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Tatsuki asks her once, when everything is finally over, and they’re having a sleepover to celebrate graduating high school.
“What was the scariest part?”
Orihime doesn’t even have to search for the answer.
“The nothingness.”
She’d always had a powerful imagination, ever since she was little. Alien abductions on the way to school, western-style shootouts in the aisles of convenience stores, a fairy godmother to feed her peanut butter soup when she was sick.
That extended to imagining the afterlife too. Before she knew about the Soul Society, even before Sora died, she used to dream about the afterlife. Once, she dreamed it was a giant skate-park where all the deities did cool tricks together. After Sora died, she tried to imagine someplace nicer, more peaceful, for him. He was always so busy trying to keep her fed, so maybe a beautiful and calm garden, with a bamboo grove and an ice cream machine and a bench made of flowers, where he could sit and listen to her prayers.
Even after she was introduced to the Soul Society and even after being in Hueco Mundo, she never stopped dreaming of what life after death could be like.
And then she rejected a god. She had pulled his existence out of reality, and her own along with him, because if that’s what it took to protect her friends, then that’s what it took.
She remembers not being afraid. The smile on her face had been true.
“Bye-bye, Ichigo,” she’d said, “I’ll take it all on.”
She wasn’t lying. She was taking it on for him, taking Yhwach away because it needed doing. She kept wishing she was stronger, and the gods had, it seemed, finally answered her.
But then, in that instant of rejection, there was nothingness. There was no god to greet her, no Sora waiting for her, no garden, no skate-park, just nothing. Not even a void, because at least a void would give her the sense that she was missing something. But there was nothing. No color, no light, no gravity, no time, no Orihime Inoue.
It’s the one memory that keeps her up at night. She has other bad dreams of what she and Ichigo went through when they were fighting Yhwach. But even in her dreams she can still heal him. Even when the dreams are worse than memories—his body broken and scattered or incinerated to ash, she can reject it every time, she knows this.
But that nothingness had been the ultimate rejection. She couldn’t bring herself back from it.
Sometimes, she’s not even sure she did come back from it. She never remembers the end of the fight. The others tell her things about how she came back, how she was brought back, how they finally won in the end, but she remembers none of it. Maybe that was the price of breaking the laws of nature, like in one of her favorite shounen manga.
Equivalent exchange—to obtain, something of equal value must be lost. At first, she thinks, a half-day’s worth of memories hardly have that much value. The truth of it comes later. The Shun Shun Rikka sleep for a month. And when she accesses her power again, she tries to thank them, tries to apologize for what she had to do.
They never speak again.
When she uses her powers, the hairpins activate, becoming an extension of her, they heal, they defend, but they aren’t themselves anymore. They fly in silent, colorless formations around her, and she thinks maybe this is the true equivalent exchange.
Shun’o and Tsubaki and Lily and Baigon and Ayame and Hinagiku are dead, and in their place is a permanent reminder of the nothingness of rejection.
Sometimes, in moments she never says aloud, she thinks it’s unfair that life moves on.
She graduates high school, she keeps working at the bakery, she gets married. She has a son, the most precious boy in all the world, and she loves him so, so much, loves his chubby little cheeks and humongous eyes, that she can almost forget all about the terror of the nothingness.
But it comes back sometimes when she sleeps. It’s paralysis and the absence of feeling anything, everything, and it never stops being terrifying, even when Ichigo manages to wake her out of it, holds her close, tells her he’s here, she’s home, this is real, it’s real, Orihime.
She mostly believes him. And she grows older, they grow older together, and the days when she doubts grow fewer and far between.
But they never cease completely.