[Bleach fic] Lay Me Down

[moonsheen]

All right, so anyone who has not read harukami's Bleach drabbles needs to do so, right now. Anyone who has not read Bleach also needs to do so right now. Shinigami antics! Shinigami antics albeit minus the gay (for the Yami no Matsuei fans in the crowd), but it can be forgiven, because hey there's a bitchy Kurosaki in this series too.

Anyway have some Bleach fic. Renji/Rukia. Shinigami antics of the....well ok this is just rampant proof that I should not attempt anything of this sort ever again. For the world's own good. So sliiight content warning.

Set after the current arc.




“Congratulations on your promotion--” She greets him, after it is all over, with a smirk. A door in her quarters opens up to a garden and she sits looking out at it with her sword laid out by her side. He thinks she looks good in uniform again. He also thinks she is raging bitch. “--again,” she finishes, lips crooked.

“Shut up,” he tells her, kicking the box of stupid-shit-he-rescued-for-her under her desk and comes up to stand behind her. It is evening, the light is low in the branches of the camellia, and the air is cool. “Don’t even start.”

Her expression is wide-eyed. “But I mean it.” She says, nearly laughing. “I really mean it. Congratulations /Captain/--”

“SHUT UP I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT.”

He rattles the shoji. She is laughing now. “All right then. I will not acknowledge your impressive advancement--”

“Die,” he tells her, with the utmost sincerity.

“—or the fact you look stunningly ridiculous in that haori, Captain Abarai.” She bows her head demurely. “Sir.”

“Feh,” he says. “Congratulations on your reinstatement--” his hand grips the doors frame above her and he leans over enough she can glance up and meet him in the eyes. “—Vice-Captain.”

She touches her armband, lightly. “Thank you.”

“What’s with that tone.”

“How would you like me to say it, Captain.”

“With a bit more enthusiasm, Vice-Captain!”

“You are an absolute freak, Captain!”

“…and you can keep your goddamn bunny clips this time.”

She blinks. “You saved those?”

He looks away, and scratches the back of his neck. “…Yeah.”

She smiles. “Thank you,” she says a second time and he thinks that that’s more like it. She reaches back and touches the ends of the haori, rubbing the cloth between her fingers, once, twice, as though the texture of it is fascinating to her.

“That’s disrespectful,” he informs her, grinning.

Her voice is flat. “Forgive me, Captain.” She lets it go, tucks up her legs, and folds her arms over her knees. “…so tell me, did they burn everything?”

She’s being overdramatic. He rolls his eyes. “They didn’t burn anything-- just confiscated a whole lot of junk. Chances are it’s all locked up in some room and news of your pardon hasn’t gotten around to the guy with the key yet. Not sure how it couldn’t have but eh, things have been pre~tty damn loud around here lately—it wouldn’t surprise me.” He nudges the small of her back with a toe. “Anyway, I just brought you some stuff. Be appreciative.”

“Duly noted.”

“Bitch.” He snorts, watching a blossom detach itself from the tree. “You’re a complete nuisance, you know that right? And I got promoted because of you. So it’s your own damn fault. So you tell me.” He rests both hands on her shoulders, squeezes, and murmurs low and close to her hair. “It still hurt?”

She doesn’t press her palms over her chest, though they twitch as though she’d like to. “No.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Would you…” The words stumble. She stops, looks cross with herself, and starts over: “Would you like to see for yourself?”

On opposite wall of the garden, the breeze teases a chime. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Yeah, I would.”

She nods and he steps back. She stands, picks up her sword, and follows him, sliding the door shut behind her. The silhouette of the tree rises over her shoulder for a second, and then she crosses the room, tugging at the front of her kimono as she goes. She sets the sword against the wall and turns, pulling the folds apart. She shows him.

The scar is large, like he’s expected it to be; starting under her collarbone and running down lengthwise, ending just above her midriff. The entry wound cuts a thick dark line in the pale skin between her breasts—the exit wound he knows is drawn between her shoulder blades must be smaller. The blade had plunged in at an angle; had been wide near the hilt; had been narrowed into a cruel, clean angle at the tip, like it dreamed of parting moonlight and had settled for parting flesh and had done it quite easily in comparison.

“It itches,” she admits.

“Itches,” he repeats. /Itches/.

It’s getting dark in her quarters, in the dim light filtered through the screens. He exhales, the sound easily drowning the rustle of cloth as he comes toe to toe with her. He lifts his hand and she doesn’t move. He lays his fingers on the top ridge of the mark. It feels different than he expects, and this annoys him, because he knows what scars should be, and this is not that. It’s different, for reasons he can guess. There’s heat under that thick, itchy skin. The skin around it colors unevenly. She does her best to look bored and impatient. Fails miserably, but he lets that go.

“I’ll tell you something,” he says, like a secret, another one of the thousand rumored conspiracies hatched and stillborn and giving everyone headaches these days. He whispers: “I hate you.”

Her eyes go wider than they would have, less than year ago. Her hands fall to her sides. “I know.”

“No you don’t,” he growls, leaning in. “I hate you.”

She shrugs.

“—I hate you. You. Crazy. Bitch.” The point doesn’t seem to be getting through; he slips a hand behind her head and makes her look at him, his eyes narrowed, hers half-closed and nearly sleepy looking. He pronounces it clear and matter-of-fact. “I hate you.” His thumb ghosts over her cheek. “Makes me sick.”

“I see.” She yawns, and takes an idle, brazen slide of her foot forward; he feels the smoothness of the scar against his palm. “Renji.”

“Mm?”

“Can never say these things plainly, can you.”

“Mm. One to talk, you….”

“Fool,” she concludes, with a snort; swats his hands away, and pulls back with a haughty toss of her head. Arms spread, hands turned up—standing like she was bound the day of her execution. He pushes her wrists down to her sides out of disgust. She rears onto her toes--

--The haori ends up folded over the empty desk. She ends up on the bed mat--one of the few, few luxuries that hadn’t gotten locked up somewhere in her absence--on her knees, with his fingers under the edges of the cloth as she rolls it off of her shoulders. It tangles at the elbows. She frowns, struggles and in the end he’s the one to extract her from it, hard task when she’s twisting like that; he has to press a palm to her jaw and hiss at her. Cut it out. She does, and lies awash in black fabrics, arms bent, looking up at him out of the corner of an eye.

If the scar seemed large when she stood half revealed it’s gaping now, and he can’t stand it, so he bends over and covers it with his mouth. Thick, heavy, twisted skin—it tastes like sweat and metal. He holds her shoulders, runs his tongue down; she makes noise, muffled by a bit lip. His lips stray in the dark, along the underside of her breast. Over it, and the noises are not so muffled anymore, but hard gasps.

Her hands press at his upper arms, heels against his hips. They are thin: her wrists, her ankles. The skin there is thin. The rest of her is thin, skinny, bony, but those four points seem to sum it up best. They lie, they lie almost as badly as she does, because he can feel the wince in her when he’s crouched over and it’s his hand laid over the damp scar again—itches. Right. She’s a filthy liar and he tells her so, while the taut hands that loosen his obi prove him right. Muscles in her stomach jumping, throat constricting, her eyes narrowed and dark in the bad light, she sets one arm behind her and pushes herself up, her forehead laid against his chest. A hand moves on him, up along his side. Fingers tracing aimlessly he thinks, up until he recognize the pattern on his ribs, and wonders if she could always figure it out without looking. He doesn’t have the chance to wonder much more after that—her mouth opens over his chest. Breath--hot, wanting breath—simplifies things.

Cloth comes off crookedly, or it doesn’t come off at all, clinging like the heat in the room—stifling, fucking stifling, extending farther than the few steps from the closed door and the breeze outside and the falling camellia, and farther than the few steps to the cool metal of her sword, resting by door opposite to that. If the uniforms don’t obey the limbs do, and that serves: she’s stretched under him, on her back, and somehow she manages to make it look graceful, even naked with tousled hair and knees spread, she somehow manages to make herself sleek, strong even, even when he can make out all her ribs and her hair’s still dull with the smell of the white walls and sticks to her face in places—like a few strands over her mouth. She looks up at him with calm, absolutely clear eyes.

She has no right at all to that. He hates her for it; despises her so much that he lifts her face towards his, noses the hair away, grazes lips and teeth along the side her jaw and stretches over her to match. She hisses like a drawn sword when he presses into her, and cuts like one; nails behind his neck and in his shoulder, sharp and nothing like a prisoner’s. If the air doesn’t obey--she swallows but there’s nothing breathe anymore, she should /know/ that—the bodies do, and that serves. It serves. It serves repeatedly and hard enough for both of them to bruise. She folds her arms over him—at the wrists, they cross at the wrists. Her cheek, its mess of damp hair and flushed skin, is tucked against his neck. Her lips move, working against skin, working around the mute keening that’s caught her by the throat like the jaws of a particularly large, angry dog.

“Ah,” she says. at last. quietly. She doesn’t push against him, and he doesn’t feel the scar still there, between her breasts, still gaping, not going anywhere any time soon. He doesn’t clutch at her and press his mouth into her hair. He doesn’t feel he’s missed her, because he hasn’t and he doesn’t come with that deep, deep, abiding loathing he holds for her beating like blood in his head—the way her thighs go tight around him just then does the job well enough, thanks.

And. After it is over. He doesn’t think her hair, at least, has that locked out breeze tangled in it again. He does, after a time, roll over onto his back and notice she’s made raw meat out of it. That’s a little annoying--of course she doesn’t seem to mind. She takes his sigh as permission to keep her legs thrown over him and, without much grace anymore but plenty of familiarity, let’s herself curl up along him, looking at him; tired, but smiling.

“Don’t,” he says gruffly, brushing that bit of hair out of her eyes for the thousandth time in a few lifetimes.

Her eyebrows quirk. “Don’t what?”

He has no idea. “Pff. Don’t play innocent, looking like that.”

She laughs; the strands falling right back down. “All right. Whatever it is, I won’t.” Three times, she taps her finger across his collarbone. “But only because you hate me so much.”

“That! /That/ you--”

She punches him, lightly. It’s little more than a jab of her knuckles. “Shh. Then you should have specified. But I think I’ll forgive you. I don’t mind. ”

“…what’s there for you to mind...”

She shrugs. She’s already closed her eyes.


The next morning, he wakes up with her knelt over him, dressed in white robes closed enough that the only the top part of the scar shows. “Good morning, /Captain/ Abarai,” she greets, cheerfully, with words against his cheek. He swings an arm at her, and she ducks out of the way, pads across the room, shakes her head, and slides the door open--where she stands, gazing up past the top branches of the tree. She’s been looking healthier, he thinks. He also thinks she’s acting horribly smug about something.

“Captain Abarai,” he mutters. “Doesn’t have an early Captain’s meeting to go to or anything, sorry to disappoint you.”

“No? Good.”

That throws him off. He stretches, combing a hand back through his hair while readying of a retort—and that’s when he notices she’s unpacked the box he brought her. The books are on the chair, those ridiculous pens with them, and the clips…

The goddamn bunny clips.

“You have to admit. They do look good on you, Renji.”

“I hate you and I hope you die.”

“I know,” says Rukia. Rubbing her elbow, she grins.