#also ichigo planning to do a gap year in soul society makes me cry so i wanted to put the idea in everyone else's heads too

[youlovelythief]

gifts to Aphrodite

summary: Tatsuki and Orihime grow together.

pairing: orihime/tatsuki

notes: listen i know the post-686 ishihime angst is real but i thirst for tatsuhime so bad. tatsuhime was real too and we deserved tats and orihime living together post-graduation. instead all we got was forced rukia-orihime BFF shoved down our throats and NO THANK U. so here. i am more than willing to write the only tatsuhime post-686 angst fic out there. i accept my fate. also there is a second part to this / 694 words

Tatsuki says, “I want you to have everything you need in life.”

 It is spring, and they are twenty-two.

It has been eight years since a group of girls cut off Orihime’s hair in the middle school bathroom, since Tatsuki joined the judo club.

It has been six years since Orihime’s hairpins began to glow and Tatsuki began to see ghosts.

It has been four years since the war.

Three since they decided to move in together, broke college students just trying to keep living in Tokyo. Just trying to keep going.

One year since Orihime leaned over their kitchen tabletop in sweatpants and a coffee-stained t-shirt, a year since Tatsuki leaned in too, smelling like soap and deodorant and the leftover curry they’d ordered yesterday. A year since a kiss and laugh and nothing really changing but everything shifting.

Everything shifting, and everything looking like it’d be okay.

  Orihime sleeps with Kurosaki-kun because relationships aren’t just kissing and laughing at one in the morning, and hers with Tatsuki is no different.

Orihime sleeps with Kurosaki-kun because that’s what happens when two good friends decide to say fuck all to studying for anatomy and physiology and go out for a drink for the first time since starting medical school.

Orihime sleeps with Kurosaki-kun because Tatsuki is traveling for judo and their apartment, for all its Saturday morning pancakes and blankets on the couch and days recounted in front of the TV—their apartment gets lonely for weeks and stays lonely.

Orihime sleeps with Kurosaki-kun, and they agree it means nothing. She’d stopped loving him years ago, and he’d been thinking of moving to Soul Society for his gap year. Sober, he’d thought maybe two years. Drunkenly, he’d declared he would “stay for fucking good if that goddamn midget would just ‘fess up already.”

Orihime dresses and goes home. She zips her jacket all the way up to her chin against the December morning.

  She tells Tatsuki when she comes home, and forgiveness is not a road they’ve ever really had to walk before, but they do. It takes months, but eventually Tatsuki lets her back into their bed, and by this time winter has come and gone, and Orihime’s medical school graduation is coming up. It’s her last semester. She is in love with Tatsuki. They might even be—maybe, hopefully, wistfully—getting engaged. The snow has melted, and everything is shifting again, but Orihime can’t quite see it yet.

She’s looking so far up that she doesn’t see the porcelain bowl right under her nose. 6:30AM, every day. Like clockwork.

After two weeks, the remnants of her buttered toast floating in blue toilet water is unavoidable. Orihime’s not stupid. Just in denial.

She huddles next to the bathroom sink, long auburn hair pressed to her face, wet with toilet water, wet with tears.

She was this close to becoming a doctor.

  Orihime crumples in Tatsuki’s arms on a Sunday morning two months before her graduation date.

And Tatsuki—where she should have been anger and clenched fists and burning eyes and everything else she is on the mat—

Tatsuki holds her. Tatsuki looks down at her like a child holding the pieces of a broken toy.

 Later, Tatsuki sits in the laundry room, judo uniform slipping through her hands.

She lets it fall to the floor, unwashed. It smells like dust and chalk and sweat and tough plastic mats—smells like her high school gym, though she’s been training at a professional gym since college. Tatsuki thumbs the belt still looped loosely around the waist band, runs a finger down the collar. Clenches the white cloth in her fist.

She remembers joining judo club. Fourteen and angry. Remembers the way she had clumsily fought those girls, hair pulling and kicking and screaming. She’d wanted something more concrete—she’d wanted to turn her body into a shield.

She’d wanted to protect Orihime.

She can’t protect her from this.

  Tatsuki says, “I want you to have everything you need in life. I want you to be happy.”

Orihime more than understands.

  Kurosaki-kun graduates. He doesn’t go to Soul Society.

They agree on a summer wedding.