Reflection

Chapter 4

Where the hell did that idiot run off to?! Rukia had searched for Ichigo’s reiatsu all night and finding no traces of it had returned to the house.

Sitting on the edge of the bed they had been sharing since making their relationship official, she was a nervous wreck, wringing the long lacy skirting of her white nightgown. Her little hands were so worked up that the cloth of her clothing was threatening to tear. Even her right leg was bouncing in anxiety.

The door of the bedroom opened and she jumped to her feet to bite his head off for worrying her so much. Though the room was mostly dark, the light of the hallway revealed his tall shadow and spiky loud-looking orange hair.

“What the heck-?” the words halted in her throat when he turned on the light. Blinking at his downcast eyes and bare torso, she redirected her question to ask dubiously, “Where’s your shirt?”

His broad shoulders tensed.

“Dunno’, stupid Hollow took me off somewhere,” he muttered not looking her way as he walked over to the dresser to pull out some nightclothes.

“And do you even know what he did?” she barely knew of Ichigo’s Hollow so his behavioral patterns and antics were a mystery.

With his back turned to her, he hesitated before slowly shaking his head.

He’s lying.

Opening her mouth to start pressuring him to talk, he cut her off by softly saying over his shoulder, “I’ll be in the shower”.

A frown contorted her face, watching him absentmindedly closing the top drawer of the dresser to leave the room in halting, hurried steps. As soon as she heard the loud click of the bedroom door closing behind him, she sat dumbly back on the edge of the bed.

Whatever his Hollow had done had been disturbing.

Ichigo hadn’t had blood on him or appeared to have been in a fight. In fact he looked perfectly intact, too much so for someone that had a Hollow possessing him.

I’ll find out soon enough tomorrow.

Not liking having to wait so long, she clenched her jaw and laid on the bed to wait for her boyfriend’s return.

***

Orihime was procrastinating on her walk to school the next morning. It had been easy to get dressed, eat breakfast, and pack lunch, but doing something as simple as setting one foot in front of the other was the most difficult thing imaginable. Her mind kept wandering off to what Ichigo’s Hollow had done.

Redness stained her cheeks at how forward she had acted. It was disgusting that being tied up in chains while doing dirty things with him had felt so good. Anything that degrading shouldn’t feel right to anyone. It was as if she was supposed to be there doing that with the evil spirit. What embarrassed her above all was that Ichigo knew everything and had seen her naked. Sure, he hadn’t been the one that had done it, but it was still his body. It wasn’t his fault that the Hollow had hijacked his body to try to…

She shuddered ignoring the thought, forcing herself to think about school and the yummy stuff she had concocted for lunch. Breathing in the fresh cool morning air, her chest expanding, she finally could smile with a sense of normalcy.

Whatever the Hollow had planned hadn’t been finished, so she shouldn’t be so glum. The wounds inflicted on her during the encounter were gone as if nothing had ever happened thanks to her Shun-Shun-Rika.

I could live through this! Yeah! Kurosaki-kun is still happy with Kuchiki-san, I have my lunch, and homework done, Tatsuki-chan will invite me to the Dojo again… She continued to ramble happily about everything but him.

“INOUE-SAN!” a female voice shouted from somewhere behind her and at recognizing the voice all of Orihime’s careful avoidance of the ‘Hollow Incident’ crashed and burned.

She closed her eyes, straightened her back until it ached and spun around wearing a blinding smile.

“Kuchiki-san!”

The shorter girl ran up to her, leaving a glowering quiet Ichigo dragging his feet.

I can’t pretend that they don’t exist! They’re my friends!

Opening her eyes, she looked at Rukia’s flushed smiling face. The girl must have run a long distance to reach her, judging by how far away Ichigo was.

“Wow! We barely get to walk to school together! You’re always there before any of us!” was the first thing she said upon reaching her breathlessly.

“Um, yeah…” Orihime trailed off then caught herself on time before her friend became suspicious. “But I stayed up all night studying for that trigonometry test! Can you believe it?! I fell asleep on the floor and drooled over my textbook, then when I woke up I forgot that my alarm clock hadn’t been set and of course I had to shower because of all of the nasty drool on my face and hair. I even had to cook twice because I left my food out all night and didn’t have any leftovers for lunch and you know. I. Must. Have. My. Lunch-”

“Okay! Okay, I get it now Inoue!” Rukia laughed holding up both hands in a defensive stance to stop the endless flow of babble from her mouth.

She blushed at how her mouth had run off. Sometimes she couldn’t control the things that came out of it and said everything that was and wasn’t in her mind. She should have gotten used to it by now, but it was still something that embarrassed her, mostly when people had to stop her from going on and on about useless things. It was a part of her personality that made her uniquely her and even if someone gave her choice to get rid of it in spite of how embarrassing it was, she’d probably keep it out of comfort at being herself.

Her body stiffened when Ichigo finally reached them. She could feel his eyes fleet over her for a brief moment.

“Morning, Inoue”, he said lowly, his tone subdued.

“Ah, hey, Kurosaki-kun,” the words came out in a nervous laugh as she shot a glance at his hard expressionless face. Oddly, seeing him now didn’t bring that old pain back, though she still felt that she loved him. That love should no longer exist since that Hollow had tainted it. Sighing mentally, she had to face the hard fact that there were many things she didn’t know. All of her life she had been shielded from the physical aspect of love. She wasn’t dumb and knew how babies were made, but her PG-13 mind had pictured a clean romance like those in fairytales. Not something as low and sinfully humiliating as Ichigo’s Hollow. To tell the truth, she had never even imagined herself having sex with Ichigo. Her mind didn’t go that far.

But his Hollow…

Shivering at recalling those odd sensations in her body at the mercy of that spirit, Orihime yelped suddenly when Rukia yelled at her.

“Earth to Inoue! You spaced out for a minute there!”

“Oh! Sorry about that! You guys must think I’m silly for doing that all the time, huh?!” she winced.

Though Rukia nodded in agreement, there was a look of understanding in her indigo eyes. “Yeah, you’ve been doing that a lot lately…”

Realizing that her friend was worrying about her, and not only that but Ichigo now had that expression of guilt, she laughed and spun around to keep heading to school. She hated to worry people about her. It made her look like a little girl that needed protection.

I’ve taken care of myself for years now! Everyone thinks that they can shield me forever! It shamed her that she was sick of being treated like a little girl.

“We should head off to school now, or we’ll be late!” she sang smilingly, not glancing back at the couple. To make the worried Rukia and Ichigo believe her pretense of Orihime-ness, she skipped, swinging her backpack by its strap. Pretending, that was what she was doing and had been doing for years. She enjoyed feeling happiness, but faux joviality was a whole different ball game. It didn’t feel nice at all and dragged her down.

Moments later Orihime wished she hadn’t lied to her friends about studying for the trigonometry exam. She knew what was in it already and had everything calculated in her mind by hard, but out of habit she always gave her notes a once over. The events of the night before had her mind going blank as soon as she had that paper in front of her. The numbers and odd shapes might as well have been hieroglyphics.

Glancing around discreetly, she inwardly moaned at how helpless she was at seeing that all of the other students were busily doing their work while she had nothing on her paper.

Come on, Orihime! You know this!

Biting on her bottom lip, she picked up her pencil from the groove on the desk meant to cradle it and placed it’s tip on the page.

“Psst!”

Coldness ran down her spine and she tightened her grip on the No.2 pencil to the point of snapping it. She had heard that sound that came through smiling teeth and decided to ignore it because it was impossible for him to be there. Not there or anywhere else.

“You are startin’ to hurt my feelings’, lil’ hime,” the demonic voice said melodiously.

It’s him! He’s here!

Her knees began to quake so hard under the desk that they knocked together. She had to look. If the Hollow was out, Ichigo must be under possession again. Closing her eyes and breathing harshly, she rested her back on the hardwood chair and opened her eyes again to look over at Ichigo a couple of desks away from her.

There was nothing wrong with him. He was merely huddled over his desk, writing in the answers to the test. There weren’t any signs that he had been turned to her and from how the students kept working on their exams, no one had heard that voice.

“You’re lookin’ the wrong way, lil’ hime. You can’t expect me to be stuck in him all the time. I ain’t that weak.”

Not wanting to talk aloud, since that would make her classmates think that she had finally lost it, she let an expression of abject puzzlement cross her face.

The Hollow sighed as if she were hopeless before saying in an annoyed yet excited snarl, “The glass. Look at the damn glass!”

Gulping and twitching at the angering Hollow’s shifting attitude, she flattened her pencil on the sloping desk’s surface and slowly let her gaze move to the glass window. After the morning bell had run, the day had begun to turn dark with threatening rain, so the window had a graying darkness that made it look like a mirror. At first she didn’t see anything except duplicated faded images of her classmates, but then something white fluttered from where Ichigo usually sat.

Is that his Hollow?!

A white version of Ichigo smirked at her, waving nonchalantly from the desk. He looked more like the negative of a photograph. White hair, white skin, gleaming gold eyes among a sea of black. Anyone would have thought that he looked like a copy of Ichigo, but there were a lot of differences other than the unusual coloring factor. His features were sharper and more animated, full of emotions that she didn’t see in Ichigo. Those inhuman eyes of his were narrower and slightly more slanted at the corners than her friend’s. The smirk he wore on his lips showed that his canines were longer and sharper than a normal human’s.

Why is everyone still working?! Can’t they see him?!

Her frantic gaze looked about the room. The students hadn’t stopped what they were doing and when her terrified eyes fell on Ichigo, he still had his back turned. The same orange hair and tanned skin.

“No one else can see me the way you do, so don’t bother, ” he drawled out matter of factly.

Looking back at the reflected image of the Hollow on the window’s glass, she parted her lips to breathe. She was panting in fear of finally seeing what had done things to her. What made it more disturbing was how his smile widened at her terrified face, proving that he enjoyed that reaction.

To further mortify her, he winked and blew a kiss at her from the glass.

I need to get out of here now!

Trembling, feeling uncomfortable teeth-chattering cold, she scraped her seat harshly over the floor, startling everyone in the classroom. Everyone ceased their work to look at her in confusion. All of the attention made her nervous as she just stood there.

“Inoue, what’s wrong?” Ochi-sensei asked concernedly from her desk in front of the class.

“I-I need to go to the nurse’s office!” she stammered out a bit too loudly.

Her teacher frowned, probably seeing that all she had was a nervous breakdown that came out of nowhere, “B-but why would you-?”

“Sorry, I really need to go to her now!” she yelled out tearfully making the woman’s eyes widen and the other students murmur among themselves. Before the woman could question her, she ran out of the room, hoping that the Hollow wouldn’t posses Ichigo again to go after her. All that was important at that moment was getting away and perhaps staying out of class and any reflective surfaces for a while.

I wonder how long he’s been watching me like that…

Unable to stop trembling, she took a turn in the maze of hallways to go directly to the nurse’s office. The nurse wouldn’t have a thing to help her. If she even told her what was wrong, she would be sent to the nearest asylum in a straightjacket. None of her excuses sounded good enough to go there, but she had to come up with something for running out of class like that.

Menstrual cramps! That’s right! Sounds perfectly normal! She could just tell the nurse that she hadn’t kept track of her period and had felt like it had come on unexpectedly during class. That would shame just about any girl! The year before one of her classmates had started to seep blood through her gym shorts in front of everybody. The nurse surely remembered that.

Great one, Orihime!

Thanks to that Hollow she had become a liar and a really bad one at that. The nurse might buy it, but her friends would be a different story, especially Tatsuki and Ichigo.

Too late now…, she pointed out to herself upon reaching the nurse’s office door. It was time to play ‘actress’ again.

***

Her lie had been so convincing that the nurse had allowed her to stay and lay on the stretcher with a heated pad over her belly. She felt bad for making up such a convincing story, but there was no other choice. If she hadn’t gone to the nurse, she would have been reprimanded by Ochi-sensei and gotten a big fat F on her test. Thankfully her teacher and the nurse had been understanding of her supposed ‘plight’ and had gently said that she could stay there until feeling better.

Now three heating-pads and two aspirins later, she was laying on her side on the hard narrow hospital stretcher, staring up occasionally at the round little plastic wall clock with the black numbers ticking away the hours. It was close to lunchtime already.

I can’t stay here for the rest of the day. Plus, I’m starting to get a little hungry…, her stomach then decided to growl like an angry monster making her grimace and press the heating-pad closer.

The door of the small room opened and she started at seeing a familiar orange-head slowly make his way in.

“Kurosaki-kun?! What are you doing here?!” she exclaimed, sitting up immediately looking at her friend in surprise.

“I just wanted to know what made you run out like that and the others are worried about you”, he informed her quietly, before walking over to a metal chair facing the uncomfortable bed. He hadn’t looked at her again, his gaze on the floor ever since he had set foot in the room.

Pasting a smile on her face, she laughed it off bashfully waving a hand at the boy with the downcast eyes, “Oh, I’m fine! You guys shouldn’t worry about me-!”

“You’re scared of me, aren’t you?” he interrupted her.

“Ah… no,” she said unconvincingly.

“Then why are you all nervous when I’m around and why did you run off in the middle of a test?”

“I-I…”, she was stuck. The truth was that she wasn’t scared of Ichigo, but what was inside of him. If it weren’t for that Hollow she would have an easier time in talking to him. Besides that, she didn’t think that seeing her friend without Rukia accompanying him would look right. She did have some strange old-fashioned morals when it came to certain things and being alone with a boy while his girlfriend was in class just seemed wrong.

His amber eyes finally met hers and her heart ached. They were dull in comparison to the hot gold ones of his Hollow that were more gleeful. Ichigo’s eyes were glazed over with pain. That was explained why they were so flat.

Closing her eyes, squeezing the heating pad tightly enough to bust it open, she made the painful decision of telling her friend what had scared her.

“Actually, Kurosaki-kun, it’s not you that scares me.”

“I know…”

She nodded, grimacing. “I-I’m going to tell you what scared me in class.”

He stayed silent, waiting for her to continue.

Taking a deep breath and releasing it in a sigh, she asked, “What does your Hollow really look like?” The question sounded a bit too personal, but that creature had intimated with her by force.

“Is this what it’s all about, Inoue?”

She just had to know if her mind wasn’t delusional. She needed to hear it from Ichigo himself. There was no way of her actually knowing what he looked like since he had her blindfolded.

“Could you please just… tell me?” a blush heated her face. She wasn’t the demanding type and asking that sounded off and rude.

“White.”

Her eyes opened and widened on his tense face. “White?”

Nodding solemnly, he explained, “All white. White hair, skin. He looks a lot like me, but different. The whites of his eyes are black and their irises are gold-

Her indrawn sharp breath cut him off as she brought a hand to her chest to calm down her heartbeat.

White. All white. So it was him in the glass!

Gnawing on her lower lip out of nervousness, her eyes scanned the room to see if there was something with a reflection. Finding with her gaze a glass cabinet that was settled next to Ichigo’s chair, she stood up.

“Inoue what’re you-?”

Walking in a way that she could see the cabinet’s glass, her whole body began to suffer tremors.

He was there, his face turned to the glass so he could stare directly at her with a chastising frown as if annoyed. Those freakish eyes were sharp and searing the core of her soul.

Following the direction of her frightened eyes, Ichigo made a face probably not seeing anything, “Is he-?”

She ran out of the nurse’s office, leaving Ichigo with the words in his mouth.

Have to get home!

No longer caring that she was blatantly playing hooky, she left the school in a mad rush, without even bothering to take her things or stop when teachers walking in the hallways called out to her for running. Her escape was hard and fast, that the side of her stomach began to form a piercing ache that she had to hold a hand over. Seeing her apartment building off in a distance, she put more speed on her pumping legs, her cold sweat of dread turning to burning hot at the exertion.

Doing a stomping furious run up the stairs to her apartment, she kicked the door of her apartment and then slapped a hand on her forehead at forgetting that the door was made of metal.

Keys! Keys!

Digging a hand deeply into her cleavage, she finally fished out the set of keys and clumsily unlocked the door, entered the dark apartment and slammed the door thunderously behind her. She didn’t stop her mad movements until the long row of locks on the door had been put in order. She had at least twelve locks of different kinds, all of them had been Tatsuki’s idea.

Her frenetic breathing and rushing blood were the only things she heard.

I can see him! I can see him! Why?!

So confused and frightened, she wrapped her arms around herself, wishing fervently that it was all just a hallucination. A trick of her eyes.

But Kurosaki-kun said he was all white like that, so I must be seeing him!

That could only mean that she wasn’t completely free of the Hollow. No, she had seen that strange look in his eyes. He was hunting her down, waiting for the right moment to pounce. Living in Ichigo’s body made her an all too easy target for him.

It was all too much, sobs began to break into her panting. She hadn’t done anything to that Hollow and he was playing a sick game that had her questioning her sanity! And what was most worrisome was that a part of her was thrilled that someone that twisted would show an uncanny amount of interest in her at all…

***

Author’s Note: