shiyori fic commission for the wonderful @viciousvizard
“She’s balanced on a ladder, ankles peeking out from beneath her too-long pedal-pusher slacks. He knows she’s thankful for having the option these days. No more forcing herself into dresses and skirts. She’s been tying her hair into two round buns lately, wearing flat slip-on shoes that make the most annoying clicking sound against the wood floors. Large sweaters that cover her modest figure. All these things, he notices, and he can’t find a single thing worth complaining about there, but he still finds a way.”
//rukia/kaien commission for my superpal @captainrukia
What You Need
It has been three days. She counts them as if there is any imaginable amount of time that needs to pass before you can act like you did before it all started to fall apart. It has been three days of darkened hallways, silent exchanges, breathy hesitations to ask how he’s holding up, if he needs anything...The fog of Miyako’s death hangs heavy throughout the barracks, and it slows all of their movement, all of their speech. And Rukia, such a waif, struggles against that thickness almost as much as he does.
Gone are his proud posture and his glowing smile. She has never seen him so brooding, and she hates the part of her that finds it fascinating. To see him beneath his new black cloud, his fists always tightened and his brow always wrinkling downwards. It gives new shape to the unnamable feeling that she already had, since first they met. It is a sort of pulsating in her veins, a gravity that keeps her tethered to him, a weakness to his sounds and scents. And now, when he is so broken, she finds it only gets worse. There comes a new aspect to her wanting:
She wishes she could fix him.
She can’t bring his wife back, and though it has taken her great pain to admit it, she does not want to. She can’t replace a woman like Miyako. She can’t speed up the arduous process of grief. She can only watch from a distance as he suffers.
One dark evening, as she tarries about her menial tasks, folding the freshly washed uniforms, placing them in the wooden cubbies. The repetition of it soothes her, until she hears familiar footsteps beyond the open door to the utility room. She knows him by his walk. She wonders if he knows her, too. She wonders if he wants to.
She stops her folding, and turns toward the sound. Funny how his presence is always too large for him to truly seem like a shell of a man. He approaches, seeming taller than ever, dwarfing her in his severity. She looks up, bringing a hand to her chest to clutch at the fabric of her uniform, as if she could contain her heart.
“Kaien-dono…” She’s not spoken his name in days, and it comes out foreign and hoarse. There is a look in his eyes that she feels privileged to see. The nighttime look, saved for his wife, saved for bed, saved for the love that preempts sleep.
He looks so worn down. She wants to fix it. She doesn’t know, cannot know, how.
With a sigh he drops his head, falls to his knees before her, as if ready for some kind of repentance. Like instinct, she raises her hands, and they tremble even as she lays them on his head with a decided confidence. She feels a deep breath against her belly as his arms wrap around her, clinging, as if he will fall through the floor should he not hang on tight enough.
There is hurt radiating from him. She realizes then that a tear struggles free from her eye.
They stay like that for a few quiet moments, the only sound his heavy breathing. He rests his head upon her modest chest, and she scolds herself for her blushing. She is only here as a comfort. She is only here as a pillar to keep him upright.
But after a while, his grip softens. It travels. Timidly, hands venturing just the slightest bit lower, higher. He nuzzles his head against her chest, and she curls her toes. If this is what he needs…
She knows it isn’t, not really. That he will only end up hating himself. But too strong is the want. Too perfect is the feeling of his head and hands and heartbeat. She runs a hand through his hair, encouraging him to stay. With a breath, he looks up, chin resting between her breasts-- ah, in her thrill, they’ve made themselves known through even the thick fabric. There is such a hungry sadness in his face. Her lips part in a sympathetic pout, and she tilts her head to the side.
If this is what he needs.
His hands climb her, over her skinny hips, rustling the knot of her obi. He slides his palms over the subtle plane of her chest, and she gasps. The way he exhales, it thrills her, the sound so ferocious and full of desire. He slips one hand beneath the fabric, fingers passing over her skin, kneading just-so, and already she melts. Her inexperience, maybe, or the sheer adoration she feels.
He unties the obi, and she shrugs out of her kosode. He looks up at her flushed face with glistening eyes. She offers him a subtle nod of permission. When he kisses her on the sternum, she feels the warm, wet inevitability. He plays there a while, kissing and suckling so gently, and she curls her fingers into his thick hair, whimpering. She tries so much to fix him with her pearly skin.
Eventually, his hands begin their traveling anew, rounding her bottom, caressing her thighs, the back of his knuckles grazing between her legs. She shivers. Even she has hardly dared to touch that place.
But it is his, if that is what he needs.
The rest happens quickly. Never do their lips meet. As he stands, he pulls her up, hands beneath her arms, settling her on the counter top. Staring one another down, they remove only what is necessary. As if keeping some manner of clothes on will save them from shame.
She bites her lip in a combination of excitement and fear to see him, throbbing and tinted the perfect red. He pulls her closer, and the pain is nothing compared to what she is sure he must feel.
He continues to devour her in so expert a way as he ruts, driving himself into her fragile virgin body in a staccato so reckless she wonders if she will bleed. She doesn’t care, if her blood is what he needs.
He curses beneath his breath, and she swears he is crying. She wraps her skinny arms around his neck, spreading her thighs as far as she can make them, allowing him to go deep. It is as if, could she get him far enough inside of her, enough a part of her, he will simply not have to exist in the same way anymore. She can keep him there.
Perhaps sensing her willingness, he presses his hands into the sides of her knees, holding her open, looking down where their bodies meet. The sight seems to both anger and elate him. She, too, cannot help but watch as he thrusts and thrashes.
He pulls away to spill himself upon her chest and belly. The volume of it carries so great a distance. They both look upon her sullied body with awe.
For a second, it looks as though he might finally kiss her. He runs a hand down her cheek, his expression, for once, unreadable.
But he retreats. He hides himself back within the folds of his uniform, and leaves her wilting on the counter top.
“I’m sorry…” he says as he pauses in the doorway.
She forgives him. She will always forgive him.
That night she manages to fall asleep with a smile on her face. She tries to will it away, and fails. For once, she was what he needed.
Sometimes he mistakes her for a part of the earth. When she’s in the garden, it is as though she grows right from the flowers. It is impossible to tell where she ends, where the garden begins, and if he is looking adoringly at a mirage or a mythical creature. She is often smiling, but it takes on a different value when she’s surrounded by all that growth. She does not even smile that way for him, but he doesn’t mind. He has his own. He has the joy of being the only man she looks at in his earned way.
She notices him, and she lifts her head from her sister begonias and greets him with a slow, certain blink of her eyes. He grins, lifting his teacup as if in a toast to the sight of her.
He had offered to help, but she let him down very gently, citing the decaying spider plant in his office. How he had managed to kill something so hardy, she could not figure out. There had seemed another thought ready to escape her lips, but she had stayed silent, absolving his lack of a green thumb with a kiss, instead.
She has enough nurturing for the two of them. He is surrounded by the evidence.
She passes a hand over a thick bed of marigolds, whose petals, he’s noticed, are a little velvety up close. He doesn’t trust himself to touch them as she does, her fingers starkly pale against the sea of deep maroon and curls of orange and yellow. The marigolds all seem to happily shake beneath her. They grow a little brighter, as if she had guided them toward the sunlight.
When her work is done, she comes to him. He is sitting on the steps of the engawa, and when she approaches she slides her arms over his shoulders, briefly holding him against her chest. They have settled into the comfortable silence of love, when it lasts long enough. You no longer have to fill the moments with chatter. You can speak, even chastely, with your body.
She pours herself some tea, and while it cools, she lays her head upon his shoulder. She is no longer framed by flowers, and it always takes him a moment to adjust. She looks so right, blending with the earth, that when she is instead surrounded by wood and stone he worries she will wither. But then, when they touch, he feels certain of her once again.
“I’d like to grow some lily-of-the-valley,” she says, soft, her voice always the joyful blend of a sigh and a song. “Your division’s flower…”
“Aw,” he teases. She gently nudges her elbow into his arm.
He imagines it, the pale white blooms hanging heavy in a bough. He’s always thought they looked like tear drops or bells. When the wind blew, he always expected to hear ringing. He’d like to see them here, as a part of her.
“That way everyone’ll know yer my girl, huh?” A signifier of him, planted in her literal garden.
“Something like that.” Which meant: no. He grins though, and slides an arm around her back. The sun goes behind a cloud.
-
It has always been difficult to focus during meetings. It has only gotten worse since he has loved her, that she should stand across from him looking regal, pretty, proud, and perfect. Already he was easily distracted, prone to daydreaming. And now, even the bow in her hair manages to drive him wild.
Rose is beside him. He notices. He gives him shit. But he’s taken a century’s worth of his teasing, so he doesn’t see the harm in enduring a little bit more, for her sake.
She lets her eyes float to him from across the room. Usually he finds it easy to slip into some flirtatious routine, to wink or wiggle his eyebrows, or to send some concentrated, steamy reiatsu her way and her way only. But today, he just looks. There is a defenselessness in his eyes, an earnestness. He has nothing charming to offer her. He bites his lower lip. Her own, they part, as if it would be appropriate to speak, to ask him what he’s so moony about all of a sudden.
She finds out later, when the meeting’s been dismissed. As they exit the room, he reaches for her wrist to catch it in a gentle, loving hold.
“Mm?” she asks, trying to be professional, though her eyes always burn on him now. It is unavoidable, and everyone already knows. They’ve not said it out loud, but he’s keen enough to know that it’s not so secret.
He says nothing, just smiles and lifts a hand to her cheek, fingers lacing into her hair. The room is empty, and Ise-san has turned off the lights.
“I just love you,” he says, casual as one can manage.
“Is that all?” Always she teases. But still she lifts herself up on her toes, helped by his arms around her back, and kisses him sweetly. In his ear, she whispers. “I love you too.”
It is a blur that brings them to the darkened corridor. Her love tends to make him dizzy and foolish, out of his own head even as his focus is narrowed on her. It’s quick, and has the tone and urgency of something far less loving, but when it’s over, he just holds her for a while. Their uniforms still parted and askew, pressing her to him as if...as if he could be as one of her flowers. There is no telling where their bodies separate.
After some quiet, further admissions of affection, they are at it again. He leaves lewd marks all across her chest. She leaves reddened lines in his back from her desperate scratching.
But in the evening, they lay nestled like spoons in a warm, freshly-made bed, and there is nothing but softness.
-
He feels that he is not as magnificent as her. That there are no pieces of him in the world. No flowers left behind in his wake. He makes nothing brighter. He can turn things upside down, maybe. He can make things confusing. Hopefully not for her. But he must. He’s sure she doubts him. That his years of flirtation and philandering have made her suspicious of his devotion.
So he leaves pieces of himself behind. Things to make her sure that he is tethered here, to her.
One morning, combing his hair before her vanity, he hears the familiar scratching of a needle to a record. Not expert, like he does it, but careful and practiced. He’d bought her the turntable, but all the records were his. Or, they were. Every record that he left in her quarters, he thought of as a gift. A token of his love. He told the story of it through songs. He’s danced with her to Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” made love to her beneath the sad Lady’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” She’s offered her opinions on them, vaguely, and he’s sure she says she likes them simply to pacify him. Until this morning.
Above the smell of fresh tea, through the warm yellow light of dawn, he hears it. He’d turned her onto Carly Simon months ago, and found her reaction to it tepid. Carly wasn’t for everyone. But once the scratching stops, once the needle finds its perfect groove, he hears the throaty crooning.
Nobody does it better…
He grins wide, and places his comb onto the vanity, turning his head to the hallway, where the sound carries.
Baby you’re the best…
He cannot stop the smiling as he saunters down the hallway. I wasn’t looking, but somehow you found me. When he makes it into the living room, he sees her. She is spinning lazily to the music, her freshly donned shihakusho billowing around her. There is still some morning sleepiness in her eyes, though she glows as if she is ready for the day, the afternoon, the evening. She is smiling, and she smiles all the more when she sees him watching from the doorway.
With a raise of her eyebrows she invites him to join.
Nobody does it quite the way you do.
He cannot tell where the music ends, where her laugh begins. He cannot tell where their hands meet. They turn in an endless whirlwind of love, and the dizziness makes them late for work.
Even once the record ends, and the room is filled with silence, he can only hear the sweet music. It is her breathing, and his. Maybe he is only magnificent, is only a part of the earth, when his head is resting on her perfect chest and their limbs are indistinguishable. This is what people mean-- and he used to think it was so silly-- when someone is the world to you.
//369 commission for my wonderful friend @kazeshinigami <3
A Change in Direction
Upon the third line of a haiku, in tradition, one must indicate a change in direction. Izuru always visualized it as the wind picking up, tossing leaves and grass and the strands of your hair all around until it settles on the North, the West, or wherever it wants to go, wherever it wants to carry you. Without the third line, a haiku is a thought that cannot be finished.
The breeze flips the pages of his notebook, and he presses his thin fingers down to keep them still. He is stuck on that third line, perhaps because it is so difficult for him to imagine a change, to imagine that two lines of sorrow can lead to one line of hope, and not the other way around.
He looks out across the neatly trimmed grass. Renji is pinning a long piece of cloth to the clothesline. It is a faded burgundy, though everything, when set in contrast to his burning-bright hair, looks dull. Nothing in the world can glow so fiercely. Izuru has told Renji this, much to his blushing. It moves him to know that he has that sort of power-- making this mountain of a man just a little bit giddy, just a little bit boyish. It is the only power Izuru has that isn’t grim, isn’t fearsome. It is, he thinks, one of the only good things he brings to the world.
Renji waves at him from across the little courtyard and Izuru grins like a reflex. They are a perfect two lines to open a haiku. Expertly crafted, not a single word that does not belong. But without the third line, they can’t even hope to feel complete.
Their third line will return to them soon. They know this, and yet still they always worry that they will be proven wrong. Their other lover who wants so much and so often to die. Just like Izuru used to. Before he did.
Stiff, he stretches out his decayed arm, hearing the hollowness of his chest in the ongoing breeze. He has yet to be repaired all the way.
Shuuhei slides open the door that leads to the engawa. Suddenly Izuru knows how to finish his haiku.
He writes down that elusive third line, smiling in his crooked way, the way that still hurts, the way that makes his skin feel strained and cracked. But then, two soft kisses on his golden, feathery head, and it no longer hurts.
They all make their silent agreement to head indoors. They communicate by touch.
-
Renji has his hair tied in a loose knot. There are only two people, these days, who get to see him looking that mild and soft. For everyone else he bears his thick and flowing mane as if terrified of being anything less than intimidating. But Izuru and Shuuhei have ran their fingers through that hair too many times for them to be fooled. They know his indoor voice, his snoring. They know every mood and its warning signs, every smile and its cause.
It is hard to be known. It is hard to be weak. Living as he had for so long, he could not afford to be anything but a beast. But in the safety of this shared room, between the warm glow of these two men, it all becomes so much easier. It is easy to kiss and to hold, and to be gentle as his strong and callused hands will let him.
Shuuhei has returned from another needlessly long day, and he and Izuru have fought him into something resembling a rest. Still he sits upright, back straight, hands politely in his lap, at the table where their tea is cooling. It is too late for all that caffeine, they know, but it is nigh impossible to feel as though it’s nighttime when the sun stays out so late, and later every day as they approach this new season. His lovers, Renji knows, would not sleep peacefully even without the evening tea. He knows now their nightmares. He is not without his fair share of them, some nights. Some nights none of them will rest. Some nights it turns into conversations that stretch into the dawn, some nights it turns into love so sweet they feel as though they will never have a bad dream again.
Tonight, they all lay reading by candlelight. Shuuhei, with his many articles, determining which lucky souls will be published in the next issue of the Bulletin. Izuru, with some sad little human-world novel. And Renji, with some long-dead noble’s pillowbook of thoughts and stories. It is all silence save for the turning of pages.
And tonight, as it is ever-changing, it is Izuru who decides when the lights go out. He gently takes the stack of papers from Shuuhei’s grasp, knowing that most of the time the only way to get him to stop working is by force. And Renji, seeing the sight unfold, shuts his book without bothering to mark the page.
They keep the nightmares at bay. He feels joy unparalleled in both his heart and body.
-
In the sweat-soaked morning, body still reeling from the love he has slowly convinced himself he deserves, he watches the sun struggle through the wooden blinds. It comes in thick, ethereal sheets, casting its lattice-like pattern over his two still-sleeping loves. Izuru is pale like light, his hair the same yellow as the sun. Renji, he looks more like the blazing, fleeting few moments of the late sunset, just before the sky is bathed in stars.
Does that make Shuuhei something like the afternoon? Or does it make him the pitch-black of night? He leans toward that. There was a time when he would have blamed it on the pit of despair, the claw-like way with which he drags others down into his darkness. And still, there are moments when he falters away from the light, brought back only by two pairs of loving hands.
It is too much responsibility to place on just two men, to keep him afloat. They don’t mind, but still he carries the guilt. To work, to bed. They assure him that he is not the one to blame for that sinking feeling. Izuru, perhaps halfheartedly. There are men to blame for their sorrow, in part, but it doesn’t stop them from accepting the fault for themselves. Foolish, they were, and still are. It makes Renji livid in a way that ought to comfort, and lately, it does what it ought to do.
Things get better. They have, for the time being, stopped falling apart.
Yes, he’s like the dead of night. The day’s heat lingers just enough to warm you, but the pleasant chill sets in. The dark sky glistens. It is either quiet save for crickets, or it is bathed in the loud chaos of debauchery. The night doesn’t make any sense, and Shuuhei struggles to make sense of himself.
But the night is always between the sunset and the sunrise, so for that fact alone, at least, he belongs with Renji and Izuru.
He lets them sleep. He is always the first one up, his work ethic so ingrained it has taken on the role of his alarm clock. He sets up the kettle, turns on the stove. They will awake to the smell of tea and the sizzle of breakfast. And they will come to him, wrap him in their arms. Renji’s, so sturdy and strong. Izuru’s, one obsidian black and the other a ghostly pale, both thin--
There is a small piece of paper tacked to the cabinet in which they keep their tea, no doubt put there in the fog of the evening prior. Three short lines in Izuru’s handwriting. Oh, how it’s become so brittle-looking since he died and came back, as if his weak hands can hardly hold the pen…
Outstretched, the tree limbs,
They grasp like fingers for death--
Wait, and live ‘til Spring.
The room is filled with a warm breeze. Shuuhei sees the filtered light shake, and looks to the source. The tree limbs, shivering in the wind, the first buds of springtime struggling through the wood. Soon it will all be in bloom.
my newest commission for my pal @danvssomethingorother in which that successful rusty we met in season four gets his Marriage on
“People expect fanfare. They expect the event of the century, and Rusty’s not above enjoying the attention. He’s not above appearing in photos, glowing with joy, being the talk of the town. He’ll see himself on the cover of People magazine, looking shrimpy in his fiance’s-- his husband’s arms. The thought of it makes him ball up his fists, crack his knuckles, his toes. It’s like a dirty word. A privileged word. And he gets to use it...”
