The Heart in the Dreamer's Furnace

    Phantasmagoric, nightmarish, and inky...these dreamtime eidolons tormented her so. They took on forms both familiar and strange. But no one form would they keep for long, these demons her nightmares gave birth to. They desired a multitude of shapes, each designed to raise goose bumps over her flesh in her trepidation. Her hollowfied brother, defeated hollows of the past, Aizen and the venom behind his beguiling smile, Nnoritora’s released form, Muramasa’s assumed shape after going berserk from betrayal. The most frightening one of all, however, was the diabolical, cadaverous entity that replaced Ichigo atop the canopy of Los Noches two years ago –the abomination whose hellish semblance was a reflection of the malice that formed its nature within its feral mind.
    It frightened her down to her very core, twisting her insides into tight little knots and coiling around her heart with a constrictor’s suffocating embrace. It was a manifestation birthed by the weight her own heart’s weakness placed on someone else –her creation. And now its lingering resonance would vibrate through her dreams for the rest of her life. This was her toll to pay.
    Orihime would never confess her dreams were full of demons. Not even to her best friend. Nor could she admit to the tears she occasionally awoke with. She was the sun outside this apartment, radiant and, while maturing considerably as time passed by, still whimsical. But at night she became lamenting rain. No matter how many moist threads she connected to the earth, the ashes remained untouched.
    The face they once formed occasionally visited her somnial world, his brief visits banishing the demons. His emerald eyes penetrated straight into her soul, reverberating a silent plea to connect to her –the gaze he perished with. It haunted her with startling lucidity even all this time later. Like the moon, Ulquiorra repelled the shadows grasping at her with injurious touches.
    His appearances, bittersweet as they were, gave her comfort she couldn’t describe and unlike any other could give. She felted needed –wanted –, as if they both had what the other sought. She truly felt worthy of being called the sun. Eerily, pleasantly real, she had a hard time believing he was merely an ignus fatuus devised by her dreams. His eyes were too focused. The outstretched hand he reached for hers with felt too corporeal. Try as she might, however, she could only graze his fingertips with her touch. Tormenting in the close proximity. The twilit limbo separating the day from night would never allow the sun and moon to complete the connection.
    Glimpses of memories Orihime was quite certain she never possessed –though they certainly felt like they belonged to someone –danced around her like fragments of shadows pushing and pulling at the incandescence of lambent flames. The heart beating within the fire burned so passionately she could hardly stand it without wanting to break down into tears. She could not cognize whose heart this was not matter how many times she felt the warmth emanating from the fire’s breath. Deep within the heart of her dream, she felt the depths of her consciousness tangle with another’s like two coalescing oceans. Whose heart beat within the fire, she never could decipher. Not as long as the second consciousness enlaced with her own. Hers? His? Or theirs?
    The memories were filled with umbral entities of their own, not of which she recognized. They had horrors and angst of their own. The darkness they lurked within was suffocating in its density. She could never dare to breath when she witnessed them. Nor when she saw the pure white creature trapped in them, its only color coming from the emerald eyes that made the fire burn all the more brightly. When not faced with her own demons, she was faced with his.
    Her sympathy stirred the other consciousness again, just like many nights before. From the pitch-black did the shadows produce a hand, white fingers long and nails solid black. Attached to the hand, past the length of the arm, Ulquiorra’s face emerged. Past the shadows, his golden eyes shifted to a familiar, powerful green. She answered the gesture almost automatically with full knowledge of her impending failure. Stretching and reaching as she might, her fingertips could only connect to his. Regardless of how much nearer she wandered, the gap remained the same. Where her emanated light brushed against his abyss of darkness their touch could go no further.
    “Sorry,” Orihime murmured, thoughts wondering to the jar of ash that neighbored her brother’s framed photograph upon a shelf. “I couldn’t save you...Waited too late. I hesitated. I didn’t think I was strong enough...”
    She noticed his saturated hair clinging to his melancholic countenance and the water dripping off his pale skin and clothing. It was as if he had been standing in the rain. Two years of dreaming these reoccurring circumstances and terrifying ghosts of the past. Two long years of dreaming, and for the first time she saw something new. The puddle quickly forming from the rhythmic patter of falling droplets soaked through her shoes a little two easily. The puddle itself seemed uncanny –she felt like he was below her, though gravity never dared to contradict her footing. Yet somehow, at the same time, she felt as if they stood upon horizontal ground. The dream’s lucidity never having any effect on its surrealism, she couldn’t be certain at what angle they really stood.  She felt wet and caressed by a fire’s warmth simultaneously.
    The way he looked at her, Orihime felt as if she was his way out of whatever prison he was trapped in. The way his lips curved just enough to suggest the smallest of grins, she felt as she had given him the key without even realizing it. Unbidden, but unrestrained, a tear eased out the corner of her eye and fell upon the green strip trailing down his left cheek from underneath his eye. As the water puddle at her feet expanded, the lonely tear traced the green streak. In the two years that passed, she had her suspicions. But now it was a certainty. This was Ulquiorra. The same Ulquiorra whose ashes adorned her shelf.      
    When he at last opened his lips to speak, his soft words were resonant and quiet. Like the reverberation of the last note played in a piano’s euphony, his words vibrated through her like a phantom melody’s emanation. Soft, subtle, and powerful.  
    “The heart is here.....in this hand...”
    Towards the end his voice dropped to a whisper. As quiet as the words were, they still shook her with their vibration. The heart in the fire felt as if it might burst open; the fire could hardly contain it. Orihime became enveloped in the fire, its many fiery tongues wrapping around her. She found breaking free of the intense heat of its emotions impossible. As much as it overwhelmed her to the point her breath was forced, she couldn’t find the will to break away. She feared she might freeze without this incandescing warmth consuming a part of her she could neither name nor touch nor see. Whether the heart in the fire was hers, his, or a melding of both, it hardly mattered anymore.
    With renewed vim she launched forward, the tips of his fingers not enough to satisfy her. No sooner had she cognized she had moved forward, the palm of his hand against hers warmer than she’d have guessed, did she find herself falling through him –like the moon’s reflection upon a benighted lake. Panicking, she twisted around with an extended hand, confused to find he was now in the semblance of his second release state. A flash of gold–like a departing glimpse of sunlight –and the hole in his chest was now a scar resembling the crescent moon outside her room in Los Noches, its tapering tips a breath away from connecting. From both sides his wings closed in on her like great umbratic phantoms, and she spied in the limitless darkness that enveloped her a fire around which vacillating shadows danced.....
    Moonlight pooled in from her window, spreading a stretching sheet of white illumination across the floor. Caught in the edge of its phosphorescence, the eyes of the stuffed animals lined up on the shelf glinted at her. Her heart slammed against her chest repeatedly, and her pillow was damp with tears. Absent-mindedly, she traced a damp petal on one of the large flowers adorning the pale lavender pillowcase.  In comparison to the fire burning bright within the deepest depths of her dreams, the air felt cold. Lonely. Swiping away the remaining tears she awoke with, Orihime found her hairpins clutched tight in the grasp of her other hand balled into a fist rather than by her futon. She uncurled her fingers curiously and found her palm carried two flowery imprints embedded deep into her soft skin.  
    From the other room a crash shattered the breathless, unexplainably nostalgic silence. Her hairpins fell to the floor as she jumped in alarm, heart leaping into her throat. Orihime swept them up with fingers still trembling from the unexpected scare and rose to investigate. The adjoining room of the quaint apartment was as she had left it save for the shards of glass shimmering from the streetlight outside. They were strewn upon the shelf and the floor, the only sign of disorder in the room. Sprawled motionless amidst the scintillating fragments was a pale, listless figure...