Isshin looking at her, and then behind her for Ichigo...back to her and reading the truth on her face.

 

The way his cheery features had crumpled was yet another in a long line of heavy blows to her heart.

 

And the way Yuzu had flipped out, beating furiously at Inoue with tiny fists before her father dragged her away and embraced her tightly...that had broken it.

 

Orihime had been incapable of remembering any other word beyond sorry.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

 

It made no difference, she already knew it didn't. Apologies hadn't changed a thing when Sora had died, and then it had been Isshin's regret that he couldn't save her brother.

 

They must be even now.

 

Equality hurt.

 

o)0(o

 

Unohana had told her to come here rather than her empty and unprotected apartment, though how a family of which three members had fallen to Hollows could keep her safe was a mystery. Tomorrow she would ask Sado or Ishida if they could lodge her instead.

 

But for now she was in Ichigo's room.

 

After her confession he had invited her in, asking no questions (why the white dress, where had they been, what had happened, how had he died, when?); only informing her that she had missed dinner (7pm sharp). With surprisingly calm practicality he had designated his dead son's abode as the new spare room. And then she had been left to her own devices as Isshin concentrated on his last remaining child.

 

None of them were in a fit state to talk at the moment.

 

Inoue perched on the edge of a Western-style bed, hugging the empty Kon plushie to her chest. She didn't know where the gikon was now, but he'd probably be highly upset at having missed such an opportunity. Her mind flitted from thought to thought, unable to concentrate on any whether they were serious or not.

 

The room was strangely fresh, a strong smell of disinfectant and dust dislodged by cleaning in the air. There was a paler patch of carpet near the desk. Isshin had warned her that Karin had suffered a heart-attack in her brother's room, before apologising that he had nowhere else to put her as Yuzu needed space and the clinic beds were off-limits to guests. He never asked why she seemed unsurprised that Karin was also gone far away.

 

They must have scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to erase the event.

 

Looking around the odd, sanitized bedroom; she could already tell that there would be no scraps of Kurosaki-kun left. Dust wouldn't work. She'd found a comb, but it seemed he'd never used it, so no strands of hair would yield DNA for her to `heal' back into a whole person.

 

It was hopeless.

 

Tipping sideways onto the bed, Orihime began to cry. She'd been holding back for hours, but she was alone now, and no one would be burdened by it. Hiding her face in the pillow, she remembered that last and first time in this place, saying farewell to a sleeping Ichigo; wishing that she'd dared give him that kiss. It truly had been the final goodbye.

 

Yet so deep down she had prayed it wouldn't be.

 

The tears streamed down endlessly, body racked by great gasping sobs. She'd even managed to bring an Espada back from death! Why couldn't she do the same for someone she actually cared about?

 

About to knock on the door and proffer a warm drink he'd made for her, Isshin heard the muffled wailing, lowered his hand, and shuffled away down the dark corridor.

 

o)0(o

 

Sometime in the small hours of the morning Inoue awoke with a gasp. She stared at the darkness, fearing that those nightmares were still lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce and rip her throat out.

 

Dreams of monsters and Hollows and war beneath the desert. Places she'd never been, creatures she'd never imagined. Where had they come from? She felt exhausted despite the hours of sleep.

 

Fumbling around for a bedside lamp, she flicked the switch but nothing happened. Perhaps it was unplugged.

 

“Shun Shun Rikka?” called the girl quietly, needing to combat a gnawing sense of loneliness. They spun out of her hair, emitting gentle light like fireflies. A few hovered beside her, giving tiny hugs.

 

“What's going to happen now?” asked Baigon in the fairy-version of a rumbling voice. His stolid, sumo-sized proportions made a small dent as he landed on the duvet.

 

Inoue shrugged and shook her head wordlessly.

 

“We can't bring him back from nothing.” Shun'ou flicked his blonde ponytail, looking at his counterpart Ayame. “Can we? If it was one of us, we could learn to because we originate from you, `Hime-chan. But for others we need something to work from.”

 

“We have to set parameters. We have to know what we're dealing with.” Ayame's explanation was hushed, she seemed to hide deeper inside her toadstool-patterned carapace than usual.

 

Their mistress sighed forlornly, not having expected any other answer to her unspoken question. Stroking one of Hinagiku's purple wings, she closed her eyes. “Tsubaki?”

 

He twitched guiltily. “What?” He was the furthest from her, fidgeting with a pencil taller than himself from the late Ichigo's desk.

 

“I'm sorry for demoting you. Will you be able to fight again?”

 

“Demotion?!” muttered Hinagiku, squeakily rebellious. “I hardly think shielding from all harm is a demotion!”

 

The little ninja-sprite dragged a hand down the pencil's length, and it clattered on the table in two halves. “I'm fine,” he sniffed. “The only problem is you being so weak-hearted.”

 

“It's not easy for me to rip a person in half!” hissed Orihime suddenly, defensive. “Is that a crime? Yes, if I was strong like everyone else I could have sliced up all the arrancars and rescued Karin and saved Ichigo, yes, I get it! Do you have to keep reminding me? I can't look a living being in the eye and…and do that to them…”

 

Hurt, she buried her head in her arms and refused to look at the fairies again.

 

“When you said goodbye to Berry-tan, didn't you take a lock of his hair?” mused Lily, who had adopted the vaizard Mashiro's nickname for Ichigo. She was trying to defuse the heavy atmosphere. It was odd to see a cerise-haired fairy in a blue swimsuit act so seriously.

 

“Yeah, yeah!” Ayame suddenly became excited. “You said it was a tradition from another country! A lover's token, right?”

 

Inoue blushed scarlet at the words. “I saw that on some stupid TV show. But I don't have it anymore; they took all my things away.” She teased the now petal-less hairgrips out of her tangled auburn hair, holding the turquoise-enamelled metal out on her palm. “I put it behind the pins but it fell out, see?” Her voice was wavering, as if her hopes had leapt for a split second.

 

Tsubaki had carved one of the pencil pieces into a small heap of shavings and now kicked the other half off the desk. He was inexplicably in a huff. Perhaps he was reacting to subconscious anger from Orihime.

 

Stalking towards her, he stopped dead and glared. If looks could kill, she'd have been cremated last week. Leaping into the air, he made one frustrated circuit of the ceiling before swooping and alighting on Inoue's head. He hit her once, and again for good measure. “Stupid idiot!”

 

She blinked away tears but said nothing, because at the end of the day she deserved it, and far, far greater punishments beside.

 

“Don't fucking lose it again, alright?!” grumbled Tsubaki, and a pinch of bright ginger fluff drifted down to land on her folded arms.

 

She stared at it blankly. As uncomprehendingly as if it was a mutant orange spore that had just grown out of her dress. After a minute or so she stopped breathing.

 

The Shun Shun Rikka were beginning to grin widely.

 

“That…um…that's…”

 

Tsubaki nodded smugly.

 

The smile that dawned on her face came like sunrise on a century of midnight. The six flowers found themselves blazing with golden fires as her heart leapt immeasurably high.

 

She was laughing, hand covering her mouth in disbelief but still laughing with all her soul.

 

o)0(o

 

The doors clicked shut with finality, but Ichigo could still hear the ferocious rain drumming against the city of glass outside. A seam of golden light still leaked in through a hairsbreadth gap. Tiredness sent his vision blurring in and out of focus, the black chains were only growing tighter and tighter. But he could still hear the…

 

The…

 

There was a word for it.

 

Right?

 

A word?

 

Patter patter patter boom boom boom patter patter patter.

 

That had a name.

 

He couldn't remember anymore. Never mind. Never mind.

 

He could feel himself letting go, relaxing completely into oblivion.

 

The noise beyond had stopped.

 

Noise?

 

What was noise?

 

He was breathing out, a long, slow, calming breath; but he couldn't make his lungs suck in again. Couldn't stop breathing out.

 

A strange voice was cackling, but he no longer heard anything. He seemed tranquil. A sleeping face smiling like a child who had never been crushed under the corpse of his mother. The permanent frown had been soothed away.

 

Outside, the clouds had ceased to roll and seethe. The rain had stopped, but it hadn't gone away.

 

It was suspended in mid-fall, suffused by that mysterious amber light, a billion beads of gold floating in the atmosphere.

 

The shattered bone fragments of a Hollow's mask were twitching back together, reforming with the peal of wild laughter.

 

And at the base of a single storm-grey skyscraper, the doors were creeping open again.

 

o)0(o

 

The first thing to appear was another scrap of hair. Then a fat globule of blood hovering over the plain blue bedspread whilst the chambers, valves and muscle of a heart were woven into existence around it. Shards of bone came next, clicking together like ivory jenga tiles until long, curved shanks and ribs slowly became visible. Tendons, tissues knitting into organs, vertebrae and a delicate, intricate web of nerves spinning out from each one. Lungs swelled bubble by bubble around a network of splitting branches. A strange, rippled grey mass quickly ensconced by the plates of a cranium. Jelly-like fat appearing in a slick layer over the torso, not as much as expected; though Ichigo was very lean and often recovering from something so perhaps it was less than surprising. Inoue found herself squeamishly mesmerised, identifying this kidney or that brain stem and many things she'd never heard of until she was sure she'd never need another biology lesson.

 

Certain substances poured into the physical plane from some unseen reservoir all at the same time. Blood, a few pints, looking like a lot more as it undulated through the air like a drop of dye diffusing into water. A flood of reiatsu and with it threads of black, white and red. His shihakusho, in the bankai form that it had been destroyed in, filaments that matched the strength of spiritual power weaving thicker and faster as more and more of his energy returned. Just in time to shield a few immodest areas as well.

 

The quality of the reiatsu began to warp, darken. Without being asked Hinagiku, Lily, Baigon and Tsubaki leapt back into their new golden pyramid, to protect the sensitive, sleeping Kurosakis from this storm of vaizard energy.

 

“You're not tired?” asked Ayame of Inoue. Regeneration as opposed to reassembling, not to mention the sheer volume of work to do when resurrecting such a dense soul as Ichigo's…it was a miracle she hadn't collapsed from fatigue at the skeletal stage.

 

“No,” laughed Orihime. Every cell that appeared was only making her feel more drunk on ecstasy. Alive. Alive. She was bringing him back from a dead dimension, saving him, repaying him, but most importantly not helplessly losing him the way she had her brother.

 

She was spitting in the eye of fate. She was taking control over life and death. And that didn't scare her as much as it should have.

 

“Well…” muttered Tsubaki in a don't-get-cocky tone, despite being the personification of her ego; “It's all reiryoku. It would be far harder if we were dealing with physical particles instead of spirit particles.”

 

“Don't be such a downer,” replied Lily, teasing him.

 

“Skin…” whispered Inoue in awe, silencing them.

 

Skin. And now she could see the jaw-dropping fine detail of this rebirth. Skin, a little weathered, a little tanned, taut with health and slightly crinkled around all those martial arts-strengthened joints. Peppered with faint, near-invisible scars from a decade of karate lessons and deeper ones from a year of part-time soul reaping. Glancing back to his face, there were eyebrows, eyelashes, tiny creases on his forehead from his funny, scary expressions. A spiky mass of orange on his crown. All the fine details that told his personality; that made him Ichigo.

 

Shun'ou sounded tired as he warned her there was still a lot to be done. Neuronal pathways, memories, fine motor nerves, capillaries, connections, pathways, essential acids and chemicals and infinite tiny intracellular microstructures.

 

“Yes,” she murmured, still pouring out her reiatsu into the Shun Shun Rikka, heart still overflowing with determination and joy. “Yes. Of course.” He looked finished. That was Ichigo, right there. She wondered when he'd wake up. She wondered if she had time…

 

Leaning down through the barrier of amber light, she lingered anxiously, hesitantly over him, just like last time. And drifted closer, closer; her hair brushing his cheek.

 

Feeling embarrassed, she closed her eyes, and blindly dipped the last few inches until their mouths met.

 

It didn't feel any different. His lips were cool, lacking pulse as her Souten Kesshun trapped him in suspended animation; he did not breathe. Inoue stayed there for a second or two, surprised by the lifeless sensation after so much time spent resurrecting him, then pulled away. He will wake up, right? She wanted to demand of her winged proxies, but to voice that doubt would only hinder their difficult work.

 

Ichigo's eyes snapped open.

 

“It's a bit late for mouth-to-mouth…I'm already dead, bitch!”

 

His eyes were black. And the mutated voice crawling out of his cold mouth was that of a Hollow.

 

Orihime leapt away with a shriek of horror, back slamming into the wardrobe.

 

The Hollow-Ichigo, Other-Ichigo, Not-Ichigo scrabbled with weak hands, trying to pull himself up with an unfinished body. “Aww,” it cooed in that inhuman, zombie-cockroach accent. “I didn't know you cared so much.”

 

“I don't!” yelped the girl, trying desperately to merge into the wood behind her and disappear. “I don't; I don't love you at all!”

 

The black-eyed Ichigo lunged for her, rebounding with a hiss of burnt flesh off the shields surrounding him. “Keep on lying to yourself; I'll bite your tongue out.”

 

A single flinch transformed all of her happiness into uncompromised fear. The golden arc of healing radiance shattered, but the triangular barriers remained steadfast, more accustomed to appearing when she was scared.

 

As Ayame and Shun'ou's twin influence broke, so did the curative coma. The Hollow shuddered and collapsed when its body gave in to reality's pressure. Bruises were blooming all over the visible skin: blood trying to move where there were no pathways. Limbs twitched and spasmed at the behest of a half-repaired brain. It could no longer draw breath and a strangled imitation of a scream gurgled limply in the silence before dawn.

 

“I - I won't heal you…” vowed Inoue, trembling uncontrollably as everything slipped madly out of her grasp. “I'll let you die again… I only wanted Ichigo back!”

 

“I am Ichigo,” drawled the humanoid monster round a paralytic tongue. “That's reeaal unconditional.” It spat the words out weakly, yellow irises rolling back with agony till only the black sclera showed. A mask was drawling over its face, a vain attempt to tap into its own regenerating abilities.

 

The reiatsu it gave off was poisonous.

 

There was no more time to think.

 

“Tsubaki!” If she didn't stop the Hollow now, it would ravage Karakura, starting with Kurosaki-kun's family. She could not allow that. “Koten Zanshun. I - ”

 

“I'm going, I'm going…bitch!” the Hollow snarled. She bit back the final deadly word, `reject'.

 

Ichigo's eyes faded to white, the familiar hazel irises returned, and his spine arched in pain. The ghost of a scream scraped from his malfunctioning throat.

 

Orihime collapsed to the floor, hyperventilating. “Quick,” she sobbed. Gasping. “Quick, before he dies again. Souten K - Keh - Kesshun… I reject!”

 

Bathed once more in angelic light, the welcome return to numbness sent Ichigo's conscious streaming back into oblivion.

 

o)0(o

 

Although the sun was not yet on the horizon, the midnight blue sky was beginning to bleach in preparation for dawn's colours when Orihime finally finished.

 

The Shun Shun Rikka fluttered erratically towards the bed and collapsed in a snoozing heap the moment they landed, curling up on the duvet now spread cosily over Ichigo's complete, fully-functioning, perfect, living, breathing, sleeping body.

 

The very instant their powers cut out, Inoue was hit by exhaustion in the abstract form of a ton of bricks. Stumbling towards them, she too curled up beside the bed, her head leaning on its edge and one hand loosely clasping Ichigo's. It slid tiredly to her side a second later. But she had felt his pulse, and was satisfied.

 

Without even the energy to mumble a `thank you' to her fairies, a deep sleep overtook her and she fell back into the realms of nightmares.

 

o)0(o

 

Alliriyan~*