On The Battlefield, The Sense That Serves As Your First Language Will Always Be Reiatsu. If You Have

On the battlefield, the sense that serves as your first language will always be reiatsu. If you have them, vision and audition are key, too, but they are the harmonies, that which augments. You feel the pressure first and foremost, edges brimming over where reiryoku within becomes that pressure without. It would be easier if it were pressure like a headache, isolated in space and pulsing, but the pressure comes from everywhere at once—where you enemy is or has been, and if you are very skilled, where they intend to be. (If you don’t beat them there.) A million tiny pressures, streaking and fraying. The only time you can feel your own reiatsu is when the battlefield is so turned upside down it is no longer certain whose is whose. When you get lost in the cacophony.

Part of the reason the Academy teaches the crisp, hard binary of Hollows and otherwise, energy and blight, is because in real life, in the midst of that cacophony, it is so hard to tell the difference sometimes the only thing that saves you is falling back on your certainty: Know evil as an absolute, and purify it. (That it is so hard to tell the difference should not be taken as an insinuation that no difference exists. Perish the thought.)

Imagine fighting side-by-side, or trying to. Have you ever? Only those with incredible control and attunement to each other would attempt it: Reiatsu roostertailing from your adversaries and partners alike, pressure raining down so hard these giant things you know to be there blink out of existence, lose their edges, become everywhere and nowhere. And of course, bodies in flight, pressure fighting pressure, is a dance in itself. You’re used to it, the pressure, the fluctuations that make the reishi beneath your feet resonate and roll. But get enough bodies in motion and that can snap around on anyone at the wrong place, the wrong time, and all the while you never having touched each other.

Take care, shinigami.

I guess we. have garage doors. in Soul Society now.

The thing is, I suppose, when you are 1000 years old, you see this and you're like 'wow that's so futuristic and cool I bet we could make a really sweet entrance with one of those babies."

momo

I'm back in Soul Society to redeem my sins, but I don't regret what I did. I made a human friend. But… everyone's memory of me… has been wiped clean. Yours, too.

BLEACH ブリーチ (2018) dir. Sato Shinsuke

Orihime gives Chad a manicure to see if it powers his arm up and also because she thinks it would be a nice thing to do for a friend. Chad is always doing things for other people without a second thought and I think Orihime would pick up on that.

I was rolling this around in my head, trying to decide when I wanted to set it and who else I wanted to be in it, when I got punched in the face with this mildly angsty idea, which ended up twisting the prompt around a little bit. (I feel like I always do this to you 😂. Maybe I do this to everyone.) Anyway, I hope you like it! I love them so much!!!

Takes place in the early Blood War, around the time when Ichigo goes to the Royal Realm, shortly after the first set of battles, while Orihime and Chad are still in Hueco Mundo.

(read on ao3)

💅 💅 💅

Orihime didn't know what she was thinking when she grabbed the nail polish off the shelf in her bathroom. It was a 16-in-1 gel palette set (with 4 metallics!) that she had won last fall as a fifth-place prize in a contest they were holding down at the shopping district last fall. She hadn't yet taken the plastic wrapping off. She had been saving them for a special occasion.

A war was not a special occasion.

Orihime had to admit that she probably panicked a little. Mr. Urahara was opening Garganta back to the Living World twice a day so that Mr. Tessai could bring various supplies that he needed to Hueco Mundo. Orihime had been shooed through so she could pack some clothes and whatever else she needed, and to let Tatsuki know that she wasn't going to be around for a bit. It had made sense at the time, but once she was actually in her apartment, her vision narrowed down to a dark tunnel and she had to gulp big deep breaths of air because it was all too much like the time Ulquiorra had given her twelve hours to say good-bye to just one person.

She got it together eventually and did manage to find Tatsuki and Keigo and Mizuiro, too. (Ishida wasn't around, but he had known where they were going.) Still, though, she wondered what she had been thinking when she got back to Hueco Mundo and found her bag packed with every pair of underwear she owned, her winter coat, a jumbo-sized box of Hello Panda that she must have stopped somewhere to buy, and the nail polish.

There had been a lot of waiting around, once she had finished healing everyone who needed healing, so maybe she had been thinking it would be a nice way to pass the time. Maybe she had thought the Tres Bestia would like it. They probably would have, but Urahara had already sent time off on some errand. Nel wasn't interested, although she was very interested in the Hello Panda.

So Orihime painted her own nails. She painted her pinkies and her thumbs with the metallic silver, and then drew on the six-petaled flower of her hairpins on top in teal. She painted the rest of her nails in teal. She had planned to paint a flower for each of her Shun Shun Rikka on each of the remaining six nails. The left hand actually came out pretty good! The right…

"Is something the matter, Inoue?"

Orihime blinked rapidly and looked up. She'd been staring so hard at her own efforts that her eyes had gone dry.

Sado had been sitting nearby, reading a book, with a massive set of headphones over his ears, things he had brought back from his own whirlwind trip home. Sado hadn't had much to say since Ichigo left, but Orihime had noticed that he preferred to stay within eyeshot of her. Tatsuki's cat did that with Tatsuki's mom, who had rescued her from a sewer grate as a kitten. Now, Sado was peering down at her, the headphones slung loosely around his neck.

"Ohhhh, I was just wishing I had put the camellia on my left hand," Orihime sighed. "Ayame and Hinagiku will understand if their flowers are a little shaky, but Tsubaki is going to be so mad."

Sado frowned thoughtfully. "Would you like me to help?"

Orihime's mouth dropped into a soft 'o'. She supposed she shouldn't be surprised. She'd seen the doodles Sado did in the margins of his schoolwork. It was usually graffiti-style Spanish words, but sometimes (usually when class was particularly boring) he'd draw out an entire lion, all rippling muscles and fangs, or a sleek motorcycle with highlights and shading that made it look like it made of chrome and leather and rubber, even though it was really all just pencil.

"The brush is very small," she said stupidly.

"It's fine," said Sado.

Barely a minute later, a miniscule camellia graced her right index finger, perfect right down to the lacy stamen.

"How did you do that?" Orihime gasped.

"I don't know a lot of flowers," Sado admitted, "but I know how to draw camellias. Abarai and I used to have a lot of time to kill while we were recovering from throwing boulders at each other. He can only draw about three things, but one of them is camellias."

"What are the other two?" Orihime asked shyly. The idea of big, tough Abarai drawing anything was very cute to her. She wondered if one of them was bunny-people.

"Skulls," said Sado. "And Zabimarus."

The last they had heard, Abarai had been very badly injured and so had Rukia, but both were expected to make it. Orihime pressed her lips together. Of course they were going to make it. They were both very, very tough. Next time she saw Abarai, she would ask him to draw a Zabimaru for her.

"Do you want me to do the other two?" Sado asked.

"It's a daisy and a hibiscus," Orihime said. "Do you know how to draw those?"

"I can manage a daisy," Sado agreed. "I am actually pretty good at hibiscus." That made sense, of course, given Sado's collection of tropical shirts.

"Thank you, Sado," she said, watching him work. He was very good at using pressure on the brush to get little petal-shaped blobs of paint. She wondered if he ever painted, in addition to drawing.

Sado sucked in a breath. "Do you think…" he started, and then started again. "Do you think we could do mine next?"

"What? Yes! Of course!" For a moment, Orihime was so excited to have finally found a taker that it took her a moment to be surprised. "I didn't know you liked to paint your nails, Sado-kun!"

Sado finished the hibiscus before speaking. "I don't. I mean. I haven't ever. Before."

"It'll be your first time, you mean?"

"Yes." Sado paused. "But I've wanted to. Ichigo and I went to a punk show once. A band he liked. He painted his nails black. I was…I mean, it looked…well. It's Ichigo. You know. He's braver than me."

Orihime started to argue with that, then stopped herself. "Not many people are braver than Ichigo," she said instead.

Sado gave a curt nod. "That's why I want to do it."

They did his left hand in white and red and black, with bold stripes and zigzags and a slightly melty-looking skull on his ring finger.

"Should we do the right in black and bright pink?" Orihime asked, eying the same beautiful fuschia Sado had painted her hibiscus with.

"No," said Sado. "My right hand is the one that protects. I want to paint it with the things I want to protect. So for the first one, I want you to paint it silver, with a teal flower, just like yours."

For a second, Orihime couldn't breathe. "Sado-kun," she finally said, "shouldn't Ichigo be the first one?"

"Ichigo is the first person I want to protect," Sado agreed. "But you were the first person I trained with. You're the person I've always trained with. So you should be first."

She couldn't argue with that, so Sado's thumb got painted to match hers. Orihime wasn't very confident in her ability to draw Ichigo's substitute badge, but Sado believed in her, and they both agreed that Ichigo wouldn't mind if it was a little wobbly. They did the background in sparkly gold, which they also both agreed that Ichigo would approve of.

They were going to be fighting Quincy--they had already been fighting Quincy--but they decided to paint the middle finger white with a blue cross anyway, because Ishida had it first. Just because the rest of the Quincy were turning out to be jerks didn't change how they felt about him. The middle finger felt somehow appropriate for that.

There was some debate over disrespectfulness, but they couldn't bring themselves to do it the other way around, so the ring finger was for Abarai (a black lightning bolt on a red ground) and the pinkie for Rukia (a silver snowflake on purple).

Orihime looked down at Sado's hands resting on the table. They were wide and powerful, with thick, knobbly boxer's knuckles and traced with silvery scars. His fingers were long and elegant, though, slightly tapered with square, even nails, now covered in bright colors and sparkles.

Orihime placed her own hands on the table, spreading her fingers wide to mirror his.

"I'm glad I brought the nail polish," she declared, to herself more than anyone else. "They don't have enough color in Hueco Mundo."

"Mm," Sado agreed.

It occurred to Orihime that both the shinigami and their enemies favored black and white, at least officially. But when she thought of her friends, she could only think of splashes of color--the wrap of a sword hilt, the flutter of a scarf. Eyeshadow and bright hair and the lining of a haori.

"Do you like it?" Orihime asked.

"I do," said Sado.

"It might chip," she warned. "Just let me know. I'll fix it if it does."

Sado smiled down softly at their colorful, sparkly, not-quite-matching fingertips, nearly touching. "I know you will."

befor the execution