Bitter Ashes

Rain

His body felt heavy. Had his body ever felt heavy like this? Confusion slowly seeped into his mind and his skin for the moment. Skin? Questions filled with his mind at trying to recall the last moments that seemed moments ago to his soul, finding his hands lightly, reaching out to pick up a supple feeling in a tingle to the tips of his fingers, letting the texture recall in his mind. It was chilled to his finger tips but it held a type of rough texture in each blade as his senses came, touching his skin a moment as he somehow recalled it in his mind in some place long ago. Grass? A type of plant many humans used for their yards... but there were no green things in the Hollow World.

Human?

The word felt ill fitting in his mind as he let his fingertips drift over the edges of this grass. In feeling the coolness of his skin for the moment, was it wet? What might cause it to be wet? As he felt this, he also felt the same wetness hitting his skin, chilling it on contact. What was the word to describe flowing water from the sky? Rain. Feeling it kiss his skin, and a chill as it slides down to hit the earth once more. It evoked something of a hidden memory in his mind, he could not recall, but he soon died. Such a feeling on his skin had come from here that first day of meeting.

Did he dare to recall it? Yet his mind journeyed down the path in seeing her in the moment, of feeling this rain on his hands like that day. Hair cast in a halo of gold, skin pale, like his own if she happened to maybe be standing in the moonlight, and those eyes in such pure heartbreak, with what humans called tears, in her eyes, and tracing down the hollow of her cheeks. Feeling them –for a moment –to land warmly on his hand as he reached out to catch this falling liquid. That first meeting. It had been the first pull he had felt in his once empty heart. In trying to recall the woman's name now in his mind:

Orihime....Inoue.....

It lingered on his lips in a bitter taste as the rain kissed his lips in a simple reminder he was still in this world. Tongue licking out to taste this mortal rain of the human world, to find it salty, like the tears of that girl. He could recall only fractions in his mind. Was he alive?

It made no sense to his mind in the moment of what being alive meant right now! He had turned to ash had he not? Recalling the very particles of him disappearing with each breath his chest took, as the bounds of them broke down due to the attack and will of that lone man. Yet, he also could recall her eyes looking at him. So pure and untouched by his darken soul, as she said those words to him in a whisper.

"I'm not afraid of you."

Such a simple five words alone had caged his soul, as he simply reached out his hand in those last recalled moments of his life, seeking something beyond his own understanding. The heart? She had also reached out to him, maybe to try and save him from his bitter end, but, he had in that moment let go to fade away into the ash he was and was meant to be. He was far too tainted to truly even come close to the pure heart she had shown him in that moment.

Cracking open a single eye, he blinked as the fading twilight hit his green eyes, it truly was his first time at actually seeing the world. How had he come to be here? Several questions seeped into his mind as something new sounded in his ears.

A beat and thump?

Some kind of rhythmic thump in his chest, beating under the skin and bone that caged it! How could this be? His mind racing in the labialization, he knew what it was.

The heart...

Yet, to have a heart meant he had to be living and human. Had he come back to life as the beating hit his chest, and breathing in the air as it floated in his lungs a moment in each breathe? Had he come back human? Why was he back? More and more questions seemed to lay on his mind. Still, his last memories started with that woman, and maybe in finding her might also bring out these answers, of which he was, and how in the world he had come to wake on a rainy spring day.